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A Benign Influence Diffused itself from One and is Felt by the Sensitive, as if Borne on Telepathic Waves
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Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 3
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Evil Flows from Poisoned Wells; Good Flows from Pure and Crystal Fountains, Dazzling a Silvery Shower of Love and Beauty!
Nature Keeps Her Equilibrium by Bringing in Counter Forces, or Complementary Ones, to Correct or Balance Any Condition where to Much has Gone too Far!
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There is an Invisible Mechanism within the Universe and an Intelligent Mind (God) Directing this Mechanism!
One Who Knows Not the World-Order, Knows Not One’s Own Place therein!
There were the films of symphony performances, the full-scale operas, the unending virtuous concerts! I thought I would go mad with the beauty of it—witnessing in living color and mesmerizing detail the London Philharmonic play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the great Itzhak Perlman racing through the Brahms Concerto with an orchestra surrounding me. One of the situations in which children of all social levels come together and compete for status in terms of the same set of middle-class criteria and in which working-class children are most likely to be found wanting is in the schooled. American educators ae enamored of the idea of “democracy” signifies the fullest realization of the individual’s potentialities, the development of skills to an optimal level, the development of character and the abilities which can be bound by others, preparation for effective participation in the adult vocational World. Despite reservations such as with due regard to individual differences, this conception of democratic education implies that a major function of the schools is to promote, encourage, motivate, stimulate, in brief, reward middle-class ambition and conformity to middle-class expectations. However sincerely one may desire to avoid odious comparisons and to avoid, thereby, injury to the self-esteem of those who do not conform to one’s expectations, it is extremely difficult to reward, however subtly, successful conformity without at the same time, by implication, condemning and punishing the non-conformist. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
That same teacher who prides oneself on one’s recognition and encouragement of deserving work-class children dramatizes, by that very show of pride, the superior merit of the college-boy or college-girls working-class child to one’s less gifted or [street] corner-boy and corner-girl working-classmates. There are three goof reasons why status in the school, insofar as it depends upon recognition by the teacher, should be measured by middle-class standards. First, the teacher is hired to foster the development of middle-class personalities. The middle-class board of education, the middle-class parents whom they represent and, it is to be presumed, many of the working-class parents as well expect the teacher to define one’s job as the indoctrination of middle-class aspirations, character, skills and manners. Second, the teacher oneself is almost certain to be a middle-class person, who personally values ambition and achievement and spontaneously recognizes and rewards these virtues in others. The third relates to the school itself as a social system with certain structural imperatives of its own. The teacher’s textbooks in education and one’s own supervisors may stress individualization and consideration for the needs, limitations and special problems of each student. Nonetheless, the teacher actually handles 20, 30, or 40 students at a time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Regardless of what one conceives one’s proper function to be, the teacher necessarily looks with favor on the quiet, cooperative, well-behaved pupils who make one’s job easier and with disapproval and vexation on the lusty, irrepressible boisterous youngsters who are destructive of order, routine and predictability in the classroom. Furthermore, the teacher is like to be upwardly mobile or at least anxious about the security of one’s tenure in one’s present job. One is motivated, therefore, to conform to the criteria in terms of which one’s superiors evaluate one. Those superiors may themselves be progressive and in teacher meetings preach democracy in the classroom and individualization and indeed genuinely believe in those goals. However, the degree to which a teacher tries to achieve these goals or succeeds in doing so is not highly visible and readily determined. On the other hand, grades, performance and standardized examinations, the cleanliness and orderliness of the classroom and the frequency with which the children are sent to the front office are among the most easily determined and objective bases for the evaluation of teacher performance. A good rating, then, by one’s supervisors is possible only if the teacher sacrifices to some degree the very individualization and tolerance which those same supervisors may urge upon one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Research on the kinds of behavior which teachers regard as the most problematical among their pupils gives results consistent with our expectations. The most serious problems, from the standpoint of the teacher, are those children who are restless and unruly, who fidget and squirm, who annoy and distract, who create discipline problems. The good children are the studious, the obedient, the docile. It is precisely the working-class children who are most likely to be problems because of their relative lack of training in order and discipline, their lack of interest in intellectual achievement and their lack of reinforcement by the home in conformity to the requirements of the school. Both in terms of conduct and in terms of academic achievement, the failures in the classroom are drawn disproportionately from the lower social class levels. The child has little or no choice in selecting the group within which one shall compete for status and one is evaluated against the total range of the ability distribution. It is here that, day after day, most of the children in the lower fourth of the distribution have their sense of worth destroyed, develop feelings of insecurity, become frustrated and lose confidence in their ability to learn that which they are capable of learning. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In dialogue, each experiences the other as a person, as the origin and source of one’s intentional acts. Each participant aims to show one’s being to the other as it is for the individual. Transparency, not mystification, is one of the goals. It matters little whether the dialogue is nonverbal or verbal; whether it occurs between a philosopher and one’s pupil, a therapist and one’s patient, a parent and child, or two friends. The aim is to show oneself in willful honesty before the other and to respond to the other with an expression of one’s experience as the other has affected it. Dialogue is like mutual unveiling, where each seeks to be the experienced and confirmed by the other as the one he or she is for oneself. Such dialogue is most likely to occur when the two people believe each is trustworthy and of goodwill. The threat that motivates people to conceal their intentions and experience in manipulative encounters is absent in dialogue. The aims that makes the action of each intelligible to other will be fully revealed. Now, I would like to examine the relationship between an experimenter and one’s subject in the light of those analyses of the two kinds of encounter. The usual encounter between a psychological researcher and one’s subject has more in common with the example of the young being on the make than it has with dialogue. The experimenter wants something from the subject, but one wants to keep the individual partly mystified as to what it is. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Moreover, one does not want to frighten the subject away; so the psychological researcher often cloaks one’s intentions with camouflage. If one tips one’s hand, one may influence the subject and bias one’s findings. One tells the subject as little as one can when the latter appears in the laboratory. Actually, in some ways a research psychologist tries to impersonate a machine by depersonalizing oneself. One tries to be invisible or to be constant. One seldom tries to fin out from one’s subject just how that person experiences one, the researcher, either perceptually or in one’s fantasy. When an individual appears before others one’s actions will influence the definition of the situation which they come to have. Sometimes the individual will act in a thoroughly calculating manner, expressing oneself in a given way solely in order to give the kind of impression to others that is likely to evoke from them a specific response one is concerned to obtained. Sometimes the individual will be calculating in one’s activity but be relatively unaware that this is the case. Sometimes one will intentionally and consciously express oneself in a particular way, but chiefly because the tradition of one’s group or social status require this kind of expression and not because of any particular response (other than vague acceptance or approval) that is likely to be evoked from those impressed by the expression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Sometimes the traditions of an individual’s role will lead one to give a well-designed impression of a particular kind and yet one may be neither consciously nor unconsciously disposed to create such an impression. The others, in their turn. May be suitably impressed by the individual’s efforts to convey something, or may misunderstand the situation and come to conclusions that are warranted neither by the individual’s intent nor by the facts. In any case, in particular impressions, we may take a functional or pragmatic view and say that the individual has effectively projected a given definition of the situation and effectively fostered the understanding that given state of affairs obtains. There is one aspect of the others’ response that bear special comment here. Knowing that the individual is like to present oneself in a light that is favorable to one, the others may divide what they witness into two parts; a part that is relatively easy for the individual to manipulate at will, being chiefly one’s verbal assertions, and a part in regard to which one seems to have little concern or control, being chiefly derived from the expressions one gives off. The others may then use what are considered to be the ungovernable aspects of one’s expressive behavior as a check upon the validity of what is conveyed by the governable aspects. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
In this fundamental asymmetry is demonstrated in the communication process, the individual presumably being aware of only one stream of the individual’s communication, the witnesses of this stream and one other. For example, in Shetland Isle one crofter’s wife, in serving native dishes to a visitor from the mainland of Britain, would listen with a polite smile to his polite claims of liking what he was eating; at the same time she would take note of the rapidity with which the visitors lifted one’s fork or spoon to one’s mouth, the eagerness with which one passed food into one’s mouth, and the gusto expressed in chewing the food, using these signs as a check on the stated feelings of the eater. The same woman, in order to discover what one acquaintance (A) actually thought of another acquaintance (B), would wait until B was in the presence of A but engaged in conversation with C. No being in conversation with B, and not being directly observed by him, A would sometimes relax usual constraints and tactful deceptions, and freely express what one was actually feeling about B. This Shetlander, in short, would observe the unobserved observer. Those who discuss labor often comment that nowadays most jobs call for a capacity to deal with people rather than with things, for more interpersonal skills and fewer mechanical skills. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society. There is a continual subdivision of work in many branches of the economy. Complex tasks in which a craftsman used to take pride are divided into simpler, more repetitive segments, each more boring and less well paid than the original job. Work is deskilled and the worker belittled. However, celebrants and critics alike have not inspected at close hand or with a social-psychological eye what it is that people jobs actually require of workers. They have not inquired into the actual nature of this labor. Some do not know exactly what, in the case of emotional labor, becomes deskilled. A second discourse, closer to the person and more remote from the overall organization of work, concerns the display of feelings. There are many minor traffic rules of face-to-face interaction as they emerge at a card game, in an elevator, on the street, or at the dining table of an insane asylum. We cannot dismiss the small as trivial by show how small rules, transgression, and punishments add up to form the longer strips of experience we call work. At the same time, it is hard to explain, for example, why companies train flight attendants in smiling, or how emotion tone is supervised, or what profit is ultimately tied to emotional labor. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
It is hard, in other words, to draw on this discourse alone and see how display work fits into the larger scheme of things. The third discourse takes pace in a quiet side street of American social science; it deals with the timeless issues of what an emotion is and how we can manage it. To uncover the heart of emotional labor, to understand what it takes to do it and what it does to people, it is important to realize that certain events in economic history cannot be fully understood unless we pay attention to the filigreed patterns of feeling and their management because the details of these patterns are an important part of what may men and women do for a living. Because such different traditions are joined here, my inquiry will have a different relevance for those who do the work it describes—the flight attendants. However, most of us have jobs that require some handling of other people’s feelings and our own, and in this sense we are all partly flight attendants. One who has realized truth according to the Secret Doctrine may continue to follow the same vocation which one was practising before. That is, a king may remain a king and a carpenter may continue one’s carpentering. There is no law or rule which may be laid down as to the kind of work an illuminate may perform or abstain from performing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Similarly, the illuminate is not to be judged by one’s practice of or one’s omission to practise asceticism. The secretary who creates a cheerful office that announces her company as friendly and dependable and her boss as up-and-coming, the waitress or the waiter who creates an atmosphere of pleasant dining, the tour guide or hotel receptionist who makes us feel welcome, the social worker whose look of solicitous concern makes the client feel cared for; the salesman who creates the sense of a hot commodity, the bill collector who inspires fear, the funeral parlor director who makes the bereaved feel understood, the minister who creates a sense of protective outreach but even-handed warmth—all of them must confront in some way or another the requirements of emotional labor. Emotional labor does not observe conventional distinctions between types of jobs. By my estimate roughly 33 percent of American workers today have jobs that subject them to substantial demands for emotional labor. Moreover, of all women working, roughly 50 percent have jobs that call for emotional labor. As traditionally more accomplished managers of feeling in private life, women more than men have put emotional labor on the market, and they know more about its personal costs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Any functioning society makes effective use of its members’ emotional labor. We do not think twice about the use of feeling in the theater, or in psychotherapy, or in forms of group life that we admire. It is when we come to speak of the exploitation of those at the lower level of the hierarchy by those at the higher levels in any society that we become morally concerned. In any system, exploitation depends o the actual distribution of many kinds of profits—many, authority, status, honor, well-being. It is not emotional labor itself, therefore, but the underlying system of recompense that raises the question of what the cost of it is. In the primitive World, we might say, the child had been the bearer of the collective immortality, since it was through him or her that the souls of the ancestors reentered the World. This is one reason why many primitives handled their children so gently: the child was actually in the process of giving birth to himself or herself with the help of the ancestral spirit; if one was mean to the child, the spirit might be upset and withdraw from the World. Under the ideology of the patriarchal family, the child becomes the individual successor to his father—actually, then, merely, the son of a father, and is no longer the independent mediator of the spirts from the ancestral World. However, this now the only spiritual lineage in which the on can perpetuate himself in turn. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
This is why, too, fathers could be despotic with their children: they were merely objects to whom one had oneself given life. Today we are shocked when we read of the ancient Greek who blinded his sons for disobeying him and going off to war—but their lives were literally his personal property, and he had this authority and used it. Considering that science is widely regarded as the highest value in contemporary industrial society, it is very difficult for the average person to believe that what science commands could be wrong or immortal. If the Lord had not told Abraham not to kill his son, Abraham would have done it, like millions of parents who practiced child sacrifice in history. For the believer neither God nor his modern equivalent, Science, can command anything that is wrong. For this reason, the high degree of obedience is not more surprising than that 35 percent of the group refused at some point to obey; in fact this disobedience of more than a third might well be considered more surprising—and encouraging. People remove the awareness of the conflict by renationalization, and the conflict manifests itself only unconsciously in increased stress, neurotic symptoms, or feeling guilty for the wrong reasons. Subjects are in a conflict situation because they are caught between obedience to authority and behavior patterns learned from childhood on: not to harm other people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
However, is this really so? Have we learned not to harm other people? That may be what children are told in Sunday school. In the realistic school of life, however, they learn that they must seek their own advantage even if other people are harmed. It seems 65 percent of the subjects could be conditioned to behave cruelly, but a reaction of indignation or horror against this sadistic behavior was clearly present in most of them. Apparently they had little or no feeling of opposition to the cruel acts they were performing. Possibly this is because they enjoyed the suffering of others and felt no remorse when their behavior was sanctioned by authority. Another possibility is that they were such highly alienated or narcissistic people that they were insulted against what went on in other people: or they might be psychopaths, lacking in any kind of mortal reaction. As for those in whom the conflict manifested itself in various symptoms of stress and anxiety, it should be assumed that they are people who do not has a sadistic or destructive character. (If one had undertaken and even could have made an educated guess as to how people would behave.) However, we cannot forget in more people the presence of conscience, and their pain when obedience made them act against their conscience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Thus, while it may seem there is proof of the easy dehumanization of beings, the subjects’ reactions show rather the contrary—the presence of intense forces within them that find cruel behavior intolerable. We have to consider not only cruel behavior but the—often unconscious—guilty conscience of those who obey authority. (The Nazis had to use an elaborate system of camouflage of atrocities in order to cope with the conscience of the average being.) Another attitude in the striving for power is that of never giving in. Agreeing with an opinion or accepting advice, even if they are considered right, is felt as a weakness, and the mere idea of doing so provokes rebellion. Persons for whom this attitude is important are inclined to lean over backward and, out of sheer fear of giving in, compulsively take the opposition stand. The most general expression of this attitude is the neurotic’s secrete insistence that the World should adapt itself to one instead of adapting oneself to the World. One of the basic difficulties in psychoanalytic therapy comes from this source. The ultimate reason for a patient’s analysis is not the gaining of knowledge or insight, but the use of this insight in order to change one’s attitudes. In spite of recognizing that a change would be for one’s own good, a neurotic of this type abhors this prospect of changing because in implies for one a final giving in. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The incapacity to do his has implications also for love relationship. Love, whatever else it may mean, always implies surrender, giving in to the lover as well as to one’s own feelings. The more a person, whether man or woman, is incapable of such giving in, the more unsatisfactory will be one’s love relationships. This same factor may have a bearing also on frigidity, inasmuch as having a climax presupposes just this capacity of completely letting go. The influence which we have seen that the striving for power has on love relations allows us to understand more completely many of the implications of the neurotic need for affection. Many of he attitudes involved in the striving for affection cannot be wholly understood without considering the part that is play in them by the striving for power. It is impossible to present the basic conflict by simply showing it in operation in a number of individuals. Because of its disruptive power the neurotic builds a defensive structure around it which serves not only to bolt it from view but so deeply imbeds it that it cannot be isolated in pure form. The result is that what appears on the surface is more the various attempts at solution than the conflict itself. A simple detailing of case histories, therefore, would not bring all its implications and nuances to full relief; the presentation would necessarily be too circumstantial and give too untransparent a picture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
When we look at the complaint type of personality, it manifests all the traits that go with moving toward people. One shows marked need for affection and approval and an especial need for a partner—that is, a friend, lover, husband or wife who is to fulfill all expectations of life and take responsibility for good an evil, one’s successful manipulation becoming the predominant task. These needs have the characteristics common to all neurotic trends; that is, they are compulsive, indiscriminate, and generate anxiety or despondence when frustrated. They operate almost independently of the intrinsic worth of the others in question, as well as of the person’s real feelings toward them. However, these needs may vary in their expression, they all center around a desire for human intimacy, a desire for belonging. Because of the indiscriminate nature of one’s needs, the complaint type will be prone to overrate one’s congeniality and the interests one has in common wit those around one and disregard the separating factors. One’s misjudging of people this way is not due to ignorance, stupidity, or the inability to observe, but is determined by one’s compulsive needs. One feels-as illustrated by a patient’s drawing—like a baby surrounded by strange and threatening animals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
There she stood, tiny and helpless, in the middle of the picture, around her a huge bee ready to sting her, a dog that could bite her, a cat that could jump at her, a bull that could gore her. Obviously, then, the real nature of other beings does not matter, expect in so far as the more aggressive ones, beings the more frightening, are the ones whose affection is the most necessary. In sum, this type needs to be liked, wanted, desired, loved; to feel accepted, welcomed, approved of, appreciated; to be needed, to be of importance to others, especially to one particular person; to be helped, protected, taken care of, guided. When in the course of analysis the compulsive character of these needs is pointed out to be a patient, one will be likely to assert that all these desires are quite natural. And, of course, here one is on defensible ground. Except for persons whose whole being has become so warped by sadistic trends that the desire for affection is choked beyond all possibility of functioning, it is safe to assume that everyone dos not to feel liked, to belong, to be helped, and so on. Where the patient errs is in claiming that all one’s frantic beating about for affection and approval is genuine, while in reality the genuine portion is heavily overshadowed by one’s insatiable urge to feel safe. Only when a being finds out one’s correct relation to the Universe and to one’s fellow creatures will one find one’s own well-being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Presence of the Divine in the Name of Demands a Shy and Trembling Heart that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!
Silent entangler of beauty’s tresses! Most happy listener when the morning blesses thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes. The streets of Cresleigh Mills Station with their giant homes, were soothing to him. Soon he was shopping in brightly lighted emporiums for decent clothes. And in his comfortable parlor from midnight till dawn he watched television, learning all about this modern World in which he had emerged, how things were done, how things had to be. A steady stream of dramas, soap operas, news broadcast, and documentaries soon taught him everything. He lay back in his large overstuffed easy chair marveling at the blue skies and the brilliant Sun he saw before him on the large television screen. He watched sleek and powerful Germany automobiles speeding on mountain roads and over prairies. He watched s somber bespectacled teacher speak in sonorous tones of “the ascent of man.” What is it about the structure of American society that produces delinquency in certain sectors of that society? We believe that problems of adjustment to social class play a vital role in the genesis of the delinquent subculture. First and most obviously, the working class child stares the social class status of one’s parents. In the status game, then, the working-class child starts out with a disadvantage and, to the extent that one cares what middle-class person think of one or has internalized the dominant middle-class attitudes toward social class position, one may be expected to feel some shame. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The one area of one’s occupational life in which one might be free to act, the area of one’s own personality, must now also be managed, must become the alert yet obsequious instrument by which goods are distributed. “When he was seven years old, I used to carry him [to work] on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to work 16 hours a day…I have often knelt down to feed him, as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop.” Fed meals as he worked, as a steam engine is fed coal and water, this child was an instrument of labor. We should be concerned with the fundamental: the cost of becoming an instrument of labor. Shame is felt perhaps most strongly over the failures of other people, especially one’s parents, who have not been successful, who have not worked hard enough to have a large and beautiful house, or a new BMW M750Li automobile, Cadillac Escalade, Chevy Impala, Ford F350, or Honda Accord, or to send one to a private school, to live on the right street, on the right side of the river, or go to the right church. As class is an expression of economic success, then it follows that to belong as a child or an adolescent in a class below others is a statement that one’s parents have failed, they did not make it good. This is bad enough when they have not risen, unbearable if they have stated to fall even lower. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Deeper than our disapproval of any breaking of then ten commandments possesses our conviction that a failure to keep moving is unforgiveable sin. Furthermore, people of status tend to be people of power and property. They have the means to make more certain that their children will obtain respect and other rewards which have status significance even where title in terms of deserving middle-class conduct is dubious. One me stress that throughout the importance of parental status in obtaining special consideration in school activities and on the job through “connections” and other means of exerting pressure. Finally, parents of good standing in the class system can usually provide their children with money, Betty Crocker desserts, clothes, cars, Cresleigh homes and other material amenities which not only function as external trappings and insignia of status, but which serve also as a means and avenue to activities and relationships which confer status. Like one’s parents, a child is unlikely to be invited to participate in activities which require a material apparatus one cannot afford; if invited, one is less likely to accept for fear of embarrassment; and if one accepts, one is less likely to be in a position to reciprocate and therefore to sustain a relationship premised on a certain among of reciprocity. It seems reasonable to assume that out of all this there arise feelings of inferiority and perhaps resentment and hostility. It is remarkable, however, that there is relatively little research explicitly designed to test this assumption. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
However, invidious status distinctions among young people are, after all, a result of individual differences in conformity to a set of conduct norms as well as simple functions of their parents’ social status. Variations in character reputation scores cannot be explained simply as a result of social class membership. The existence of “achieved” as well as “ascribed” criteria of status for children makes it possible for some working-class children to “rise above” the status to which the social class position of their parents would otherwise consign them. However, this does not make the situation psychologically any easier for those of their brethren who remain behind, or rather, below. Low achieved status is no pleasanter than low ascribed status, and very likely a good deal more unpleasant, for reasons we have indicated earlier; it reflects more directly on the personal inadequacy of the child and leaves one with fewer convenient rationalizations. The young trainee sitting next to me wrote on her digital note pad, “Important to smile. Do not forget to smile.” The admonition came from the speaker in the front of the room, a crew cut pilot in his early fifties, speaking in a Southern drawl: “Now girls, I want you to get out there and really smile. Your smile if your biggest asset. I want you to go out there and use it. Smile. Really smile. Really lay it on.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The pilot spoke of the smile as the flight attendant’s asset. However, as novices like the one next to me move through training, the value of a personal smile is groomed to reflect the company’s disposition—its confidence that its planes will not crash, its reassurance the departures and arrivals will be on time, its welcome and its invitation to return. Trainers take it as their job to attach to the trainee’s smile an attitude, a viewpoint, a rhythm of feeling that is, as they often say, “professional.” This deeper extension of the professional smile is not always easy to retract and the end of the workday, as one worker in her first year at American Airlines noted: “Sometimes I come off a long trip in a state of utter exhaustion, but I find I cannot relax. I giggle a lot, I shatter, I call friends. It is as if I cannot release myself from an artificially created elation that kept me ‘up’ on the trip. I hope to be able to come down from it better as I get better at the job.” As the Public Service Announcement jingle says, “Our smiles are not just painted on.” Our flight attendants’ smiles, the company emphasizes, will be more human than the phony smiles you are resigned to seeing on people who are paid to smile. There is a smile like strip of paint on the nose of plane. Indeed, the plane and the flight attendant advertise each other. The radio advertisement foes on to promise not just smiles and service but a travel experience of real happiness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
As in any industry such as banking, real estate, fashion, sales or retail, politeness and a smile are seen in one way, this is no more than delivering a service. Also, workers know their own smiles and convinces provided to customers is part of the on-the-job behavior, which is part of professionalism, dollar bills, and bitcoins that have intervened between the smiler and the smiled upon, and the extra effort it takes to invoke this spontaneous warmth makes it possible to exist in uniform—and companies now advertise spontaneous warmth, too. Customers call to inform departments that not only would they like educational material, but they would also like it to make them happy as well as inform them, and when your goal is to please the customer or member, you have to comply to their wishes. Nonetheless, at first glance, it might seem that the circumstances of the nineteenth-century factory child and the twentieth-century flight attendant could not be more different. To the boy’s mother, to Karl Marx, to the members of the Children’s Employment Commission, perhaps to the manager of the wallpaper factory, and almost certainly to the contemporary reader, the boy was a victim, even a symbol, of the brutalizing conditions of his time. We might imagine that he had an emotional half-life, conscious of little more than fatigue, hunger, and boredom. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
On the other hand, the flight attendant enjoys the upper-class freedom to travel, and she participates in the glamour she creates for others. She is the envy of clerks in duller, less well-paid jobs. However, a close examination of the differences between the two can lead us to some unexpected common ground. On the surface there is a difference in how we know what labor actually produces. How could the worker in the wallpaper factory tell when his job was done? Count the rolls of Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper; a good had been produced. How can the flight attendant tell when her job is done? A service has been produced; the customer seems content. In the case of the flight attendant, the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself, in a way that loving or hating wallpaper is not part of producing wallpaper. Seeming to love the job become part of the job; actually trying to love it, and to enjoy the customers, helps in this effort. You ever notice when you shop at a corporate store, where the manager is polite and acts like they own the business, care about the presentation of the products and inventory, and wants you to be satisfied, not only does it make your more confident in their abilities, but it makes it more likely that you will purchase products from the brand or business again in the future. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
In processing people, the product is a state of mind. For instance, in real estate, people are greeted not only with a smile, but with concerned enquiry such as, “Would you also like to tour residence 3 today and hear about the options, Miss?” The atmosphere is that of a civilized party—with the guest, in response, behaving like civilized community members. Once or twice our inspectors tested the employees by being deliberately exacting, but they were never roused, and at the end of the tour they lined up to say farewell with undiminished brightness. Potential buyers are quick to detect strained or forced smiles, and they come to view the property wanting to enjoy the tour and get an idea of what it will be like to live in the home and community. The customers look forward to signing the contract and buying the house because it was a pleasant experience. Surely that is how it ought to feel. This is an emotional labor. Emotional labor is the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has an exchange value. This labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mine in others—in this case, the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place. This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to out individuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there is possessed a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is used to do the work. The factory boy’s arm functioned like a piece of machinery used to produce wallpaper. His employer, regarding that arm as an instrument, claimed control over its speed and motions. In this situation what was the relation between the boy’s arm and his mind? Was his arm in any meaningful sense his own? The real estate agent does physical work when she gives tours, and she does mental work when she prepared for and actually organizes sales. And his is also part of an emotional labor. This is an old issue, but as the comparison with the real estate agency suggest, it is still very much alive. If we can become alienated from service in a service-producing society, we can become alienated from the service in a service-producing society. We need to characterize American society of the twenty first century in more psychological terms, for now the problems that concerns us mist order on the psychiatric. For the real estate agent, the smiles are part of her work, a part that requires her to coordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless. To show that enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Similarly, part of the job is to disguise fatigue and irritation, for otherwise the labor would show in an unseemly way, and the product—buy contentment—would be damaged. It suggests what costs even happy workers under normal conditions pay for this labor without a name. The speed-up of demand has sharpened the ambivalence many workers feel about how much of oneself to give over to the role and how much of oneself to protect from it. Because it is easier to disguise fatigue and irritation if they can be banished altogether, at least for brief periods, this feat calls for emotional labor. It is also good to remember some people are really curious about products and for them, seeing a new house could be like being exposed to an advanced trigonometry class—they have no idea what they are looking at, how they will fit into it, or what designs will go well in the space. There have always been public-service jobs, of course; what is new is that they are now socially engineered and thoroughly organized from the upper levels. Though a real estate agents job is no worse and in many ways better than other service jobs, it makes the worker more vulnerable to the social engineering of one’s emotional labor and reduces one’s control over that labor. Emotional labor is potentially good. No customer wants to deal with a surly waiter, a crabby member service representative, or a cashier who avoids eye contact in order to avoid getting a request. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Lapses in courtesy by those paid to be courteous are very real and fairly common. What they show us is how fragile public civility really is. We are brought back to the question of what the social carpet actually consists of and what it requires of those who are supposed to keep it beautiful. The laggards and sluff-offs of emotional labor return us to the basic questions. What is emotional labor? What do we do when we manage emotion? What, in fact, is emotion? What are the costs and benefits of managing emotion, in private life and at work? What one cannot do in the beginning, one may be able to do in the middle of one’s journey. One should not let misgivings about one’s capacity to travel far stop one from travelling at all. Those who already possess a flair for emotional labor will naturally advance more easily and more quickly than those who do not. However, there is no reason for the one who is new to learning about emotional labor to adopt a defeatist attitude and negate the quest altogether. One’s weaknesses may come in the way of one’s seeking, yet one still remains an authentic seeker. If one lets one’s thoughts become negative, the quest would have to be entered with a realization of all its complexity and with a comprehension that one’s good intentions could be frustrated by adverse circumstances. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
A being needs to know his or her limitations and to accept them. However, one need not accept them as absolutes. There is always the mysterious miracle, the second wind, the untapped unpredictable resources. One should fit one’s aspiration to one’s estimated capacity but, in order not to miss unknown possibilities which might yet emerge to the surface, one should do so loosely and not rigidly. It is true that enlightenment is to be found wherever it is earnestly sought. However, one’s own desire and needs will provide one with a source of direction; and it may be that these will indicate that one’s individual progress may be hastened or better served by a journey to some particular location. No matter what the personal circumstances of a being may be, no matter whether one be rich or poor, well or ill, mature or young, educated or illiterate, there is no point in one’s life where some part at east of the quest may not be introduced. Would they have done better to have stayed home, rather then to have gone off looking for gurus in the news media? The answer must vary from seeker to seeker. From a long-range point of view, is anyone really “lost”? It is sometimes consoling to remember that we have Eternity before us, and we can only do what we are capable of at a given time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Individuals who present themselves before others may wish them to think highly of them, or to think that one thinks highly of them, or to perceive how in fact one feels toward them, or to obtain no clear-cut impression; one may wish to ensure sufficient harmony so that the interaction can be sustained, or to elude them, get rid of, confuse, mislead, antagonize, or insult them. Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of one’s motive for having this objective, it will be in one’s interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of one. This control is achieve largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and one can influence this definition by expressing oneself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with one’s own plan. Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for one to mobilize one’s activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in one’s interest to convey. If some acknowledge and accept the responsibility which accompanies their spiritual eminence, others prefer to leave humankind in God’s keeping and to themselves! Some illuminates are willing, even eager, to get involved with individuals but others are not. If they prefer to live quietly, unnoticed, this does not make them more selfish and less holy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
If one attains enlightenment, it is not possible to predict with precision what a being would do. With some persons, force of habit or innate tendencies may lead to the continuance of the same outer life which one led before enlightenment. So an individual leading a solitary withdrawn life may still do so whereas another may start a preaching crusade to the mass of people. For, with the personal self subdued by God, the latter is then the operative factor. And the spirit is like the wind which blows as it listens. However, we must go forward with the process of evocation of the Holy Ghost for the sake of communicating with these powers to gain insight, or compelling them to create beneficial Changes. When one reaches a level of spiritual maturity through substantial contact with the powers of God and the discipline of Jesus Christ (these things are mutually dependent) and has been infernally empowered by the Rite of Preparing for the Grace of God, we can see reality through unveiled eyes. This will change us in incredible ways forever. One will begin to trump the physical decay, and the desire to gain power and strength will intensify as one grows tired of being tired. As a result, the individual will begin to integrate more practical techniques of grounding this power within to growth in physical and spiritual strength. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Though the physical body may be at its weakest, your will shall start to be exercised and developed in very intense ways. Keep that in mind. The power of God are keys that open up the soul and perception through their spiritual eyes. God will grant you the infernal blessing of seeing through your eyes. Tear down the limits of the flesh and allow the Lord to dwell within you are you dwell within him. Remember to stay centered in your own God Self to prevent being deceived and led toward self-destruction. “And then I will remember my covenant which I have made unto my people, and I will bring my gospel unto them,” reports 3 Nephi 16.11. Not long ago, an intellectual leader was reported as saying, “I hope for the say when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.” These words, seriously meant, deserve thoughtful consideration, especially in view of the fact that the last sixty-five years have brought to this country an immense increase in the willingness to use the name of God—an unquestionable and astonishing revival, if not of religion, certainly of religious awareness. Do we hop that this will lead us to a state in which the name of God will be used without sublime embarrassment, without the restriction imposed by the fact that in the divine name there is more present than the name? Is an unembarrassed use of the divine name desirable? Is unembarrassed religion desirable? Certainly not! For the Presence of the divine in the name of demands a shy and trembling heart. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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If they Come in the Form of to-die-for Clay Dinnerware, I Guess Monday Blues are Okay!
Furthermore, while alcoholic may find solidarity in a movement such as A.A., narcotics addicts huddle together for mutual protection while under the influence. Theirs is truly a league of the damned. William Burroughs, himself a former addict, tells us, “Nothing ever happens in the junk World.” Nothingness, however, is precisely what many addicts and alcoholics seek, as Elmer Bendiner shows in his description of the “Bowery men.” Here in this brotherhood of the beaten and defeated, men find a perfect hiding place from the World, find what so many citizens of the modern World seek and never find—an escape from tensions. In this respect, at least, as Bendiner observes, they have something in common with the organization of man. However, while he fails to achieve tranquility, they succeed. Bowery men are deviants in that they reject the drive for status. However, what of those who deviate in that most sensitive area of human experience, pleasures of the flesh? Are they also alienated—either by choice or because of society’s hostility? Donald Cory, an acknowledged homosexual, offers an interesting description of homosexuals as a minority group. Like other minorities seeking a place in the community which has been denied them, they wage a grim struggle against society’s rejection. And as in the case of other minorities, part of their fate is to “internalize” the contempt of the majority. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
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The Power of the Ballot We Need in Sheer Self-Defence—Else What Shall Save Us from a Second Slavery?
As the Essence of Courage is to Stake One’s Life on a Possibility, so the Essence of Faith is to Believe that the Possibility Exists!
It is Well to Remember that the Revealing God is Also the Concealing God for One!
Visibility, significance, recognition! All that I had ever wanted when I took to the architectural design studio, all that I had ever wanted as a boy heading to Paris with a head full of dreams, all I had ever wanted I now had right here with my brothers and sisters! I had all that I have ever hoped for, and I had it here and now in this place and amongst my own people. The old human story simply did not matter. I had this, I had this moment, I had this recognition, and this visibility and this significance. And how could I ask for anything more? How could I look from right t left, at immortals who had witnessed all the epochs of recorded history, and want more than this? How could I gaze at immortals who had been drawn to this very spot by something more immense than they had ever witnessed, and long for more than the recognition they were now giving me? The victory of our own tribe to embrace one another, and let go of the hatred that had divided us for centuries, was my victory. After the house has schooled its tenants, there is still much uncertainty about the proper way to behave in this new and unique environment. What the house does not do, the neighbors finish off. By their example they indicate the code to be followed. Hence, if one person has a refrigerator, next-door thinks she should have one; if A has a BMW M5, B wants one too. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
“If,” says Mrs. Abbot, “you make your garden one way, they will knock theirs to pieces to make theirs like it. It is the same with the curtains—if you put up new curtains, they have new curtains in a couple of months. And if someone buys a new Persian rug they have to hang it on the line so you can see it.” The struggles for possessions is one in which comparisons with other people are constantly made. Some of those who have achieved a more complete respectability look down on the others; those with less money resent the more successful and keep as far away from them as they can. “The whole answer—the whole trouble is, many men cannot earn enough. They have to hide in the closet or behind the curtains. They have got a certain amount of pride.” Resentment may also produce an aggressive spirit. “This place is all right for middle-class people, people with a bit of money. It is no good for less affluent people—I think they have all got money troubles, that is why they are so spiteful to each other.” We have been arguing that, the possession of a new house having sharpened the desire for other material goods, the striving for them becomes a competitive affair. The house is a major part of the explanation. However, there is more to it than that. In Bethnal Green people, as we said earlier, commonly belong to a close network of personal relationship. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
These people know intimately dozens of other local people living near at hand, their school-friends, their work-mates, their pub-friends, and above all their relatives. They know them well because they have known them over a long period of time. Common family residence since childhood is the matrix of friendship. In this situation, Bethnal Greeners are not, as we see it, concerned to any marked extent with what is usually thought of as “status.” It is true, of course, that people have different incomes, different kinds of jobs, different kinds of houses—in this respect there is much less uniformity than at Greenleigh—even different standards of education. However, these attributes are not so important in evaluating others. It is personal characteristics which matter. The first thing they think of about William is not that he has a “fridge” and a BMW M5 sports sedan. They see him as a bad-tempered, or a real good sport, or the man with a way with women, or one of the best boxers of the Repton Club, or the person who got married to Ava last year. In a community of long-standing, status, in so far as it is determined by job and income and education, is more or less irrelevant to a person’s worth. He is judged instead, if he is judged at all, more in the round, as person with the usual mixture of all kinds of qualities, some good, some bad, many indefinable. He is more of a life-portrait than a figure on a scale. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
People in Bethnal Green are less concerned with “getting on.” Naturally they want to have more money and a better education for their children. The borough belongs to the same society as the estate, one in which standards and aspirations are moving upward together. However, the urge is less compulsive. They stand well with plenty of other people whether or not they have net curtains and fine pram. Their credit with others does not depend so much on their “success” as on the subtleties of behavior in their many face-to-face relationships. They have the security of belonging to a series of small and overlapping groups, and from their fellows they get the respect they need. How different is Greenleigh we have already seen. Where nearly everyone is a stranger, there is no means of uncovering personality. People cannot be judged by their personal characteristics: a person can certainly see that his or her neighbor works in one’s back garden in one’s short sleeves and one’s wife goes down to the shops in a blue coat, with two canvas bags: but that is not much of a guide to character. Judgment must therefore rest on the trappings of the being rather than on the being oneself. If people have nothing else to go by, they judge from one’s appearance, one’s house, or even one’s Minimotor. One is evaluated accordingly. Once the accepted standards are few, and mostly to do with wealth, they become the standards by which “status” is judged. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
In Bethnal Green it is not easy to give a man a single status, because he has so many; he has, in addition to the status of citizen, a low status as a scholar, high as a darts-player, low as a bargainer, and high as a story-teller. In Greenleigh, he has something much more nearly approaching one status because something much more nearly approaching one criterion is used his possessions. Or rather we should say that the family has one status. The small group which lives inside the same house hangs together, and where people are known as “from No. 22” or “37,” their identity being traced to the house which is the fixed entity, each one of them affect the credit of the other. The children, in particular, must be well dressed so that neighbors, and even more school friends and teachers, will think well of them, and of the parents. “We always see that the children look smart. At these new schools, you like them to go to school respectable. We like to keep them up to the standard out here.” The status is that of the family of marriage much more sharply than it is in Bethnal Green. In Bethnal Green the number of relatives who influence a person’s standing is much larger, and they are varied in their attributes. From a prominent local personality, a street-trader, say, a councilor, or a publican, a person can borrow prestige; but through another relative one may be associated with less enviable reputation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
One connection confers high status, another lone. It is therefore all the more difficult to give a person a single rating. On the other hand, the comparative isolation of the family at Greenleigh encourages the kind of simplified judgment of which we have been speaking. People at Greenleigh want to get on in the light of these simple standards, and they are liable to be more anxious about it just because they no loner belong to small local groups. Their relationships are window-to-window, not face-to-face. Their need for respect is just as strong as it ever was, but instead of being able to find satisfaction in actual living relationships, through the personal respect that accompanies almost any kind of respect is just as strong as it ever was, but instead of being able to find satisfaction in actual living relationships, through the personal respect that accompanies almost any steady human interaction, they have to turn the other kind of respect which is awarded, by some strange sort of common understanding, for the quantity and quality of possessions with which the person surrounds oneself. Those are the rules of the game and they are, under strong pressure from the neighbors, almost universally observed. Indeed, one of the most striking things about Greenleigh is the great influence the neighbors have, all the greater because they are anonymous. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Though people stay in their houses, they do in a sense belong to a strong compelling group. They do not now their judge personally but her influence is continuously felt. One might even suggest, to generalize, that the less the personal respect received in small group relations, the greater is the striving for the kind of impersonal respect embodied in a status judgment. The lonely man, fearing he is looked down on, becomes the acquisitive man; possession the balm to anxiety; anxiety the spur to unfriendliness. We took as out starting point people’s remarks—so frequent and vehement as to demand discussion—about the unfriendliness of their fellow residents. We have suggested two main explanation. Negatively, people are without the old relatives. Positively, they have a new house. In a life now house-centered instead of kinship centered, competition for status takes the form of a struggle for material acquisition. In the absence of small groups which join one family to another, in the absence of strong personal associations which extend from one household to another, people think that they are judged, and judge others, by the material standards which are the outward and visible mark of respectability. One may work toward enlightenment and inner freedom, to the aspiration which draws one most. Whatever helps consciousness come nearer to high moods is a useful spiritual path to someone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
One should take any approach which appeals to one, if it is morally worthy, and try to use what one can of it. Several different methods of spiritual development have been offered to humanity. Some have more merit than others and some are more effective than others. However, so much depends on the particular needs and status of each person, that the value of a method cannot be generalized with fairness. It is misleading to pick out any one way to the Overself and label it the best, or worse still, the only way. It is unfair to compare the merits of different ways. For the truth is that firstly each has a contribution to make, and finally each individual aspirant has one’s own special way. The claims that these simpler paths like devotion or repeating a declaration can lead to the goal, are neither true nor untrue. For they lead to the philosophic path which, in its own turn, leads directly to the goal. Is there a single teacher, prophet, messenger, or stain who has been universally acclaimed and universally followed? For that to be, all humankind would need the same outer background and inner status. Great or small there are certain differences between all persons. They cannot pursue the same ways, therefore we should let others take a different view in religion from ourselves. They very widely that it is an adventure for society if there exists as greater a diversity of approaches as possible—they are thus better able to suit particular needs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Why should anyone be afraid of diversity in religious views, of variety in religious practices? Let heresies multiply! Let the sects flourish! For out of all this free competition, the seeker has a better chance to find truth. The modern seeker is fortunate in this: that one has a wealth of teachings to choose from—or by which to be bewildered. We must not only acknowledge the differences between beings but respect them. Consequently we must accept the fact of variations in responsive capacity and not demand that all should think alike, believe alike, behave alike. What is too much for one individual is too little for another. No universally applicable prescription can be given to suit everyone alike. All these paths should converge towards one another, as all must merge in the central point in the end. However different personal reactions will necessarily be with every individual seeker, there will still remain certain experiences, requirements, and conditions—and these are the most important ones—along one’s oath which must be the same for every other seeker too. Each being’s approach must inevitably be individualistic yet each will also share in common all the essential which constitute the Quest. Whether a being is a Zionist or a Zennist, whether one seeks the Christian Salvation or the Japanese Satori, the fundamental approach is more or less the same. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
There is no cut and dried system or method which can be guaranteed to work successfully in every case. However, there are suggestions, hints, ideas which have been culled from the personal experiences of a widely varied, World-spread number of masters and aspirants. Since each being’s pat is peculiarly an individual one, no book can guide all one’s steps. A book may help one through some situations, inform one about the general course of inner development, and warn one against the probable mistake and chief pitfalls. Each being has to strive for this higher consciousness in one’s own way. Each path to it is unique. However, at the same time one may profitably avail oneself of the general instruction contained in writing like the present one. Let us now consider the innocence of the “enemy,” a typical young member of the Ohio National Guard, roughly around the age of 22. I am helped in this by a letter I received from a college girl whose brother was exactly in that position: I shall quote from this letter: “My younger brother Michael was afraid to answer the telephone in those says for fear it would be his National Guard Headquarters calling him for riot duty on one of the nearby campuses. Michael says that the rest of his group was afraid of a phone call as he. He was not at all sure the student protestors were wrong, and even if they were, the presence of the National Guard was no answer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
“If my brother had been called for riot duty, and if some irresponsible officer had provided him with a loaded gun, and if the confrontation had become strained, he may have shot a student…I think that both Allison Krause and the Guardsman who shot her were playing roles that did not belong to either of them.” Let us assume, with my correspondent, that Michael is mobilized and arrives on the Kent State campus. He picks up the fact that the students at Kent State had woefully neglected any real communication with the townspeople—indeed, had gone out of their way to irritate them. On Saturday nights, according to a dispatch in the New York Times, students would sit on the downtown sidewalk, making the townspeople walk around them to the accompaniment of obscenities, totally unaware, although it is hard to believe, of the degree of hatred this was engendering in the people of the town of Kent. Over a period of two days Michael sees one building burnt down, he gets only three hours sleep the night before, the students yell obscene jokes at him and pelt him with rocks as he is marched with his battalion through the taunting crowds. Shall we condemn Michael, our hypothetical young guardsman, as murderer? #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
If we do that—because he was the one who squeezed the trigger—and fold up our briefcases and go home, we are preventing ourselves from understanding a large segment of reality, and we are capitulating exactly at the point where we should press on the hardest. Michael’s sister, my correspondent, goes on to point out where she thinks the culprit is: “I think the country has evolved into a kind of massive unreality and fear…It is a kind of out-of-touchness which robes people of most of their alternative except survival.” There is no denying that this massive “unreality and fear” exists. In our day we tend to live out the state of mind that Camus predicted in his early novel, The Stranger, in which Meursault, the anti-hero, exists in a general state of semiconsciousness. He makes love to a girl as though both were half-asleep, and he finally shoots an Arab in the Sun on the desert in a condition of semiawareness that leaves us, as no doubt it left him, wondering whether he really shot the Arab or not. He is tried for murder. His crime is actually the murder of himself. What my correspondent calls this “massive unreality” and “out-of-touchness” makes every being a stranger to other beings as well as oneself. And the fact that it is the sickness of contemporary beings, who surrenders one’s consciousness in the face of the continual assaults on one’s senses, like surf in a perpetually stormy ocean, does not make our problem any easier. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
However, you and I also make up this country which has become so filled with “massive unreality and fear.” When we think of the “country” or the “society” as at fault, we tend to posit the country as an anonymous “it” which does things to us, the people in it. It is then, in part, a convenient peg on which to hang our own projections. Thus we evade the issue on its deeper levels. I am not discounting the importance of social psychology, the study of the way groups takes on roles and use them for their various purposes of security. I am also aware of the effect of electrotechnics on the individual, of the mass impersonality of technology, and of the experience each of us undergoes as the sport of innumerable pressures operating on us in “a World we never made.” However, our society, our country, has this power because we as individuals capitulate to it; we give over our own power, as I have tried to point out earlier, and we then are offended because we are powerless. To that extent, we victimize ourselves. Our survival depends on whether human consciousness can be asserted, and with sufficient strength, to stand against the stultifying pressures of technological progress. If the country has evolved into a state of “massive unreality and fear,” it must be you and I who experience this unreality and fear. And so we must push on in our endeavor to understand the psychological uses of innocence and murder. #Randolphharris 13 of 23
The striving for power serves in the first place as a protection against helplessness, which as we have seen is one of the basic elements in anxiety. The neurotic is so averse to any remote appearance of helplessness or weakness in oneself that one sill shun situations which the normal person considers entirely commonplace, such as any acceptance of guidance, advice, or help, any kind of dependence on persons or circumstances, any giving in to or agreeing with others. This protest against helplessness does not arise in all its intensity at once, but increases gradually; the more the neurotic feels factually handicapped by one’s inhibitions, the less one is factually able to asset oneself. The weaker one factually becomes the more anxiously one has to avoid anything that has a faint resemblance to weakness. In the second place, the neurotic striving for power serves as a protection against the danger of feeling or being regarded as insignificant. The neurotic develops a rigid and irrational ideal of strength which makes one believe one should be able to master any situation, no matter how difficult, and should master it right away. This ideal becomes linked with pride, and as a consequence the neurotic considers weakness not only as a danger but also as a disgrace. One classifies people as either “strong” or “weak,” admiring the former and despising the latter. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
One goes to extremes also in what one considers to be weakness. One has more or less contempt for all persons who agree with one or give in to one’s wishes, who have inhibitions or do not control their emotions so closely that they always show an impassive face. One despises the same qualities in oneself as well. One feels humiliated if one has to recognize the existence of anxiety or an inhibition in oneself, and thus despises oneself for having a neurosis and is anxious to keep this fact a secret. One also despises oneself for not being able to cope with it alone. The particular forms that such a striving for power will take depend upon what lack of power is most feared or despised. I shall mention a few expressions of this striving that are especially frequent. For one, the neurotic will desire to have control over others as well as over oneself. One wants nothing to happen that one has not initiated or approved of. This quest for control may take the attenuated form of consciously permitting the other to have full freedom, but insisting on knowing about everything one does, and feeling irritated if anything is kept a secret. Tendencies to control maybe repressed to such a degree that not only the person oneself, but even those about one, may be convinced of one’s greater generosity in allowing freedom to the other. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
If a person represses one’s desire for control so completely one may, however, become depressed or have severe headaches or stomach upsets every time the other has an appointment with other friends or unexpectedly comes home late. Not knowing the cause of the disturbances one may accredit them to weather conditions, to an error in diet or similar irrelevant conditions. Much of what appears as curiosity is determined by a secret wish to control the situation. Also persons of this type are inclined to want to be right all the tie, and are irritated at being proved wrong, even if only in an insignificant detail. They have to know everything better than anyone else, an attitude which may at times be embarrassingly conspicuous. Persons who are otherwise serious and dependable, when confronted with a question to which they do not know the answer, may pretend to know, or may invent something, even if ignorance in this particular instance would not discredit them. Sometimes the emphasis is on the need to know in advance what will happen, to anticipate and predict every possibility. This attitude may go with a distaste for any situation involving uncontrollable factors. No risk should be taken. The emphasis on self-control shows in an aversion to being carried away by any feelings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
If he falls into love with her, the attraction which a neurotic woman feels for a man may suddenly turn into contempt. Patients of this type find it hard to allow themselves much drift in free associations, because that would mean losing control and letting themselves be carried away into unknow territory. I am going to talk with you tonight about something that is very close to my own thoughts—this something I have been thinking about for years in my own hear, and in the period when I spent two years in bed with tuberculosis up in the Adirondack mountains before there were any drugs for this disease—all of these things come together in these ideas I have been sharing with you tonight. They came, particularly, when I was interviewing, in New York City, student candidates to be trained in analytic institutions. I was on the committee for two groups, and so I interviewed for these two different groups. What I asked myself was, “What makes a good psychotherapist? What is there in a particular person that would tell us that here is somebody that can genuinely help other people in the fairly long training of the psychoanalyst?” It was quite clear to me that it was not adjustment—adjustment that we talked of so fondly when I was Ph.D. student, and so ignorantly. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
I knew that the well-adjusted person who came in and sat down to be interviewed would not make a good psychotherapist. Adjustment is exactly what a neurosis is; and that is one’s trouble. It is an adjustment to nonbeing in order that some little being maybe preserved. An adjustment always flounders on the question—adjustment to what? Adjustment to a psychotic World, which we certainly live in? Adjustment so societies that are Faustian and insensitive? And then I looked further. We know very little about the effect of punishment on learning, because almost no truly scientific studies have been made of it on human beings. For instance, we do not know how much punishment is best for learning—and we do not know how much difference it makes as to who is giving the punishment, whether an adult learns best from a younger or an older person than oneself—or any things of that sort. Harry Stack Sullivan, who was the only psychiatrist born in America to contribute a new system that was powerful enough to have an influence, not only on psychiatry, but on psychology, sociology, and a number of other professions, was one of my teachers. We all revered him greatly. Dr. Sullivan was an alcoholic, and he was latently homosexual—he once proposed to Clara Thompson when he was drunk and got up very early the next morning to take it back. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Dr. Sullivan never could get along with any groups with more than two of three people. It dawned on me that mental problems are problems that always had their beginnings, and their cures, in interpersonal relationships. Consider Abe Maslow. He was not a therapist, but one of the great psychologists. Dr. Maslow had a miserable time of it. He came from an immigrant family in the slums; he was alienated from his mother and afraid of his father. In New York, groups often lived in ghettos, and Abe was beaten up by Italian and Irish boys in the vicinity (he was Jewish); he was underweight, and yet, this man, the man who had so many hellish experiences—was the one who introduced the system of peak experiences into psychology. Dr. Freud and Dr. Maslow are two of the most important people in the development of psychology. I want to propose a theory to you, and this is the theory of the wounded healer. I want to propose that we heal other people by virtue of our own wounds. Psychologists who become psychotherapist, psychiatrists, too, as far as that goes, are people who had, as babies and children, to be therapists for their own families. This is pretty well established by various studies. And I propose to carry that idea further and to propose that it is the insight that comes to us by virtue of our own struggle with our problems that lead us to develop empathy and creativity with human beings—and compassion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
There was a study made in England, at the University of Cambridge, of geniuses—great writers, great artists, and so on—and of the forty-seven that this woman took as her sample, eighteen had been hospitalized—in a mental hospital—or had been treated with lithium, or had electric shock. These were people that you know. Handel—his music came out of great suffering. Byron—you would think he did everything but suffer, but he was a manic depressive. Anne Sexton, who, I believe, later committed suicide, was a manic-depressive. Virginia Woolf, who I know committed suicide, was also troubled by depression. Robert Lowell, the American poet, was manic depressive. Now, what I enlarge that to say that there are positive aspects to all diseases, to all illness, whether it is mental or physical. We may say that some form of struggle is necessary to carry us to the depth out of which creativity comes. Therefore a certain amount of discipline and personal power must be accumulated to prevent physical, mental, and spiritual catabolism. One must develop a self-devotion which will instill self-love, self-respect, and beneficial thinking that will empower you to shatter obstacles as the God of your World. If you can work through the test of your own demons and your imaginations own worst fears all else will seem rudimentary and insignificant. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Just remember, you must be honest with yourself and work hard as hell (pun intended) to become something great. Indeed, we sometimes see obstacles as locked doors which keep us from uniting the various levels of our consciousness. However, awareness just moves around and the filter of perception changes. Operating from a higher state of awareness is not to be mistaken for uniting the isolated levels of consciousness. Consciousness cannot expand until it is first made whole and this is to oppose creation and all its limitations. It is a force which acts as the very key which unlocks the cages of imprisonment so that we can reach liberation by stepping into outer darkness which reunited the isolated frequencies of the light spectrum. Through this we not only better perceive reality but we are also better able to counter create though personal alchemical transmutation and spirituality. Feel your soul absorbing the isolated colors of the light spectrum and reuniting the consciousness which has been torn through creation. Jerome Kagan, a professor up at Harvard, made a long and intensive study of creativity, and what he concluded is that the artist’s main capacity, what he calls “his creative freedom” is not born within him. The creativity is made in the pain of adolescent loneliness, the isolation of physical disability. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
We often expect people who experience the ultimate in horror in their background to be broken people. When we hear of what people have been through, we doubt they will survive. However, some not only survive, they become exceedingly creative and productive human beings. Individuals who have suffered calamitous events in the past can, and do, function later at average levels and may even function at higher-than-average levels. Relevant coping mechanisms may avert the potentially detrimental effects of calamitous experiences, but they may also transform these experiences into growth-producing experiences. Inmates who have had poor, unpampered childhoods adapted best to the concentration camps, whereas most of those who had been reared by permissive, wealthy parents were the first to die. Many of our most valuable people have come from the most calamitous early-childhood situations. Investigations of the childhoods of eminent people expose the fact that they did not receive anything like the kind of child rearing that a person in our culture is led to believe is healthy for children. Now, whether in spite of or because of these conditions, these children not only survived, but reached great heights of achievement, many after having experiences the most deplorable and traumatic childhoods. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
There was a study also done right here in Berkeley of the long-term development of human beings. A group of psychologists followed people through from birth to 30 years of age. They followed 166 men and women through adulthood, and they were shocked by the inaccuracies of their expectations. They were wrong in about 66 percent of the cases, mainly because they had overestimated the damaging effects of early troubles. They had also not foreseen—this sentence is interesting to all of us—they also had not foreseen the negative effect of a smooth and successful childhood, that a degree of stress and challenge seemed to spur psychological strength and competence. The goal here is to allow the essence of God to flow through and operate within each level of our being or consciousness. In this way we can become fully open to gateways to his powers. As we build our faith the Holy Ghost will serve as our foundation. It will align us and our temple with the frequency of the Godhead to be employed and serve to raise your own level of spiritual power. This will further unite physical and spiritual discipline in order to create a dynamic synergy which will assist in tearing the veil between physical and spiritual realms. Powerful changes will begin to take place within you and your life experience as you begin to integrate and merge with these spiritual forces. “And a portion of that Spirit dwelleth in me, which giveth me knowledge, and also power according to my faith and desires which are in God,” reports Alma 18.35. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 