Randolph Harris II International Institute

It seemed at times that the men singing the Christmas carols made me cry. I expected the women to sing, it seemed natural, but for the men to join in, men of all ages, and to do it with such stout hearts, that seemed especially reassuring and wonderful. I cried every year. It was that and the purity of the soprano who sang ‘O Holy Night,’ and ‘What is This?’ Of course I joined in the singing myself. Nonetheless, it made me ponder on a third dimension which science has added to modern war. It has created war nerves and the war of nerves. I am not thinking about the technical conditions for a war of nerves: the camera person and the radio and the massed display strength. I am thinking of the climate in which this stage lightening flickers and is made to seem real. The last eighty years have given us a frightening show of these mental states. There is a division in the mind of each of us, that has become plain, between the being and the brute; and the rift can be opened, the being submerged, with a cynical simplicity, with the meanest tools of envy and frustration, which in my boyhood would have been thought inconceivable in a civilized society. I shall come back to this cleavage in our minds, for it is much more than an item in a list of war crimes. However, it is an item. It helps create the conditions for disaster. And I think that science has contributed to it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Science; the fact that most people are impressed by it but ignorant and helpless—all this seems to me to have contributed to the division in our minds. And scientists cannot escape the responsibility for this. They have enjoyed acting the mysterious stranger, the powerful voice without emotion, the expert and the god. They have failed to make themselves comfortable in the talk of people in the street; no one taught them the knack, of course, but they were not keen to learn. And now they find the distance which they enjoyed has turned to distrust, and the awe has turned to fear; and people who are by no means fools really believe that we should be better off without science. These are the indictments which scientists cannot escape. Of course, they are often badly phrased, so that scientists can side-step them with generalities about the common responsibility, and who voted the credits for atomic research anyway; which are perfectly just, but not at all relevant. That is not the heart of the matter; and the people in queues and pubs are humbly groping for the heart. They are not good at saying things and they do not give model answers to interviewers. However, when we say “We have forgotten what is right,” what is in their minds is perfectly true. Science and society are out of joint. Science has given to no one in particular a power which no one in particular knows how to use. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Why do not scientists invent something sensible? Wives say it every time they stub their toe on the waste bin, and husbands say it whenever a fuse blows. Why is it the business of no one in particular to stop fitting science for death and to begin fitting it into our lives? We will agree that warlike science is no more than a by-product of a warlike society. Science has merely provided the means, for good or for bad; and society has seized it for bad. However, what are we going to do about it? The first thing to do, it seems to me, is to treat this as a scientific question: by which I mean as a practical and sensible questions, which deserves a factual approach and a reasoned answer. Now that I have apologized on behalf of scientists, and this on a scale which some of them will certainly think too ample, let us cut out what usually happens to the argument at this point, the rush of recriminations. The scientists are conscious of their mistakes; and I do not want to discuss the mistakes of non-scientists—although they have made a great many—except those which we all must begin to make good. I have said that a scientific answer must be practical as well as sensible. This really rules out at once the panaceas which also tend to run the argument into a blind alley at this stage; the panaceas which say summarily “Get rid of them.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Naturally, it does not seem to me to be sensible to get rid of scientists; but in any case, it plainly is not practical. And whatever we do with our own scientists, it very plainly is not practical to get rid of the scientists of rival nations; because if there existed the conditions for agreement among nations on this far-reaching scheme, then the conditions for war would already have disappeared. If there existed the conditions for international agreement, say to suspend all scientific research, or to abandon warlike research, or in any other way to forgo science as an instrument of nationalism—if such agreement could be reached, then they would already have disappeared. So, however we might sigh for Samuel Butler’s panacea in Erewhon, simply to give up al machines, there is no point in talking about it. I believe it would be a disaster for humankind the coming of the Dark Ages. However, there is no point in arguing this. It just is not practical, nationally or internationally. There are no panaceas at all; and we had better face that. There is nothing that we can do overnight, in a week or a month, which can straighten by a laying on of hands the ancient distortion of society. Do not let us fancy that any one of us out of the blue will concoct that stirring letter to The Times which will change the black mood of history—and the instruction to diplomats. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Putting scientist in the Cabinet will not do that, and women in the War Office (Department of Defense) will not, now will bishops in the Privy Council. There are no panaceas. We are the heirs to a tradition which has left science and society out of step. The being in the street is right: we have never learned to handle such things. Nothing will do but that we learn. However, learning is not done in a year. Our ultimate survival is in our own hands. Our survival while we are learning is a much chancier thing. We had better be realistic about that. Meanwhile we had better settle down to work for our ultimate survival; and we had better start now. We have seen that the diagnosis has turned out to be not very difficult. Science and our social habits are out of step. And the cure is no deeper either. We must learn to match them. And there is no way of learning this unless we learn to understand both. Of the two, of course, the one which is strange is science. I have already blamed the scientists for that. One has been the preacher of our age, timid, thwarted, anxious to be asked to help; and with a secret ambition to play the Grey Eminence. Through years of childhood poverty one dreamed of this. Scientific skill was a blue door beckoning to one, which would open into the society of dignitaries of the state. However, the private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does. The difficulties only of language. To grow familiar with the large ideas of science calls for patience and an effort of attention; and I hope I have shown that it repays them. For nearly three hundred years, these ideas have been applied to technical needs; and they have made our World anew, triumphantly, from top to toe. Our shoes are tanned and stitched, our clothes are spun and dyed and woven, we are lighted and carried and doctored by means which were unknow to neat Mr. Pope at Twickenham in 1740. We may not think that is much to put against the eighty thousand dead in Hiroshima, Japan, or we may. We may not think it recompenses us for the absence of any Mr. Pope from Twickenham today; we may even hold it responsible. It is certainly not a spiritual achievement. However, it has not yet tried to be. It has applied its ideas monotonously to shoe-leather and bicycle bells. And it has made a superb job of them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Compare its record in its own field with that of any other ideas of the same age: Burke’s ideas of the imagination, or Bentham’s on government, or Adam Smith on political economy. If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have created something, then certainly it is the ideas of science. We may think that all that science has created is comfort; and it certainly has done that—the very word “comfortable” in the modern sense dates from the Industrial Revolution. However, we always stopped to think what science has done not to our mode of living but to our life? We talk about research for death, the treat of war and the number of civilians who get killed. However, have we always weighed this against the increase in out own life span? Let us do a small sum. The number of people killed in Great Britain in six years of war by German bomb, flying bombs, and V2’s was sixty thousand. They were an average lot of people, which means that on an average they lost half their expectation of life. Quite an easy long division shows that the effect of this in our population of fifty million people shorten the average span of life by less than one tenth of one percent. This is considerably less than a fortnight. Put this on the side. And on the credit side, we know that in the last hundred and sixty years the average span of life in California has increased by forty years. That is this the price of science, take it or leave it—a fortnight for forty years. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

And these forty years have been created by applying to daily life, to clothing and bedding, to hygiene and infection, to birth and death, the simple ideas of science—the fundamental ideas I have been talking about: order, cause, and chance. If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have created life, it is the ideas of science. We have not neglected these ideas altogether in our social organization. However, it is a point I have made several times, we have got hopelessly behind with them. The idea of order is now old enough to have reached at least our filing cabinets. The idea of cause and effect has entered our habits, until it has become the new a priori in the making of administrative plans. The difficulty is to dislodge it, now that it is hardening into a scholastic formula. For the idea which has given a new vigor to science in our generation is larger than the machinery of cause and effect. It stipulates no special mechanism between the present and the future. It is content to predict the future, without insisting that the computation must follow the steps of causal law. I have called this idea of chance, because its method is statistical, and because it recognizes that every prediction carries with its own measurable uncertainty. A good prediction is one which defines its area of uncertainty; a bad prediction ignores it. And at the bottom this is no more than the return to the essentially empirical, the experimental nature of science. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Science is a great many things, and I have called them a great many names; but in the end they all return to this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we think. When we have faced our Worldly problems, it needs more courage than we have ever found. This is how society has lost touch with science: because it has hesitated to judge itself by the same impersonal code of what works and what does not. We have clung to Adam Smith and Burke, or have agitated for Plato or Aquinas, through wars and famine, through rising and falling birth-rates, and through libraries of learned argument. And in the end, our eyes have always wandered from the birth-rate to the argument: from the birth-rate to what we have wanted to believe. Here is the crux of what I have been saying. Here is our ultimate hope of saving ourselves from extinction. We must learn to understand that the content of all knowledge is empirical; that its test is whether it works; and we must learn to act on that understanding in the World as well as in the laboratory. This message of science: our ideas must be realistic, flexible, unbigoted—they must be human, they must create their own authority. If any idea have a claim to be called creative, because they have liberated that creative impulse, it is the ideas of science. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

This is not only a material code. On the contrary, my hope is that it may heal the spiritual cleft which two wars have uncovered. I have seen in my lifetime an abyss open in the human mind: a gulf between the endeavor to be human, and the relish in being brute. The scientist has indeed had a hand in this, and every other specialist too, with one’s prim detachment and one’s oracular airs. However, of course, the large strain which has opened this fault is social. We have made beings live in two halves, a Sunday half and a workday half. We have ordered them to love their neighbor and to turn the other cheek, in a society which has constantly compelled them to shoulder their neighbor aside and to turn their backs. So we have created a savage sense of failure which, as we know now to our cost, can be tapped with an ease which is frightening; and which can thrust up, with explosive force, a symbol to repeat to an unhappy people its most degrading dream. Can science heal that neurotic flaw in us? If science cannot, then nothing can. Let us stop pretending. There is no cure in high moral precepts. We have preached them too long to beings who are forced to live how they can: that makes the strain which they have not been able to bear. We need an ethic which is moral and which works. It is often said that science has destroyed our values and put nothing in their place. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

What has really happened of course is that science has sown in harsh relief the division between our values and our World. We have not begun to let science get into our heads; where then was it supposed to create these values? We have used it as a machine without will, the conjured spirit to the chores. I believe that science can create values: and will create them precisely as literature does, by looking into the human personality; by discovering what divides it and what cements it. That is how great writer have explored human beings, and this whether they themselves as being have been driven by the anguish of Akasha in Anne Rice’s The Queen of the Damned or by the sympathy of Marius in Anne Rice’s Blood and Gold. The insight of science is not different from that of the arts. Science will create values, I believe, and discover virtues, when it looks into being; when it explores what makes one human and not an animal, and what makes one’s societies human and not animal packs. I believe that we can reach this unity in our culture. The nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science. Rembrandt was the contemporary of Huygens and Spinoza. At that very time, Isaac Newton walked with Dryden and Christopher Wren. We know that our is a remarkable age of science with the new 5 G internet. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Science is for us to use to broaden and liberate culture. These are the marks of science: that it is open for all to hear, and all are free to speak their minds in it. They are marks of the World at its best, and the human spirit at its most challenging. One distinguishing characteristic of the encounter is the degree of intensity, or what I would call passion. I am not referring here to the quantity of emotion. I mean a quality of commitment, which may be present in little experiences—such as a brief glance out the window at a tree—that do not necessarily involve any great quantity of emotion. However, these temporally brief experiences may have a considerable significance for the sensitive person, here viewed as the person with the capacity for passion. Students these days have a great deal of talent, but they lack passion and commitment. Interestingly enough, my men students get married early for reasons of security and become dependent on their wives, and often it is only through their wives that I, as their teacher, can draw out their talent. The fact that talent is plentiful but passion is lacking seems to me to be a fundamental facet of the problem of creativity in many fields today, and our ways of approaching creativity by evading the encounter have played directly into this trend. We worship technique—talent—as a way of evading the anxiety of the direct encounter. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

When passion has been obliterated in favor of learning, the present writer can easily foresee one’s fate in an age, in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the boon can easily be perused during an afternoon nap. Agnostic positivism—this doctrine tells us, we have no right to dream dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the Universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our highest interest. We must always wait for sensible evidence for our beliefs; and where such evidence is in accessible we must frame no hypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position in abstracto. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish according to what the unseen World contained, a philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the other would be one’s wisest cue. However, unfortunately, neutrality is not only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because, as the psychologist tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involved conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. #RandolpHarris 13 of 19

If, for instance, I refuse to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire as if it were still warm. If I doubt that you are worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just as if you were unworthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring my house, I leave it uninsured as much as I believed there were no deed. And so if I must not believe that the World is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing. And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner interests would lead us to believe, that most ridiculous of commands? Is it not sheer folly of strict and rigid doctrines to say that our inner interest can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden World may contain? In other cases divinations based on inner interest have proved prophetic enough. Take science itself! Without an imperious inner demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematic harmonies, we should never have attained to proving that such harmonies are possessed hidden between all the cogs, sprockets, and interstices of the crude natural World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need. Whence such needs come from we do not know: we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes the with Dr. Darwin’s accidental variations. However, the inner need of believing that this World of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of may generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible Universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible Universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic “thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence” is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind. If the study of the uniqueness of the individual does not fit into what we know of science, then so much the worse for that conception of science. It, too, will have to endure re-creation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Phenomenology has a history in American psychological thinking, but on the whole I think it has languished. The European phenomenologists with their excruciatingly careful and laborious demonstrations, can reteach us that the best way of understanding another human being, or at least a way necessary for some purposes, is to get into one’s Weltanschauung and to be able to see one’s World through another’s eyes. Of course such conclusion is rough on any positivistic philosophy of science. The existentialist stress on the ultimate aloneness of the individual is a useful reminder for us, not only to work out further the concepts of decisions, or responsibility, of choice, of self-creation, or autonomy, or identity itself. It also makes more problematic and more fascinating the mystery of communication between alone-ness via, for example, intuition and empathy, love and altruism, identification with others, and homonymy in general. We take these for granted. If we regarded them as miracles to be explained, it would be better. Another preoccupation of existentialist writers can be phrased very simply, I think. It is the dimension of seriousness and profundity of living (or perhaps the tragic sense of life) contrasted with the shallow and superficial life, which is a kind of diminished living, a defense against the ultimate problem of life. This is not just a literary concept. It has a real operational meaning, for instance, in psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

I (and others) have been increasingly impressed with the fact that tragedy can sometimes be therapeutic, and that therapy often seems to work best when people are driven into it by pain. It is when the shallow life does not work that it is questioned and that there occurs a call to fundamentals. Shallowness in psychology does not work either as the existentialists are demonstrating very clearly. He existentialists along with many other groups are helping to teach us about the limits of verbal, analytic, conceptual rationality. They are part of the current call back to raw experience as prior to any concepts or abstractions. This amounts to what I believe to be justified critique of the whole way of thinking in the Western World in the 21st century, including orthodox positivistic science and philosophy, both of which badly need re-examination. Possibly most important of all the changes to be wrought by the phenomenologists and existentialists is an overdue revolution in the theory of science. I should not say “wrought by” but rather “helped along by,” because there are many other forces helping to destroy official philosophy of science or scientism. It is not only the Cartesian split between subject and object that needs to be overcome. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

There are other radical changes made necessary by the inclusion of the psyche and of raw experience in reality, and such a change will affect not only the science of psychology but all other sciences as well, for example, parsimony, simplicity, precision, orderliness, logic, elegance, definition, and so forth, are all the realm of abstraction rather than of experience. I close with the stimulus that has most powerfully affected me in the existentialist literature, namely, the problem of future time in psychology. Not that this, like all the other problems or pushes I have mentioned up to this point, was totally unfamiliar to me nor, I imagine, to any serious student of the theory of personality. We should be sensitized to the necessity of grappling with and systematizing the dynamic role of the future in the presently existing personality, for example, growth and becoming and possibly necessarily point toward the future; so do the concepts of potentiality and hoping, and of wishing and imagining; reduction to the concrete is a loss of future; threat and apprehension point to the future (no future = no neurosis); self-actualization is meaningless without reference to a currently active future; life can be a gestalt in time, and so forth and so on. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

And yet the basic and central importance of this problem of the existentialists has something to teach us. I think it fair to say that no theory of psychology will ever be complete which does not centrally incorporate the concept that beings have a future within one, dynamically active at this present moment. In this sense the future can be treated as a-historical sense. Also we must realize that only the future is in principle unknown and unknowable, which means that all habits, defenses and coping mechanisms are doubtful and ambiguous since they are based on past experience. Only the flexibly creative person can really manage the future, only the one who can face novelty with confidence without fear. I am convinced that much of what we now call psychology is the study of tricks we used to avoid the anxiety of absolute novelty by making believe the future will be like the past. “Remember to learn wisdom in thy youth; yea, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God. Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goes let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever,” reports Alma 37.35-36. Sometimes the literal form of expressions tends to be taken as the whole of the truth and the inner reality is missed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

October 5, 2019 12:53 am

The Moon was generous and gradually I made out a bit of the sky, which was bright metallic blue. The trees—a thousand years old, it is as if they meant to hide the house, and perhaps they did. My father always told me a home was never supposed to impose on nature, but blend into nature. The little neighborhood itself was tight and beautiful; the sheer height of its stucco walls caught me off guard. The glistening green cypress and redwood trees were the biggest I had ever seen. I did love Cresleigh Ranch, with the irrational and possessive love that only great houses can draw from us—houses that say, “I was here before you were born and I will be here after you”; houses that seem a responsibility as much as a haven of dreams had this immortality, this brimming power. The history of Cresleigh Ranch has as much of a grip on me as its overweening beauty. I had lived my whole life in a Cresleigh home, except for my wonderful adventures abroad. My native village, at the period to which I am now referring, had some five thousand inhabitants, and public order by a lieutenant. This excessive number of police is in itself revealing. There was not sympathy between the soldiers and the carabineers during the First World War, because the latter were on duty in the rear areas, and some of them, it was said, took too much interest in the wives and finances of the men at the front. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

In small places, rumors of this kind are immediately given a very exact personal application. So it happened one evening that three soldiers home from the front on short leave, had a quarrel with some carabiners and were arrested by them. This action was ridiculous and ungallant to begin with, but it became absolutely monstrous when the commanding officer of the carabineers canceled the three soldiers’ leave and sent them back to the front. I was a close friend of one of them (he was killed in the war afterward), and his old mother came sobbing to me to tell me about the affair. I begged the mayor, the magistrate and the parish priest to intervene, but they all declare it was outside their province. “If that is the way things are,” I said, “there is noting for it but revolution!” We have always used this fateful historical term, in our dialect, in order to describe a mere violent demonstration. In those wartime years, for example, two revolutions had already taken place in my native village, the first against the church because the seat of the bishopric had been transferred to another township. The third, which I am about describe, when down in history as “the revolution of the three soldiers.” The men were to be escorted to the train at five o’clock; so the revolution was arranged for half an hour earlier, in front of the barracks. Unfortunately it took a more serious turn than had been intended. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

It began as a joke, which three of us boys were bold enough to start. One of us, at the agreed moment, went up to the bell-tower and began hammering away at the great bell, the signal in our part of the country denoting a serious fire or other public danger. The other two went off to meet one of the less affluent villagers to explain what was happening. Alarmed by the ringing of the tocsin, they had at once stopped working in the fields, and were hurrying anxiously toward the village. In a few minute a threatening and tumultuous crowd had collected in front of the barracks. They began by shouting abuse, then they threw stones, and finally shots were fired. The siege of the barracks lasted until late at night. Rage had made my fellow-villagers unrecognizable. In the end, the windows and gates of the barracks were broken open; the carabineers fled across the orchards and fields under cover of darkness; and the three soldiers, whom everyone had forgotten; went back to their homes unobserved. So we boys found ourselves absolute master of the place for an entire night. “Now what are we going to do?” the other boys asked me. (My authority came, mainly, from the fact that I knew Latin.) “Tomorrow morning,” I said, “the village is sure to be reoccupied by hundreds and hundreds of armed men, carabineers and police, who will arrived from Avezzano, Sulmona, Aquila, and perhaps even from Rome.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

“But what are we going to do tonight, before they arrive?’ the other boys insisted. “Obviously one night is not enough to create a new order of things,” I said, thinking I had guessed what they were after. “Could not we take advantage of the fact that the whole village is asleep, to make Socialism?” That was what the other boys wanted me to suggest. Perhaps they were still overexcited from their riotous evening; perhaps they really believed that anything was possible now. “I do not think,” I said, “I honestly do not think that, even if the whole village is asleep, one can make Socialism in a single night.” I must mention in my own justification that at the time of the theory of socialism overnight had not yet been propounded. “One night, though, might be enough to sleep in one’s own bed before going to prison,” one of the others finally suggested. And as were tired, we all found this advice both sensible and acceptable. Such episodes of violence—with their inevitable sequel of mass arrests, trials, legal expenses, and prison sentences—reinforced distrust, diffidence, and skepticism in the less affluent in minds. From them, the State became the irremediable creation of the devil. If one wanted to save one’s soul, a good Christian, should avoid, as far as possible, all contact with the State. The State always stands for swindling, intrigue and privilege, and could not stand for anything else. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Neither law nor force can change the swindling, intrigue, and privilege the State stands for. If retribution occasionally catches up with it, this can only be by the dispensation of God. In 1915 an earthquake of exceptional violence destroyed a large part of our province and killed, in thirty seconds, about fifty thousand people. I was surprised to see how much my fellow-villagers took this appalling catastrophe as a matter of course. The geologist’ complicated explanations, reported in the newspapers, aroused their contempt. In a district like ours, where so many injustices go unpunished, people regarded the recurrent Earthquakes as a phenomenon requiring no further explanation. In fact, it was astonishing the Earthquakes were not more frequent. An Earthquake buries rich and poor, learned and illiterate, authorities and subjects alike beneath its ruined houses. When faces with the cataclysm of nature, here is possessed, moreover, the real explanation of the Italians’ well-known powers of endurance. An Earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain—the equality of all beings. After the Earthquake a neighbor of ours, when her house was completely destroyed, a woman who kept a bakery, lay buried, but not hurt, for several days. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Not realizing that the disaster was general, and imagining that it was only her own house which had fallen down, either because of some defect in its construction or because someone had put a curse on it, the vulnerable woman was greatly distressed; so much so that when a rescue party wanted to drag her out of the ruins she absolutely refused. She calmed down, however, and quickly regained her strength and her wish to live and to rebuild her house, the moment she was told there had been an Earthquake and that an enormous number of houses had collapsed as well. In the Christian Bible, the story of the Flood it is God Who is sorry that He mand humans, and Who decides to blot them from the face of the Earth. Today it is humans who have the power to blot themselves out, and often one is so sorry that one has been made human that they desire to withdraw from humanity altogether. Many more people than we are aware of in our daily experience feel this desire; and perhaps something in us responds to them. Can it be that the Earth, fully conquered by beings, will cease to be a place where human want to live? Is our passionate thrust into outer space perhaps an unconscious expression of being’s flight from the Earth? There are no sure answers to these questions, which, nevertheless, must be asked, because they cut through false feelings of security about the relation of beings to the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The old insight that “beings are but a pilgrim on Earth” is echoed in theses questions, and applicable today to humankind as a whole. Humankind itself is a pilgrim on Earth, and there will be a moment when this pilgrimage comes to an end, at some indefinitely remote time, or perhaps soon, in the very near future. Christianity gives no indication of the length of being’s history; the early church expected the end at any moment, and when it did not come and the Christians were profoundly disappointed, the span was extended. In modern times, the span has become stretched to an unlimited extent. Scientists speak today of millions of years that human history could continue. Millions of years, or thousands of years, or tomorrow—we do not know! However, we ask—what is the meaning of this history, whenever it began, whenever it will end? And we ask at the moment not what it means for you and me, but, rather, what it means for the Universe and its ultimate goal. In the old story, God repented of having created beings. The implication is when God created humans, that God took a risk, and every risk carries with it the possibility of failure. Some Angels did not think God knew what he was doing, and that “was the whole purpose of the Universe. That through watching the Universe evolve, God was going to find out. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

“What God has set in motion, you see, is a giant Savage Garden, a giant experiment, to see if the end result produced beings like Himself. We are made in his image, all of us—He is anthropomorphic, without question, but again He is not material” (Anne Rice, Memnoch the Devil, page 176). The first time, according to the story, nature executed the divine judgment on beings. This time, beings may themselves be the executioner. Should this occur, the privileged position of the Earth, of which the astronomers speak and in which beings have always believed, would seem to prove to have been of no avail. It would seem as though its unique role had been given it in vain. We should not crowd such thoughts away, for they deserve to be taken seriously. Indeed, it seems to me, it is impossible for thoughtful people today to crowd them away. What has the Christian message to say about them? I repeat—it tells us nothing about the duration of human history. It does not say that it will continue after tomorrow, nor how it will come to an end in scientific terms. None of this is its concern. What the Christian message does tell us is that the meaning of history is possessed above history and that, therefore, its length is irrelevant to its ultimate meaning. However, it is not irrelevant with respect to the innumerable opportunities time affords for creation of life and spirit, and it is for these that we must fight with all our strength. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Furthermore, if history should end tomorrow, through humankind’s self-annihilation, the appearance of this planet and of beings upon it will not have been in vain. For a being shall have at least appeared once, in the billions of years of the Universe, towards whose creation all the forces of life on Earth worked together, and in whom the image of the divine Ground of all life was present. At least once, a living being shall have come into existence, in whom life achieved its highest possibility—spirit. This is the ultimate source of being’s greatness, and those of us who openly or covertly accuse life should open ourselves to this truth: in the short span of our life, and the short span of human history and even of the existence of this planet, something of eternal significance did happen—the depth of all things became manifest in one being, and the name of that being is human, and you and I are human! If we cannot accept this, and insist that this could have been so but was not, and that humankind is evil, and that the Earth is contaminated by being’s guilt, and that the blood of the murdered in all periods cries for revenge to Heaven so that even God was forced to repent of His creation, then let us contemplate these words: “The man Noah found favor in the eyes of God.” This one man represents something in ever man that makes him a mirror of the divine in spite of evil and distortion. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

And the Christian message continues: there is one man in whom God found His image undistorted, and who stands for all humankind—the one, who for this reason, is called the Son and the Christ. The Earth, contaminated by beings, is purified and consecrated through humans—namely, through the divine power of healing and fulfillment, of love and blessedness, made manifest in the one man and at work in all humankind, in all periods and in all places. This is what justifies human history, as it also justifies the Earth that, for millions of years, prepared for the advent of beings, and justifies the Universe that produced the Earth. And yet, the Universe is justified not only by the Earth, nor is creation justified by beings alone. Other Heavenly bodies, other histories, other creatures in whom the mystery of being is manifest may replace us. Our ignorance and our prejudice should not inhibit our thought from transcending the Earth and our history and even our Christianity. Science and the poetic imagination have made this leap, and Christianity should not hesitate to join them. Further, it should not hesitate to show that the Christian experience of divine power and glory implies an inexhaustible divine creativity, beyond the limits of Earth or beings and any part or state of the Universe. This means that we cannot seek for a beginning or and end of the Universe within the pat and future of measurable time. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

“Beginning” and “end” are not behind and before us, but above us in the eternal. From the eternal everything comes and to it everything goes, in every moment of life and history, in every moment of our planet and the Universe to which it belongs. Creation is past and present. Fulfillment is future and present. It is in the present that past and future meet, because they come from, and go to, eternity. The question of beings and their Earth, this question that has plunged our time into such anxiety and conflict of feeling and thought, cannot be answered without an awareness of the eternal presence. For only the eternal can deliver us from our sensation of being lost in the face of the time and of the Universe. Only the eternal can give us the certainty that the Earth, and, with it, humankind, has not existed in vain, even should history come to an end tomorrow. For the last end is where the first beginning is, in Him to Whom “a thousand years are but as yesterday.” Adam Ferguson had argued that the primitive World had to break up because of human’s burning ambition to improve himself, to compete and stand out in a ceaseless struggle for perfection. Ferguson’s was a very straightforward and unburdened view of humans. As we would put it, the frail human creature tries to change one’s position from one of insignificance in the face of nature to one of central importance; from one of inability to cope with the overwhelming World to one of absolute control and mastery of nature. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Each organism is in a struggle for more life and tries to expand and aggrandize itself as much as possible. And the most immediate way to do this is in one’s immediate social situation—vis-à-vis others. This is what Hobbes meant with his famous observation that evil is a robust child. Rousseau quoted this in his essay on inequality, and his whole intent was to show that this is not true, that the child is innocent and does evil in a number of clumsy and unintentional ways. However, this is just what Hobbes was driving at, that the organism expands itself in other ways open to it and that this has destructive consequences for the World around it. Rousseau and Hobbes were right, evil is “neutral” in origin, it derives from organismic robustness—but its consequences are real and painful. What Radin did wad to bring all this up to date with an acute understanding of personality types and interpersonal dynamics and a frankly materialistic perspective on society. This is already the makings of a union of Marx and Dr. Freud. Seen in this way, social life is the saga of the working out of one’s problems and ambitions on others. What else could it be, what else are human objects for? I think it is along lines such as these that we would find the psychological dynamics for a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history; it would be based on power, but it would include individual deviance and interpersonal psychology, and it would reflect a “social contrast” forged in desire and fear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The central question of such a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history would be, Who has the power to mystify, how did one get it, and how does one keep it? We can see how naïve the traditional Marxist view of simple coercion is: it does not begin to take into account what we must now call the sacredness of class distinctions. There is no other accurate way to speak. What began in religion remains religious. All power is sacred power, because it begins in the hunger for immortality; and it ends in the absolute subjection to people and things which represent immortality power. However, if the emergence of social privilege marks the Fall of Man, the Fall took place not in the transition from “primitive communism” to “private property” but in the transition from tribal society to modern society. That is, from a type of terrestrial being that had no notion of the sacred to one that did. And if sacredness is embodied in persons, then they dominate by a psychological spell, not by physical coercion. Privilege is prestige, and prestige in its fundamental nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and enchantment. Thus the chains that bind beings are self-imposed. If we left this idea unadorned, it would still need explaining: why are beings so eager to be mystified, so willing to be bound in chains? The bind is explained by one idea, the truly great idea that emerged from psychoanalysis and that goes right to the heat of the human condition: the phenomenon of transference. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

People take the overwhelmingness of creation and their own fears and desires and project them in the form of intense mana into certain figures to which they defer. They follow these figures with passion and with a trembling heart. When one thinks of one’s own eager fascinations, one can feel revolted by oneself and by the obedient throngs who look with such timidity and satisfaction on the leader. Look how the girls blush, how hands reach out tremblingly, how eyes lower and dart to one side, how quickly a few choke up, ready for tearful and grateful submission, how smugly those nearest to the leader smile, how puffed up they walk—how the Devil himself seems to have contrived an instant, mass puppet show with real live creatures. However, there is no way of avoiding the fatality of it: the thousands of hearts palpitating, the gallons of adrenalin, of blood rushing to the cheeks—it is all lived truth, a terrestrial reaction to the majesty of creation. If anything is false about it, it is the fact that thousands of human forms feel inferior and beholden to an identical, single, human form. In all this I am not negative the pure Marxian side of historical domination; that is real enough and we know it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

However, there can never be a way of relieving or eliminating the domination of structures of power without coming to grips with the spell of power, a spell that explains voluntary self-alienation whether it deals with spirits of undocumented immigrants. Being are literally hypnotized by life and by those who represent life to them, which explains the passion of submission that Anne Rice summed up so brilliantly in Tale of the Body Thief, in the scene when Lestat and David try to get his body back. In other words, Marxism has come to grips with the conservative argument: that there is something in human nature that invites inequality no matter what we do. We can call it functional inequality and see it as a completely neutral and unavoidable factor in social life. Or, beings are fate-creating agents: they coerce by simply existing; they do not even necessarily, like Lestat, try to project electric mana; they are already a natural vortex of the problems of life. We can sum all this up in one sentence that presents to narrow Marxism the most fundamental challenge it has faced: being fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation. What is the shape of al revolutionary philosophy of history that would begin to take full account of that? Beings are differently constituted. There are a dozen main types and innumerable subdivisions within each type. It is not possible for a single spiritual approach to suit them all.  #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Out of encounter is born the work of art. This is true not only of painting, but o poetry and other forms of creativity. The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born. How active this makes language to express our ideas; it is just as true that language uses us. Language is the symbolic repository of the meaningful experience of ourselves and our fellow human beings down through history, and, as such, it reaches out to grasp us in the creating of a poem. We must not forget that the original Greek and Hebrew words meaning “to know” meant also “to have pleasures of the flesh.” One reads in the Bible “Abraham knew his wife and she conceived.” The etymology of the term demonstrates the prototypical fact that knowledge itself—as well as poetry, art, and other creative products—arise out of the dynamic encounter between subject and objective poles. The metaphor of pleasures of the flesh indeed expresses the importance of the encounter. In the pleasures of the flesh the two persons encounter each other; they withdraw partially to unite with each other again, experiencing every nuance of knowing, not knowing, in order to know each other again. The man become united with the woman and the woman with the man, and the partial withdrawal can be seen as the expedient by which both have the ectastatic experience of being filled again. Each is active and passive in his or her way. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

It I a demonstration that the process of knowing is what is important; if the male simply rests within the woman, nothing will happen beyond the prolonging of wonder of the intimacy. It is the continuous experiencing of encounter and re-encounter that is the significant happening from the viewpoint of ultimate creativity. Pleasures of the flesh is the ultimate intimacy of two married adult beings in the fullest and richest encounter possible. It is highly significant that this is experience that is also the highest form of creativity in the respect that it can produce a new being. The particular forms the offspring take in poems, drama, and the plastic arts are symbols and myths. Symbols (like beautiful Cypress trees) or myths (like that of Prince Lestat) express the relationship between the conscious and unconscious experience, between one’s individual present existence and human history. Symbol and myth are the living, immediate forms that emerge from encounter, and they consist of the dialectic interrelationship—the living, active, continuous mutual influence in which any change in one is bound to bring a change in the other—of subjective and objective poles. They are born out of the heightened consciousness of the encounter we are describing; and they have their power to grasp us because they require from us an give us an experience of heightened consciousness. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Thus in the history of culture and artistic discovery precedes other forms. On the basis of this [artistic] activity, a symbolic discourse becomes possible, and religion, philosophy and science follow as consequent modes of thought. This is not to say that reason is the more civilized form and art the more primitive one, in a pejorative sense—an egregious error unfortunately often found in our rationalistic Western culture. This is, rather, to say that the creative encounter in the art form is total—it expresses a wholeness of experience; and science and philosophy abstract partial aspects for their subsequently study. No one reaches the World of truth through any other path than one’s own, the one which one’s individual nature fits one for. Someone else’s help can at best improve one’s condition and prepare one’s mind but cannot take one into truth. Those cases which seem to contradict this statement are cases either of self-deception or of illusion. Too often time spent on these chalked-out paths is wasted. “And now the Spirit of the Lord doth ay unto me: Command thy children to do good, lest they lead away the hearts of many people to destruction; therefore I command you, in the fear of God that ye refrain from your iniquities; that ye turn to the Lord with all your mind, might, and strength; that ye lead away the hearts of no more to do wickedly; but rather return unto them, and acknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done,” reports Alma 39.12-13. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Great spirits now on Earth are sojourning, some of us will catch freshness from Archangel’s wings, a meaner sound than Raphael’s whispering. And other spirits there are standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come; these, these will give the World another heart, and other pulses. Hear ye not the hum of mighty workings? Listen awhile ye nations, so silently, it seems a beam of light coming from another galaxy in which trembling diamonds of eternity never linger. Many days have passed since my heart was warmed luxuriously by divine Mozart. Much I have travelled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen: round many western islands have I been which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. The poetry of Earth is never dead: when all the birds are faint with the hot Sun, and hide in cooling trees, a voice will run from the vision of the tree of life. If only we would allow it to do so, the human being will bring about its own redemption. However, instead we hypnotize the mind with ideas that may suit other persons but are unsuited to us, we practise techniques that warp our proper development, we follow leaders who know only the way they have themselves walked and who insist on crowding all seekers on it regardless of suitability, and we join groups which obstruct our special line of natural growth. “But behold, ye cannot hide your crimes from God; and except ye repent they will stand as a testimony against you at the last day,” reports Alma 39.8. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

October 1, 2019 11:06 pm

With the theory of capitalist encirclement, capitalists as a rule are personified by Wall Street. For generations, it has referred to the showcase of American capitalism: our financial services system that ensured the efficient use of funds by channeling capital to its most productive use. Indeed, the governing ethos in America is that Wall Street is the heart and soul of our capitalist economy. Now again there can be no doubt that there was a policy of encirclement against Bolshevist Russia at the beginning of the revolution; but it would be fatal to believe that the terror was the consequence of the policy of intervention and of the cold war. Possibly the policy of encirclement strengthened the terror, just as the wars of intervention during the French Revolution gave Robespierre’s Terror a new impetus. However, the terror as a normal method of politics against the class opponent is contained in the Leninist definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat; it was then extended to the party and finally to the supposedly classless society, without a visible connection with the intensity of the capitalist policy of encirclement. However, the Bolshevist view of history, steadily activating anxiety, made possible identification with the leader Stalin and thus underpinned his caesarist dictatorship. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The most important type—if only because of its immense political influence—is the theory of the conspiracy of the Jews according to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These contain the secret plans of Jewish leaders, supposedly formulated in the year 1897, for achieving Jewish World domination by force, terror, corruption, the disintegrating influence of liberalism, freemasonry, and so forth. This World domination was to be a mock-democracy, through which the Jewish leaders were to operate. That the Protocols are a forgery, prepared by Czarist Russians, was definitely established by the Bern trial of 1934-35. It is equally beyond question that they are essentially a plagiarism of the work by Maurice Joly directed against Napoleon III, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu. However, if the Protocols represent a forgery, and if the plans for a Jewish World conspiracy belong in the realm of mythology, where then does that kernel of truth lie which according to my view is necessary to make possible the influence which anti-Semitism and the Protocols have had? I shall confine my analysis to Germany, but the German situation can be understood only when one becomes aware of the fact that in Germany before 1933 spontaneous anti-Semitism was extremely weak. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

As early as 1942, I wrote, in opposition to an almost unanimous opinion: “The writer’s personal conviction, paradoxical as it may seem, is that the German people are the least anti-Semitic of all.” I still hold this too view today; for it is precisely the weakness of spontaneous anti-Semitism in Germany which explains the concentration of National Socialism on it as the decisive political weapon. The element of truth (if one may call it that) is first of all a religious one: the catechistic representation of the crucifixion and with it the blood guilt of the Jews. However, this is a thoroughly ambivalent element: for it is precisely the crucifixion of Christ which makes possible the salvation of Christians (and all beings); and the spiritually Semitic origin of Christianity is acknowledged by the Church. While thus the historical-religious defamation of the Jews forms the basis without which anti-Semitism could hardly be activated, the catechistic representation of the crucifixion is not sufficient by itself. If we start from the policy of National Socialism and seek to understand the role of anti-Semitism within the political systems, the existence of a total anti-Semitism can perhaps be better understood. I can sketch the problem only in it broadest outlines. Germany of 1930-33 was the land of alienation and anxiety. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The facts are familiar: defeat, a tame, unfinished revolution, inflation, depression, non-identification with the existing political parties, non-functioning of the political system—all these are symptoms of moral, social, and political homelessness. The inability to understand why beings should be so hard-pressed stimulated anxiety which was made into nearly neurotic anxiety by the National Socialist policy of terror and its propaganda of anti-Semitism. The goal of National Socialism was clear: the welding together of the people with the charismatic leader, for the purpose of the conquest of Europe and perhaps of the Word, and the creation of a racial hegemony of the Germans over all other peoples. However, how were the people to be integrated, despite all cleavages of class, party, religion? Only though hatred of an enemy. However, how could one settle on the enemy? It could not be Bolshevism, because it was too strong; the Catholic Church could not be so designated because it was needed politically and loyalties to it were anchored too securely. The Jews remained. They appeared in public consciousness as powerful, but were in reality not as strong as many believed. They were relative strangers, and at the same time the concrete symbols of a so-called parasitical capitalism, through their position in commerce and finance; they incarnated a supposedly decadent morality through their avant garde position in art and literature; they seemed to be the successful competitors sexually and professionally. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

With all this, the thesis of the Jewish conspiracy had the element of truth necessary to permit this view of history to become a frightful weapon. It would be mistaken to want to construe a connection between the socioeconomic status of a person and one’s anti-Semitism; that is, to claim that the academically educated person is more immune than the uneducated, or the poorly paid more immune than the better paid. What is correct, however, is that there exists a connection between loss of social status and anti-Semitism. The fear of social degradation thus creates for itself a target for the discharge of the resentments arising from damaged self-esteem. This lead us to the analysis of the historical situations in which anxiety grips the masses. By now we know the strata of alienation are alienation from the product of labor, alienation from the activity of labor, alienation from the senses, and alienation from other people, or from society. The psychological stratum remains no matter what social institutions beings live in. It creates potential anxiety which beings in the masses attempt to overcome through ego-surrender. This affective identification with a leader is facilitated by the notion of false concreteness, the theory of conspiracy. The most unashamed pretender to supernatural powers was, on the primitive level, the medicine man, or shaman. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

The shaman invented the specialty of entering into the World of the dead and coming back from it unharmed; he or she went on these supernatural trips and personally carried out whatever business the tribe or members of it had in the powerful World of the spirits; one went to see a dead soul safely to the other side, to harangue the invisible spirits and make them let go of a sick person, and so forth. The shaman was the hero who died and was reborn unfailingly, who established a being’s link with the invisible power World. It was an agonizing role to play, and it was played best by those individuals who actually were seized by spirits and killed by them–the epileptics. Noting strikes greater terror into a being’s heart than to witness an eruption of power from the depths of nature that one cannot understand or control—whether it is lava erupting from the volcano or the foam and convulsions of an epileptic. And so for all these reasons primitive beings saw the epileptic shaman as a natural hero, a source of fear and respect. One was also the first natural systematizer of religion because one actually had experiences of rebirth, reincarnation, and eternal life in the dream state following a convulsive seizure. These experiences are more or less characteristic for all epileptics. This is how we understand the birth of these basic religious nations, verified objectively by many individuals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The shaman was the mystifier par excellence, and it was only logical that one should often be more powerful than chiefs, more feared, and get greater rewards. Sometime one allied one’s self with the chief of a tribe, and the resulting exploitation was called clearly a form of gangsterism. On the origins of inequality, primitive society was from the very beginning a struggle by individuals and groups for special privileges—who would get the best meat, the easiest access to women, some leisure and security. The elders always tried to arrange these for their own benefit, and so did the shamans. On the simplest levels of culture they were already organizing themselves into an exclusive fraternity so as to get and keep maximum power. How does one get maximum power in a cosmology where rituals is the technics that manufactures life? Obviously by getting control of the formulas for the technics. Very early the elders and the religious personages tried to get control of the ritual The religious systematizer built their symbolic interpretations around the crises of life, those passages where one’s identity was in doubt, where one was moving from one state to another, where everything had to go smoothly in order for a flowering out of birth into a new status to take place. And so the puberty and the death rituals came to be surrounded by the greatest importance, wherein lay the greatest possibilities of bungling. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Over and beyond the frankly religious and psychological nature of these passages, there is a socioeconomic purpose to them—or rather to the control of them by certain groups. With puberty rites of the Australian aborigines, over and above all other reasons is the somewhat cynically expressed purpose of the old men of having novices supply them, for many years, with regular presents in the form of animal food, of reserving the choice dishes for themselves by the utilization of the numerous food taboos imposed on the younger people, and, finally, of keeping the young women for themselves. Again, with another tribe, we can observe that the fundamental and immediate objective was to maintain power in the hands of the older people and to keep the women in proper subjection. Those who systematized the puberty, were not obeying some mystical, myth-making urge in the unconscious. Rather, specific individuals banded together formally or informationally, individuals who possess a marked capacity for articulating their ideas and for organizing them into coherent systems, which, naturally, would be of profit to them and to those who whom they are allied. This puts closer on the very beginnings of the modern debate on the origins of inequality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

These observations suggest the question of whether it is not perhaps the greed for material things in general that is the basic phenomenon, and the need for affection only one way of obtaining this goal. There is no general answer to this question. Craving for possession, as we shall see later, is one of the fundamental defenses against anxiety. However, experience shows also that in certain cases the need for affection, though it is the prevailing protective device, may be repressed so deeply that it does not appear on the surface. The greed for material things may then lastingly or temporarily take its place. In reference to this question of the role of affection three types of neurotic persons can be roughly distinguished. In the first group there is no doubt whatever that the persons crave affection, in whatever form it may appear, and by whatever methods they may obtain it. Those in the second group reach out for affection but if they fail to get in some relationship—and as a rule they are bound to fail—they do not reach out immediately for another person, but withdraw from people altogether. Instead of trying to attach themselves to some person they have compulsively attach themselves to things, having to ear or buy or to read or, generally speaking, to get something. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Such a change may sometimes take grotesque forms, as in person who after failing in some love affair start to eat so compulsively that they gain twenty to thirty pounds in a short time; if they have a new love affairs they lose this weight again: and if this love affair ends in failure they again put on weight. Sometimes one can observe the same behavior in patients; after an acute disappointment with the analyst they start to eat compulsively and gain weight to such a degree that they are scarcely recognizable, but they lose it again when the relations are straightened out. Such a greediness about food may also be repressed, and then it may become manifest in a loss of appetite or functional stomach upsets of some kind. In this group personal relationships are more deeply disturbed than in the first group. They still desire affection, and they still dare to reach out for it, but any disappointment can break the thread that binds them to others. The third group of persons have been stricken so severely and so early that their conscious attitude has become a deep disbelief in any affection. Their anxiety is so deep that they are contented if no positive harm is done to them. They may acquire a cynical, scoffing attitude toward affection and prefer the fulfillment of the tangible wishes concerning material help, advice, and pleasures of the flesh. Only after much of their anxiety has been released are they able to desire affection and appreciate it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The different attitudes of these three groups can be summarized as: insatiability concerning affection; need for affection alternating with general greediness; no manifest need for affection, but general greediness. Each group shows an increase in both anxiety and hostility. Coming back to the main trend f our discussion we have to consider now the question of the special ways in which insatiability concerning affection; need for affection alternating with general greediness; no manifest need for affection, but general greediness. Each group shows an increase in both anxiety and hostility. Coming back to the main trend of our discussion we have to consider now the question of the special ways in which insatiability concerning affection manifests itself. The main expressions are jealously and demands for unconditional love. Neurotic jealousy, unlike a normal person’s jealousy, which may be an adequate reaction to the danger of losing someone’s love, is altogether out of proportion to the danger. It is dictated by a constant fear of losing possession of the person or one’s love; consequently any other interest that person may have is a potential danger. This kind of jealousy may appear in every human relation—on the part of parents toward their children who want to make friends or to marry; on the part of children toward their parents; between marriage partners; in any love relationship. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The relationship with the analyst is no exception. It is shown there in an intense sensitivity about the analyst seeing another patient, or even about the mere mention of another patient. The motto is, “You must love me exclusively.” The patient may say, “I recognize that you treat me kindly; nevertheless, as you probably treat others equally kindly, your kindness to me does not count at all.” Any affection which must be shared with other persons or interests is immediately and entirely devalued. Disproportionate jealousy is often thought of as condition by jealousy experienced in childhood toward siblings or toward one of the parents. Sibling rivalry as it occurs among healthy children, jealousy toward a newborn baby for example, vanishes without leaving any scar as soon as the child feels sure that one does not lose any of the love and attention one has had hitherto. According to my experience, excessive jealousy occurring in childhood and never overcome is due to neurotic conditions in the child similar to those in an adult, as described above. There already existed in the child an insatiable need for affection, rising out of a basic anxiety. In psychanalytic literature the relation between infantile and adult jealousy reactions is often expressed ambiguously inasmuch as the adult jealousy is called a “repetition” of the infantile one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

If the term means to imply that an adult woman is jealous of her husband because she was equally jealous of her mother, it would not seem tenable. The intensified jealousy that we find in a child’s relation to parents or siblings is not the ultimate cause of later jealousy, but both spring from the same sources. Perhaps an expression of the insatiable need for affection still stronger than jealousy is the quest for unconditional love. The form in which this demand most often appears in the conscious mind is, “I want to be loved for what I am and not for what I a doing.” So far we might consider this wish nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly, the wish to be loved for ourself alone is not alien to any of us. He neurotic wish for unconditional love, however, is much more comprehensive than the normal one, and in its extreme form it is impossible of fulfillment. It is a demand for love, literally without any condition or any reserve. This demand includes, first, a wish to be loved regardless of any provocative behavior. This wish is necessary as security, because the neurotic person secretly registers the fact that one has understandable and proportionate fears that the other may withdraw or become angry or vindictive if this hostility should become evident. A patient of this type will express the opinion that it is very easy and means nothing to love someone who is amiable, that love ought to prove its ability to stand any kind of untoward behavior. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Any criticism is felt as a withdrawal of love. In the process of analysis resentment may be aroused by an intimation that he may have to change something in one’s personality, even though that is the purpose of the analysis, because one feels any such intimation as a frustration of one’s need for affection. The neurotic demand for unconditional love includes, second, a wish to be loved without any return. This wish is necessary because the neurotic person feels that one is incapable of feeling any warmth or giving any affection and unwilling to do so. One’s demands include, third, a wish to be loved without any advantage for the other. This wish is necessary because any advantage or satisfaction derived from the situation by the other promptly arouses the neurotic’s suspicion that the other likes one only for the sake of that advantage or satisfaction. In relationship based on pleasures of the flesh persons of this type will begrudge the satisfaction which the other person receives from the relation, because they will feel they are loved only for the satisfaction involved. In analysis these patients begrudge the satisfaction which the analyst receives from helping them. They will either disparage the help the analyst has given them or, while intellectually recognizing the help received, will not be able to feel any gratitude. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Or they will be inclined to ascribe any improvement to some other source, to a medicine taken or a remark made by a friend. Of course they also begrudge the fees they must pay. While they many recognize intellectually that the fees are a recompense for time, energy and knowledge, emotionally they will consider the paying of a fee as a proof that the analyst is not interested in them. Persons of this kind are likely too to be awkward in making presents, because presents make them uncertain about being loved. The demand for unconditional love includes, finally, a wish to be loved with sacrifices. Only if the other person sacrifices everything for the neurotic can one really feel sure of being loved. These sacrifices may concern money or time, but may also concern convictions and personal integrity. This demand includes, for example, the expectation that the other should side with one even to a disastrous degree. There are mothers who rather naively feel justified in expecting blind devotion and sacrifices of all sorts from their children because they have borne them in pain. Other mothers have repressed their wish for unconditional love so that they are able to give their children a great deal of beneficial help and support; but such a mother derives no satisfaction from the relationship to her children because she feels, like the examples already mentioned, that the children love her only because they receive so much from her, and thus secretly begrudges them whatever she gives them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The quest for unconditional love, in its implications of a ruthless and merciless disregard for all others, shows more clearly than anything else the hostility hidden in the neurotic demands for affection. In contrast to the normal vampire type, who may be consciously determined to exploit others to the limit, the neurotic person is usually totally unaware of how exacting one is. One has to keep the knowledge of one’s demands from awareness because of stringent tactical reasons. No one could possibly say frankly, “I want you to sacrifice yourself for my sake without getting anything in return.” That is not a capitalist attitude. One is forced to put one’s demands on some justified basis, such as that one is ill and therefore needs all the sacrifices. Another powerful reason for not recognizing one’s demands is that when they are once established, it is hard to give them up, and realizing that they are irrational is the first step toward giving them up. They are rooted, aside from the bases already mentioned, in the neurotic’s profound conviction tat one cannot live on one’s own resources, that all one needs has to be given to one, that all the responsibility for one’s life rests on others and not on one’s self. Therefore giving up one’s demands for unconditional love presupposes a change in one’s entire attitude toward life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

All the characteristics of the neurotic need for affection have in common the fact that the neurotic’s own conflicting tendencies bar the way to the affection one needs. What then are one’s reactions to a partial fulfillment of one’s demands, or to a complete rejection? Some existential philosophers are stressing the self-making of the self too exclusively. Speaking of the self as a project, which is wholly created by the continued (and arbitrary) choices of the person oneself, almost as if one could make oneself into anything one decided to be. Of course in so extreme a form, this is almost certainly an overstatement, which is directly contradicted by the facts of genetics and of constitutional psychology. As a matter of fact, it is just plain silly. On the other hand, the Freudians, the existential therapists, and the Rogerians and the personal growth psychologist all talk more about discovering the self and of uncovering therapy, and have perhaps understressed the factors of the will, of decision, and of the ways in which we do make ourselves by our choices. Of course, we must not forget that both of these groups can be said to be over-psychologizing and under-socializing. That is, they do not stress sufficiently in their systematic thinking the great power of autonomous social and environmental determinants, of such force outside the individual as poverty, exploitation, nationalism, war, and social structure. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Certainly no psychologist in one’s right mind would dream of denying a degree of personal helplessness before these forces. However, after all, one’s prime professional obligation is the study of the individual person rather than of extra-psychic social determinants. In the same way, sociologists seems to the psychologists to stress social forces too exclusively and to forget about the autonomy of the personality, of will, of responsibility, and so forth. It would be better to think of both group as specialists rather than as blind or foolish. In any case it looks as if we both discover an uncover ourselves and also decide on what we shall be. This clash of opinion is a problem that can be settled empirically. Not only have we been ducking the problem of responsibility and of will, but also their corollaries of strength and courage. Recently the psychoanalytic ego psychologist have waked up to this great human variable and have been devoting a great deal of attention to ego strength. For the behaviorists, this is still an untouched problem. “I was racked with eternal torment, for my soul was harrowed up to the greatest degree and racked with all my sins. Yea, I did remember all my sins and iniquities, for which I was tormented with the pains of hell; yea, I saw that I had rebelled against my God, and that I had not kept his holy commandments,” reports Alma 36.12-13. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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September 27, 2019 11:55 pm