Randolph Harris II International Institute

Oh, poor child, I thought. You might have had a little more compassion for everyone if you had known how beautiful you were, and you might have thought yourself a little bit stronger and more able to gain something for yourself. A it was, you play sly games on those around you, because you did not have faith in your own self or even know what you were. Economic activity itself, from the dawn of human society to the present time, is sacred to the core. It is not a rational, secular activity designed simply to meet human survival needs. Or, better, it is not only that, never was, and never will be. If it were, how explain being’s drive to create a surplus, from the beginning of society to the present? How explain being’s willingness to forgo pleasure, to deny oneself, in order to produce beyond one’s capacity to consumer? Why do people work so hard to create useless good when they already have enough to eat? We know that primitives amassed huge piles of food and other goods often only to ceremoniously destroy them, just as we continue to do. We know that many of their choicest trade items, such as bits of amber, were entirely superfluous; that many of their most valuable economic possession created with painstaking labors were practically useless, for instance, the big ceremonial axe-blade of the Trobriands. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

And we know that historically this creation of useless goods got out of hand and led to the present plight of beings—immersed in a horizon of polluting junk, besieged by social injustice and class and race oppression, have and have-nots, all grasping, fighting, showing, not knowing how they got into their abysmal condition or what it all means. When attempting to be serious, the mass media must rig up pseudo-problems and solve them by cliché. They cannot touch real problems or real solutions. Plots are packed with actions which obscure the vagueness and irrelevance of meanings and solutions. Similarly, to replace actual individuality, each character and situation is tricked up with numerous identifying details and mannerisms. The more realistic the characteristics, the less real the character usually, r the situation, and the less revealing. Literal realism cannot replace relevance. Mass media inveigh against sin and against all evils accepted as such. However, they cannot question things not acknowledge as evil or appear to support things self as evil. Even Rigoletto, were it a modern work, could not be broadcast since crime and immorality pay and the ending is unhappy for everybody but the villain. Combating legal censorship, organized group pressures, and advertising agencies is gallantly romantic—and as quixotic as being’s rage against one’s own mirrored image. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

These agencies are interested only in presenting what is wanted and in preventing what might often people. They are nuisances perhaps, but things could not be very different without them. Police officers do not create the law, thought becoming the target of the few who would defy it. The very nature of the mass media excludes art, and requires surrogation by popular culture. Though the Hays production code applies only to movies, its basic rule states a principle which all mass media must follow: “Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment” must be upheld. Doubtless “correct standards” are those standards mist of the audience is likely to believe correct. They authorize whatever does not upset or offend the audience, and nothing else. “Correct standards of life” must exclude art (expect occasional classics). For art is bound to differ from the accepted, that is, the customary mora and aesthetic view, at least as it takes shape in the audience’s mind. Art is always a fresh vision of the World, a new experience or creation of life. If it does not break, or develop, or renew in significant aspects the traditional, customary, accepted aesthetic and moral standards, if it merely repeats without creating, it is not art. If it does, it is incompatible with the “correct standards of life” which must control mass media. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Mass media thus never can question being’s fate where it is questionable; they cannot sow doubt about an accepted style of life, or an approved major principle. To be sure, mass media often feature challenges to this and that, and clashes of opinion. These are part of our accepted style of life, as long as challenges do not defy anything but sin and evil in the accepted places and manner. The mass media must hold up “correct standards of life” whereas art must create, not uphold views. When film or broadcast, the visions of the playwright or novelist cannot deviate from the accepted “correct standards” and they must be entertaining. They must conform to the tastes of the audience; they cannot form it. Virtue must triumph entertainingly—virtue as the audience sees it. The poets, Shelly thought, are “the unacknowledged legislators of the World.” Shelley’s poet wrote for a few who would take the trouble to understand them. They addressed an audience that knew and shared the common traditions they were developing. High culture was cultivated in special institutions—courts, monasteries, churches, universities—by people who devoted their lives to the development of its traditions, and were neither isolated nor surrounded by masses wishing to be entertained. (Besides, there were no means of addressing a mass.) #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

There was no need and no temptation for the artist to do anything but to create in one’s own terms. Poets, painters, or philosophers lived in and were of the group for whom they produced, as did most people, were they peasants, artisans or artists. The relations between producers of culture and consumers were so personal (as were the relations between producers and consumers generally) that one can hardly speak of an impersonal market in which one sold, the other bought. In both high and folk culture, each bounded and autonomous Universe—court r village—relied on the particular cultivators and inventors of its arts and sciences no less than the latter relied on their patrons. Each region or court depended on its musicians as it depended on its craftsmen, and vice versa. The mutual personal dependence had disadvantages and advantages, as has any close relationship. Michelangelo or Beethoven depended on irksome individual patrons more than they would today. On the other hand, whatever the patrons’ tastes or demands, they were individual and not average tastes or demands. Folk culture grew without professional help. High culture was cultivated like an orchard or garden. However, both folk and high cultures grew from within the groups they distinguished and remained within them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

High culture was entirely dominated by people with more than average prestige, power and income—by the elite as a group, who also dominated politics and society in general. This group determined what was to be produced, culturally and otherwise; and they took their toll often by oppression and spoliation of the mass of people whom they ruled. With the development of industry, the elite as a group lost its power. The great mass consumers now determines what is to be produced. Elite status, leadership in any form, is achieved and kept today by catering to the masses, not by plundering or oppressing them. The nobleman may have become rich by robbing (taking from) his peasants. However, the industrialist becomes a millionaire or billionaire by selling to (exchanging with) farmers. And one’s business is helped by giving one’s customers, via television, the entertainers they want. These in turn reach elite status by appealing to the masses. So do politicians. The elite no loner determines what is produced, any more than it dominates society in other respects. Rather, the elite becomes the elite by producing the goods that sell the goods that cater to an average of tastes. With respect to culture, the elite neither imposes any tastes nor cultivates one of its own. It markets and helps homogenize and distribute popular culture—that which appeals to an average of tastes—through the mass media. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The changes in income distribution, mobility and communication, the economics of mass production already discussed, have caused the power of individual consumers to wane. However, the power of consumers as a group has risen and that of producers as a group has dwindled. From a sample of many diverse societies, the giving of gifts between groups and individuals was the heart of archaic social systems. On the primitive level we see compellingly that social life is a continual dialogue of gift giving and counter gift giving. To the anthropological observer the thing was simply marvelous: goods were shared and freely given; being observed the principle of social reciprocity and respected social obligations to the letter. When there was food, there was food for all; the hunter who killed the game distributed it with pride and often took the least desirable part of the animal for oneself. This was the core of truth in the myth of primitive communism. If someone had something you wanted, you asked for it and received it. However, often this continuous gift giving and taking seemed to the Western observer to be perverse; a native would work very hard at the trading post to earn a shirt, and when he came back a week later someone else would be wearing it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Westerners could only think that this represented a basic lack of responsibility, a kind of simplemindedness. It is so alien to our “I got mine—you get yours” philosophy. Or more alarmingly, missionaries would find that natives came to their hut and simply took valuable knives, guns, clothes, and so forth, without so much as a “thank you,” as though these were coming to them. How could traders, missionaries, and administrators understand something that often eluded anthropologists themselves: that primitive beings did not act out of economic principles, that the process of freely giving and receiving was embedded in a much larger, much more important cosmology, that since the explorers had destroyed the old gods and replaced them, one had to give freely just as the gods had done. Primitive life was openly immersed in debt, in obligation to the invisible powers, the ancestors, the dead souls; the group lived partly by drawing its powers from the non-living. Unlike us, primitives knew the truth of being’s relation to nature: nature gives freely of its bounty to beings—this was the miracle for which to be grateful and beholden and give to the gods of nature in return. Whatever one received was already a gift, and so to keep things in balance one had to give in return—to one another and, by offerings, to the spirits. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The gods existed in order to receive gifts. This helps us understand why primitive society seems so masochistic to us in its willing submission to nature and to dead spirits. It has found the perfect formula for keeping things in balance: In the archaic consciousness the sense of indebtedness exists together with the illusion that the debt is playable; the gods exist to make the debt payable. Hence the archaic economy is embedded in religion, limited by the religious framework, and mitigated by the consolations of religion—above all, removal of indebtedness and guilt. And this explains too the thing that has puzzled thinkers since the beginning of the study of beings: why were not natives content to live in the primitive paradise, why could not beings simply relax and consume nature’s bounty, why was one driven from the very beginning to develop a surplus beyond basic human needs? The answer is that primitive beings created an economic surplus so that one would have something to give to the gods; the giving of the surplus was an offering to the gods who controlled the entire economy of nature in the first place, and so beings needed to give precisely in order to keep oneself immersed in the cosmology of obligation and expiation. The ceremonial destruction of mountains of precious food was just that: a ceremonial, religious act. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The painstaking fabrication of charms or the dangerous hunting down of rare objects like whale’s teeth represented the sweat of one’s brow for the most vital motive beings knew: to keep the cycle of power moving from the invisible to the visible World. When beings give, the stream of life continues to flow. In order to understand this, we have to abandon our own notions of what a gift is. It is not a bribe by one who is a stranger to you and simply wants to get in god with you, or by a loved one who wants to draw close to you or even selflessly give you pleasure. No serious person would doubt that the ultimate effect of the abolitionist movement was constructive. It is even possible that if it had been more successful, the Civil War, with its inconceivable suffering, might have been averted. Wendell Phillips, Willian Lloyd Garrison, James Gillespie Birney, and Theodore D. Weld are beings that fit our definition of aggression very well. They were actively moving into territory of others (slaves were personal property and sanctified thereby) to accomplish a restructuring of power. Their activities were characterized by great conflict, both inward and outward, the latter including continual threats on their lives and limbs. In their early lives, these for seemed like very unlikely candidates for their later profound aggression in the cause of anti-slavery. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Wendell Phillips had led the typical life of  a Boston Brahmin of his time, taking a law degree at Harvard; William Lloyd Garrison was attracted first to writing and politics; when one first hears of Theodore Weld, it is as a lecturer on the art of improving one’s memory; James Birney was twice suspended from Princeton for drinking, although he was readmitted and graduated with honors, and eventually became a planter and lived like a young southern aristocrat, drinking and gambling in excess. What characteristics in these men determined the fact that their aggression was to be constructive rather then destructive (like John Brown’s, for example)? When we look back into their childhood, each had been consistently loved by one’s parents. I believe that this is crucial to the understanding of the constructive nature of aggression. When a person has not been loved or has been loved inconsistently or by a mother or father who was oneself radically insecure, there develops in his later aggression a penchant for revenge on the World, a need to destroy the World for others in as much as it was not good for one. Each had—and we must assume that this begins early in infancy—a deep compassion for others, which took the later, particular form of compassion for slaves and the persecuted. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Garrison and Weld were attracted to the movement by empathy for the Africans held as slaves. Birney wrote: “It is hard to tell what one’s duty is toward the poor creatures; but I have made up my mind to one thing, I will not allow any of them to be treated brutally.” Phillips was first attracted to the abolitionist movement by the mob’s murder of fellow abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy, and later joined the movement when he saw the mob threaten Garrison’s life. Thereafter, his motivation differed slightly from the others in that he was continually outraged that in his beloved Boston there should be such a disregard of civil liberties. The physical courage of these four, made necessary by their being under constant threat of mob violence, bears deeper scrutiny. For the kind of aggression in which they moved, they had to have a capacity for risk, for existing in extremis. All four had had an abundant amount of energy as children, which had taken the forms of vigorous play and of fighting with their peers. However, their courage seemed more a triumph over anxiety (as, in the last analysis, courage may always be) rather than something with which they were born. Garrison tells, in a letter to a friend, of his “knees shaking in anticipation” of a lecture he had to give to the Congregational Societies of Boston, and a newspaper account of the day tells of his voice being so faint that the audience could scarcely hear him. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, he recovered and gave a strong plea for the emancipation of the slaves. Although Garrison suffered least of the four abolitionists and indeed appeared to enjoy combat, it would be a mistake to overlook the fear he experienced on numerous occasions when his life was in jeopardy from angry mobs. The social courage required here is even more impressive. Birney wrote that the pain of alienation from those with whom we [went] up from Sabbath to Sabbath to the house of God—many of our near relations estranged from us, and the whole community looking upon you as an enemy to its peace, is no small trial. In 1834 he wrote to Weld: “I have not one helper—not one from whom I can draw sympathy on this topic!” Again and again, he faced censure and threats of violence from mobs, while he believed that if ever there was a time, it is now come when our republic with her cause of universal freedom is in a strait, where everything that ought to be periled by the patriot should be freely hazarded for her relief. Men must themselves die freeman [rather] than slaves, or our Country, glorious as has been her hope, is gone forever. “Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men, Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life,” reports 2 Nephi 31.20. RandolphHarris 13 of 18

The opposition they received served to strengthen them in their commitment. Garrison responded to it with increasing aggression and closer identification with the Africans now in America. He wrote with eloquence: I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak or write, with moderation. No, no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of a ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which he has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present! I am in earnest. I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead. “For behold, he surely must die that salvation may come; yea, it behooveth him and becometh expedient that he dieth, to bring to pass the resurrection of the dead, that thereby men may be brought into the presence of the Lord. Yes, behold, this death bringeth to pass the resurrection, and redeemeth all humankind from the first death—that spiritual death; for all humankind, by the fall of Adam being cut off from the presense of the Lord, are considered as dead, both as to things temporal and to things spiritual,” reports Helaman 14.15-16. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

No sensitive person can go through such prolonged aggressive activity without serious doubts from time to time about the rightness of one’s position. Birney’s period of doubt and indecision touches us particularly for it hinges on a typical contemporaneous worry. He was continuously afraid that his decisions would be influenced too much by feeling, trying as he was to convince by reasons others as well as himself: “When I remember how calmly and dispassionately my mind has proceeded from truth to truth connected with this subject [for instance, slavery] to another still higher, I feel satisfied that my conclusions are not the fruits of enthusiasm.” He later despaired that the South could ever be reached by reason. Despite failing health he same to New York to serve as secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Interestingly enough, he, who had depended on reason, despaired of gradualism before he died in 1857: “When or how it [slavery] will expire I must say I see not.” “And blessed art thou because thou hast established a church among this people; and they shall be my people. Yea, blessed is this people who are willing to bear my name; for in my name shall they be called; and they are mine. And because thou hast inquired of me concerning the transgressor, thou art blessed,” reports Mosiah 26. 17-19. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Constructive aggression causes suffering as well as inner conflict. The suffering that dedication to such a cause entails was responsible for the commitment of greater and greater numbers to it. Prominent Bostonians were incensed when the mob threatened the life of Garrison. Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, a prominent physician, wrote: “Then it has come to this, that a man cannot speak on slavery within sight of Faneuil Hall.” When Bowditch volunteered to help a member of the city government, Samuel Eliot, standing nearby, to suppress the rioters, Eliot, “rather intimated that the authorities, while not wising for a mob, rather sympathized with its object…to forcibly suppress the abolitionists. I was completely disgusted and I vowed from my heart as I left him with utter loathing, ‘I am an abolitionist from this very moment.’” The role of the forces of law and order presents a dismal picture in this period, as in our own. It reveals a truth that we know but, for our own peace of mind, try to forget. Not only did members of the government covertly instigate violence by sympathizing with it, as in the incident quoted above, but there was also an incident the like of which could be multiplied a thousand fold: the good people of Boston watched, ashamed and helpless, as a former slave was taken by force to be shipped back to slavery while their own militia guarded the capture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Indeed, many who had regarded the abolitionists as hotheads and spokesmen for the lunatic fringe had second thoughts when they observed incidents like this. The aggression of the abolitionists succeeded in its central aim—to combat the apathy that always emerges in a time of anxiety and guilt. The anxiety was caused by the social upheaval of that historical period; the guilt for holding slaves was felt even among the southerners themselves. However, the abolitionist would not permit escape into apathy. They continued to jar the populace and permitted no man’s conscience to sleep. These four men had a powerful grievance—the inhuman character of slavery. They also had a powerful aim at stake—the possibility of correcting injustice. While destructive aggression sometimes contains only the first, both of these must be present in constructive aggression. In contrast to affirmation and assertion, aggression occurred because the opposition was so entrenched and apathy and inertia were so strong that the greater force was necessary for stirring up effective action. It is the nature of any society to protect the status quo, and aggression, from time to time, moves into violence not only because of the blind rage of mobs but also because of the action of police and militia on the side of “law and order.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

It is inspiring to watch how each of these men gathered his individual strength, not present to start with, and transcended himself with his own effort in bringing the power of his oratory and his example to bear upon the opposition. In this self-transcendence there must often have been the experience of ecstasy. When a being as reached this state of inward detachment, when one has withdrawn from passion and hate, prejudice and anger, all human experience—including one’s own—becomes for one a subject for prayer, a theme for analysis, and a dream bereft of reality. One’s reflection about other being’s experiences is not less important than about one’s own. Fromm this standpoint nothing that happens in the lives of these around one can be without interest, but everything will provide material for detached observation and thoughtful analysis. One who has attained that state of desirelessness has liberated oneself from the need to court, flatter, or deceive others, from the temptation to prostitute one’s powers at the behest of ambition, from the compulsion to drag oneself servilely after conventional public opinion. One neither inwardly desires nor outwardly requires any public attestation to the sincerity of one’s services or the integrity of one’s character. The quiet approval of one’s own conscience is enough. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

September 2, 2019 11:30 pm

Your Master knew these things. He knew. But he was of a pagan time, obdurate and angry, and fusing ever the grace of God. In you, he saw God’s grace, because your soul is pure. You are young and tender and open like the moonflower to take the light of night. You hate of now, … Continue reading →

This gallery contains 1 photo.

August 26, 2019 10:17 pm

Oh, how innocent he sounded, how it came from his heart, ancient and childlike, a heart so preternaturally strong that it had taken hundreds of years to render it safe to beat in the company of mortal hearts. In order to evaluate the role played in neuroses by the various attempts at protection against the basic anxiety it is necessary to realize their potential intensity. They are prompted not by a wish to satisfy a desire for pleasures or happiness, but by a need for reassurance. This does not mean, however, that they are in any way less powerful or less imperative than instinctual drives. Experience shows us that the impact of a striving for ambition, for instance, may be equally as strong as or even stronger than an impulse for pleasures of the flesh. Any one of the four devices which include securing affection, submissiveness, power, or withdrawal, pursued exclusively or predominantly, can be effective in bringing the reassurance wanted, if the life situation allows its pursuit without incurring conflicts—even though such a one-sided pursuit is usually paid for with an impoverishment of the personality as a whole. For example, a woman following the path of submissiveness may find a great deal of secondary satisfaction in a culture which requires from a woman obedience to family or husband and compliance with the traditional forms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

If it is a monarch who develops a restless striving for power and possession, the result again may be reassurance and a successful life. As a matter of fact, however, a straightforward pursuit of one goal will often fail to fulfill its purpose because the demands set up are so excessive or so inconsiderate that they involve conflicts with the surroundings. More frequently reassurance from a great underlying anxiety is sought not in one way only, but in several ways which, moreover, are incompatible with one another. Thus the neurotic persona many at the same time be driven imperatively toward dominating everyone and wanting to be loved by everyone, toward complying with others and imposing one’s will on them, toward detachment from people and a craving for their affection. It is these utterly unsoluble conflicts which are most often the dynamic center of neuroses. The two attempts which most frequently clash are the striving for affection and the striving for power. Yet, the clash between individual desires and social requirements does not necessarily bring about neuroses, but may just as well lead to factual restrictions in life, that is, to the simple suppression ore repression of desires or, in most general terms, to factual suffering. A neurosis is brought about only if this conflict generates anxiety and if the attempts to allay anxiety lead in turn to defensive tendencies which, although equally imperative, are nevertheless incompatible with one another. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Our drift toward violence and nuclear war is not only due to biological factors beyond our control. Rather, if one opens one’s eyes, it is clear that these unfortunate circumstances are also caused by social, political, and economic circumstances of our own making. Human aggressiveness is an instinct fed by an ever-flowing fountain of energy, and not necessarily the result of a reaction to outer stimuli. That energy is specific for an instinctive act and accumulates continuously in the neural centers related to that behavior pattern, and if enough energy has been accumulated an explosion is likely to occur even without the presence of a stimulus. However, the animal and humans beings usually find stimuli which release the dammed-up energy of the drive; they do not have to wait passively until the proper stimulus appears. They search for, and even produce stimuli. This is called appetitive behavior. Humans say they create political parties being the cause of aggression. However, in cases where no outside stimulus can be found or produced, the energy of the dammed-up aggressive drive is so great that it will explode, as it were, and be acted out in vacuo, i.e., without demonstrable external stimulation, the vacuum activity performed without an object—exhibits truly photographic similarity to normal performance of the motor actions involved. This demonstrates that the motor coordination patterns of the instinctive behavior pattern are hereditarily determined down to the finest detail. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Therefore, aggression is primarily not a reaction to outside stimuli, but a built-in inner excitation that seeks for release and will find expression regardless of how adequate the outer stimulus: It is the spontaneity of the instinct that makes it so dangerous. It is a hydraulic model, in analogy to the pressure exercised by dammed-up water or steam in a closed container. This hydraulic concept of aggression is, as it were, one pillar which refers to the mechanism through which aggression is produced. The other pillar is the idea that aggression is in the service of life, that it serves the survival of the individual and of the species. Broadly speaking, intraspecific aggression (aggression among members of the same species) has the function of furthering the survival of the species. Aggression fulfills this function by the spacing out of individuals of one species over the available habitat; by selection of the better being, relevant in conjunction with the defense of the female, and by establishing a social rank order. Aggression can have this preservative function all the more effectively because in the process of evolution deadly aggression has been transformed into behavior consisting of symbolic and ritual threats which fulfil the same function without harming the species. The instinct that served the animal’s survival has become grotesquely exaggerated and has gone wild in humans. Aggression has been transformed into a threat rather than a help to survival. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Above all, it is more than probably that the destructive intensity of the aggressive drive, still a hereditary evil of humankind, is the consequence of a process of intra-specific selection which worked on our forefathers for roughly forty thousand years, that is, throughout the Early Stone Age. When humans had reached a stage of having weapons, clothing, and social organization, so overcoming the dangers of starving, freezing, and being eaten by wild animals, and these dangers ceased to be the essential factors influencing selection, an evil intra-specific selection must have set in. The factor influencing selection was now the wars waged between hostile neighboring tribes. These must have evolved in an extreme form of all those so-called warrior virtues which unfortunately many people still regard as desirable ideals. This picture of the constant war among the savage hunters-food-gatherers since the full emergence of modern beings around 40,000 or 50,000 B.C. is a widely accepted idea. The assumption of forty thousand years of organized warfare is basically saying that war is the natural state of humans, and is presented as an argument to prove the innateness of human aggressiveness. The logic is that humans are aggressive because their ancestors were aggressive. However, this opens a question about genetic reasoning. If a certain trait is to have a selective advantage this must be based on the increased production of fertile offspring of the carriers of that trait. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

However, in view of the likelihood of a higher loss of the aggressive individuals in wars, it is doubtful whether selection could account for the maintenance of a high incidence of this trait. In fact, if one considers such a loss as negative selection, the gene frequency should diminish. Actually, the population density in that age was extremely low, and for many of the human tribes after the full emergence of Homo sapiens there was little need to compete and to fight each other for food or space. Humans are among the thousands of species of animals that fights their own species. However, on the other hand, they are among the thousand of species that fight, the only one in which fighting is disruptive. Humans are the only species that is a mass murderer, the only misfit in one’s own society. Why should this be so? By a number of complicated and often questionable constructions, defensive aggression is supposed to be transformed in humans into a spontaneously flowing and self-increasing drive that seeks to create circumstances which facilitate the expression of aggression, or that even explodes when no stimuli can be found or created. Hence even in a society that is organized from a socioeconomic viewpoint in such a way that major aggression could find no proper stimuli, the very demand of the aggressive instinct would force its members to change it or, if they would not, aggression would explode even without any stimulus. Love itself is a product of the aggressive instinct. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The failure to express aggression in action is unhealthy. Repression of sexuality can lead to mental illness. Present day civilized beings suffer from insufficient discharges of their aggressive drive. Aggressive-destructive energy is continuously produced, and very difficult, if not impossible in the long run, to control. The so-called evil in animals becomes a real evil in humans, even though its roots are not evil. The ego hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are the source of pain. Aggression is primarily against one’s self—I am the one who ultimately dies—and it must be turned against others and external objects to avoid this self-destruction. The death instinct is a metaphor which is by no means the whole truth, but it is an important part of the truth that cannot be neglected. Depression is often the return of the repressed, namely the indirect expression of unconfronted aggressive tendencies. Aggression is always the result of frustration, and wherever there is frustration there will be aggression. The theoretical flaw, however, is that it tacitly assumes that all aggression is negative, and implies that when we some day construct a society without frustration in it, there will be no aggression. However, most important of all, the theory fails to take seriously the cruel realities of life, such as impoverished communities or oppression, abuse, and corruption. How can aggression in the prisons, where men and women are fighting for their loves as human beings, be encompassed in the term frustration? #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

It is possible that aggression is will to power in human life. People, like Napoleon, the democratic party, and the fake news media, develop a compensatory striving for power. Civilization itself arises out of a being’s need to increase one’s power vis-à-vis nature. They are striving for superiority. Humans create symbols and bases their culture upon them; the flag and patriotism are examples, as are status, religion, and language. The capacity to create and deal with symbols, actually a superb achievement, also accounts for the fact that we are the cruelest species on the planet. We skill not out of necessity but out of allegiance to such symbols as the flag and fatherland; we kill on principle. Thus our aggression occurs on a different level from that of animals, and not much can be learned from animals about this distinctively human form of aggression. Therefore, to say that people are behaving like animals insults animals for most animals seems to be well behaved. As ritual is an organization for life, it has to be carried out according to a particular theory of prosperity—that is, how exactly to get nature to give more life to the tribe. The most striking thing to us about the primitive theory of prosperity is how elemental it was—or organic, as we would say today. Primitive beings observed nature and tried to discern in it what made the dance of life—where the power came from, how things became fecund. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

If you are going to generate life, you have to determine its principles and imitate the things that embody them. Organisms respond naturally to the Sun, which gives heat and light, and find their richness in the Earth, which produces food out of noting—or rather out of its mysterious bowels. The Australian aborigines have an expression about the Sun’s rays having intercourse with the Earth. Very early humans seems to have isolated the principles of fecundity and fertilization and tried to promote them by impersonating them. And so beings identified with sky or the Heavens, and the Earth, and divided themselves into Heavenly people and Earthly ones. In cosmic rites the whole World is involved, but in two parts, Sky and Earth, because all prosperity is conceived to be due to the orderly interaction of the Sky and Earth. They sky alone cannot create, nor the Earth alone bring forth. Therefore in the ritual that regulates the World there must be two principles and they must be male and female, for the interplay of the Earth and Sky is analogous to the intercourse of the genders. The World was divided not only into Sky and Earth but also into right and left, light and darkness, power and weakness—and even life and death. The point is that reality in the round has to be represented in order for it to be controlled. The primitive knew that death was an important part of creation, and so one embodied death in order to control it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion,–ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little concern. We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,–these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A. Believe truth! Shun error!—these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently out whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance. It may be best to believe nothing, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very small matter when compared with the blessing of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than to postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Some find it impossible to doubt everything. We must remember that these feelings of our duty about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our passional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to grind out falsehood as veracity, and one who says, “Better go without belief forever than believer a lie!” merely shows one’s own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. One may be critical of many of one’s desires and fears, but this fear one slavishly obeys. One cannot imagine any one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a being in this World. Some believe fantastically they rather doubt everything. It is like a general informing his or her soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a World where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of hearty seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher. Unwise people think that in the World of essence there should be no bloom of flowers and no fall of leaves. The Master here shows that in the mind of the enlightened being the external World appears as for the ordinary being and remains a mere mentation for the mentalist. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The permanence which ordinary normal people seem to find in merely living does not exist for one. One finds only transience. This affects both the bright and dark sides of existence, the good fortune and ill fortune. All is unstable and subject to change. The enlightened being has the same kind of body and the same five sense as unenlightened beings have. One’s experience of the World must be the same, too. However—and this is a vast difference—one experiences it along with the Overself. For incarnate beings the cosmic dream is always going on. This is also the case for the sage. However, one has the knowledge of what is happening and the power to intromit it one step further back. We are all in this dream which is itself the product of, and hidden within, a greater dream. Is God, the Dreamer, then asleep? This is the mystery: that one is both awake and asleep at the same time. How can being’s tiny mind understand such a thing? Of course not. Let one be still and seek not to carry one’s profane curiosity into the Holy of Holies. In the end it shall be as if one were never existent, but this cannot be the same as death. For the dream—of which one is a part—goes back into the Dreamer, into the Living God. If the illuminate detaches oneself from the World because of its immediate transiency, one re-attaches oneself to it again because of its ultimate unity with one’s own innermost being. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

One lives in the knowledge of the World-Idea—not in its fullness of detail but in its general outline—which is fulfilling itself in the whole Universe and wit which one tries to co-operate according to one’s knowledge. This it is which supports one’s inner being, counters one’s everyday experience of human weakness and evil, and transfigures one when leaving the hour of communion to resume that experience. “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me,” reports Romans 7.19-20. Do these words of Paul correctly describe our nature? Is the split between willing the good and achieving it as radical as they would indicate? Or do we resist the indictment by insisting that we often do good that we want and avoid the evil that we do not want? Is not Paul perhaps grossly exaggerating the evil in beings in order to emphasize the brightness of grace by depicting it against a very dark background? These are questions that every critic of Christianity asks. However, are they not also the questions that we ask—we, who call ourselves Christians, or at least who desire to be what the Christian message will us to be? Actually, none of us believes that one always does the evil one would like not to do. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

We know that we sometimes do achieve the good that we want—when, for example, we perform an act of love towards a person with whom we do not sympathize, or an act of self-discipline for the sake of our work, or an act of courageous non-conformity in a situation where it may endanger us. Our moral balance sheet is not as bad as it would be without these acts! And have we ever really known a preacher of what is called the total depravity of beings who did not show, in one’s own behavior, reliance on a positive moral balance sheet? Perhaps even Paul did. At least, one tries to tell us so when one boasts about one’s sufferings and activities in a letter to the Corinthians. Certainly, one calls one’s boasting foolishness. However, do we not also insist that our boasting is foolish? Yet we do not stop boasting. Are not perhaps those who believe, in the surface, that they have noting to boast about, being sick, disintegrated, and without self-esteem? They may even be proud of the depth of despair in which they visualize themselves. For without a vestige of self-esteem no one can live, not even one who bases one’s self-esteem on despairing of oneself. However, why then do we not simply dismiss Paul’s words? Why do we react positively to his statement that “I do not do the good that I want?” It is because we feel that it is not a matter of balance sheets between good and evil that the words express, but rather a matter of our whole being, or our situation as beings, of our standing in the face of the eternal—the source, aim and judge of our being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

It is our human predicament that a power takes hold of us, that does not comes from us but is in us, a power that we hate and at the same time gladly accept. We are fascinated by it; we play with it; we obey it. However, we know that it will destroy us if we are not grasped by another power that will resist and control it. We are fascinated by what can destroy us, and in moments even feel a hidden desire to be destroyed by it. This is how Paul saw himself, and how a great many of us see ourselves. The belief that a fully illumined master or religious prophet can be succeeded generation after generation by a chain of equally illuminated leaders following the same tradition, is delusive. One cannot bequeath the fullness of one’s attainment to anyone, one can only give others an impetus toward it. One one’s self is irreplaceable. If churches and ashrams would only admit that they are led by faulty fallible people, liable to weaknesses and error, they would render better spiritual service than by continuing to maintain the partial imposture that they are not so led. If there were such public acknowledgement that their authority and inspiration were very limited, religious and mystical institutions would be more preoccupied with helping others than with themselves. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Something else that occurred in the breakthrough of this insight is that everything around me became suddenly vivid. I can remember that on the particular street down which I walked that houses were painted an ugly shade or orange that I would normally prefer to forget immediately. However, by virtue of the vividness of this experience, the colors all around were sharpened and were imbedded in my experience, and that ugly orange still exists in my memory. The moment the insight broke through, there was a special translucence that enveloped the World, and my vision was given a special clarity. I am convinced that this is the usual accompaniment of the breakthrough of unconscious experience into consciousness. Here is again part of the reason the experience scares us so much: the World, both inwardly and outwardly, takes on an intensity that may be momentarily overwhelming. This is one aspect of what is called ecstasy—the uniting of unconscious experience wit consciousness, a union that is not in abstracto, but a dynamic, immediate fusion. I want to emphasize that I did not get my insight as though I were dreaming, with the World and myself opaque and cloudy. It is a popular misconception tat perception is dull when one is experiencing this state of insight. I believe that perception is actually sharper. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

True, one aspect of it resembles a dream in that self and World may become kaleidoscopic; but another aspect of the experience is a sharpened perception, a vividness, a translucence of relationship to the things around us. The World becomes vivid and unforgettable. Thus the breakthrough our material from unconscious dimensions involves a heightening of sensory experience. We could, indeed, define the whole experience that we are talking about as a state of heightened consciousness. Unconsciousness is the depth dimension of consciousness, and when it surges up into consciousness in this kind of polar struggle the result is an intensification of consciousness. It heightens not only the capacity to think, but also the sensory processes; and it certainly intensifies memory. There is another thing we observe when such insights occur—that is, the insight never comes hit or miss, but in accordance with a pattern of which one essential element is our own commitment. The breakthrough does not come by just taking it easy, by letting the unconscious do it. The insight, rather, is born from unconscious levels exactly in the areas in which we are most intensively consciously committed. The insight came to me on that problem to which, up till the moment I put my books and papers away in the little office that I occupied, I had devoted my best and most energetic conscious of thought. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The idea, the new form which suddenly becomes present, came in order to complete an incomplete Gestalt with which I was struggling in conscious awareness. One can quite accurately speak of this incomplete Gestalt, this unfinished pattern, this unformed form, as constituting the call that was answered by the unconscious. Another characteristic of this experience is that the insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation. It comes at a break in periods of voluntary effort. My breakthrough came when I had put away my books and was walking toward the subway, my mind far away from the problem. It is as though intense application to the problem—thinking about it, struggling with it—starts and keeps the work process going; but some part of the pattern that is different from what I am trying to work out is struggling to be born. Hence the tensions that ins involved in creative activity. If we are too rigid, strict, or bound to previous conclusions, we will, of course, never let this new element come into our consciousness; we will never let ourselves be aware of the knowledge that exists on another level within us. However, the insight often cannot be born until the conscious tensions, the conscious application, is relaxed. Hence the well-known phenomenon that the unconscious breakthrough requires the alternation of intense, conscious work and relaxation, with the unconscious insight often occurring, as in my case, at the moment of the shift. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Albert Einstein once asked a friend of mine in Princeton, “Why is it I get my best ideas on the morning while I am shaving?” My friend answered, as I have been trying to say here, that often the mind needs the relaxation of inner controls—needs to be freed in reverie or day dreaming—for the unaccustomed ideas to emerge. Human consciousness is driven by two basic concerns—fear of life and fear of death. The fear of life is concerned about separating (from others), venturing forth or standing out on one’s own. Put another way, it is fear of becoming free. The fear of death, on the other hand, is a concern about attaching (to others), retreating back to the womb, or returning to a state of matter. It is a fear, in other words, of becoming limited. These fears can be the cause of a variety of psychological dysfunctions. Depression and dependency, for example, can be traced to a dire fear of life (separation anxiety); narcissism and mania can be linked to a pronounced fear of death (attachment anxiety). The greater one’s life or death fear, moreover, the greater one’s tendency to swing in the opposite direction. “Nevertheless, Alma labored much in the spirit, wrestling with God in mighty prayer, that he would pour out his Spirit upon the people who were in the city; that be would also grant that he might baptize them unto repentance,” reports Alma 8.10. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

August 26, 2019 12:34 am