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He Who Does Not Work Should Not Eat
We can forgive a child who is afraid of the dark, but it is deeply concerning when a man is afraid of the light. Man is a creature of desires, universally motivated by self-interest; the mechanism of competition, if free and fair, transmutes the self-seeking of the economic man into deeds that work for “the greatest good of the greatest number.” However, this machinery is delicate and must be permitted to operate under “normal” conditions and must not be overridden by government interference; to enjoy the fruits of an inherently beneficent natural economic law, men must permit it to operate unhampered; they must be industrious, frugal, temperate, and self-reliant; self-help, and not a weak recourse to state intervention, is the way of economic salvation. We must not, however, always have blind faith in the doctrines and simplicity of classical laissez faire economics, and its belief in the adequacy of self-interest as an explanation of human conduct. The historical method cannot lead to such doctrinaire extreme. This younger political economy no longer permits the science to be used as a tool in the hands of the greedy and the avaricious for keeping down and oppressing the labouring classes. It does not acknowledge laissez-faire as an excuse for doing nothing while people starve, nor allow the all-sufficiency of competition as a plea for grinding the poor. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Malthus assumed that man has a definite and unalterable set of attributes; but Darwinism holds that man is pliable and circumstances determine his characteristics. On true Darwinian premises one can assume no such thing as a permanent natural rate of increase; for the human rate of increase would be susceptible to change in accordance with man’s surroundings and circumstances. We regard the state as an agency whose positive assistance is one of the indispensable conditions of human progress. We believe that political economy as a science is still in an early stage of its development. While we appreciate the work of former economists, we look not so much to speculation as to the historical and statistical study of actual conditions of economic life for the satisfactory accomplishment of that development. The most fundamental things in our minds are on the one hand the idea of evolution, and on the other hand, the idea of relativity. A new World is coming into existence, and if this World is to be a better World we know that we must have a new economics to go along with it. If the consumer challenges the corporation to respond to his wishes, the management will begin to respond to this challenge. However, as it stands, many corporations are taking on the form of a dictator and demanding that the consumer be thankful for allowing them to purchase from their businesses and that the consumer accepts whatever the business gives them, even if it is substandard quality and service. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Accusations will not help to clarify or to improve the situation. Managers as well as consumers are part of the same alienated system; they are its prisoners rather than its creators. The managers tend to seduce the consumer into passiveness, but the consumer is attracted to his passive role; he makes it easy to be seduced. The resistance to basic change exists on both sides, but the wish for imaginative change, for liberation of energies, for new or creative solutions exists on both sides, too. A further measure would be legal restrictions on present methods of advertising. This point hardly needs an explanation. It refers to all semihypnotic and irrational advertising which has developed in the last three quarters of a century. It could be effected by a simple law, like the one requiring cigarette manufacturers to put a warning of danger to health on their product, or as fake and misleading advertising in interstate commerce and specifically false advertisements with respect to food, drugs, and cosmetics are forbidden by federal statutes. Whether such a law has a chance to be passed against the combined powers of the advertising industry, the newspapers, television, radio, and, most of all, that part of industry for which hypnotic advertising is an important aspect of its planning and production, depends on certain changes in our democratic process, and chance to be informed, to debate and to discuss this problem, and whether the power of citizens is superior to that of lobbies and those members of Congress who are influenced by lobbies. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
What about a redirection of production itself? Assuming that the best experts and an enlightened public opinion came to the conclusion that the production of certain commodities is preferable to that of others in the interest of the population as a whole, could the freedom of the enterprise to produce that which is most profitable or requires least vision, experimentation, and daring be restricted within the framework of our Constitution? Legally this would not cause any great problem. While in the twentieth century such change might required the nationalization of industry, today it can be achieved by laws which require no change in our Constitution. The production of “useful” things could be furthered and the production of useless and unhealthy things could be discouraged by tax laws which favour those industries that agree to fit their production into the pattern of a sane society rather than into a pattern of “profit regardless.” The government could influence adequate production by loans or, in certain instances, by government-owned enterprises which would pave the way for private initiative, once feasibility of profitable investment was proved. It is also important to increase investment in the public sector in relation to investment in the private sector. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
All investments in the public sector—like public transportation, housing, schools, parks, theaters, and so on—have a twofold merit: first, of fulfilling needs adapted to man’s aliveness and growth; second, of developing a sense of solidarity rather than one of personal greed and envy and hence competitiveness with others. Our society, like many of the past, has accepted the principle “he who does not work should not eat.” (American Communism has elevated this old principle into a “socialist” precept, phrasing it slightly different.) The problem is not whether a man fulfills his social responsibility by contributing to the common good. In fact, in those cultures which have explicitly or implicitly accepted this norm, the rich who did not have to work, were exempted from this principle, and the definition of a gentleman was a man who did not have to work to live in style. The problem is that any human being has an inalienable right to live regardless of whether he performs a social duty. Work and all other social obligations should be made sufficiently attractive to urge man to desire to accept his share of social responsibility, but he should not be forced to do so by the threat of starvation. If the latter principle is applied, society has no need to make work attractive and to fit its system to human needs. It is true that in many societies of the past the disproportion between the size of the population and the available techniques of production did not permit the freedom to dispense with the principle of what is, in fact, forced labour. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
In the affluent industrial society there is no such problem, and yet even the members of the middle and upper classes are forced to follow norms laid down by the industrial system for fear of losing their jobs. Our industrial system does not give them as much leeway as it could. If they lose a job because they lack “the right spirit”—which means they are too independent, voice unpopular opinions, marry the “wrong” women—they will have great difficulties in finding another job of equal rank, and getting a job of inferior rank implies that they and their families feel that their personality has been degraded; they lose the new “friends” whom they had gained in the process of rising; they fear the scorn of their wives and the loss of respect from the children. We must uphold the principle that a person has an inalienable right to live—a right to which no conditions are attached and which implies the right to be treated at least as well as the owner of a dog or a cat treats his pet, which does not have to “prove” anything in order to be fed. Provided this principle were accepted, if a man, woman, or adolescent could be sure that whatever he did his material existence would not be in jeopardy, the realm of human freedom would be immensely enhanced. Acceptance of this principle would also enable a person to change his occupation or profession by using one or more years in preparing himself for a new and, to him, more adequate activity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
It happens that most people decide about their career at an age when they do not have the experience and judgment to know what activity is the most congenial to them. Perhaps in their mid-thirties they wake up to the fact that it is too late to start that activity which they now know would have been the right choice. In addition, no woman would be forced to remain unhappily married because she did not have what it takes even to prepare herself for a job at which she could make a living. If he knew he would not starve during the time he looks for a job more to his liking, no employee would be forced to accept conditions which to him are degrading or distasteful. This problem is by no means solved by unemployment or welfare dole. As many have recognized, the bureaucratic methods employed here are humiliating to such a degree that many people are afraid of being forced into the dole-receiving sector of the population, and this fear is sufficient to deprive them of the freedom not to accept certain working conditions. How could this principle be realized? Several economists have suggested as a solution an “annual guaranteed income” (sometimes called a “negative income tax”). The guaranteed annual income for work in order not to arouse resentment and anger in those who work. If it is to guarantee a modest but still adequate material basis, the present wage level would have to rise considerably. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
It is feasible to determine a minimum standard of living which is as high as the present minimum standard for a modest and adequate material basis. Anyone who is attracted by a more comfortable life would be free to achieve a higher level of consumption. The guaranteed annual income could also serve, as some economists have observed, as an important regulating feature in our economy. What we need is some device that can be permanently instituted as a regular feature of the industrial economy by which demand can be made to keep pace with a constantly proliferating supply. The guarantee of a basic income to all members of the community irrespective of the earnings of employment, as Social Security payments are now guaranteed to all persons over the age of seventy-two years of age, would provide the flow of effective demand that the economy more and more desperately requires. However limited the impact of Darwinism on economic theory, one could doubtless compile a formidable list of obiter dicta in which competition was justified in Sumnerian fashion as a special case of the struggle for existence. The survival of the fittest was a precept of sheer brutality and nothing else. I must deem any man very shallow in his observation of the facts of life who fails to discern in competition the force to which it is mainly due that mankind has risen from stage in intellectual, moral, and physical power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
An aspect of the filter which makes awareness possible is the logic which directs the thinking of people in each culture. Just as most people assume that their language is “natural” and that other languages only use different words for the same things, they assume also that the rules which determine proper thinking are natural and universal ones’ that is what is illogical in one cultural system is illogical in any other because it conflicts with “natural” logic. A good example of this is the difference between Aristotelian and paradoxical logic. Aristotelian logic is based on the laws of identity which states that A is A, the law of contradiction (A is not non-A), and the law of the excluded middle (A cannot be A and non-A, neither A nor non-A). Aristotle stated: “It is impossible for the same thing at the same time to belong and not to belong to the same thing in the same respect…This, then, is the most certain of all principles.” In opposition to Aristotelian logic is what one might call paradoxical logic, which assumes that A and non-A do not exclude each other as predicates of X. Paradoxical logic was predominant in Chinese and Indian thinking, in Heraclitus’ philosophy, and then again under the name of dialectics in the thought of Hegel and Marx. The general principle of paradoxical logic has been clearly described in general terms by Lao-tse: “Words that are strictly true seem to be paradoxical.” And by Chuang-tzu: “That which is one is one. That which is not-one, is also one.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Inasmuch as a person lives in a culture in which the correctness of Aristotelian logic is not doubted, it is exceedingly difficult if not impossible, for him to be aware of experiences which contradict Aristotelian logic, hence which from the standpoint of his culture are nonsensical. A good example is Dr. Freud’s concept of ambivalence, which says that one can experience love and hate for the same person at the same time. This experience, which from the standpoint of paradoxical logic is quite “logical,” does not make sense from the standpoint of Aristotelian logic. As a result, it is exceedingly difficult for most people to be aware of feelings of ambivalence. If they are aware of love, they cannot be aware of hate—since it would be utterly nonsensical to have two contradictory feelings at the same time. In therapy, the personal growth is facilitated when the counselor is what he is, when in the relationship with his client he is genuine and without “front” or façade, openly being the feelings and attitudes which at that moment are flowing in him. We have used the term “congruence” to try to describe this condition. By this we mean that the feelings the counselor is experiencing are available to him, available to his awareness, that he is able to live these feelings, be them in the relationship, and able to communicate them if appropriate. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Congruence means that he comes into a direct personal encounter with his client, meeting him on a person-to-person basis. It means that he is being himself, not denying himself. No one fully achieves this condition, yet the more the therapist can listen acceptantly to what is going on within himself, and the more he is able to be the complexity of his feelings without fear, the higher the degree of his congruence. I think that we readily sense this quality in our everyday life. We could each of us name persons whom we know who always seem to be operating from behind a front, who are playing a role, who tend to say things they do not feel. They are exhibiting incongruence. We do not reveal ourselves too deeply to such people. On the other hand, each of us knows individuals whom we somehow trust, because we sense that they are being what they are, that we are dealing with the person himself, and not with a polite or professional façade. This is the quality of which we are speaking, and it is hypothesized that the more genuine and congruent the therapist is in the relationship, the more probability there is that change in personality in the client will occur. Therefore, never accept more than you believe. A person may feel obliged, for instance, to accept whatever “bad” things emerge concerning himself, and to suspect a “resistance” if he hesitates to do so. However, if he regards his interpretation as merely tentative, and does not try to convince himself that it is definite, he will be on much safer ground. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The essence of analysis is truthfulness, and this should extend also to acceptance or nonacceptance of interpretations. The danger of making an interpretation that is misleading or at least unprofitable can never be excluded, but one should not be overawed by it. If one does not weaken, but carries on in the right spirit, a more profitable path will open sooner or later, or one will become aware of being in a blind alley and perhaps even learn from that experience. Clare, for instance, before embarking on her analysis of the dependency, had spent a couple of months digging after an alleged need to have her own way. From the data that emerged later we can understand how she was led in that direction. She told me, though, that during these attempts she had never had a feeling of conviction remotely like those she experienced later, during the period reported. Also, the ultimate reason why she had taken that earlier course was that Peter (her boyfriend) often reproached her for being dominating. This illustrates the importance of following one’s own interests; and the importance of not accepting anything without full conviction. However, while this early search of Clare’s meant a waste of time it petered out without harm and did not prevent her from doing highly constructive work afterward. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The constructive character of Clare’s work was due not only to the essential correctness of her interpretations but also to the fact that her analysis in this period showed a remarkable degree of continuity. Without intending to concentrate on one problem—for a long time she did not even know what it was—everything she embarked upon turned into a contribution to the problem of her dependency. This unanswering unconscious concentration upon a single problem, which made her approach it relentlessly from ever-new angels, is desirable but rarely attained to the same degree. We can account for it in Clare’s case, for at that period she was living under a formidable pressure—how formidable she fully recognized only later—and hence she unconsciously bent all her energies into solving the problems that contributed to it. Such a compelling situation cannot be created artificially. However, the more absorbing one’s interest in a problem, the more will a similar concentration be approximated. Clare’s self-analysis illustrates the recognition of a neurotic trend; understanding its implications; and discovering its interrelations with other neurotic trends. In Clare’s analysis, the steps overlapped to some extent: she recognized many of the implications before she finally detected the trend itself. Nor did she make any effort to cover definite steps in her analysis: she did not deliberately set out to discover a neurotic trend, and she did not deliberately examine the connections between her dependency and her compulsive modesty. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The recognition of the trend came of itself; and, similarly, the connecting links between the two trends almost automatically became more and more visible as the analytical work proceeded. Clare did not select the problems—at least not consciously—but the problems came to her, and in their unfolding they displayed an organic continuity. There was in Clare’s analysis a continuity of still another kind, even more important, and more possible to emulate: at no time was there any insight that remained isolated or disconnected. What we see develop is not an accumulation of insights that a person gains in an analysis is correct, he may still deprive himself of the greatest benefits of his work if the nights remain scattered. Thus Clare, after recognizing that she let herself be immersed in misery because she secretly believed she could thereby command help, might merely have traced the origin of this trait in childhood and regard it as a persistent infantile belief. That might have helped some, because nobody really wants to be miserable for no good reason; the next time she found herself succumbing to a spell of misery, she might have caught herself up short. However, at best this handling of her insight would have diminished in the course of time the gross attacks of exaggerated unhappiness. And these attacks were not the most important expression of the trait. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Or Clare might have gone no further than the next step, connecting her finding with her actual lack of self-assertion and recognizing that her belief in magic help substituted for an active dealing with life’s difficulties. This, although still inadequate, would have helped considerably more, because it would have opened a new incentive to do away with the whole attitude of helplessness lying behind the belief. However, if she had not linked up the magic-help belief with her dependency, and seen the one as an integral part of the other, she could not thoroughly have overcome the belief, because she would always have made the unconscious reservation that if she could only find the permanent “love,” help would always be forthcoming. It was only because she saw that connection, and because she recognized the fallacy in such an expectation and the excruciating price she had to pay for it, that the insight had the radically liberating effect it did. Wilhelm Reich, originally a psychoanalyst, became more and more convinced that healthy personality was impossible if a person defended himself or herself from the experience of vitality, pleasures of the flesh, and other emotional repression. Such repressions produce muscular tension. He gave the name muscular armor to those groups of muscles that a person keeps in chronic tension in order not to feel unwanted dimensions of experience. One indication that a person is not living a chronically “armored” life is the capacity to experience an enjoyable experience during pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Alexander Lowen adapted some of Reich’s ideas and techniques and founded a school of therapy that he calls bioenergetic analysis. He observes a person’s body, noting peculiarities of chronic tension and posture that are the outcome of the way the person lives. For example, a person with chronically hunched shoulders, who breathes shallowly, may reveal thereby a sense of personal helplessness in a hostile World. Lowen has his patients do certain stretching exercises to identify areas of tension; but he also encourages them to yell, and to beat a pillow or mattress with a tennis racquet, or fists and feet, to release tension. “Unarmoring” a person frees that person from repressions that protect one from pain but also destroy the capacity for pleasure. The man who reposes his emotional strength or mental peace on any single person is taking a chance whose outcome may disappoint him. The feelings of the transformed man no longer come out of the ego but out of the Overself’s life deep within the ego. A fuzzy sentimentality which passes for mystical feeling is only its counterfeit. If a man had trained himself to reject self-pity as an emotional egoism that is harmful, he is not likely to encourage its display in other men merely because they conventionally expect him to be sympathetic. Yet it must always be remembered that when pity, which begins in the emotions, is filtered through the reasons, it is not destroyed but balanced. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The Sacramento Fire Department must be as technically advanced as their communities so that when an emergency involving technology occurs, they are equipped and trained effectively to deal with the issue that results. Often lives depend on their readiness and skill levels as new hazards develop into emergency incidents. “I had been through EMT experience, and I had learned all the basic firefighting techniques from the local firehouse, where they let me take the pipe and open roofs. My brother was on the truck, and he’d take me on the roof with him. The knowledge I got there was unbelievable. And then, I had twelve relatives of one kind or another who are or have been firemen. When I went to training school, I probably knew as much as some of the instructors there. But you’re in there to learn, so you keep your mouth shut and do as you’re told. That’s just what I did, and I never had a problem. We were in training school five months, and the last month and a half we would go to school for a day and be assigned to a fire company for a day, wherever they needed us. I’m a very proud fireman. My wife thinks I’m crazy. I’ve got pictures all over my wall of my father, my brother, because I like to walk by them and think of me following in my father’s and brother’s footsteps. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“The first time I went to a fire in a special unit, I felt excited, yes, also proud I was here following my father. This is what I always wanted to be. A person could go to college for years and years and never gain the goal they want. And here I am, a couple of years out of high school. I got what I want.” The challenge for today’s leaders in the fire service is to create a vision for the future and make it happen. They have no way of knowing what the future will be like, however. You can do your part to help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. Also, remember to raise your children to love America, be patriotic, love God and Jesus Christ, respect law and order and show reverence their elders. It is a privilege to be an American citizen, and one of the many benefits of that privilege is the ability to earn an education. Stay in school and study hard. In tribute to the Founding Fathers of this blessed Republic, may we strive to keep these United States of America forever righteous and just. May ours be a land where none shall prey upon or exploit his fellowman, where bigotry and violence shall not be tolerated, where poverty shall be abolished, and all men live amicably as bothers. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester Mystery House calls to mind cracking thunder above the secretive mansion, howls of strange animals in the night, and spiky iron gates. Inside this legendary fortress may lurk angels, ghosts, and demons. The Winchester Mystery House is celebrating 101 years of giving tours. As many of you know, when Mrs. Winchester died in 1922, it took six moving vans, six weeks to remove all her furniture. On the last day, when almost everything had already been removed, Daisy stood in the now almost empty mansion once more. There were still a few boxes left in the basement. Two of the movers went back into the basement to get them out, while Daisy waited for them upstairs. The bell in the belfry started to strike twelve midnight. They loaded the boxes into the van, carefully locked the front door of the house and then the garden gate. At this precise moment, all three clearly heard the front door open and close again, and loud steps reverberated inside the empty mansion. “There must be someone in there,” one of the movers said. Quickly he unlocked the gate and front door once more and re-entered the dark house. After a few moments, he returned, relocked the door and gate, and somewhat sheepishly, shook his head. “Nothing. It’s all empty.” Not at all, Daisy thought, as the car pulled out into the night, not at all. That was only the reception committee for the tours that were to begin in 1923.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Knights of Labour and Social Gospel
Many Americans endorse solidarism; they see the group (the species, family, tribe, class, or nation) as the unit of survival, and minimize or overlook entirely the individual aspects of competition. It is precisely this, which critics found objectionable, in the current trend of evolutionary thought. Although social solidarity is a basic fact in evolution, solidarity is a thoroughly natural phenomenon, a logical outgrowth of natural evolution. The transition to solidarism, which is part of a larger reconstruction in American thought, first became apparent in the 1890s—the period that saw the publication of Drummond and Kidd, of Huxley’s essay, and, in preliminary form, of Mutual Aid. Rising with solidarism were other streams of criticism. In the realm of philosophy, the new spirit was marked by the ascendancy of the pragmatic movement, especially significant because it rejected the cold determinism of Spencer’s philosophy and constructed a new psychology, in part out of Darwinian materials. As social dissent became more vociferous, there arose a new concern with conscious social control. Inspired by events in the political and industrial arena, social science also reassessed its aims and methods. Earlier conceptions of the social significance of Darwinism were undergoing profound changes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
The sincere and candid reformer can no longer consider the national Promise as destined to automatic fulfillment. The reformers…proclaim their conviction of an indubitable and beneficent national future. However, they do not and cannot believe that this future will take care of itself. As reformers they are bound to asset that the national body requires for the time being a good deal of medical attendance, and many of them anticipate that even after the doctors have discontinued their daily visits the patient will still need the supervision of a sanitary specialist. From the disorders and discontents that plagued America in the eighteen seventies, eighties, and nineties, there arose a stream of dissenting opinion on the merits of the free competitive order. Two panics followed by long and harrowing depressions racked the economic life of the nation in the first and last of these decades; and in the intervening one, hardly a period of uninterrupted prosperity, labour uprisings of unprecedented scope and violence took place. The growth of the Knights of Labor and the strikes of the eighties, climaxed by the eight-hour movement and the Haymarket affair, gave to labour strife a central place in public attention. In the depression of the nineties, agricultural protest combined with labour unrest to create the national political upheaval of 1896. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Outside the immediate ranks of labour, an articulate source of reform sentiment in urban communities was the social-gospel movement. Many Protestant clergymen now criticized industrialism as their predecessors had criticized slavery, and their protest gave to the dissent of the post-bellum period a strong Christian flavour. The clergy of the cities had direct experience with industrial evils. They saw the living conditions of the workingmen, their slums, their pitiful wages, their unemployment, the enforced labour of their wives and daughters. Many ministers were troubled because the churches were out of touch with the working class, and sensed the unreality of talk about moral reform and Christian conduct in such an oppressive and brutalizing environment. They were not only shocked but alarmed by the industrial scene. Although they sympathized with trade unions, especially as defensive organizations, they were troubled by the ugly potential of industrial violence. They were learning about the doctrines and methods of European socialism, and, at the outset at least, feared their spread in the United States of America. What they sought, therefore, was a compromise between the harsh individualism of the competitive order and the possible dangers of socialism. Although agrarian discontents played a prominent role in national and state politics, the clergy focused their attention almost exclusively upon the problem of labour. There lay the menace; there lay the promise. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Most social gospel leaders worked in this urban setting. The most famous and the most active of them was the prolific Washington Gladden (1836-1918), a preacher in several cities and for a time a writer on the editorial staff of the Independent. Among Gladden’s contemporaries who shared his moderate reformism were Lyman Abbott, one of the most influential clergymen of the age; the Rev. A.J.F. Behrends, who hoped to persuade Christians to forestall the menace of socialism by anticipating its more acceptable proposals; and Francis Greenwood Peabody, who taught Christian ethics at Harvard. Other advocates of the social gospel were closer to socialism. William Dwight Porter Bliss (1856-1926) of Boston organized a Protestant Episcopal reform group, the Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labour (CAIL), and published a radical paper, the Dawn, which supported sundry left-wing movements. George Herron (1862-1925), a famous platform speakers and professors of Applied Christianity at Iowa College who joined the Socialist Party in 1889, was a leading propagandist of the movement. Walter Rauschenbush (1861-1918), another convert to socialism, exerted through his writings a profound influence on Christian social thinking in the Progressive period. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
The greatest literary success of the movement were produced by Midwesterners. Josiah Strong’s discussion of national problems, our Country, was a best seller in the 1880’s. A Kansas minister, Charles M. Sheldon, wrote a crudely novelized tract, In His Steps (1896), describing the social experiences of a small-town congregation that patterned its conduct on the precepts of Jesus as the Christ; the volume sold about 23,000,0000 copies in English between the day of its publication and 1925. The movements inspired by Henry George and Edward Bellamy were of one piece with the social gospel. Both men, products of pious home environments, were intensely religious; their writings were filled with a moral protest thoroughly familiar to readers of social-gospel literature. That the social gospel and the followers of George and Bellamy shared a common outlook was shown by the adherence of many socially minded clergymen to both the Nationalist and single-tax movements. On another front the social gospel was linked to those academic economists who had begun to criticize individualism; such progressive economists as John R. Commons, Edward Bemis, and Richard T. Ely formed a bridge between churchmen and other professional economists. At one time over sixty clergymen were listed as members of the American Economic association. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The social-gospel movement arose during the years when evolution was making converts among the progressive clergy, and since ministers who were liberal in social outlook were almost invariably liberal in theology also, the social theory of the movement was deeply affected by the impact of naturalism upon social thought. The growing secularization of thought hastened the trend among clergymen to turn from the abstractions of theology to social questions. The liberalization of theology broke down the insularity of religion. Social-gospel leaders were also inspired by the vistas of development opened both forward and backward in time by the evolutionary perspective; their belief in an inevitable progress toward a better order on Earth—the Kingdom of God—was fortified by the evolutionary dogma. Wrote Walter Rauschenbusch: “Translate the evolutionary theories into religious faith, and you have the doctrine of the Kingdom of God. This combination with scientific evolutionary thought has freed the kingdom ideal of its catastrophic setting and its background a demonism, and so adapted it to the climate of the modern World.” Spencer’s organic interpretation of society also appealed to the progressive clergy, although they usually put it to uses of which he would have sternly disapproved. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
To them the social-organism concept meant that the salvation of the single individual had lost its meaning, and that in the future men would speak with Washington Gladden of “social salvation.” It also implied a harmony of interests between classes which served as a framework for their appeals against class conflict and for extended state intervention. Lyman Abbott, however, thought that the social-organism idea provided an argument for slow and gradual reform. No longer under the influence of the theological concept of the total depravity of human nature, some social-gospel writers also accepted the idea that the social order should be transformed by changing the character of individuals—a conception in which they were close to Spencer and other conservatives. In one critical respect the pioneers of social gospel departed from prevailing social uses of evolution: they detested and feared the free competitive order and all its works. However profoundly influenced by individualism, however timorous about socialism, they were in general agreement on the need to modify the free workings of competition to abandon Manchesterian economics and the social fatalism of the Spencerians. “Christianity,” wrote the Rev. A. J. F. Behrends, “cannot grant the adequacy of the ‘laissez-faire’ philosophy, cannot admit that the perfect and permanent social state is the product of natural law and of an unrestricted competition.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Citing Emile de Laveleye, a Belgian expositor of socialism, as having said that followers of Darwin and advocates of a natural-law political economy “are the real and only logical adversaries at once of Christianity and of socialism,” Behrends continued: “Our contention is not against Darwinism as a philosophy of unconscious and irresponsible existence; it may be in purely biological science; but the gifts of reason and of conscience, the powers of self-consciousness and of self-determination, make man more than animal or a plant, and so invest him with the power to modify and control the law of natural selection and to mitigate the fierceness of the struggle for existence. It is time that the poor and oppressed should understand that their deliverance will never come from the political economy which allies itself with the school of Haeckel and Darwin. It knows nothing of the duty of mercy, it recognizes only the right of the fittest to survive.” Of like mind was Washington Gladden, who often asserted his opposition to Spencer and all the glorifiers of selective competition. He warned that the weaker classes would unite to attack a competitive system in which they were threatened with annihilation, and that huge warring combinations of capital and labour would be the natural consequence of accepting the law of strife as a norm for industrial society. He urged an “industrial partnership” between employers and employees as an alternative to disaster. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
The development of trade unions in manufacturing industries represented a step in putting the consumer in the decision-making process. Events in recent decades have unfortunately turned these organizations away from their original broad social purposes. Today they provide a measure of workers’ control over internal conditions; however, their sphere of action often does not extend much beyond wages, hours, and certain work practices. Furthermore, if they are to fulfill their commitment to full membership participation, because they have developed along dehumanized bureaucratic lines, they now must reorganize themselves. To further highlight this illustration, in a factory, the participants would discuss the basic problems about which decisions have to be made: course of production, changes in techniques of production, working conditions, housing for participants, supervision of workers or employees, etcetera. The various possible courses of action would have to be mapped out, and the arguments in favour or against each of these alternatives made explicit. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The participant face-to-face group should become part of all enterprises, whether in business, or education, or health. The participant groups would operate within the various departments of the enterprise and be concerned with the problems of their department. As far as discussion referring to the enterprises are concerned, they could take place within all groups, whose decisions would be tailed. Again, since the working out of details requires a great deal of experimentation, there is no point in proposing details for this kind of organization. What holds true of participation in all kinds of enterprises holds true for political life too. In the modern national state with its size and complexity, the idea of expressing popular will has deteriorated to a competition between various parties and professional politicians, most of whom, at election time, tailor their program to what the polls say will gain them votes and when elected act according to various pressures brought to bear on them, of which the will of the voters is only one—but only a few according to their knowledge of the issues, their concern, and their conviction. The fact is that there is a striking correlation between education and the political opinion of voters. The least informed voters lean more toward irrational, fanatical solutions, while the better educated ones show a tendency toward more realistic and rational solutions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Since, for many reasons, it is neither feasible nor desirable to restrict general suffrage in favour of the educated, and since the democratic form of society is superior to an authoritarian form which offers little hope that the philosophers will be kings, there is in the long run only one chance of the twenty-first century by a political process through which the voters become informed, interested, and concerned with the problems of their society, as the members of a Town Meeting were with the problems of their town. The development in communications techniques can become very helpful in this process. Briefly, an equivalent of the Town Meeting which is feasible in a technological society could be the following: to form a kind of Lower House, composed of many thousands of groups of Town Meeting size, which would be well informed and debate and make decisions about principles of political actions; their decisions would form a new element in that of the existing systems of checks and balances; computer technique would allow a very fast process of tallying the decisions made by the participants in these Town Meetings. As political education grew, they would become increasingly a part of the decision making on the national and state level. Because these meetings would be based on information and debate their decisions would be fundamentally different from those of a plebiscite or an opinion poll. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
However, a condition for even the possibility of these changes is that the power in the United States of America be returned to those organs which the Constitution has made responsible for the exercise of power in various areas. The military-industrial complex threatens to take over many functions of the legislative and executive branches. The Senate has lost a great deal of its constitutional role in influencing foreign policy; the armed forces have become ever more influential in shaping of politics. Consider the size of our defense budget of $825 billion, which increased from $816 billion in 2023; it is not surprising that the Defense Department (and the CIA, operating without effective control by other branches of the governmental system) should tend to expand more and more. While this is understandable, it constitutes a crucial danger to our democratic system, a danger which can be averted only by the firm expression of the part of the voters of their intention of reasserting their will. Given its vastly superior resources—the fact that even in peacetime it gets the majority of the taxes collected by the Federal government—the Department of Defense was bound to become the most influential of all the executive departments. Man is serving the aims of history without his own knowledge. It is the cunning of reason which makes man an agent of the absolute idea while he is subjectively driven by his own conscious goals and individual passions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
When we descend from the Heaven of ideas to the Earth of human activity, one begins to understand that it is not consciousness that determines life, but the life determines consciousness. It is the consciousness of men that determines his existence, but on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines consciousness. While man believes that his thoughts mold his social existence, the facts are the reverse: his social reality molds his thoughts. The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux from their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etcetera—real, active men, as they are conditioned by the definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never by anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical process. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Because of the cunning of reason, in the Germany Ideology the class achieves an independent existence over and against individuals whose existence and personal development are predetermined by their class. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness, as it exists for other men, and for that reason is really beginning to exist for me personally as well; for language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is therefore from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time, it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to man as completely alien, all-powerful, and unassailable force, with which men’s relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature [natural religion]. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
If every momentary passion is to cloud a man’s judgment and confuse his reason, if he is to become angry with every doctrine which he dislikes, if he is swept away by the emotional claims of mere prejudice when examining a theory or a viewpoint, if his heart is agitated with bitterness over personal injustices incurred to the extent that he declines to see both sides of the matter, he can never come to a right conclusion but will be tossed about like a rudderless ship—his emotions of hate, fear, or love forever interposing themselves between him and the truth. He who exhibits anger at views which he dislikes, for instance, is exhibiting his unfitness to study philosophy. For psychoanalysis of his state of mind yields the fact that he gets angry not because the views are untrue, but because they are repugnant to him, the individual named “X.” We must learn to seek after the truth not by our heartfelt emotions, nor by our vivid imagination, but by our keen reason. The kind of truth you will find will depend on the kind of person you are, the kind of thinking of which you are capable, the kind of experience you have had, and the kind of instruction you have received. The man with a distorted mind, for instance, will discover only distortions of truth; that is, there will be a basis of truth beneath his ideas, but their structure will be perverted or distorted. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Now, our friend Clare was determined by a desperate need to restore her own self-regard. However, by trying to escape humiliation, she had injured her dignity more than anything else. These efforts had been particularly pernicious since they involved not only an uncritical bending to Peter’s wishes but also an unconscious inflation of her feeling for him. She realized that the more her actual feeling for him diminished the more she had worked it up to a pitch of false emotion, thus ensnaring herself still more deeply in her bondage. Her insights into the needs that constituted this “love” had lessened the tendency toward an inflation of feelings, but it was only now that her feelings dropped sharply to their actual level; in all simplicity she discovered that she felt very little for him. This recognition gave her a feeling of serenity that she had not had for a long time. Instead of wavering between longing for Peter and wanting to take revenge, she took a calm stand toward him. She still appreciated his good qualities, but she knew that it would be impossible for her ever to be closely associated with him again. With this last finding to be reported here, Clare tackled the dependency from a new angle. The work done up to this point was a gradual recognition that she was dependent because of her huge expectations of the partner. She realized step by step the nature of these expectations, this work culminating in the analysis of the “private religion.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Now Clare saw in addition how the loss of spontaneous self-confidence had contributed to the dependency, and her repressed aggressive and insecurity. I feel confident that she could have done this work by herself, though perhaps it would have taken a longer time. The analysis of the repressed aggressive trends contributed in turn to a still better understanding of the dependency. Also, by rendering her more assertive, it removed any danger that might still have existed that she would ever relapse into another morbidly dependent relationship. However, the power exercised on her by her need to merge with a pattern was essentially broken by the analytical work that she had done alone. Canting moralists busy themselves with drawing up the catalogue of virtues. They could better employ their time by first coming to an understanding of the one who is to possess these admirable virtues, the Self. For then they would find, if they find the Self, the very fountainhead of all virtues. Clarity of vision goes much better with purity of heart. We must not crucify truth to assist a political cause. Nevertheless, however ready to come to terms with an imperfect society, however intimidated by the political powers of an institutional religion, the philosopher will not feign one’s assent to false doctrines. When such an assent is demanded of one, one must be true to the best that is in oneself. The use of falsehood to propagate truth has always ended, historically, in the persecution and suppression of truth. When a human begins to excuse in one’s own mind an evil course for the sake of an excellent objective, one begins unconsciously to change one’s objective. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
A few years ago, I read a little book on the process of education, most of which was devoted to describing how learning takes place, based on studies in psychology. This was all very sound, as anyone could know by being with young children or by observing himself. However, the rest of the book was devoted to the question, How can we make this happen? It seems to me that since that is what happens (learning), all that we must do is let it happen. We are so back-end-to, it is pitiful. I have even heard teachers say that children must be taught how to play. An awful thing about what I am taught is that it does not grow. In school, I was taught that the past had changed—and for the better—but the present was “the end.” We had arrived. So, the longer I lived, the more misinformation I had in my head—like 6 percent maximum legal interest, a country named Bohemia, the chief exports of Japan, and the English economic system—not to mention our own. What ours is still seems to me sometimes to be wrong because it is not what I was taught it was. When I was taught it was completely irrelevant. Repeatedly, when I have discovered myself clinging tenaciously to something that is not so, I have found that it is something that I was taught. What I learn myself is more flexible. My own observations may be fallible—I know they are—but they are a lot less fallible than anything I have been taught because change is part of what I notice, and I do not get stuck. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Mentally ill persons are regarded as those who a deficient in some of the skills essential to full communication with others, for example, ability to transmit “messages” (thoughts and feelings), perceive messages, or decode (understand the meaning of) them. Healthy personality, from this point of view, entails mastery of the many problems involved in communication with others. Dread of communication and certain aspects of one’s experience to others can seriously impair health, whereas frank and free communication makes possible the fulfillment of love and growth. Human beings are born with appetites. These include hunger, thirst, elimination, rest, change, and pleasures of the flesh. When any of these appetites is deprived, or when a child encounters some problem, he or she is said to be in a state of insecurity. Such insecurity is natural for a person; it cannot be avoided. When confronted by insecurity, a person can seek to overcome it in a dependent way, by appealing to others to intervene in one’s behalf. When a person has been able to assume that the person upon whom he or she relies on to gratify needs and to make decisions are always available and are willing to act in one’s service, dependent security is achieved. When it comes to Sacramento, the city has a dependent security on the Sacramento Fire Department. “When I was in the Navy, I learned a lot of rope stuff, so when I would come back on leave to the Engines, I would make the apparatus fancy. I would braid the handrails with rope, so the guys’ hands wouldn’t get cold in the winter. Then, when I would go out of the Service, Sacramento City was looking for fire patrolmen, so I joined the Sacramento City Fire Patrol. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“The fire patrol is associated with the fire department, but it is hooked up with the fire department’s alarm circuit, and when an alarm comes in, they respond at the same time as the firefighters. The patrol’s main job is to protect merchandise insured by the insurance companies. We would spread canvas covers over the goods and push water out of the building even whole the firefighters were fighting the fire. Fire patrolmen are experts in forcible entry, probably better than the truck companies, because the firemen concentrate on the fire floor and above, whereas the fire patrol concentrates on everything below the fire floor. So if there was a fire on the eighteenth floor, we would open seventeenth, sixteenth, fifteenth, all the way down to where we could stop the water. We came across every type of door imaginable, and we forced them. We did more door forcing than the fire department because that’s what we had to do—stop the water. I was assigned to Fire Patrol (some number that will remain private). Years ago they used to have ten fire patrol houses and four hundred men. Today there are three patrol houses and about ninety men left in them. The patrol was very careful about the type of people it hired, because it couldn’t have people going in there and ripping off things like furs, jewelry, and cameras. If anything was missing, you’d have a big investigation. Not only that, you’d involve the fire department, because after the fire was knocked down on the fire floor, the patrol had to go in and push the water out. So we have to be very careful with what we did and how we touch things. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“One night we had a special call to a fire at a hotel. When we didn’t have work for ourselves to do, we often assisted the fire department, helped stretch a line or force doors. It was a real cold and windy night. The temperature was eighteen or nineteen degrees. Cold enough, anyway, to make ice with your breath. There was an elderly woman in a window on the twelfth floor of the hotel, and Ladder was raising a 144-foot aerial to try to rescue her. Two guys when up the last extension of the ladder, and, believe me, in that cold wind it was hairy. At the top, the ladder is only about 12 inches wide, not much room when you’re swinging twelve stories above the ground. The woman was on the windowsill, and I remember that she had a shoe box in one hand and a cat in the other. The ladder was at its max, and they were still three feet short of the twelfth floor. And the whole floor behind the woman was on fire. The guys were talking to the woman, telling her to stay. The next thing, the room lit up, and out she went, on fire. I don’t think she had a chance to jump at them. I think that when the room went up, it pushed her right out. My captain and I were on the eleventh floor. We saw the whole thing, and we watched her right down to the pavement. Later on you always think about what you could have done. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“They could have lowered a line and pulled up a scaling ladder, using it to go one more floor. That’s what I imagined, because I had seen a rescue where two guys from Ladder went from the raised aerial two floors with a scaling ladder and made a rescue. A scaling ladder is one with a long hook on the end of it that you can hook over the windowsill above you. Anyway, that went through my mind. But those guys had their hands full, and both of them got department medals for trying to get to her. The firefighters respected the fire patrol because they used us when they needed us. I remember at a hotel fire, there was no truck company in, and the fire patrol did all the forcible entry and the ventilation until the truck company got there. We didn’t have masks, and we took a beating. I remember coming back and being sick for three days. I took the fire department test. This was my big chance. I was going to be a Sacramento City fireman. A year later I received my letter that I was going to be appointed. I was so happy because I had prepared myself for it. I went to the Cal Poly Humbolt to study fire science, and I also worked out for the physical. The list had two and a half years to go, and there was no way I was not going to get in the department. In fact, I even bought a house in Pocket, a suburb of Sacramento. I had two captains in Sacramento just waiting for me to come. They knew me and wanted me in their particular companies. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“The letter said I was going to be appointed July 1, but a month before that the sky fell in, and life changed drastically. In June I got this other letter saying they were going to freeze the list because of cutbacks. It was a real blow. They actually froze the list for two and a half years and let it die. I was devastated. Here I had my house, and I was all ready to go, and then boom. There was an upspring of fires and many areas became burnt out prairie land, and the fires shifted to the next area. The same thing. I never accepted it until about a year ago. I had so much hate.” Many people never take budget cuts and a loss of firefighters into consideration. We have become such dependent security of the Sacramento Fire Department that no one considers what happens when they are overwhelmed and understaffed. You can save lives and property by contributing to the Sacrament Fire Department. And remember, teach your children to love America, to respect law and order, respect their elders and love God and Jesus Christ. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Righteousness maketh no nation great, but sin is a reproach to any people. We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. Behold, how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
The Winchester Mystery House
Happy Father’s Day from Winchester Mystery House!
Pictured: Sarah’s ranch foreman, John Hansen, and his son, Carl.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
A Succession of Lies Necessary to Make the World Go Forward
If you do not take interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools. From other quarters the principle of competition was defended with new subtleties. In the 1890’s, although competition was increasingly thrown on the defensive, two popular writers entered the lists on its behalf and once again attempted to fit competitive ethics into the evolutionary scheme. Two new currents in the intellectual atmosphere provoked a change in the tone of evolutionary apologetics: the growth of social protest evident in the Henry George and Edward Bellamy movements, the publication of the Fabian essays, and a growing general familiarity with Marxism; and in the field of biology the publication of August Weismann’s researches into the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Weismann had developed what he thought was conclusive evidence against such inheritance. If he was right—and most biologists believed he was—the Lamarckian features of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy were no longer tenable; men could no longer hope to evolve an ideal race by gradual increments of knowledge and benevolence handed down to their children; social evolution must be redrawn along stricter Darwinian lines; if there was to be any process at all, it must come from a severe reliance upon natural selection. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Progress results from selection and that selection inevitably involves competition. Therefore, the central aim of a progressive civilization must be to maintain competition. For the great masses of men, however, for the underrepresented everywhere, the incentives to maintain competition grow slighter and slighter. That is why throughout history we have had swelling cries of protest. [Man’s] interests as an individual have, in fact, become further subordinated to those of a social organism, with interests immensely wider and a life indefinitely longer than his own. How is the possession of reason ever to be rendered compatible with the will to submit to conditions of existence so onerous, requiring the effective and continual subordination of the individual’s welfare to the progress of a development in which he can have no person interest whatever? Why should the red Indian or the New Zealand Māori, undergoing extermination before the advance of more progressive peoples, have an interest in progress? Or, more important for western civilization and its future, what rational sanction can there be for the “great masses of the people, the so-called lower class,” to submit to the person trials and tortures incident to social progress by way of the competitive system? #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
They are already becoming more and more aware that their individual rational interest is clearly to abolish competition, to suspend rivalry, to establish socialism to regulate population and keep it “proportional to the means of comfortable existence for all.” This antagonism between the rational interest of the mass-individual and the continued progress of the social organism cannot be reconciled by reason. However, let philosophy abandon its attempt to find a rational sanction for conduct—then the problem is seen in a new light. At the same time the social function of religion is made crystal clear. One common characteristic underlies all conceptions of religion: they revel man in some way in conflict with his own reason. The universal instinctive religious impulse serves this indispensable social function: it provides a supernatural, nonrational sanction for progress. All kinds of religious systems are associated with conduct, having a social significance; and everywhere the ultimate sanction which they provide for the conduct they prescribed is a superational one. Religion as a social institution has survived because it performs an essential service to the face: it impels man to act in a socially responsible way. Such an impulse is absent from all merely rational ways of thought. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
There is no rational sanction for altruism; its sanction is superrational, and runs counter to individual self-interest. No wonder that it is so often found in close association with the religious impulse. The altruistic impulse should be heeded, and is being heeded, for there is a growing tendency to strengthen and equip the lower and weaker against the higher and wealthier classes of the community. This is the best possible answer to the threat of socialism. Socialism, abandoning competition, would result in degeneracy and inundation by more vigorous societies. These effects of charities, and of the general trend toward strengthening the masses to compete by means of social legislation, is to stimulate competitive tension. Thus, the social efficiency of western society is increased. All future progressive legislation must lift the masses into this energetic competition. As state interference widens, mankind will paradoxically move further and further away from socialism. The state will never go so far as to manage industry or confiscate private property. From all this progressive movement will come a “new democracy” higher than anything yet attained in this history of the race. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
It was a peculiar mixture of obscurantism, reformism, Christianity, and social Darwinism that enthralls the masses. Among religious folk who want a rational foundation for their beliefs, among social Darwinists of older laissez-faire stripe, orthodox Spencerians, trained philosophers and sociologists, and rationalists of all kinds, they believer that the intellectual foundations of religion have slipped away from the orthodox church. They are not rationalists, most of them have never seriously examined the rational basis of their creed, but the disturbing influences of rational criticism have reached them in the shape of his vague uneasy feeling. Now these people, morally weak because they have relied upon dogmatic supports of conduct, are ready to grasp eagerly at a theory which will save their religious systems in a manner which seems consistent with the maintenance of modern culture. The state should equalize the chances of competition but not abolish it. Many people understress the tendency of the unfit, even without organized social assistance, to survive and grow more fit rather than suffer elimination. The wealthier classes have been inadequately understood in evolutionary philosophy. The great fault of current sociology is it speaks grossly of “mankind” or “the race” or “the nation,” without refining these terms into classes and individuals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
With all the talk about the evolutionary progression of the whole mass society, Spencer and Kidd are guilty of disparaging the great man and losing sight of his contribution and achievements. They fallaciously belittled the stature of great leaders by attributing their deeds to the whole of society and its inherited skills and accomplishments; by the same logic the great masses of men could also be shorn of credit for their petty performances. The great man, in Mallock’s scheme, was certainly not to be identified with the physically fittest survivor in the struggle for existence. All you could say for the physically fittest survivor was that he manages to live; and while this does undoubtedly contribute to the progress of the race, it is slow and unspectacular. The great man, on the other hand, galvanizes society by acquiring unique knowledge or skill and imposing it on the mass. The physically fittest promotes progress by living while others die; the great man promotes progress by living while others die; the great man promotes progress by helping others to live. The struggle of ordinary workers to find employment is a social equivalent of the struggle for existence; it contributes but little to progress, for the greatest forward steps in the development of man have been accomplished without any improvement in the breed of its labourers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The industrial struggle that really promotes progress is the battle among leaders, among employers. When one of two competing employers succeeds in conquering the other, the working men of the vanquished are absorbed in the employ of the victor, and lose nothing; but the fruits of the successful leader’s skill are bequeathed to the community. It is, then, not the virtue struggle for existence but the war for domination among the well-to-do that results in social progress. Domination by the fittest is of the greatest benefit to society as a whole. In order to facilitate the process the great man must be impelled by strong motives and granted the instruments of domination. Fundamentally this is an economic problem. The great man can exert his influence by one of two economic means—the slave system and the capitalistic wage system, can do so only by founding a slavery system. They could not eliminate the struggle for domination; they could only enclose it in their cumbrous and wasteful order. To progress, a social system must retain competition between the directors of labour, the contest for industrial domination. No matter what happens to society, the domination of the fittest great men—capitalistic competition—must be ensured. Such men are the true producers. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The fundamental condition of social progress is that these leaders be obeyed by the masses. In politics, as un industry, the forms of democracy are hollow; for whole executive agencies are designed to execute the will of the many, the opinions of the many are informed by the few. When we consider the problem of information in face-to-face groups, we must ask (a) how the necessary information can be transmitted to the group for which it is relevant and (b) how our education can increase the student’s capacity for critical thought rather than to make him a consumer of information. It would not be useful to go into details of how this type of information can be transmitted. Given sufficient concern and interests, there are no great obstacles to developing adequate methods. A second requirement for the functioning of all face-t0-face groups is debate. Through the increasing mutual knowledge of the members, the debate will lose an acrimonious and slogan-throwing character and will become a dialogue between human beings instead of a disputation. While there will always be fanatics and more or less sick as well as unintelligent people who cannot participate in this kind of debate, an atmosphere can be created which, without any force, eliminates the effectiveness of such individuals within the group. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
It is essential for the possibility of a dialogue that each member of the group not only try to be less defensive and more open, but also that he try to understand what the other person means to say rather than the actual formulation he gives to his thought. In every fruitful dialogue, each participant must help the other to clarify his thought rather than to force him to defend formulations about which he may have his own doubts. Dialogue implies always mutual clarification and often even understanding the other better than one understands oneself. Eventually, if the group did not have the right to make decisions and if these decisions were not translated into the real process of that social sector to which they belong, the information and debate would remain sterile and impotent. While it is true that to act, man must think first, it is equally true that if man has no chance to act, his thinking withers and loses its strength. It is impossible to give a blueprint of what decisions the fact-to-face groups in enterprises should be called upon to make. It is obvious that the very process of information and debate has an educational influence and changes the people who participate in it. Hence, they are likely to make more wrong decisions in the beginning than after many years of practice. It follows that the area of decision making should grow while people learn how to think, to debate, and to make judgments. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
In the beginning their decisions might be restricted to the right to ask their respective bureaucrats to explain decisions, to give specific information which is desired, and the right to initiate plans, rules, laws for the consideration of the decision-making bodies. The next step would be the right to enforce reconsiderations of decisions by a qualified majority. Eventually, the face-to-face groups would be entitled to vote on fundamental principles of action, while the detailed execution of their principles would remain essentially a matter for the management. The decision of the face-to-face groups would be integrated into the whole process of decision making, implementing the principle of central planning by the principle of the “subjects’” control and initiative. The consumer should also be represented in the decision-making process. The concept of unconscious forces determining man’s consciousness, and the choices he makes, have a tradition in Western thought going back to the seventeenth century. The first thinker who had a clear concept of the unconscious was Spinoza. He assumed that men “are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.” In other words, the average man is not free, but he lives under the illusion of being free because he is motivated by factors unconscious to him. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
For Spinoza this very existence of the unconscious motivation constitutes human bondage. However, he did not leave it at that. The attainment of freedom, for Spinoza, was based on an ever-increasing awareness of the reality inside and outside man. The idea of unconscious motivation was expressed in a very different context by A. Smith, who wrote that economic man “is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” Again in a different context we find the concept of the unconscious in Nietzsche’s famous saying: “My memory says I have done this. My pride say I have not done it; my memory yields.” Actually the whole trend of thought which was concerned with uncovering the objective factors determining human consciousness and behaviour is to be looked upon as part of the general trend to grasp reality rationally and scientifically, which has characterized Western thought since the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval World had been well ordered and seemed to be secure. Man had been created by God and was watched over by Him; man’s World was the center of the Universe; man’s consciousness was the last mental, indubitable entity, just as the atom was the smallest, indivisible physical entity. Within a few hundred years, this World broke to pieces. The Earth ceased to be the center of the Universe, man was the product of an evolutionary development starting with the most primitive forms of life, the physical World transcended all concepts of time and space which had seemed to be secure even a generation before, and consciousness was recognized as an instrument for hiding thought, rather than being the bastion of truth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
When “growing opinion” says that I am the product of my class, this makes no sense to me. Certainly, this can and does happen, but it does not have to happen. I have been conditioned, and there are ways in which I am still conditioned. However, I know when my conditioning is getting in my way, and I have been learning to do my own brainwashing. I had discovered that, although I cannot yet do it all the time, still I can, for a short period—in some circumstances longer than in other—de-condition myself by flicking my mental switch and non-cold matter-of-factly deal with the facts and persons present. My “hope for education” includes the possibility that we might begin to learn to do this in the first grade, or even in kindergarten. If education were turned “upside down,” it seems to me that education would find itself right side up. Then, it would take place through the interaction of what is inside with what is outside, which the inside coming first. We seem to forget that that is where things came from in the first place. When my daughter was twelve, I discovered that she had done a real and thorough job of research on the American cowboy. She started out just by linking cowboy stories. She read every one that she could get hold of, quite indiscriminately, but then discrimination began to take place. The one to go to was Zane Grey because “I can tell at the beginning of the book how it’s going to end.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
She became more interested in factual accounts, and in stories which were accurate in their information. In reading for her pleasure, she noticed that in different parts of the west, different names were used for cowboys’ gear and even for the cowboys themselves who were “buckaroos” in Oregon. She noticed that the gear varied from place to place, according to the terrain and the influence of the Indians and the Spaniards. All this time she had put it down so neatly that it could be grasped immediately, together with her own sketches where illustration was possible. For the first time, I thought of “research” was something not “out there” that must be learned from others, but something that in the first place came out of people in just the way that it had come out of her. How else could it have happened. Now, recalling Clare, after a while, it became clear to her that her efforts to escape humiliation had injured her dignity more than anything else. These efforts had been particularly pernicious since they involved not only an uncritical bending to Peter’s wishes but also an unconscious inflation of her feeling for him. She realized that the more her actual feeling for him diminished, the more she had worked it up to a pitch of false emotion, thus ensnaring herself still more deeply in her bondage. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Clare’s insights into the needs that constituted this “love” had lessened the tendency toward an inflation of feelings, but it was only now that her feelings dropped sharply to their actual level; in all simplicity, she discovered that she felt very little for him. This recognition gave her a feeling of serenity that she had not had for a long time. Instead of wavering between longing for Peter and wanting to take revenge she took a calm stand toward him. She still appreciated his good qualities, but she knew that it would be impossible for her ever to be closely associated with him again. With this last finding to be reported here Clare tackled dependency from a new angle. The work done up to this point was a gradual recognition that she was dependent because of her huge expectations, this working culminating in the analysis of the “private religion.” Now she saw in addition how the loss of spontaneous self-confidence had contributed to the dependency in a more direct way. The crucial finding in this regard was the recognition that her picture of herself was entirely determined by the evaluation of others. It is in accord with the significance of this insight that it struck her so deeply that she almost fainted; the emotional recognition of this tendency constituted an experience so deep that for a short moment it almost overwhelmed her. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The insight did not itself solve the problem, but it was the basis for recognizing the inflation of her feelings and the far-reaching significance that “rejection” had for her. This piece of analysis also paved the way for a later understanding of her repressed ambition. It enabled her to see that to be accepted by others was one way of lifting her crushed self-regard, a purpose that was served from another direction by ambition to excel others. Albert Ellis developed an approach to psychotherapy that he calls rational-emotive therapy, to highlight the fact that he is concerned with feelings, but no less concerned with sensible thinking about life problems. He regards neurotically disturbed people as individuals who talk nonsense to themselves, who refrain from vital living because they dread catastrophic consequences for ordinary self-assertiveness. They do not think clearly, and they do not check the validity of their thinking. For example, a painfully shy and lonely person may be saying to himself, “I would like to ask that girl for a date, but she might refuse me, and that would be awful.” Dr. Ellis might reply to this patient, “Well, supposed she does refuse you; what’s so terrible about that? You are ‘awfulizing,’ and that interferes with life.” By virtue of such arguments with a patient’s excuses for diminished living, and for not changing self-defeating patterns, Ellis is often able to convince the patient to try ways to live that generate satisfaction and growth. Ellis provides a wholesome reminder that, although excessive thinking can rob a life of feeling and action, wrong thinking can paralyze life itself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Among the moral self-restraints which an aspirant is required to practice is that of truthfulness. There are several reasons for this prescription. However, the one which affects his quest directly is the effect of untruthfulness upon his inner being. It not only spoils his character and destiny but also deforms his mind. In the lair’s mouth the very function of language becomes a perverted one. He renders defective the very instrument with which he is seeking to make his way to the Overself; it becomes spoiled. If he meets with any mystical experience, it will become mixed with falsity of hallucination. If he finds spiritual truth, it will not be the pure or whole truth but the distortion of it. Where situations are likely to arise which make truth-telling highly undesirable, the earnest aspirant should try to avoid them as much as possible by forethought. The pattern of indifference to truth-speaking must be broken up. The pattern of scrupulous respect for truth-speaking must be built up. The discipline of his ego must include the discipline of its speech. His words must be brought into correspondence with his ideals. Every word written or uttered must be diamond clad truth. If the truth is awkward or dangerous to say, then it may be advisable to keep silent. May he tell a small white lie to liberate himself from an awkward situation? “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Not only will he refrain from telling a conscious lie of any kind, but he will not, through bragging vanity, exaggerate the truth into a half-lie. Any tendency in these directions will be crushed as soon as he becomes aware of it. He will take the trouble to express himself accurately, even t the point of making a fad of the careful choice of his words. Let him not maim his heart nor deform his mind by formulating thoughts which are false. If philosophy be the quest of ultimate truth, if the rule be broken, then it is certain that such a quest cannot be carried to a successful conclusion. We have begun to question Nature and we must abide by the consequences. However, we need not fear the advancing tide of knowledge. Its effects on morals will be only to discipline human character even more. For it is not knowledge that makes men immoral, it is the lack of it. False foundations make uncertain supports for morality. As psychiatry, psychology, and social work have tried to contribute directly to the demand for psychotherapy, they have suffered serious dilution of their basic and unique contributions. If these disciplines will take joint initiative toward the creation of a new, socially efficient and socially responsive profession, they will maintain proper consultative authority for that profession, they will help to meet the social need, and they will create the means whereby they may be freed for intensified, specialized efforts in accordance with their respective, unique and interdependent skills—to the end that we may gain better understanding, better treatment, and better prevention of mental suffering. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
As firefighters, the Sacramento Fire Department faces monumental risks in their jobs every day. There are a few ways of getting around these risks and therefore preventing many of the firefighter injuries and deaths. “In those days our training school was in a real old building, and we did our outdoor training, our ladder work, at Municipal Stadium. It was a six-week school. We run a much more extensive training school now. I was a cadet for seven years at my first station, which was a long time. My father-in-law tried to take care of me by sending me to a station that wasn’t very busy. We didn’t take many men into the department in those days, and not many guys retired. So I had to wait. It was a good learning experience. I took a promotion exam, but I didn’t do too well, because my wife had a child right before the exam and I was baby-sitting rather than studying. In those days, getting promoted was no big deal. I enjoyed what I was doing. But then you get to the point where you figure, hey, I want to improve myself. The first job we had was about three hours after I came to work. It was a mattress fire on the third floor of an apartment house. It was scary, smoky. You couldn’t see. I remember that most. I think the first really serious fire was in downtown, which turned out to be an all-nighter. Shortly after that, we had another apartment house fire. It was seven o’clock on a winter morning. We took like 117 people out of the building over ladders and down stairways. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“I was scared as all hell when I saw so many people in real trouble, scared about doing things right. Fortunately, we had a couple of old-timers there who were pretty sharp. We carried fifty-five-foot ladders at that time. I always think about it. Under the standard now, we carry forty-foot ladders. In that particular fire, if we didn’t have a fifty-five-foot ladder, we would have lost another five people. We used the fifty-five-foot ladder, with a twelve-foot jack ladder, to get people off the sixth floor of the building. There was no access for an aerial on that side. Things just happened so fast, I didn’t then realize the magnitude of it. I just worked hard. Fortunately, this apartment house had balconies on the side. The fire was pretty well involved when we got there. I remember putting a lot of ladders up. It was icy. We put fifty-five up with four men. One of them was the captain. It was a wooden ladder than weighed about 350 pounds. Normally you use five men, and some books talk about six. Putting that ladder up under good conditions was a difficult task. This was a cold, icy morning in December. Even putting a thirty-three-footer up was tough at the time. But, we were able to get that ladder up, somehow ‘cause your muster up extra strength when you have no choice. Over the years I still think about that fire. The guys did a super job.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Imagine if the Sacramento Fire Department fought fires like they did 60 years ago, with the equipment and knowledge they have now, injuries and fatalities would be a fraction of what they were. One way you can help reduce the loss of life and property and help firefighters under stressful conditions is by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. The time may come when one must choose between one’s ethical life and his material livelihood. In this agonizing experience he may choose wrongly unless his hope and belief in the benevolence of whatever Powers there be is firm and strong. However, a wrong choice will not dispose of the problem. Sooner or later, it will present itself again with more compelling insistence. For a glimpse of truth once given is like a double-edged sword: a privilege on one side, a duty on the other. A man’s allegiance to Truth must be incorruptible. Be sure to raise your children to love America, love God, respect law and order, and be kind to their elders. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. For happily the government of the United States of America which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasion their effectual support. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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If Life is Not to be Trivial, it Must be Hard
Several people say they turn to the TV news to figure out what is going on in the World. However, only 20 percent of Americans regularly attend church, but 57 percent of Americans tune in to TV news. The Christian Bible is the account of God’s action in the World, and His purpose for creation. Therefore, it is more logical to attend church and learn more about the World, yourself and God. Psychology is a nice supplement to religion. Maslow continuously pondered what humans might become, in the hope of learning how more of us might grow toward those seemingly Utopian levels of being. Maslow’s work remains as one of the most helpful sets of principles governing the development of the healthy personality. He suggested the existence of two kinds of motivation: B, or being motivation, and D, or deficiency motivation. D-motivations are those that grab us when we are deeply deprived or have a loss of some basic need, such as the burglar who may be driven by hunger or the coward who may be driven by fear for personal safety. In contrast, the self-actualizing person is seen as motivated by the being needs, to be the fullest possible self, to be able to sing, create, work at highest capacity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The peak experience concept has met with a great deal of interest. Maslow suggests the existence of these marvelous experiences that overwhelm the person and are great heights of delight and joy or meaningfulness, awesome experiences that may occur to a self-actualizing person but are not exclusively confined to that kind of person. Here are two contrasting examples of the more moderate peak or positive experiences collected from tenth-grade students: “Mine happened just last night. I love the summer and hate the winter. So last night when I stepped outside and found how warm it was I just couldn’t go back into the house. I walked around the house and then looked around. You can see all the houses around from our house and just looking around at them and hearing the sounds of the night relaxed me and I felt like I was watching over the whole World. It was a gentle feeling and gave me a little bit of a thrill.” “Yes, in the winter I love to walk out in the snow and let it fall lightly on my face. When this happens it seems to make a strange sort of happiness fall on me also.” Deep philosophic courage is a power not easily gained. A man must overcome much within himself, must hold his spine unbending and his effort undeviating. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
All those negative qualities which act as encumbrances to true understanding of situations, occasions, events, and persons must be guarded against in attitude and action. Amid his gross brutalization and maniacal exaggerations, Nietzsche’s evil mysticism expressed some truth. He affirmed rightly that if life is not to be trivial, it must be hard. His quest of the Overself must be an untiring one. It is to be his way of looking at the World, his attitude toward life. It is far more important to develop the strength within himself needful to break the spell than to be for preventative protection against it. In the first case, he progresses enormously and rapidly; in the second, he is static. Each difficulty surmounted, each weakness resisted will fortify his will and increase his perseverance. It will evoke the better part of his nature and discipline the baser, and thus fit him more adequately to cope with the next ones. He must be equally steadfast in adhering to this attitude whether other people utter complaints against him or make compliments to him. We must retain our determination and our loyalty to the quest in all circumstances. Physical pains, climatic extremes must not deter us. We must console ourselves with the thought that these things are certain to pass away. They are mental figments, ideas which will be negated, whereas the truth and reality we seek belong to the immutable, and can never be negated. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Few of us can withdraw from the World and most of us must engage in its activity. However, that is no reason for accepting the evils which are mixed in with this activity. Tenacity of purpose is a characteristic of all who accomplish great things. Drawbacks cannot disgust him, labour cannot weary him, hardships cannot discourage him in whom the quality of persistence is always present. However, to the man without persistence every defeat is a Waterloo. Indecision of purpose and infirmity of will must yield to the resolute mind and the determined act. The person who sways uncertainly between one side and the other misses opportunity. The student’s inner reactions to outer events provide him with the opportunity to use his free will in the right direction. His attitude towards his lower nature, that is, how far he encourages or discourages it, is another. And his recognition of what are good opportunities and what should be avoided, together with his acceptance or rejection of them, is still another. Mental indolence and moral lethargy are hardly likely to waft us into the high haven of spiritual peace. We must learn to think fearlessly and courageously about every problem that faces us; we must try to elevate our hearts above the level of the moral lepers and spiritually disabled of our time. He will learn to endure the blows of misfortune with a bravery heretofore unknown and a serenity heretofore unexperienced. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
If he is to achieve a full self-mastery, the strength of will which can lead a man to command of his desires for pleasure of the flesh cannot stop there. It must also go on to his diet and feelings, his speech and habits. However, many people, including the less affluent not only practice age discrimination, but they also advocate a lower-class bias. Class-stereotype is ambivalent, describing lower class people both negatively (less competent, less human, more objectified), and sometimes positively, perhaps warmer than upper class people. At a variety of levels and life stages, social-class stereotypes reinforce inequality. Sometimes, people who have benefited from Affirmative Actions like to uplift people of their culture, but discriminate against others as an act of revenge for bias that have faced. Social class matters, as a social construction, can be described in terms of what persons do; their jobs, habits, hobbies, lifestyles, but also in terms of what other people expect from them, their personality traits, life choices, aspirations, motivations. These oversimplified characterizations (id est, stereotypes) entail descriptions and prescriptions that impact individuals’ achievements, self-evaluations, and well-being. However, some of the elite feel a certain personal alienation from the dominant characters and opinions of American intellectual life, which doubtlessly quickens their championship of those who are thought to have little chance of succeeding in life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Some think that free silver is a poor social remedy, and it will only lead to monetary inflation like what many are experiencing since the COVID pandemic. There are also those who think the proper way to deal with poverty and inequality is by advocating careful elimination of the unfit and dependent, chiefly by eugenic methods. While others believe that education is a great way to end inequality. Proponents of equality want a field that shall be broad enough to embrace the whole human race. However, as it stands, we are assimilating a mass crude material from the bottom and they are just exacerbating conditions of racism, agism, discrimination, harassment, and facilitating the expansion of criminal activity. This is leading many to believe that society is doomed to hopeless degeneracy. Yet, it is possible to take another view. The only consolation, the only hope, lies in the truth that so far as the native capacity, the potential quality, the promise and potency of a higher life are concerned, those swarming, spawning millions, the bottom layer of society, the proletariat, the working class, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, nay even the denizens of the slums—that all these are by nature the peers of the boasted aristocracy of brains that now dominates society and looks down upon them, and the equals in all but privilege of the most enlightened teachers of eugenics. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
In the past, sociocracy, or the planned control of society by society was considered a solution. Under sociocracy, purposeful social activity, or collective telesis, could be harmonized with individual self-interest by means of attractive legislation designed to release the springs of human action for socially beneficial deeds by positive rather than negative and compulsory devices. Where individualism has created artificial inequalities, sociocracy would abolish them; and while socialism seeks to create artificial equalities, sociocracy would recognize inequalities that are natural. A sociocratic World would distribute its favours according to merit, as individualist demand, but by equalizing opportunity for all it would eliminate advantages now possessed by those with underserved power, accidental position or wealth, or antisocial cunning. We need to arrive at a better understanding of the importance of feeling in human motivation. The unique and artificial character of social organization and social processes are an odd inconsistency to deck out sociology with physics, chemistry, and biology, and to set it in the framework of a cosmological system. Some are not only ahead of the masses in point of time, but they are head, shoulders and hips above the general population in many respects scientifically. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
All the efforts which are made to develop and maintain the mental hygiene practices of our citizens help to restrain what would otherwise be an ever-growing demand for psychiatric services. The role of the family in contributing to emotional stability is a most crucial one and the programs in parent education which are offered under a variety of auspices play a vital role in contributing to sound psychological environments in the home. We would do well to give all possible support to programs in parent education and to resources for parent consultation; we should be particularly concerned to provide programs for parental guidance in those areas and communities in which they are presently lacking. The psychiatrist and psychologist can find especially effective avenues for their services as consultants in clinics or other programs for parent education. Next to home, the school provides a universal setting with potential for teaching and demonstrating sound mental hygiene principles. If the schools have been less than optimally effective in this responsibility in the past it is partly because they have been uncertain of the relative priorities of the provision of subject-matter instruction versus the stimulation of the pupil’s total personal growth. While the contribution of the individual teacher can occur in a variety of way, ranging from early detection of emotional distress and referral to provision of “emergency” tension relief and even relationship therapy, the optimal participation of teachers in mental hygiene activities is greatly enhanced in those schools that have provided for formal integration of mental health services, with the consultative assistance of professional workers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Better preparation of teachers for their opportunities, responsibilities, and limitations as mental hygienists can help much to reduce the demand for specifically psychiatric or psychological treatment. Such resources for expert treatment of childhood problems are even more severely restricted than are those for adult patients, and there must be increasing attention to the development of consultative skills—on the part both of teachers and experts. The potential of the church and the clergy in helping to promote mental health and to render assistance in cases of milder personal maladjustments is presently only partially realized. Based on a questionnaire survey, it was found that the average clergyman devotes only about two hours per week to personal counseling. Fewer than one out ten spend as much as ten hours a week on this activity. There is, considering the readiness of the distressed person to turn to his clergyman, a clear need to augment the preparation of the minister for this activity and to support him in his endeavours to render assistance, especially by giving him access to consultation. Increasing the effectiveness of our public education toward positive mental health and working toward more effective utilization of the front-line troops in early recognition and treatment of emotional upset constitute two ways of holding down the always excessive demand for psychiatric help. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
A third avenue deserving careful consideration would consist of efforts to educate the public more specifically as to the precise nature of psychiatric treatment, specifically of psychotherapy, to try to lower the public’s presently naïve and immodest expectations of what occurs in and what can happen because of psychotherapy, and to encourage a proper appreciation for therapeutic conversation. As an important part of this effort, both psychotherapists and potential patients should be helped to recognize that there is neither magical cure nor specific expert treatment for the philosophical neuroses. If all of these methods of reducing the demand for the psychotherapeutic services of psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker are vigorously pursued, the problem of manpower shortage will be alleviated but not solved. There will still be a fully “legitimate” call for individual psychotherapy exceeding the supply available through the present and future supply of the acknowledged specialist. Is there a rational and socially conscionable answer to this problem? The man who seeks to release himself from moral responsibility for his actions or his fortunes can in no way make any real progress on the spiritual path. He may improve his capacity to mediate, he may become more sensitive physically, but his real battle—against the ego—remains unfought and therefore unwon. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
We have looked at social character as the structure through which human energy is molded in such specific ways, that it is usable for the purposes of any given society. It is also the basis from which certain ideas and ideals draw their strength and attractiveness. This relation between character and ideas is easy to recognize in the case of the individual character structure. A person with a hoarding (anal, according to Dr. Freud) character orientation, will be attracted to the ideal of saving, he will be repelled by ideas of what he would call “reckless spending.” On the other hand, the person with a productive character will find a philosophy centered around saving “dirty,” and will embrace idea which emphasize creative efforts and the use of material goods is concerned, the relationship between character and ideas is the same. Some examples ought to show this relation clearly. With the end of the feudal age, private property became the central factor in the economic and social system. There had been, of course, private property before. However, in feudalism private property consisted largely of land, and it was connected to the social situation of the landowner in the hierarchic system. Since it was part of the social sole of the owner, it was not salable on the market. Modern capitalism destroyed the feudal system. Private property is not only property in land, it is also property in the means of production. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
All property is alienable; it can be bought and sold on the market, and its value is expressed in an abstract form—that of money. Land, machines, gold, diamonds—they all have in common the abstract money form in which their value can be expressed. Anybody can acquire private property, regardless of his position in the social system. It may be through industriousness, creativeness, luck, ruthlessness, or inheritance—the ownership of private property is not affected by the means of its acquisition. The security, power, sense of strength of a person does not, as in the feudal system, depend any longer on a person’s status, which was relatively unalterable, but on the possession of private property. If the man of the modern era loses his private property he is nobody—socially speaking; the feudal lord could not lose it as long as the feudal system remained intact. As a result, the respective ideals are different. For the feudal lord, and even for the artisan belonging to a guild, the main concern was the stability of the traditional order, the harmonious relation to his superiors, the concept of a God who was the final guarantor of the stability of the feudal system. If any of those ideas were attacked, a member of feudal society would even risk his life to defend what he considered to be his deepest convictions. For modern man the ideals are different. His fate, security, and power rest on private property; hence for bourgeois society, private property is sacred, and the ideal of the invulnerability of private property is a cornerstone in its ideological edifice. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Although the majority of people in any of the capitalist societies do not own private property in the sense used here (property in the means of production), but only “personal” property such as a BMW, television set, etcetera—that is, consumer goods—the great bourgeois revolution against the feudal order has nevertheless formulated the principle of the invulnerability of private property so that even those who do not belong to the economic elite have the same feeling, in this respect, as those who belong. Just as the member of the feudal society considered an attack against the feudal system immoral, and even inhuman, so the average person in a capitalist society considers an attack against private property a sign of barbarism and inhumanity. He will often not say so directly but rationalize his hate against the violators of private property in terms of their godlessness, injustice, and so on; yet and often unconsciously, they appear to him as inhuman because they have violated the sanctity of private property. The point is not that they have hurt him economically, or that they even threaten his economic interests realistically; the point is that they threaten a vital ideal. It seems, for instance, that the repugnance and hate which so many people in capitalistic countries have against communist countries is largely based on the very repugnance they feel against the outright violators of private property. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
There are so many other examples of ideas which are rooted in the socio-economic structure of a society that it is hard to select the most representative ones. Thus, liberty became the paramount idea for a middle class fighting against the restrictions that the feudal class imposed upon them. “Individual initiative” become an ideal in the highly competitive capitalism of the nineteenth century. Teamwork and “human relations” became the ideals of the capitalism of the twentieth century. Since “fairness” is the basic law of the free market in which commodities and labour are exchanged without force or fraud, fairness became the most popular norm in capitalist society. At the same time, the idea of fairness became identified with an older norm, “love thy neighbour,” via the popularized version of this norm in the form of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The theory that ideas are determined by the forms of economic and social life does not imply that they have no validity of their own, or that they are mere “reflexes” of economic needs. The ideal of freedom, for instance, is deeply rooted in man, and it is precisely for this reason that it was ideal for the Hebrews in Egypt, the slaves in Rome, the German peasants in the sixteenth century, the German workers who fought the dictators of East Germany. On the other hand, the idea of authority and order is also deeply implanted in human existence. It is precisely because any given social order can appeal to ideas which transcend the necessities of this order that they can become so potent and so appealing to the human heart. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Yet why a certain idea gains ascendance and popularity is to be understood in historical terms, that is, in terms of the social character produced in each culture. One more qualification must be made. It is not only the “economic basis” which creates a certain social character which, in turn, creates certain ideas. The ideas, once created, also influence the social character and, indirectly, the social economic structure. Social character is the intermediary between the socioeconomic structure and the ideas and ideals prevalent in a society. It is the intermediary in both directions, from the economic basis to the ideas and from the ideas to the economic basis. Many people are confronted by a confusing false dichotomy. They believe that the choice is between an anarchic system without any organization and control and, on the other hand, the kind of bureaucracy which is typical both for contemporary industrialism. However, this alternative is by no means the only one, and we have other options. One option is between the “humanistic bureaucratic” or “humanistic management” method and the “alienated bureaucratic” method by which we conduct our affairs. This alienated bureaucratic procedure can be characterized in several ways. First, it is a one-way system; orders, suggestions, planning emanate from the top and are directed to the bottom of the pyramid. There is no room for the individual’s initiative. Persons are “cases,” whether welfare cases of medical cases, or, whatever the frame of reference is, cases which can all be put down on a computer card without those individual features which designate the difference between a “person” and a “case.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Our bureaucratic method is irresponsible, in the sense that it does not “respond” to the needs, views, requirements of an individual. This irresponsibility is closely related to the case-character of the person who becomes an “object” of the bureaucracy. One cannot respond to a case, but one can respond to a person. This irresponsibility of the bureaucrat, feeling himself part of the bureaucratic machine, most of all wishes not to take responsibility to make decisions for which he could be criticized. He tries to avoid making any decisions which are not clearly formulated by his case rules and, if in doubt, he sends the person to another bureaucrat who, in turn, does the same. Anyone who has dealt with a bureaucratic organization knows this process of being sent around from one bureaucrat to the other and, sometimes after much effort, coming out at the same door which he had entered without ever having been listened to except in the peculiar way in which bureaucrats listen, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes impatiently, but also always with an attitude which is a mixture of their own helplessness, irresponsibility, sense of superiority toward the “petitioning” subject. Our bureaucratic method gives the individual the feeling that there is nothing which he can initiate and organize without the help of the bureaucratic machine. As a result, it paralyzes initiative and creates a deep sense of impotence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Firefighters are important because they save lives. The Sacramento Fire Department is a highly skilled organization which makes huge contributions to the community. “I was lucky enough to make a rescue after eight or nine months in the volunteers. Luck is a factor because, you have to be at a fire where somebody needs to be rescued. Then you have to be at the right place at that fire. You have to have enough knowledge to know how to do it and then be lucky enough to successfully pull it off. You can’t plan it. I don’t believe in fate per se, but I think there are certain things in the cards. I was fairly young. I was on a pumper, and we were the third or fourth pumper there. The truck company was pretty heavily engaged, and there were a number of people on the fire escapes. Sacramento is basically a bedroom community. You know, little private dwellings. All of a sudden, we had an -apartment house fire, which was taxing. It was a nine-story building, and the fire was in the cellar, so the whole building was at risk. My pumper pulled up, and another fellow and I reported to the chief. “What do you want us to do?” He said, “I’ve got a report that there’s a baby in that apartment.” A baby, right. It happens so often it seems to be a cliché. So we went up the hallway, it was pretty smoky, and we came to two doors. I had a feeling that the baby was to the right. The other guy said, “I’ll go straight.” I went into the room at the right, it wasn’t extremely hot, but it was smoky. On my first search I didn’t find anybody, but I figured I better do it again. The second time around, I found the baby lying on the floor between a night table and a bed, I guess he rolled off the bed or something, I’m not sure. He had on a little green-and-white-striped shirt and Pampers. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
“Right then, when I took him out, I knew that the rewarding feeling was similar to putting a fire out, only more so. Shortly after probie school, I was assigned to Engine Company 2 in Midtown Sacramento. There I was fortunate enough to be involved in my first City of Sacramento rescue. You make your own luck in many instances. It was very unusual for a probie in an engine company to be put into a search with an officer. We were at a false alarm when the dispatcher asked us if we were available. The battalion chief gave us the go-ahead, and we were first at the fire by a good fire minutes. It was a high-rise apartment building. Being a gung-ho probie, I had gotten completely geared up for the false alarm. I had a mask on and everything. The other guys, because it was a hot summer night and although this was a known false alarm box, hurried to the scene. People at the apartment were screaming that there was a baby trapped. Another baby, right. People leave them behind like old bathrobes. The lieutenant, seeing I was a new guy said, “Let’s go.” We went up the elevator part of the way, then ran up the stairs to the hallways leading to the fire apartment. The door was open, and the smoke was nearly to the floor. It was hot. We went in the direct of the heat. Again it was another one of those, he went to the left, and I went to the right, and I found this little boy on the floor. He was conscious, and I removed him to the street and took him to the hospital. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
“The sad part was that there was another child in the apartment, the lady’s nephew. A guy, I think he was from another truck, went in off the aerial ladder, got in the window, cut himself on the glass, and made a real spectacular rescue of the child. The kid was badly burned, and he didn’t make it. It was just one of those things again. You just go along doing your job, and there you are. It was unusual for me to be there, because the truck company is in charge of forcible entry, going in and searching for victims, and they work more or less independently. Whereas in an engine company the people work together in one group to fight the fire. It was not so much aggressiveness on my part, it was my ‘gung-ho-ness.’ I was serious about every aspect of the job, even cleaning the brass, and every time we went out the door, I wanted to be fully prepared. And it paid off. Sure, putting out a fire is satisfying, there’s nothing like it except making a grab, rescuing somebody. But even in a busy area, some companies don’t make one grab a year. While a nozzle man in a busy area is going to put out three, four fire a night. There’s a lot to be said for that. That’s an enjoyable part of it, too.” Life safety is the primary job of the Sacramento Fire Department. You can help save lives by making a contribution. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Frightened Restitution
The thought has crossed the minds of many that humankind faces a fate of evolutionary destruction of self. However, it is plain to see that others continually strive for the higher aspects of their own possibilities, to be more compassionate; loving; creative; to create great, beautiful parks and vast, wild, free lands; more exquisite poetry and buildings—to perfect themselves and the World about them. There is a struggle, the movement of humankind is heading toward the development of the self to levels of superb functioning for perhaps a few persons who become models of human effectiveness and for higher levels of living, joy of living, for much greater numbers. Humans have sought to perfect themselves throughout history. Early Christians sought purification of self in the face of temptation, salvation, and underwent training to be reborn in Jesus as the Christ. It is recognized that humans are capable of states of being that far surpass present levels of beauty and goodness. The term healthy personality is used here to describe those ways of being that surpass the average in actualization of self and in compassionate relationships with others. The human can be studied as a natural phenomenon, with methods appropriate to the study of zoology or ethology. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
However, humans have the capacities for speech and for self-consciousness. People give meaning to their World and can communicate meanings to other persons. If we wish to understand human behaviour, we must not view it as we would the behaviour of animals struggling to survive in each environment; we must regard behaviour as action, as a kind of speech. Humans “say” something to the World and to their companions by their actions. If we wish to understand humans in their existence as human beings, we must find out what they mean to say, and how they say it in words, action, and even in physiological responses. Of course, we also find out what they mean by asking them to tell us. Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. Nearly always, giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases, it is a downright destructive and evil thing. One has only to remember some of our wolfish financiers who spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back. It is not enough to suppose that their philanthropy is a kind of frightened restitution, or that their natures change when they have enough. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Such a nature has enough, and nature does not change that readily. I think that the impulse is the same in both cases. For giving can bring the same sense of superiority as getting does, and philanthropy may be another kind of spiritual avarice. Pure altruism is a rare and difficult quality, remote from the actuality of human condition. The cautious person is also entitled to ask whether it is justifiable, whether a man is not entitled to do justice to himself as well as to others. The obvious reply is that there is no reason why his own good should not be included in that of the whole community. Although we must admit that He acted most generously, it is an arguable question whether God did the right thing by sacrificing His son. He may love mankind without being in love with mankind. He may act with unwearying altruism and compassion towards them and yet with clear sight of their moral uglinesses and mental deformities. An intellectual enlightenment not accompanied by moral purification, can lead only to a meagre result when turned to the service of humanity. The altruist must educate his own character before he can influence effectually the character of others. Only then are false steps and dangerous missteps less likely to be taken. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
If the motive is pure, a generous act not only helps the beneficiary but ennobles the doer. The wisdom of the act is, however, a different matter and requires separate analysis. When some scientists dare to study the human being, they think of the subject as being like a laboratory rat. At least it would seem that way from the large amount of research in psychology based upon that animal. And there is no doubt that many things about the white rat are similar to aspects of the human being, including some motivations—pleasures of the flesh, hunger, safety, and so on. However, another image of the human being has been expressed in the Psalms (Psalm 8.5), that of being “just a little lower than the angels.” This implies many powers and capacities and almost suggests “sainthood” capabilities. However, we are exploring the “normal” person. There is a group of persons who are entirely mortal, who have their imperfections, and yet have discovered a way of life that is beyond what most people attempt to create for themselves. One of the characteristics of such people seems to be that they do have compassion, or caring, for others; but it is a very human kind of love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
People who care about themselves, respect themselves, and like to present their best self to others also take care of their bodies. They jog or exercise in some other way, watch the intake of their food, and avoid either smoking or being where heavy smokers are taking up the good air. They recognize that having a healthy body is in great part controllable by the individual. Similarly, having a healthy personality is in greatest part under the control of the person who owns it. While there are genetic factors that seem to influence the personality and there are environmental forces that influence one’s style of interacting with people, the humanist also recognizes the tremendous power of the person to affect his or her own personality-destiny. This is perhaps the most important reason for studying a healthy personality. All of us want to be as fully functioning, self-actualizing, and healthy as we can be. Knowledge of what constitutes a healthy personality should help you to develop this type of personality. Secondly, the impact of the environment, especially of the people in your environment, has a great effect upon your personality. This still does not leave you helpless in the face of the influence of your friends, because you can choose your friends and even choose many other aspects of your environment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
There are those people, friends, relatives, teachers, companions, who, when you are with them, make you feel that you are growing, becoming. These kinds of persons are known as “personality growth facilitators.” And there are also those who can destroy you psychologically. We call these “lethal personalities.” Thus, the second reason for the study of the personality is so that you may truly distinguish those people who are personality growth facilitators and find ways to be close to them. What about your effect upon others? How do you influence others so that they will feel they are growing? Almost all of us will have some role in raising children in our lifetimes, either through being parents, teachers, or neighbours. A third reason for studying the healthy personality is to be better able to have a good effect on the people who are close to us, particularly friends and children. If only for the reasons of pure curiosity, science claims the privilege of exploring the unknown. Science searches for basic laws and principles that may have no immediate benefit or that might be explored without any specific benefit in mind. Often those discoveries of basic principles and laws do have important applied use. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
More often, however, the advantages and benefits are not immediately apparent, and legislators impatient for solutions are prone to cut off funds for all but the most applied research. Even if there is no longer a trunkful of diamonds deep in the darkness of The Winchester Mansion, science for its own sake, for the sake of pushing back ignorance and obscurity, is a viable reason for studying the healthy personality. The origin of organized society was caused by the conquest of one race by another. Caste system had developed out of such conquest, and society had then passed successively through five stages: the mitigation of caste coupled with the survival of inequalities; the consolidation of relationships through the growth of law; the origin of the state; the gradual cementing of the groups into a homogeneous people; and, finally, the development of patriotism and the national form of social organization. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Progress has frequently resulted from the forcible fusion of unlike elements. As much as one may deplore the horrors of war, it has been a necessary condition of race progress in the past, and the conquest of backward races is inevitable in the future. In advanced societies, rational and peaceful forms of social assimilation may supersede the genetic and violent method of the past. It is possible that a friendly pacific age is about to dawn—just as Spencer’s militant type of society gives way to the industrial—but it is doubtful that the World has yet reached the point at which war ceases. Whether the cessation of conflict would even be desirable was an open question to Ward. His adherence in these respects to the conflict school did not in the least alter the fundamental structure of Ward’s melioristic sociology. The fact is that man and society are not. Except in a very limited sense, under the influence of the great dynamic laws that control the rest of the animal World. If we call biologic processes natural, we must call social processes artificial. The fundamental principle of biology is natural selection, that of sociology is artificial selection. The survival of the fittest is simply the survival of the strong, which implies and would better be called the destruction of the weak. If nature progresses through the destruction of the weak, man progresses through the protection of the weak. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
A study of the system of Man can lead to the acceptance of objectively valid values, on the grounds that they lead to the optimal functioning of the system or, at least, that if we realize the possible alternatives, the humanist norms would be accepted as preferable to their opposites by most sane people. Whatever the merits of the source of the validity of humanist norms, the general aim of a humanized industrial society can be thus defined: the change of the socioeconomic, and cultural life of our society in such a way that it stimulates and furthers the growth and aliveness of man rather than cripples it’ that it activates the individual rather than making him passive and receptive; that our technological capacities serve man’s growth. If this is to be, we must regain control over the economic and social system; man’s will, guided by his reason, and by his wish for optimal aliveness, must make the decisions. Given these general aims, what is the procedure of humanistic planning? Computers should become a functional part in a life-oriented social system and not a cancer which begins to play havoc and eventually kills the system. Machines or computers must become means for ends which are determined by man’s reason and will. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The values which determine the selection of facts and which influence the programing of the computer must be gained on the basis of the knowledge of human nature, its various possible manifestations, its optimal forms of development, and the real needs conducive to this development. That is to say, man, not technique, must become the ultimate source of values; optimal human development and not maximal production of the criterion for all planning. What we have failed to do in all this is to ascribe operational meaning to the so-called desirables that motivate us, to question their intrinsic worth, to assess the long-range consequences of our aspirations and actions, to wonder whether the outcome we seem to be expecting does in fact correspond to that quality of life we say we are striving for—and whether our current actions will lead us there. In other words, we are in the deeper sense failing to plan. Aside from this, planning in the field of economics must be extended to the whole system; furthermore, the system Man must be integrated into the whole social system. Man, as the planner, must be aware of the role of man as part of the whole system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Just as man is the only case of life being aware of itself, man as a system builder and analyzer must make himself the object of the system he analyzes. This means that the knowledge of man, his nature, and the real possibilities of its manifestations must become one of the basic data for any social planning. In speaking of the socioeconomic structure of society as moulding one’s chaactrer, we speak only of one pole in the interconnection between social organization and man. The other pole to be considered in man’s nature, moulding in turn the social conditions in which he lives. If we start out with the knowledge of the reality of man, his psychic properties, as well as his physiological ones, and if we examine the interaction between the nature of man and the nature of the external conditions under which he lives, and which he must master if he is to survive, only then can the social process be understood. While it is true that man can adapt himself to almost any condition, he is not a blank sheet of paper on which the culture writes its text. Needs like the striving for happiness, belonging, love, and freedom are inherent in his nature. They are also dynamic factors in the historical process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
While it is true that man can adapt himself to almost any conditions, he is not a blank sheet of paper on which the culture writes its text. Needs like the striving for happiness, belonging, love, and freedom are inherent in his nature. They are also dynamic factors in this historical process. If a social order neglects or frustrates the basic human needs beyond a certain threshold, the members of such a society will try to change the social order to make it more suitable for their human needs. If this change is not possible, the outcome will probably be that such a society will collapse, because of its lack of vitality, and its destructiveness. Social changes which lead to a greater satisfaction of human needs are easier to make when certain material conditions are given which facilitate such changes. It follows from these considerations that the relation between social change and economic change is not only the one which Marx emphasized, namely, the interests of new classes in changed social and political conditions, but that social changes are at the same time determined by the fundamental human needs which make use, as it were, of favourable circumstances for their realization. The middle class which won the French revolution wanted freedom for their economic pursuits from the fetters of the older order. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
However, they also were driven by a genuine wish for human freedom inherent in them as humans beings. While most were satisfied with a narrow concept of freedom after the revolution had won, the very best spirits of the bourgeoisie become aware of the limitations of bourgeois freedom and, in their search for a more satisfactory answer to man’s needs, arrived at a concept which considered freedom to be the condition for the unfolding of the total man. When students are permitted to be in contact with real problems; when resources—both human and technical—are made psychologically available by the teacher; when the teacher is a real person in his relationships with students and feels an acceptance of and an empathy toward his students, then an exciting kind of learning occurs. Students go through a frustrating but rewarding process in which gradually responsible initiative, creativity, and inner freedom are released. The kind of personal and intellectual change which comes about has many parallels with the changes which occur in psychotherapy. The nature of these changes has to some extent been investigated empirically. For the most part, modern culture does not, operationally, want persons to be free, despite many ideological statements to the contrary. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Both two main streams of modern life—Western and Communist—are extremely fearful of and ambivalent about any process which leads to inner freedom. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the surest roads to World catastrophe are individual rigidity and constricted learning. If we prefer to develop flexible, adaptive, creative individuals, we have a beginning knowledge as to how this may be done. We know how to establish, in an educational situation, the conditions and the psychological climate which initiate a process of learning to be freed. Learning to be free is something that our beloved Clare so desperately needs to learn. The whole area in her personality that consisted of arrogance, contempt for people, need to excel, need to triumph, was still so deeply repressed in her, even after therapy, that it had only been illuminated by flashes of insight. Even before she had started her analysis, she had occasional realizations of her need to despise people, of her great elation at any success, of the role ambition played in her daydreams, and it was a fleeting insight of this kind that she had now. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
However, this whole problem was still so deeply buried that its manifestations could scarcely be understood. It was as if a shaft learning into the depth was suddenly lit up, and soon after obliterated by darkness. Thus, another implication of this series of associations remained inaccessible. The picture of extreme solitude as presented in the tower in the desert referred not only to her feeling alone without Peter, but to her isolation in general. Subversive arrogance was one of the factors responsible for it, as well as resulting from it. And fastening herself to one person—“two on an island”—was a way of escaping from such isolation without having to straighten out her relations with people in general. Clare believed that she could now cope with Peter in a better way, but soon afterward a double blow came which brought her problems to a climax. First, she learned indirectly that he was having or had had an affair with another woman. She had barely received that shock when Peter wrote to her that it would be better for both if they separated. Clare’s first reaction was to thank Heaven that this had not occurred earlier. Now, she thought, she could stand it. The first reaction was a mixture of truth and self-deception. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The truth in it was that a few months before she probably could not have endured the stress without grave injury to herself; in the months to come she not only proved that she could stand it, but came closer to a solution of the whole problem. However, this first matter-of-fact reaction apparently resulted also from the fact that she did not let the blow penetrate beneath a defensive armour. When it did penetrate, within the next few days, she was thrown into a turmoil of wild despair. She was too deeply upset to analyze her reaction, which is understandable. When a house is on fire one does not reflect on causes and effects but tries to get out. Clare recorded two weeks later that for a few days the idea of suicide kept recurring to her, though it never assumed the character of a serious intention. She quickly became aware of the fact that she was merely playing around with the idea, and she then faced herself squarely with the question whether she wanted to die or to live. She wanted to live. However, if she did not want to live as a wilting flower, she not only had to ride herself of her longing for Peter, and the feeling that her life was smashed to pieces by losing him, but also to overcome radically her whole problem of compulsive dependency. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
If someone were to tell you ugly things about yourself, would you take heed to their words and try to make changes to yourself or would you blow them off and boot them out of your life? Why or why not? It is not always easy to see when someone is playing mind games with you. If they are adept at it, it is nearly impossible to see it, until it is too late. The principles and practice of group psychotherapy (several patients having a simultaneous session with a single group leader-therapist) have been in existence for some time. This approach to psychological treatment of emotional illness has been continually assigned a secondary role. It has been considered by many authorities to be a desirable adjunct to individual psychotherapy, but it has not generally achieved the status and prestige in the eyes either of the professionals or of patients which has been accorded to individual psychotherapy. The general preference for and greater effectiveness presumed for individual therapy is not founded on any rigorous research that has properly compared the relative efficacy of the two approaches. It is quite plausible that such a study might demonstrate group methods to be of at least equal potency to individual therapy. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
If it is incumbent upon psychiatrists and psychologists to do therapy, until this is adequately disproved, they would do better to extend their skills to the larger numbers treatable in a group setting. Experts who have had extended experience in individual psychotherapy will have acquired some sensitivities, skills, and insights that can be usefully applied in group therapy. Those persons administratively responsible for the treatment programs of clinics and hospitals should provide increasingly for group approaches to psychotherapy, with a corresponding deemphasis of the one-to-one therapeutic conversations. Where both forms of treatment are to be offered there should always be provision for careful evaluation of their relative effectiveness in producing significant changes in the patient. Firefighting is an interesting career. “There are a lot of strict requirements in the company, professional liability being what it is these days. We’re trying to weed out those who don’t come to work, those who don’t come to training, who don’t know what’s going on or how to use the new equipment. When you get someone with a new air pack who trained on an old, outdated model the last time he went to fire school ten years ago and hasn’t attended an update since, he goes into a fire situation and doesn’t know how to use the equipment. They have to take time out and go to the state fire school for thirteen consecutive weeks.” You can help prevent fires by contributing to the Sacramento Fire Department. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
Today marks the 50th anniversary of Winchester Mystery House being designated a historical landmark in California. Let’s celebrate this important milestone and pay tribute to the legacy of Sarah Winchester, the visionary behind this remarkable architectural masterpiece 🏰
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Stolen Fruits are the Sweetest
Human sin derives from human ignorance of the Presence which is always within man. Who that is aware of It could possibly transgress, could oppose Its benignity or forget Its teaching of reciprocal Universal Laws. It is true that a face may proclaim the possessor’s character, but it is also true that often only a part of this character is revealed and that the hidden part is, schizophrenically, of an opposite kind. The fact must be admitted, as every saint has admitted it, that there are two poles in human nature, a lower and a higher, an animal and an angelic, an outward-turned and an inward-turned one. It is more just to say that each man’s nature is composed of both good and bad qualities. This must be so because the animal, the human, and the angel are all there in him. The need today is not for compromise or patchwork. It is for one, outright, generous gesture. When the teacher establishes an attitudinal climate, when he makes available resources which are relevant to problems which confront the student, then a typical process ensures. Not caring if he harms others, the selfish person thinks only of satisfying his own wants first. The next higher type thinks also of his immediate circle of family and friends. However, the highest type of all gives equal regard to himself, to his family, to whoever crosses his path, and to all others. He feels for everyone, never satisfying his desires by wrongfully taking away from, or harming, another. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
For students who have been taught by more conventional means, there is a period of tension, frustration, disappointment, disbelief. Students turn in such statements as “I felt completely frustrated by the class procedure.” “I felt totally inadequate to take part in this kind of thing.” “The class seems to be lacking in planning and direction.” “I keep wishing the course would start.” After an initial session in which opportunities and resources were described, one mature participant observer described the way one group struggled with the prospect of freedom. “Thereafter followed four hard, frustrating sessions. During this period, the class didn’t seem to get anywhere. Students spoke at random, saying whatever came into their heads. It all seemed chaotic, aimless, a waste of time. A student would bring up some aspect of the subject; and the next student, completely disregarding the first, would take the group away in another direction; and a third, completely disregarding the first two, would start fresh on something else altogether. At times there were faint efforts at a cohesive discussion, but for the most part the classroom proceedings seemed to lack continuity and direction. The instructor received every contribution with attention and regard. He did not find any student’s contribution in order or out of order. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
“The class was not prepared for such a totally unstructured approach. They did not know how to proceed. In their perplexity and frustration, they demanded that the teacher play the role assigned to him by custom and tradition; that he set forth for us in authoritative language what was right and wrong, what was good and bad.” This is a good description of the bafflement and chaos which is an almost inevitable initial phase of learning to be free. One fruit of the change will be that just as the old idea was to watch out selfishly for his own interests, so the new idea will be not to separate them from the interests of others. If he asked, “How can anyone who is attuned to such impersonality be also benevolent?” Well, because he is so attuned to the real Giver of all things, he need not struggle against anyone nor possess anything. Hence, he can afford to be generous as the selfish cannot. And because the Overself’s very nature is harmony and love, he seeks the welfare of others alongside of his own. He is entitled to seek his own profit and advantage, but only in equity with and considerateness for those of the other person concerned. Gradually students come to various realizations. It dawns on them that this is not a gimmick, but that they are really unfettered; that there is little point in impressing the professor, since the student will evaluate his own work; that they can learn what they please; that they can express, in class, the way they really feel; that issues discussed in class which are real to them, not simply the issues set forth in a text. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
When these elements are recognized, there is a vital an almost awe-inspiring release of energy. One student reads as she has never read before—two books a week in the subject and hopes this “will never end.” Others undertake projects of writing, experimentation, work in a clinic or laboratory with a new zest. The report of one student is typical of many and is worth quoting at some length. “I feel that I want to share my joy with you in relation to the paper that I gave you earlier today—it is what I call ‘my first real learning experience’…I took a few minutes after I finished typing my paper to think what had made this learning experience so different from the many others which I have had. These are my reactions, sketched briefly: Based on real need—not superficial topic…reading was done to satisfy my need, not merely to collect material to fit topic and sound good…I found that I had to scrap my original approach toward writing a paper when I realized that it did not have to sound good or conform to a prescribed pattern. I jotted down my usual idea of a good outline for a paper only to find that it was not geared to my need at all, and I turned to writing about things of significance to me and then made an outline of what I had written. One of the most ‘shocking’ parts of this experience, as I have related to you one day, was the fact that I did not have to do this and yet I wanted to be working on it all the time and rushed through assigned requirements in other courses to devote time to this. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
“I wrote an annotated bibliography for the first time in my life because I wanted to have information regarding this material I had read, for future reference….there was no feeling of drudgery about this paper—I found myself saying, ‘I’m going over to the library to work on my paper for a while’ instead of, ‘Oh, I suppose I’ve got to plow through some more books tonight or I’ll never het that paper done on time.’ The lack of external pressure made this experience one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done. Basically, through experience, it has changed my whole approach to teaching…” This student is discovering what it means to be autonomous, what it means to be creative, what it means to put forth disciplined effort to reach one’s own goals, what it means to be a responsible free person, and most important, is appreciating the satisfactions which come from these experiences. Another element which is a common part of the process is that the group develops a respect and liking for each other as individuals, as they emerge in the group discussion. A teacher trying this approach writes, “In this second group, also, I found that the students had developed a personal closeness, so that at the end of the semester they talked of having annual reunions. They said that somehow or other they wanted to keep this experience alive and not lose one another.” Those who regard altruism as the sacrifice of all egoistic interests are wrong. It means doing well by all, including ourselves. For we too are part of the all. We do not honour altruistic duty by dishonouring personal responsibility. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Up to a certain point in development, man does right in seeking self-gain. However, beyond that point, he must stop the process and seek self-loss. The attitude of non-interference in other people’s lives is a benign and justifiable one at certain times but an egotistic one at other times. The best charity in the end is to show a man the higher life that is possible for him. By selfishness it is meant seeking advantage to self in all transactions with complete indifference to others’ welfare. When the essential motive imposed on us by Nature is self-interest, it is useless to prate and prattle of altruistic motives. Every man has a right to be selfish. Trouble arises only when he hurts others to fulfil this aim. Then the same Nature which prompted him to concentrate on his own existence will punish him. For the law of compensation cannot be evaded: that which we have given to others, of woe or good, will someday be reflected to us. By human standards, nature itself is uneconomical. Its process proves the least economic of all conceivable process is concealed only by the vastness of the scale on which nature operates and the absolute magnitude of its results. Some of the lower organisms give off as many as a billion ova: only a few develop into maturity, while the rest succumb in the resulting struggle for survival. The waste of reproductive powers is fantastic. Haphazard human strife, particularly in the form of industrial competition, is similarly wasteful. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Telic phenomena—those governed by human will and purpose—and genetic phenomena, the results of blind natural forces are fascinating concepts. In the face of the immense superiority of the telic over the genetic, the artificial over the natural, the persistent natural-law enthusiasm of laissez-faire theorists is like the nature-worship of Rousseauian romanticism, or, worse still, of primitive religion. The evolutionary view of nature as being in some way inherently beneficent is sheer mysticism. Man’s task is not to imitate the laws of nature, but to observe them, appropriate them, direct them. Just as there are two kinds of dynamic processes, so are there two distinct kinds of economics—the animal economics of life and the human economics of mind. Animal economics, the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, results from the multiplication or organisms beyond the means of subsistence. Nature produces organisms in superabundance and relies upon the wind, water, birds, and animals to sow her seed. A rational being, on the other hand, prepares the ground, eliminates weeds, drills holes, and plants at proper intervals; this is the way of human economics. While environment transforms the animal, man transforms the environment. Competition actually prevents the most fit from surviving. Rational economics not only saves resources but produces superior organisms. The best evidence for this is that whenever competition is wholly removed, as it is when man artificially cultivates a particular form of life, that form immediately makes great strides and soon outstrips those depending upon competition for their progress. Hence, the superior quality of fruit trees, cereals, domestic cattle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Even in its most rational form, competition is prodigiously wasteful. Witness the social waste involved in advertising, a good example of the modified form of animal cunning which is the hallmark of business shrewdness. Furthermore, Laissez faire destroys whatever value competition might have in human affairs; for since complete laissez faire allows combination and finally monopoly, free competition can be secure only through some measure of regulation. Validity of norms is based on the conditions of human existence. Human personality constitutes a system with one minimal requirement: avoidance of madness. However, once this requirement is fulfilled, man has choices: He can devote his life to hoarding or to producing, to loving or to hating, to being or having, etcetera. Whatever he chooses, he builds a structure (his character) in which certain orientations are dominant and others necessarily follow. The laws of human existence by no means lead to the postulation of one set of values as the only possible one. They lead to alternatives, and we must decide which of the alternatives are superior to others. However, are we not begging the issue by speaking of “superior” norms? Who decides what is superior? If man is deprived of his freedom, he will become either resigned and lose vitality, or furious and aggressive. If he is bored, he will become passive or indifferent to life. If he cuts down to an IBM-card equivalent, he will lose his originality, creativeness, and interests. If I maximize certain factors, I minimize others. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The question then arises, which of these possibilities seems preferable: the alive, joyful, interested, active, peaceful structure or the unalive, dull, uninterested, passive, aggressive structure. What matters is to recognize that we deal with structures and cannot pick out preferred parts from one structure and combine them with preferred parts of the other structure. The fact of structurization in social as well as in individual life narrows down our choice to that between structures, rather than that between single traits, alone or combined. Indeed, what most people would like is to be aggressive, competitive, maximally successfully in the market, liked by everybody and at the same time tender, loving, and a person of integrity. Or, on the social level, people would like society which maximizes material production and consumption, military and political power and at the same time furthers peace, culture, and spiritual values. Such ideas are unrealistic, and usually the “nice” human features in the mixture serve to dress up or hide the ugly features. Once one recognizes that the choice is between various structures and sees clearly which structures are “real possibilities,” the difficulty in choosing becomes greatly reduced and little doubt remains which value structure one prefers. Persons with different character structures will be in favour of the respective value system which appeals to their character. Thus, the biophilous, life-loving person will decide for biophilous values, and the necrophilous persons for necrophilous ones. Those who are in between will try to avoid a clear choice, or eventually make a choice according to the dominant forces in their character structure. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
If one could prove on objective grounds that one value structure is superior to all others, nothing much would be gained; for those who do not agree with the “superior” value structure because it contradicts the demands rooted in their character structure, objective proof would not be compelling. Nevertheless, a desirable living system should grow and produce the maximum of vitality and intrinsic harmony, that is, subjectively, of well-being. An examination of the system of Man can show that the biophilous norms are more conducive to the growth and strength of the system while the necrophilous norms are conducive to dysfunction and pathology. The validity of the norms would follow from their function in promoting the optimum of growth and well-being and the minimum of ill-being. Empirically, most people waver between various systems of values, and hence never fully develop in one or the other direction. They have neither great virtues nor great vices. They are like a coin whose stamp has been worn away; the person has no self and no identity, but is afraid to make this discovery. When our protagonist Clare had recovered some degree of poise, she worked through certain implications of her findings of pain in intimate relationships. She grasped more deeply the meaning of her fear of desertion: it was because her ties were essential to her that she had such a deep fear of their dissolution, and this fear was bound to persist as long as the dependency persisted. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Clare saw that she not only hero-worshiped her mother, Bruce, and her husband, but had been dependent upon them, just as she was upon Peter. She realized that she could never hope to achieve any decent self-esteem if injuries to her dignity meant nothing compared with the fear of losing Peter. Finally, Clare understood that this dependency of her must be a threat and a burden to Peter, too; this latter insight made for a sharp drop in her hostility toward him. Her recognition of the extent to which this dependency had spoiled her relations with people made her take a definite stand against it. This time she dd not even resolve to cut the knot of separation. She knew that she could not do it, but also she felt that having seen the problem she could work it out within the relationship with Peter. She convinced herself that after all there were values in the relationship which should be preserved and cultivated. She felt quite capable of putting it on a sounder basis. Thus in the following months she made real efforts to respect Peter’s need for distance and to cope with her own affairs in a more independent fashion. Clare had discovered a neurotic trend—the first being her compulsive modesty—and a trend that she did not in the least suspect of existing. She recognized its compulsive character and the harm it did to her love life. She did not yet see, however, how it cramped her life in general, and she was far from recognizing its formidable strength. Thus she overrated the freedom she had gained. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
In fact, Clare succumbed to the common self-deception that to recognize a problem was to solve it. The solution of carrying on with Peter was only a compromise. She was willing to modify the trend to some extent but not yet willing to relinquish it. This was also the reason why, despite her clearer picture of Peter, she still underrated his limitations, which were much greater and much more rigid than she believed. She also underrated his striving away from her. She saw it, but hoped that by a change in her attitude toward him she could win him back. You are not always who you think you are. Not so much when you are young and growing, but once one has matured, we have a pretty good idea of who we are and what we stand for. Again, not everyone will stay around someone who says bad things to them—but some will. The brainwasher will say all sorts of things to make their victim believe they are not as smart as they thought they were. They will make one think twice about everything that comes out of their mouth. They will have a good reason to do those things as the brainwasher constantly corrects them, even when they thought the other individual was correct. Some people like to break others down entirely so they can trap them. The goal is to be able to control another individual and they do not like to move on. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
7The exploitative orientation, like the receptive, has as its basic premise the feeling that the source of all good is outside, that whatever one wants to get must be sought there, and that one cannot produce anything oneself. The difference between the two, however, is that the exploitative type does not expect to receive things from others as a gift, but to take them by force or cunning. This orientation extends to all spheres of activity. In the realm of love and affection, these people tend to grab and steal; they tend to fall in love with a person attached to someone else. We find the same attitude regarding thinking and intellectual pursuits. Such people will tend not to produce ideas but to steal them. It is a striking fact that frequently people with great intelligence proceed in this way, although if they relied on their own gifts, they might well be able to have ideas of their own. The lack of original ideas or independent production in otherwise gifted people often has its explanation in this character orientation, rather than in any innate lack of originality. The same statement holds true regarding their orientation in material things. Things which they can take from others always seem better to them than anything they can produce themselves. They use and exploit anybody and anything from whom or from which they can squeeze something. Their motto is “Stolen fruits are sweetest.” Because they want to use and exploit people, the “love” those who, explicitly or implicitly, are promising objects of exploitation, and get “fed up” with persons whom they have squeezed dry. An extreme example is the kleptomanic who enjoys things if he can steal them, although he has the money to buy them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The most visible and acute part of the mental health problem resides in those patients with major psychiatric disorders who require hospitalization. These are the patients who must have the intensive and coordinated services of the most highly trained members of the mental health team—especially of the psychiatrist. If there were no limitations of money or personnel for the treatment of the major forms of psychiatric illness, the effectiveness of the treatment of the psychotic patient would still be sorely restricted by our lack of knowledge about etiology, pathology, and specific avenues of therapeutic action. There is an urgent need for a greatly expanded research endeavour. The design and execution of research into the causes and treatment of major mental illness requires the full-time effort of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric social workers and other mental health personnel. However, these highly trained experts are in critically short supply and their potential contribution to research is seriously reduced and, in many instances, totally blocked by the demand that they provide those clinical services presently thought to be therapeutic. To the extent that circumstances force them into purely service roles they are prevented from generating investigations that could lead to significant changes in the quality or effectiveness of their services. At the present level of our specific technical knowledge it is will to make explicit distinctions between programs of custodial management and programs of active treatment. It is totally unjustifiable and a serious social waste of critically restricted resources for the most highly trained of our mental health experts to be encouraged to assign higher priority to their clinical services and a lower priority to their responsibilities as investigators. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Be careful not to limit elements of the quest—action—to altruism or service. It is rather the reeducation of character through deeds. Thus this includes moral discipline, altruistic service, overcoming animal tendencies, temporary physical asceticism, self-training and improvement, and so forth. It is the path of remaking the personality in the external life both through thought-control and acts so as to become sensitive towards and obedient to the Overself. Altruism will then become a mere part of, a subordinate section in, this character training. Whoever labours worthily at a worthy task which does not afflict his conscience is rendering service to humanity. It does not matter whether he is affluent or less affluent. The isolationist individual who stands unmoved by a crime being committed on his doorstep, is tempted by selfishness not to burden himself with another person’s troubles. Ambition can be transformed into service. It takes a lot of altruism and ambition to be a firefighter. “I’ll never forget, it was the third day of fire school, and you know how little things stick in your mind. About four of us were raising up a fifty-foot ladder. It was a windy day, and we were getting the ladder up when it started to fall. There were some guys standing around, and everybody instinctively ran to the ladder and grabbed it to keep it from falling. There was a lieutenant there who said, ‘You know what, there was one guy who ran away. And he should have kept going right out that gate, because firemen don’t run away.’ Firemen don’t run away. All my life I’ve been that way. A good fireman instinctively knows what to do, and one of the things is this: a fireman doesn’t run away. That is some kind of pride I have, and I get it from being a fireman.” We must learn not only to develop right qualities of character, but also not to direct them wrongly. Misplaced charity, for instance, is not a virtue. Please be sure to donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to ensure they have all the resources required. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one Nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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Those Still Alive Will Envy the Dead
Commitment is the enemy of resistance, for it is the serious promise to press on, to get up, no matter how many times you are knocked down. Besides commitment, there are other thing necessary for planning an honest government; technical skill and capital. Here lies one of the great possibilities for the West (and for Russia) if they reconcile themselves to the support of democratic socialist regimes: they can give technical assistance and long-range inexpensive credits and grants to permit countries like India, Indonesia, et cetera, to develop an industry under much more favourable conditions than, for instance, China enjoyed. That country had very little economic aid from the outside, for instance, with the heavy capital investments that helped the industrialization of Czarist Russia. The nearly created counties in Africa are at the “take-off” stage. There are many other countries that are still at an economically primitive stage. The methods for the economic development of these countries must be as varied as these countries are; nevertheless planning, government ownership of important sectors of the economy, honest government, foreign aid in acquiring technical skill and capital, will be necessary for these countries too. One main objection to the suggestions to support democratic socialist systems in the underdeveloped countries will probably be that such systems will tend to join politically with the Russian-Chinese bloc, and be aligned against the West. This view sounds plausible only if one confuses Russian and Chinese communism with each other, and both with democratic socialism because they all have the words “Marxism” and “socialism” in coming. However, this is a factual misunderstanding. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Not only have democratic socialists all over the World shown their fundamental opposition to Russian r Chinese communism, not only have most of them always refused to enter into alliances with the Communist “Marxists,” but democratic socialism is, in fact, a much greater challenge to Russian and Chinese communism than any feudal or “capitalist” system in the underdeveloped countries. Such systems will eventually fall, but viable democratic socialist systems will demonstrate that the Russian-Chinese claim that their systems are the only alternative to capitalism is wrong. They will act as a dam to the political expansion of the Russian-Chinese bloc, but they can also serve as a bridge between that bloc and the United States of America-European bloc in a multicentered World. It is therefore, as sure as anything can be that central international problem for the future is the organization of the World community in which the United States of America, Western Europe, Japan, and Russia are joined by powerful industrial states in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa—in about that order; and that, within something like seventy-five years, the bulk of the presently underdeveloped areas will have attained economic maturity. The difference between us may lie in the emphasis that for many of the underdeveloped countries democratic-socialist systems will be necessary if the organization of an industrial World community is to be achieved. The acceptance of this policy requires not only that we in the United State of America overcome deep-seated, yet erroneous cliches and irrational allergies toward certain words—such as socialism, government ownership of industries, et cetera. It requires, in addition, important changes in our dealings with our European allies and in our own policy in Latin America. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
As for as our policy with regard to our European allies is concerned, we have already made a good beginning with King Charles III to help preserve the monarchy of the United Kingdom. In President Trump’s period, he began to recognize African neutralism as legitimate, had a peaceful relationship with North Korea and Russia, and helped protect Jerusalem as a holy land. Yet, the real danger is that we will not go the whole way, and that we will permit our Western allies to push us into compromises with the last remnants of their colonial policy, in exchange for their adherence in Western alliance. The United States of America and Egypt mark more than a century of diplomatic cooperation and friendship, the United States of America stands with Egypt and the Egyptian people to promote regional security, bolster economic resilience, advance people-to-people ties, tackle the climate crisis, strengthen a critical defense partnership, and support Egyptians in their pursuit of a prosperous future which protects fundamental freedoms for all. The United States of America and Egypt are cooperating closely to de-escalate conflicts and promote sustainable peace, including by supporting United Nations mediation to enable elections in Libya as soon as possible and restoring a civilian-led transition in Sudan through the Framework Political Agreement. The United States of America and Egypt share an unwavering commitment to a negotiated two-state solution as the only path to lasting resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and equal measures of security, prosperity, and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians. Building on Egypt’s transformational peace with Israel, the United States of America and Egypt are partnering to foster further regional cooperation, including through the Negev Forum process. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The United States of America is engaged with Egypt, as well as Sudan and Ethiopia, to advance a swift diplomatic resolution on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam that safeguards the interest of the three parties. The United States of America and Egypt have shared commitment to strengthening bilateral economic cooperation for the mutual benefit of the American and Egyptian people, including through expanding trade, increasing private sector investments, and collaborating on clean energy and climate technology. The United States of America has invested $600 million to digitize Egypt’s telecommunications sector, and Egypt has imported nearly $6 billion from the United States of America to construct, expand, and modernize Egyptian infrastructure to meet the needs of a growing population. As Egypt continues to confront the global repercussions of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and resulting food insecurity, the United States of America commends Egypt for concluding agreement with the International Monetary Fund on December 16, 2022 that is crucial to stabilizing its economy and enabling vital reforms. The United States of America and Egypt have committed to establishing a joint Economic Commission that will further enhance cooperation on all economic and commercial issues. Algeria is a strategically located country with which the United States of America engages on diplomatic, law enforcement, economic, and security matters. Bonds reach back to the 1795 Treaty of Peace and Amity, and in the modern era diplomatic relations date from 1962, when Algeria became independent from France. The United States of America and Algeria conduct frequent civilian and military exchanges. The two countries participated in the fifth U.S.A.-Algeria Strategic Dialogue in March 2022. They also held a joint Military Dialogue that same month. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
U.S.A. engagement in Algeria has three primary objectives: expanding our security and military cooperation, growing economic and commercial links, and building educational and culture bonds between Algerians and Americas. Exchanges of expertise play a valuable role in strengthening the U.S.A.-Algeria law enforcement and security relationship at both the senior and working levels. Programming from the State Department’s Bureaus of Counterterrorism (CT) and International Security and Nonproliferation (ISN) enables us to work with Algerian law enforcement and security agencies to interdict and investigate a wide variety of crimes and terrorist activities in strategic areas of capability like advanced investigation and prosecutorial techniques and border security. Our Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) has supported the work of Algeria’s civil society through programming that provides training to journalists, businesspeople, female entrepreneurs and parliamentarians, legal professionals, and the head of leading non-governmental organizations. There are close to 5,000 alumni of U.S.A. government exchange programs throughout Algeria. Our programs support youth entrepreneurship, and English language learning and teaching, women’s empowerment, media engagement, and cross-cultural dialogue. In 2019, Algeria and the United States of America signed a Memorandum of Understanding aimed at protecting and preserving Algeria’s cultural heritage. The United States of America is one of Algeria’s top trading partners, and Algeria is one of the top U.S.A. trading partners in the Middle East/North African region. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
According to the World Bank, the United States of America was the top source of stock Foreign Direct investment (FDI) into Algeria as of 2020, providing 28 percent or $6.2 billion of total FDI. Most U.S.A. FDI in Algeria has been in the hydrocarbons sector. The two countries have signed a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) that provides a platform to address impediments in the economic relationship and identify paths to broader commercial interaction. The two countries held TIFA talks in June 2022. The United States of America supports Algeria’s desire to diversity its economy, encourage a transition to renewable energy, move toward transparent economic policies, and liberalize its investment climate. Algeria and the United States of American belong to several of the same international organizations, including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Algeria is an active member of the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF) and serves as the co-chair of the organization’s West Africa Working Group. Alegria is also a Partner for Cooperation with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an observer to the Organization of American States, and an observer to the World Trade Organization. It also occasionally provides airlift and other logistical support to UN and AU peacekeeping operations. U.S.A. relations with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), led by the State Department of African Affairs, are deep and longstanding. U.S.A foreign policy is focused on advancing our mutual global priorities, including advancing democracy and human rights, combating the climate crisis, countering wildfire and timber trafficking, responding to multiple security, health, and humanitarian crises, and securing supply chain of critical minerals necessary for the global transition to cleaner forms of energy and mitigation of transnational organized crimes. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The United States of America is the DRC’s largest bilateral doner. The United States of America established diplomatic relations with the DRC in 1960, following its independence from Belgium. Following independence, the country saw a mix of unrest, rebellion, secession movements, a three-decade long dictatorship, armed conflict, and foreign intervention, including on the DRC’s territory. The DRC’s last protracted conflict, commonly known as Africa’s World War (2998-2003), involved nine African countries and resulted in more than 3 million deaths in the DRC from the fighting and ensuing humanitarian crisis. In 1997, the 32-year regime of Mobutu Sese Seko was overthrown by Laurent Kabila, who was in turn succeeded by his son, Joseph Kabila, who was named head of States in January 2001 following his father’s assassination. The DRC’s development and humanitarian needs are vast. U.S.A. assistance supports a more stable democratic nation by improving the capacity and governance capabilities of core national-level institutions, creating economic opportunities, responding to urgent humanitarian needs, and addressing the root causes of conflict. The United States of America has provided more than $1.7 billion in health assistance to the DRC over the past 20 years and has worked with the DRC for decades fighting deadly diseases and viruses. Approximately $112 million in bilateral PEPFAR funds were implemented in FY 2022. The United States of America provides more than $500 million annually in humanitarian assistance in the DRC to help relieve suffering for those affected by conflict and support government efforts to provide services to its citizens. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Returning now to the social conditions for necrophilia, the question arises: What is the relation between necrophilia and the spirit of contemporary industrial society? Furthermore, what is the significance of necrophilia and indifference to life with regard to the motivation for nuclear war? We shall not be too concerned with all the aspects motivating modern war, many of which have existed for previous wars as they do for nuclear war, but only with one very crucial psychological problem pertaining to nuclear war. Whatever the rationale of pervious wars may have been—defense against attack, economic gain, liberation, glory, the preservation of a way of life—such rationale does not hold true for nuclear war. There is no defense, no gain, no liberation, no glory, when at the very “best” half the population of one’s country has been incinerated within hours, all cultural centers have been destroyed, and a barbaric, brutalized life remains in which those still alive will envy the dead. I cannot accept those theories which try to persuade us that the sudden destruction of 180 million Americans will not have a profound and devastating influence on our civilization or that even after nuclear war has stated, such rationality will continue to exist among the enemies that they will conduct the war according to a set of rules which will prevent total destruction. Why is it that in spite of all this, preparations continue to be made for nuclear war without any more widespread protest than that which exists? How are we to understand why more people with children and grandchildren do not stand up and protest? Why is it that people who have so much to live for, or so it would seem, are soberly considering the destruction of all? #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
There are many answers; one important answer seems to lie in the fact that most people are deeply—although mostly unconsciously—anxious in their personal lives. The constant battle to rise on the social ladder and the constant fear of failure creates a permanent state of anxiety and stress which makes the average person forget the threat to one’s own and the World’s existence. Furthermore, the only reasons nations like America are not preaching birth control and trying to limit and reduce the population, which would reduce prices, the strain on the planet, and people is because we are a consumer driven World. Corporations and the pharmaceutical industry greatly profit from overpopulation and its consequences. There are many answers of why people want to see the destruction of life; yet none of them gives a satisfactory explanation unless we include the following: that people are not afraid of total destruction because they do not love life; or because they are indifferent to life, or even because many are necrophilous. This hypothesis seems to contradict all our assumptions that people love life and are afraid of death; furthermore, that our culture, more than any culture before, provides people with plenty of excitement and fun. However, maybe all our fun and excitement are quite different from joy and love of life? Life is structured growth, and by its very nature is not subject to strict control or prediction. In the real of life others can be influenced only by the forces of life, such as love, stimulation, example. Life can be experienced only in its individual manifestations, in the individual person as well as in a bird or a flower. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
There is no life of “the masses,” there is no life in abstraction. Our approach to life today becomes increasingly mechanical. Our main aim is to produce things, and in the process of this idolatry of things we transform ourselves into commodities. People are treated as if they do not deserve to live other than to consume and pay bills. This lead is to consider are people living beings? People love mechanical gadgets more than living beings and that is probably because the World is overpopulated and money, status has replaced real, true, genuine love. People want to be idolized. They do not want to love or be loved. One is interested in people as objects, in their common properties, in the statistical rules of mass behaviour, not in living individuals. All this goes together with the increasing roe of bureaucratic methods. In giant centers of production, densely populated big cities, expansive countries, humans are administered as if they are things; humans and their administrators are transformed into things, and they obey the laws of things. However, humans are not meant to be a thing; if humans become things, they are destroyed; and before this is accomplished one becomes desperate and wants to kill all life. In a bureaucratically organized and centralized industrialism, tastes are manipulated so that people consume maximally and in predictable and profitable directions. Their intelligence and character become standardized by the ever increasing role of tests which select the mediocre and unadventurous in preference to the original and daring. Indeed, the bureaucratic-industrial civilization which has been victorious in Europe and North America has created a new type of human; one can be described as the organization man or woman, as the automaton man or woman, and as homo consumens. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Human beings are, in addition, homo mechanicus; a gadget man or woman, deeply attracted by all that is mechanical, and inclined against that which is alive. It is true that humans’ biological and physiological equipment proves them which such strong impulses for pleasures of the flesh that even homo mechanicus still has desires for pleasure of the flesh and looks for men and/or women. However, there is still no doubt that the gadget man or woman’s interests in men and/or women is diminishing. And wait until virtual robots come along that cannot be distinguished from living beings. It might actually help to reduce the population on this overpopulated planet. To compete for a man’s interest, a woman may have to buy perfume that smells like a new sports-car. Indeed, any observer of human behaviour today will confirm that this is more than a cleaver joke. There are apparently a great number of men and women who are ore interested in sports cars, television and mobile phones than they are in women and/or men, love, nature, food; who are more stimulated by the manipulation of nonorganic, mechanical things than by life. It is not even too far-fetched to assume that homo mechanicus is more proud of and fascinated by devices which can kill millions of people across a distance of several thousand miles within minutes, than one is frightened and depressed by the possibility of such mass destruction. One day, men may love their trucks and women their hair more than dogs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
All the foregoing suggests that the definition of mental illness is arbitrary in a degree far greater than it true for physical illness. It is the discretionary quality of the definition of mental illness which at once poses a problem and points to an element of solution. Mental illness is a relative rather than an absolute matter. Failure fully to recognize this leads to confusion, circular reasoning, unrealistic goals, and unnecessary frustration. We are broadly accustomed to the notion of relativity as expressed in culture-to-culture variation in determinants of normal or adjusted personality. The works of Mead and Benedict were among the earliest to demonstrate that ways of behaving which are considered deviant and sick in one culture represent the “normal” pattern of the typical individual in another culture. Benedict, for example, describes an orientation toward property among the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest leading to behaviour that in our society could be seen as paranoid in nature. We can appreciate even the subcultural referents of behaviour disorder. Thus, the effective well-adjusted member of a rapidly paced and technologically based acquisitive-consumptive North American metropolis would find one’s modus operandi highly maladaptive if one persisted in them in one of the Hutterite cooperative communities of the Midwest. It is no so commonly recognized that, for a given culture, the extent and nature of mental illness is a function of a relativistic definition which is variable over time—being one time rigorous, conservative, and applicable to small numbers of persons, being another time loose, liberal, and appropriate to huge numbers. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The total incidence of mental illness in the population is greater during those periods in the national economy which support the expense of mental health census-taking than during economic periods than do not support such surveys. The greater the number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other trained mental health experts in the population, the higher the incidence of mental illness. The essential case-finding orientation of public health surveys is such as to encourage applications of a liberal rather than a conservative definition of illness; and, with emphasis on the goal of finding all cases showing even the slightest extent of pathology, there is an accompanying increase in the number of false positives, persons erroneously labeled ill. By contrast, when the population is not surveyed, and when health statistics are based purely on cases brought to formal diagnosis by hospital, clinic, or physician, we have a gnawing awareness of the existence of a large number of false negatives, persons whose actual pathology has escaped the gross dragnet of society’s diagnostic institutions. In this light, we can think of cultures (or subcultures) as being of a “false positive” or “false negative” type or, perhaps more accurately, as having false positive or false negative periods. The liberally oriented economically expansionist, welfare state will be a false positive culture, id est, borderline cases will tend to be systematically labeled sick. The reactionary, economically retrenching, laissez-faire society will provide a false negative culture, id est, borderline cases will tend to be systematically labeled not sick. In this context, “borderline” cases are by definition those that are of very mild or minor pathology, if any, and that are not reliably (unanimously) diagnosed by independent clinicians. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
This view of the case-finding process suggests the joint operation of two powerful and not necessarily independent factors in the definition of mental illness: the economy of the culture and the value system of the culture, the latter variously interiorized and individualized by the personnel who conducts surveys. In recent years experts representing those of the social sciences most directly concerned with problems of mental health and social welfare have been meeting to wrestle with the issues of theory and method arising in a newly evolving area of research, the area of social psychiatry. When these experts addressed themselves to the problem of “Definition of a Case for Purpose of Research in Social Psychiatry,” they generated a spectrum of suggestion ranging from denial of the existence of any good, workable criteria by which to define cases, to proposal of the highly workable, but grossly restrictive criterion of persons-who-confront-psychiatrist. Falling between these extremes were abstract criteria for defining mental health or measuring mental illness; they were abstract in the sense that the concrete procedures for application of the criteria were usually not specified. Here are a few examples: A two-dimensional criterion in which adjustment is expressed in 1) method of problem management and 2) need-free perception. On the first dimension, maladjustment is expressed by failure to face problems, failure to consider alternative solutions, failure to select an alternative, or finally, failure to implement the decision with action. On the second dimension, maladjustment is expressed by failure of the individual to perceive accurately those aspects of one’s environment with respect to which one has strong needs, failure to hold one’s perception undistorted by one’s needs. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
A tripartite criterion composed of 1) absence of the urgency to take action (felt by the individual, by society, or both) which characterized major disorder; 2) social agreement between therapist and patient, a sharing of the same values; and 3) a goal of maximization of the patient’s potential (contrasting with restoration to “reasonable adjustment” as a goal in major abnormality). A criterion statement indicating that the areas of appraisal should be the person’s 1) physical health or illness, and adjustment to it; 2) intrapersonal functioning; 3) interpersonal functioning; 4) relationship to one’s value system; and that the mode of appraisal should combine 1) clinical judgment; 2) community option; and 3) the person’s own evaluation of one’s status. A symptom-based criterion in which inefficiency, nonproductivity, and social or moral conflict are emphasized; however, detection of such functional impairment in any of a variety of possibly “pathogenic situations” is seen as appropriately shared by physician, educator, employer, clergyman. A criterion based on the network of the individual’s interpersonal relationships, the kind of relationship one has to all persona important to one. Of course, as it almost certain to happen whenever a group directs its attention to the problem of specifying what is to constitute the unit of observation in a research into an essentially social phenomenon, there was at least one voice raised in protest, denying that it is necessary to describe a phenomenon reliably before one attempts to study the relation it holds to other variables. To a point, this protest is supportable; but if a circumscribed phenomenon to be studied is not defined with reasonable precision, then at least the operations of the research process must be concretely explicated. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The existence of various values is implicit in the above general criteria of mental illness or maladjustment. In considering the possible dangers of self-analysis the essential problem is whether it involves a risk of definite harm to the individual. By endeavouring on this adventure singlehanded does one not conjure up hidden forces with which one is unable to cope? If one recognizes a crucial unconscious conflict, without yet seeing a way out, are there not aroused in one such deep feelings of anxiety and helplessness that one might succumb to a depression or even consider suicide? Transitory impairments are bound to occur in every analysis, because any reaching down to repressed material must stir up anxiety previously allayed by defensive measures. Likewise, it must bring to the foreground affects of anger and rage otherwise shut off from awareness. This shock effect is so strong not because the analysis has led to the recognition of some intolerably bad or vicious trend, but because it has shaken an equilibrium which, though precarious, had prevented the individual from feeling lost in the chaos of diverging drives. When a patient meets such a disturbance during the analytical process one may simply feel profoundly perturbed or one may have recurrences of old symptoms. Naturally, then, one feels discouraged. These setbacks are usually overcome after a short while. As soon as the new insight is really integrated, they vanish and give way to those well-founded feelings of having taken a sept ahead. They represent the shocks and pains unavoidably involved in a reorientation of life, and are implicit in any constructive process. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
It is at these periods of inner upheaval that the patient would particularly miss the helping hand of an analyst. However, we are taking it for granted that the whole process is easier with competent help. Here we are concerned with the possibility that the individual might not be able to overcome these upsets alone and thus be permanently impaired. Or that when one feels one’s foundations shaken one might so something desperate, such as driving or gambling recklessly, jeopardizing one’s position, or attempting suicide. However, the will of the believer “willing” physical death gives the Adversary power of death over that one, and no believer should yield to a “desire to die” until one knows beyond question that God has released one from further service to His people. That a believer is “ready to die” is a very small matter; one must also be ready to live, until one is sure that one’s lifework is finished. God does not harvest His corn until it is ripe, and His redeemed children should be “garnered as a shock of corn it its season. The end of history is always present to us, cutting into our temporal existence and elevating it to the eternal. We live in two orders, the historical and the eternal, and, although they are not identical, they are within each other, for the eternal order reveals itself in the historical order. In opposition to a supranaturalistic eternity with eternal places and being, it holds that the transcendent cannot be expressed in terms of being but only in terms of meaning, for if any present has meaning it has eternity. Eternal Life, the ever-present end of history, includes the positive content of history, liberated from its negative distortions and filled in its potentiality. Eternal Life, then, has two characteristics: unification and purification. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Unification means that the dispersed embodiments of meaning in historical activities and institutions have an invisible, supra-historical unity, that they belong to an ultimate meaning of which they are radiations. And purification means that the ambiguous emobidement of meaning in historical realities, social, and personal, is related to an ultimate meaning in which the ambiguity, the mixture of meaning, and distortion of meaning, is overcome by an unambiguous, pure embodiment of meaning. There is something immovable, unchangeable, unshakeable, eternal, which becomes manifest in our passing and in the crumbling of our World. Truth is the kind of error without which a particular kind of living creature could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive. It is improbable that our “knowledge” should reach farther than it must extend for the preservation of life. Morphology shows us how the sense and the nerves, as well as the brainin proportion to the difficulty of finding nourishment. Would we bear the American flag symbol of freedom into a World where humans are still in servitude? Then from our shackles we must first emancipate ourselves, from ignorance and blinding hate, and set our souls free. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all. Charity is Godly. This holiday season, please show your appreciate to the Sacramento Fire Department and make a donation. They have been proudly serving the community since 1851. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Winchester Mystery House
People in the late nineteenth century often remarked on how much manners had improved in the past fifty years. Perhaps because the new middle class was just establishing its gentility, that outdid by far the real gentry of the early nineteenth century. When Sarah L. Winchester had guests for dinner a Victorian dinner, they found small menus on the table describing the food they would be served. Servant set and removed a plate for every course, and no one used fingers to touch the food. There were special forks and ladles and knives for every conceivable food: oyster ladles and forks; tomato servers; fish knives and forks; cake knives and servers and forks; different spoons for clear soup, for cream soup, for dessert, for fruit, for breakfast coffee, for dinner coffee, and for tea. The volume and variety of sliver-plated flatware and hollowware would baffle any modern dinner. However, to the Victorian, knowing the code of the correct fork was all-important proof of gentility and all that separated the “right” people from labourers, immigrants, and vagabonds. No one at dinner passed food or served one’s neighbour. Mrs. Winchester’s dinner consisted of “Russian service,” where each course was served by gloved servants who brought each guest measured portions on a plate as in a modern restaurant.
The difference between servant and served was so important because the roles could be revered by a simple change in fortune. The host was in complete control of the guests’ meal by predetermining the order of the courses and the quantity of the food. After dinner, the ladies retired to the drawing room, and the men tarried over their cigars and port. The little doors in the sideboard held places for wine and linens. What is so amazing about Victorian table manner is how successful they were. We may no longer use all the cutlery, but we have internalized their whole system of suppressing bodily functions and being proper. In the early nineteenth century, diners still had to be reminded not to blow their noses on the tablecloth, not to spit food back into serving dishes, not to pick their teeth with their knives, and not to urinate in front of ladies. By the late nineteenth century, etiquette books no longer had to give that kind of advice because it was assumed that people knew enough to control themselves in public. The self-contained, modern, discreet person was invented in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to the loss of control inherent in modern, anonymous city life. The noteworthy element is not how quaint the Victorians were or how different, but how much more like us they are than any other people before them.
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Randolph Harris II International 