A good sense of humor helps to overlook the unbecoming, understand the unconventional, tolerate the unpleasant, overcome the unexpected, and outlast the unbearable. In giving freedom to those enslaved, we assure freedom to the free—honourable alike in what we give and what we preserve. With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in. Some people work harder, some are stronger, some have more talent and skill, hence things are naturally unequal. People need to work together, to make and gather the fruits of uneven talents, and so society by its nature is a necessary and willing agreement to share unequally among unequals. If inequalities are greater in modern times, well, so are the fruits which most people can enjoy; greater, too, are the differences in skill, and so forth. If we shudder at the thought of total determinism of modern tyranny, we must admit that the conservative case has weight, especially since we today know fairly accurately how historical inequality came about—at least in a theoretical way. And we know that this process started long before the rise of the state: in fact, it was inherent in primitive societies themselves—even in the most eqalitarian ones, in hunting and gathering societies, the simplest known. These societies knew no distinctions of rank, little or no authority of one individual or the other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Primitive societies had very simple possessions and so there was no real difference in wealth; property was distributed equally. Yet even on this level individual differences were recognized and already formed the germ of social differentiation which would gradually lead to distinctions of rank, accumulated wealth, hereditary privilege, and the eventual rise and entrenchment of the exploitative state. It would seem that the largest factor in inequality among humans discourse. Two crucial factors are worth pointing out here. First, the basic fallacy: that there was a time in early social evolution when people were not influenced by differences in personal qualities. Some are able to maintain this because of a truly fantastic sketch of social evolution, in which one see a person at first as an isolated being, not even living in a family group. Gradually family life evolved, and then tribal life, and it was that time that each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at oneself, and public esteem had value. This famous idea on the state of nature beings, then, with the epoch of the savage who lives within oneself. It ends when humans came out of this state into that of society; they became sociable beings, always outside oneself, who knew how to live only in the opinion of others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

 And so some believe that human’s downfall does not begin in the original state of humans, but it is the spirit of society alone, and the inequality it engenders, which thus changes and alters all our natural inclinations—that is, our natural solitariness, our natural immunity to the personal qualities of others. The second point of this fantasy is easier to understand because it is based on fact: one saw no accumulation of goods in the primitive societies of one’s time, and so one thought that primitive beings wanted only to live and remain idle and refused to work to build up an accumulation of goods. Accumulated goods in civilized society were a visible burden on those who slaved for them, and they were a direct cause of social injustice; and the primitive state was one of delightful laziness and freedom. However, we know this is the wrong conclusion: rather, hunters and gatherers cannot accumulate a surplus because of the primitive technology and subsistence economy, not because they do not want surplus. They are already eager to accumulate a surplus of wives and to gain special privileges for hunting lands, and so forth. The drive for self-expansion is there, but there are neither opportunities nor the World picture into which to fit it. Or, the state of nature is not idle, it is temperamental, orderly, and compulsive like all other human states. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

However, we have recently learned something from the vast collections of data on primitive beings: that if one was not in bondage to the authority of living persons, one was at the utter mercy of the power of spirits. Because of human’s fear of life and death, the tribe was in hock to the spirit of the dead. Or, if in some tribes humans did not seem to fear death, it was because they had transmuted this fear by immersing themselves in the group ideology, whatever it may have been. Now this lead us to a completely opposite position from what some anthropologists believed in the past, even on the fanciful sketch of social evolution: that is, in the state of nature the solitary individual is already unfree, even before one gets to society; one carries within oneself the bondage that one needs in order to live. We know today that this antiquated idea of the state of nature as an exploratory hypothesis to be able to imagine how life might be in a state of freedom from social coercion. We know too what a powerful critical tool this idea has been, and how it has helped us to highlight the state as a structure of domination from Marx all the way up to Mumford. However, the fact is that humans never were free and cannot be from their own nature as the starting point. Rare individuals may achieve freedom at the end of years of experience and effort; and they can do this best under conditions of advanced civilization. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

As we have seen, if it had the power to do so, each human type seeks to perpetuate itself; it tries to expand and aggrandize itself in the ways open to it. However, on primitive levels the power figures are always suspect precisely because of their dangerous power; hence the constant anxiety about witches and so forth. “Almost no mortal on Earth knows one’s lineage before the so called Dark Ages (500 to 1500 AD), and only the great families can penetrate the deep players of time to extract from them a series of examples that might inspire. But in every family there are bad people, and weak people, and some people who cannot or will not withstand the trials of life, and who fail spectacularly. Their guardian Angels weep; demons beholding them dance for joy,” Pages 62 and 61 of Angel Time by Anne Rice. The early tribal embodiments of magical power were ready scapegoats for the people—not only witches but priest-kings too. No wonder that when kings later got real power to work their will on the helpless masses, they used that power ruthlessly; in this perspective the divine king of the great slave state of the Mediterranean basin is the earlier shaman come of age and of unlimited power. We might say that instead of themselves being scapegoats, they used the entire people as their own sacrificial animals, marching them off to military holocaust at will. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

The logic of this kind of turning of the tables is almost inevitable. What each person wants is to be a survivor, to cheat death and to remain standing no matter how many others have fallen around one. In tribal society, if they can be, even at the expense of an occasional power figure who detaches oneself too much from the general level of safe mutuality and symbiosis, the people are the survivors. In the later tyrannical state, it was only natural that the king reverse this procedure—that he prove himself to be the survivor no matter how many of his people died, or even because they died. Seen in this way, history is the saga of working out of one’s problems on others—harmlessly when one has no power (or when the weapon is art), viciously when one has the power and when the weapons are the arsenals of the total state. This saga continues in modern times but in forms which disguise the same: individuals skilled in focusing power, and masses hungry for it and fearful of it. Each society elevates and rewards leaders who are talented at giving the masses heroic victory, expiation for guilt, relief of personal conflicts. It does not matter how these are achieved: magical religious ritual, magical booming stock markets, magical heroic fulfillment of five-year plans, or mana-charged military mega-machines—or all together. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

What counts is to give the people the self-expansion in righteousness that they need. The people who have power can exercise it through many different kinds of social and economic structures, but a universal psychological hunger underpins them all; it is this that locks people and power figure together in a life-and-death contract. This raises questions about the legal foundations of American society, abut what constitutes a threat to national security, and who should make that decision. “The War on Terrorism” has lead to the highest level of surveillance of our citizens. Many issues have been raised about social and economic justice, about the principles for the distribution of wealth, equal access to material goods. The 9.0 Earthquake in Japan in 2011, which led to the disasters at the nuclear power plants, and  the Novel Coronavirus, which broke out in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019 and has killed more than 900 people and infected about 40,000 globally,  Oroville Dam crisis of 2017, and the fire in Paradise, California which destroyed the entire town has led many raising issues about environmental justice, potential life-threatening issues concerning our relationship to the planet and our physical environment. What are the short term and long term consequences of our current practices, and who should make these determinations? How much power should they have? Should all countries have an equal voice? An equal vote? Who should make and enforce these rules? #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The United States of America is one of the World leaders in disturbing statistics; rates of incarceration, rates of mass murder, serial murder, homicide and violent crimes, rates of divorce, child maltreatment and exploitation of pleasures of the flesh, rates of death by state executions, auto accidents, gun accidents, diabetes, heart problems, and number of people killed by medical interventions. We spend more of our money on defense than all of the rest of the nations of the World combined, and we have more guns overall and more hand guns in particular than anyone else, and yet research since 1956 shows a consistent decline in our sense of security. The Untied States leads the World in rates of mental disorders, mental illness, and chronic diseases, while at the same time seeing educational performance plummet over several decades. Behind each one of these statistics is a justice issue, a question about the fairness of our legal and cultural institutions, a question about how the relative wealth and poverty is distributed. Age-old questions of racial justice, economic justice, and gender justice are still with us today. Questions about justice originate from our religions. Experts estimate that there may have been as many as 2,000-4,000 religions in the past, but almost all of these were primal, tribal, and confined to small areas. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Today we tend to think of religions as the so-called “World Religions,” those local and tribal perspectives which expanded beyond their native tribes and local areas, and in the more recent 6,000 years left some kind of historical record. Western civilization has been greatly influenced by the monotheistic religions of the Abrahamic traditions, those that trace their Worldly history back to the prophet Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Their holy and sacred texts (the Talmud, Bible, and Koran) contain many commentaries about mortality and justice, about how individuals should treat each other, and how rulers should act. These ancient texts have much to say about retribution and revenge, but relatively little to say about the complex social issues of our contemporary everyday life and globalized World. An ideal society should be a peaceful and harmonious social order, where the diverse interests and social classes would do their best to achieve a certain kind of functional interdependence, based upon their respective skills and roles. All institutions and all practices should be based on “Reason,” which means, a studied deliberation of the right thing to do in order to achieve the overarching goal of social harmony. The guardians, or leaders, should be selected, at a very early age, from among the aristocracy, separated from their parents, and trained for many years at the best schools, with the best teachers, before undergoing a lengthy apprenticeship of military and then political leadership. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The guardians should be motivated by the highest ideals, and should not take any pay or compensation for their leadership. The political unit would ideally be the relatively small city-state, much less complex than contemporary nation-states throughout the World. Certain key ideas about human nature, which are asserted by theorist, commonly refer to assertions about what is universal or invariant among all peoples. Some theorists have a very dismal or negative view of human nature. Perhaps British philosopher Thomas Hobbes is the best exemplar of this negative view. Hobbes thought that human beings were very competitive, aggressive, and potentially violent with all of their fellow human beings, and with this reading of human nature he proposed a strong central state to control the potentially aggressive and unruly behaviours of its citizens. The eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau expresses a much different view of human nature, one founded on self-love and thus potential love for others, so he envisioned a more cooperative and less repressive state power to regulate the activities of citizens. So these highly abstract, or philosophical, ideas about human nature are embedded in the theorist’s concepts of the ideal, or just, society. Do human beings even have a nature? It is a loving and cooperative nature or a selfish, aggressive, and potentially violent one? #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Do men and women share the same “human nature”? Do people from different cultures have the same human nature? Do individuals have the same nature through the life cycle, or does one’s nature change from infancy to childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to parenthood to old age? What are the implications of human nature? Does it mean that a society or culture should be founded upon these ideas in such a manner so as to be consistent with them? Or does it mean that human nature is something to be changed by the society? Can all or part of human nature be changed by education? Many philosophers believe that education and political leadership are institutions that can lead all citizens to accept their proper role in a peaceful and harmonious social order. What do we owe other persons in our life, including friends, siblings, spouses, children, other family members, strangers, international visitors, and other community members? How are we to act toward these other individuals, and how should we regard them? Do we have an obligation to accept the values and moral norms of our own family-of-origin, which in some cultures might include killing a family member who challenged the “honor” of the family? Are we obligated to follow our own cultural laws and norms, even when these differ from more universal ideas about human rights? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Should our behaviour be different in public settings (where people of different values, cultures, sexual preferences, religions, ethnicities come to do their common business) as opposed to private settings or situations? How should men act toward other men, women, and vice versa? How as should we act toward individuals who are members of historically oppressed or stigmatized groups? How should we express or regulate our emotions and the complex personhood with so many diverse and cross-cutting boundaries? These issues may not involve the larger issues of state and legal institutions, but they influence how we will experience our daily lives, and thus how we routinely experience justice or its opposite. What is the best type of government? Is democracy the best? Why? Should citizens have absolute rights which have to be legally protected by the states? If so, what right? What should happen to the state when they fail to protect the rights of the citizens? What are the prerogatives and limitations of government? What should be the laws, and how should these be decided? How should they be protected? How can they be changed? Who should be the leaders, and what should be their qualifications? What should be the appropriate span of the government for the national, state, regional, and local levels? #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Should the state protect the rights of underrepresented groups, or should there be rule by the majority? How much power should be given to regulate authorities? How should the government be involved in the promotion or regulation of private business activities? These re only a few of the many important questions and issues about governance, and we can see many others raised in the run-up to the 202 national elections. How can the origins of human nature be deconstructed in order to make sense of the World we live in? The most common debate around human nature is structured between two principles: first, that human nature is equal and neutral, without moral judgments; and second, that human nature is inherently self-interested. Human nature is a state of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal and each human has the liberty to dispose of one’s person or possessions; however, all of humankind is equal and independent, no one ought to hard life, healthy, liberty or possession because we are all the property of God. Humans have these for innate feelings, the feeling of distress (at the suffering of others) is the first sign of Humanity. This feeling of shame and disgrace is the first sign of Justice. This feeling of deference to others is the first sign of propriety. This sense of right and wrong is just the first sign of wisdom. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

There is a common liberty (which) results from the nature of humans…and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. For such a thing is nature of human, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: for they see their own wit at hand, and other human’s at a distance. Human nature is a is humankind’s soul whereas the intellect apprehends existence absolutely, and for all time; so that everything that has an intellect naturally desires always to exist. However, natural desire cannot be in vain. Therefore, every intellectual substance is incorruptible. Self-denial is a term used to summarize the entire Christian life. Self-denial must never be confused with self-rejection; nor is it to be thought of as a painful and strenuous act, perhaps repeated from time to time against great internal resistance. It is, rather, an overall, settled condition of life in the kingdom of God, better described as “death to self.” In this and in this alone is possessed the key to the soul’s restoration. Christian spiritual formation rests on this indispensable foundation of death to self and cannot proceed except insofar as that foundation is being firmly laid and sustained. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

However, what is this self-denial or death to self, which goes hand in hard with restoration of the soul and eventually the whole person? At first it sounds like some dreadfully negative thing that aims to annihilate us. And frankly, from the point of view of the ruined soul, self-denial is and will always been every bit as brutal as it seems to most people on first approach. The ruined life about which most people complain so much anyway. “Those who have found their life (soul) shall lose it,” Jesus said, “while those who have lost their life (soul) for my sake shall find it,” reports Matthew 10.39. And again, “Whoever aims to save their life shall lose it, but whoever loses their life for my shake shall find it. For what have you gained by possessing the entire World if in the process you forfeit your life (soul)—lose yourself. What would you trade your very soul for?” reports Matthew 16.25-26, also Mark 8.35-36; Luke 9.24-25. We must always remember, in hearing these words of Jesus about the worth of the soul, that the art of the great teacher is to put things in ways you will remember even if you do not yet understand them. In that way you can keep working on them (and they on you) until you do understand them. Jesus is the master teacher of the human race, and he teaches accordingly. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

As we have, I think, an intuitive sense that he is right about the worth of the soul. A German soldier fighting in the trenches along France’s Marne river in World War I, where one million soldiers died on the Western front in 1914, wrote home: “What is the good of escaping all the bullet and shells if my soul is injured.” Some losses are so great that nothing on Earth can make recompense for them. “And after this manner did the Holy Ghost manifest the word of God unto me; wherefore, my beloved son, I know that it is solemn mockery before God, that ye should baptize little children. Behold I say unto you that this thing shall ye teach—repentance and baptism unto those who are accountable and capable of committing sin; yea, teach parents that they must repent and be baptized, and humble themselves as their little children, and they shall all be saved with their little children. And their little children need no repentance, neither baptism. Behold, baptism is unto repentance to fulfilling the commandments unto the remission of sins. However, little children are alive in Christ, even from the foundation of the World; if not so, God is a partial God, and also a changeable God, and a respecter to persons; for how many little children have died without baptism!” reports Moroni 8.9-12. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Thou hast healed our wounds, O Lord, by the wounds of Thine Only-begotten Son. What then shall we do now that we have been bought with so great a price? how shall we serve such a Lord, by Whom liberty is promised and an inheritance is offered to us? Work in us, O Lord, what may please Thee; that we may possess Thee, do Thou possess us. We will not go back from Thee; Thou wilt let us live, and we will call upon Thy Name. My Father, I could never have sought my happiness in thy love, unless thou had’st first loved me. Thy Spirit has encouraged me by grace to seek thee, has made known to me thy reconciliation in Jesus, has taught me to believe it, has helped me to take thee for my God and portion. May he grant me to grow in the knowledge and experience of thy love, and walk in it all the way to glory. Blessed for ever be thy fatherly affection, which chose me to be one of thy children by faith in Jesus: I thank thee for giving me the desire to live as such. In Jesus, my brother, I have my new birth, every restraining power, every renewing grace. It is by thy Spirit I call thee Father, believe in thee, love thee; strengthen me inwardly for every purpose of my Christian life; let the Spirit continually reveal to me my interest in Christ, and open to me the riches of they love in him. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

By thy Spirit may I daily live to thee, rejoice in thy love, find it the same to me as to thy Son, and become rooted and grounded in it as a house on rock; I know but little—increase my knowledge of thy love in Jesus, keep me pressing forward for clearer discoveries of it, so that I may find its eternal fullness; magnify thy love to me according to its greatness, and not according to my deserts or prayers, and whatever increase thou givest, et it draw out greater love to thee. Deliver us from evil, and confirm us in Thy fear and in good works, O Trinity, our God, Who art blessed, and dost live, and govern all things, World without end. O God, Who by the prophet’s voice doest pronounce those blessed that fear Thee; grant us to render an acceptable obedience in Thy fear, and make us hence forth to walk in Thy ways; and let our work under Thy direction be pleasing in Thy sight, and its fruit be sweet in the day of reward. Almighty and everlasting God, Who resistest the proud, and givest grace to the humble; grant, we beseech Thee, that we may not exalt ourselves and provoke Thine indignation, but bow down and receive the gifts of Thy mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. I hold that if the Almighty had ever made a set of people that should do all the eating and none of the work, He would have made them with mouths only and no hands. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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