Supermarkets are all right, but it is much more fun to shop for food in nature. Here, again, we are already moving in the predictable direction, as a glance at air travel demonstrates. Once flying was simply a matter of getting from here to there. Before long, the airlines began to compete on the basis of pretty stewardesses, gourmet food, luxurious surroundings, cocktails, and in-flight entertainment. Americans Airlines, in the past, carried this process one step further by offering what it called “International accent” flights between major American cities. The American Airlines passengers were able to choose a jet on which the food, the music, the magazines, the movies, and the stewardess’ miniskirt were all French. One could choose a “Roman” flight on which the women wore togas. One could have opted for a “Manhattan Penthouse” flight. Or one could have selected the “Olde English” flight on which the women were called “serving wenches” and the décor supposedly suggest that of an English pub. It is clear that American Airlines is no longer selling transportation, as such, but a carefully designed psychological package as well. We can expect the airlines before long to make use of lights and multi-media projections to create total, but temporary, environments providing the passenger with something approaching a theatrical experience. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

The experience may, in fact, soon go beyond theater. The experience was expected to go beyond theater. British Airways once considered pointing a wavering finger at the future when it announced a plan to provide unmarried American male passengers with “scientifically chose” blind dates in London. In the event the computer-selected date failed to show up, an alternate would be provided. Moreover, a party would be arranged to which “several additional Londoners of both genders of varying ages” would be invited so that the traveler, who would also be given a tour of discotheques and restaurants, would under no circumstances be alone. The program, called “The Beautiful Singles of London,” was abruptly called off when the government-owned airline came under Parliamentary criticism. Nevertheless, we can anticipate further colourful attempts to paint a psychic coating on many consumer service fields, including retail. Anyone who has strolled through Newport Center, once an incredibly lavish new shopping plaza in Newport Beach, California, could not fail to be impressed by the attention paid by its designers to aesthetic and psychological factors. Tall white arches and columns outlined against a blue sky, fountains, statues, carefully planned illumination, a pop art playground, and an enormous Japanese wind-bell were all used to create a mood of casual elegance for the shopper. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

It was not merely the affluence of the surroundings, but their programmed pleasantness that made shopping there a quite memorable experience. Once could anticipate fantastic variations and elaborations of the same principles in the planning of retail stores in the future. We shall go far beyond any “functional” necessity, turning the service, whether it is shopping, dining, or having one’s haircut, into a pre-fabricated experience. People are not paying big money to eat in dirty plastic tents in the streets, they want the ambiance of dining in luxury that will make the meal worth the cost. We shall watch movies or listen to chamber music as we have or haircut, and the mechanical bowl that fits over the skull of a woman in the beauty parlor will do more than simply dry her hair. By directing electronic waves to her brain, it may, quite literally, tickle her fancy. Bankers and brokers, real estate and insurance companies will employ the most carefully chosen décor, music, closed circuit colour television, engineered tastes and smells, along with the most advanced mixed-media equipment to heighten (or neutralize) the psychological change that accompanies even the most routine transaction. No important service will be offered to the consumer before it has been analyzed by teams of behavioural engineers to improve its psychic loading. Reaching beyond these simple elaborations of the present, we shall also witness a revolutionary expansion of certain industries whose sole output consists not of manufacture goods, nor even of ordinary services, but of pre-programmed “experiences.” The experience industry could turn out to be one of the pillars of super-age of informationalism, the very foundation, in fact, of the post-service economy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

As rising affluence and transience ruthlessly undercut the old urge to possess, consumers begin to collect experiences as consciously and passionately as they once collected things. Today, as the airline example suggests, experiences are sold as an adjunct to some more traditional services. The experience is, so to speak, the frosting on the cake. As we advance into the future, however, more and more experiences will be sold strictly on their own merits, exactly as if they were things. Precisely this is beginning to happen, in fact. This accounts for the high growth rate visible in certain industries that have always been, at least partly, engaged in the production of experiences for their own sake. The arts are a good example. Much of the “culture industry” is devoted to the certation or staging of specialized psychological experiences. Today we find art-based “experience industries” booming in virtually all the techno-societies. The same is true of recreation, mass entertainment, education, and certain psychiatric services, all of which participate in what might be called experiential production. When Club Mediterrancee used to sell a package holiday that took a young French secretary to Tahiti or Israel for a week or two of sun and pleasures of the flesh, it was manufacturing an experience for one quite as carefully and systematically as Bayerische Motoren Werke AG Ultimate Driving Machines. Its advertisements underscore the point. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Thus a two-page spread in The New York Times Magazine began with the headline: “Take 300 men and women. Strand them on an exotic island. And strip them of every social pressure.” Based in France, Club Mediterranee now operates over seventy-four vacation “villages” in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, North America, Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, Asia, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. Similarly, when the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, offers weekend seminars in “body-awareness’ and “non-verbal communication” at $730 per person, or seven-day workshops starting at $900 and costs $1,700 per person for a couple in a private room, it promises not to simply teach, but to plunge its affluent customers into “joyous” new interpersonal experiences—a phrase some readers take to mean adventures deeper spiritual possibilities that will enlighten them and open gateways to change. Group therapy and sensitivity training sessions are packaged experiences. So are certain classes. Thus, going to an Arthur Murray or Fred Astaire studio to learn the latest dance step may provide the student with a skill that will bring enjoyment in the future, but it also provides a pleasurable here-and-now experience for the lonely bachelor or spinster. The learning experience, itself, is a major attraction for the customer. All these, however, provide only the palest clue as to the nature of the experience industry of the future and the great psychological corporations, or psychcorps, that will dominate it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

They that deny God destroy human’s nobility; for certainly, humans are akin to the beast by one’s body; and if one be not of kin to God by one’s spirit, one is a base and ignoble creature. In Aleksandr Solzhenisyn’s masterful novel The Cancer Ward, a young cancerous political prisoner named Oleg finds momentary escape from the hospital’s horrors in an attractive nurse, Zoya. One day Oleg volunteers to help Zoya with her reports. Reading from patient records, Oleg notices hardly any deaths in the hospital. “I see they do not allow them to die here,” he says. “They manage to discharge them in time.” “What else can they do?” responds Zoya. “Judge for yourself. If it is obvious a patient is beyond help and there is nothing left for him but to live out the few last weeks or months, why should he take up a bed? People who could be cured are kept waiting.” Days later, one of Oleg’s gravely ill friends is told he is being released from the hospital. The man struggles to dress, weakly bids adieu to his comrades, and sets out for the streets. The best he can hope for is an empty bench where he can lie down and wait to die. This account may be cruel, but it is not illogical. The Soviet system is committed to the eradication of any vital practice of religion. God is officially dead there. However, the death of God ultimately spells the death of what it means to be truly human. For it worth is not God-given, it must be established by man. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

And atheistic philosophies, such as the Soviet system, treat humans as an object whose value is determined solely by one’s usefulness to society. Why not, then, subject one to whatever will achieve the government’s objectives: oppression, torture, genocide? In utilitarian terms, sending terminal patients out to die is not inhumane, but eminently sensible. Why waste a bed on someone who will not survive? Now contrast The Cancer Ward with the Winchester Clinic of the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, that Mrs. Winchester left a substantial sum of cash to, in memory of William Wirt Winchester, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. This faithful heiress has provided shelter and help for those patients some of who are treatable and suffering or dying in pain, afraid, and alone. Sometimes she is criticized: “Why care for those who are doomed anyway?” But she explains, “They are created by God; they deserve to die with dignity.” Christianity can never be utilitarian; it holds every human being as precious because human beings are created in the image of God. To understand the unique nature of this Judeo-Christian view, we need only compare the ancient Hebrew law codes in the Old Testament with, say, the Assyrian laws of Hammurabi, another Middle Eastern legal code from the same period.  #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

 Historian Paul Johnson has noted that the Assyrian code made the rights of property ultimate, while “the Hebrew [laws] emphasized the essential rights and obligations of man and their laws were framed with deliberate respect for moral values.” Jesus continued—and expanded—the Old Testament law. He constantly affirmed the dignity and worth of the lowest member of first-century society—women, children, Gentiles, tax-collectors, lepers. Today’s calmour for human rights is ironic. Much of the activism emanates from those who claim no belief in God. However, consider what many who have had a major influence on modern thinking believed. Karl Marx, for example, thought humans a victim of economic forces. Dr. Sigmund Freud believed all was lost in the dark web of the psyche. Dr. B.F. Skinner insisted that freedom was an illusion and dignity a lost case. More extreme philosophers get downright angry at the snobbery of specialists—those of us who see humans as the highest species—and assert that humans enjoy no special standing in the Universe. We can no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form of creation, singled out from all other animals, and alone possessing a soul. We must learn from Jesus Christ and even love our planet and animal neighbour’s as ourselves. Although we may continue to see normal members of our species as possessing greater capacities…than members of any other species; but we will not regard as sacrosanct the life of each and every member of our species. Species membership alone is not morally relevant. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

In this light, human dignity and human rights are tenuous assertions. If humans are merely a fortuitous collection of molecules in a meaningless cosmos, why should they have any inhere rights? Humans build their kingdoms in accord with their concept of God. The rise of atheism in the twenty-first century has thus provided unlimited license for tyrants. If there is no morally binding standard above the state, becomes god and human beings mere beasts of bureaucratic burden. A government cannot be truly just without affirming the intrinsic value of human life. The Judeo-Christian ethic does more than affirm human dignity, however; it also insists that we are inclined to do evil. Humans are more than a beast, but they are not angels. This dual nature is not properly understood apart from what theologians called original sin. No modern parable portrays human’s sinful nature more powerfully than Nobel prize-winning author William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies, in which a planeload of English schoolboys is wrecked on a tropical island. Good British subjects that they are, they attempt to organize themselves into an orderly society while awaiting rescue. However, darker urges soon grip the boys. The veneer of civilization melts away, and many of them revert to savagery, first as a game, then in deadly earnest. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

One of the wounds a boar. Suddenly, “the desire to squeeze and hurt was overmastering.” Soon the boys are chanting with ritualistic fevour, “Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Bash him in!” A sow is caught and killed in a primitive sacrifice, the head cut off and placed on a post, allegedly to assuage the “beast” some of the boys have encountered. Great black and iridescent green files buzz insistently around the severed head. The boys’ “chieftain” giggles as he rubs his bloodied hands n the next boy’s face. The young savages soon turn on a fat, asthmatic, bespectacled lad nicknamed Piggy, who retains more civility than they care to have on their island. “Which is better,” Piggy asks plaintively as they advance on him, “to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?” Moments later, Piggy is knocked off a cliff. His skull cracks open, his arms and legs twitching. Eventually the pounding waves suck his body into the sea. Piggy’s friend Ralph collapses in a spasm of grief. “With filthy body, mattered hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of the man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise, friend called Piggy.” Later, when the group is rescued, a shocked naval officer asks how such savagery could have happened. “I should have thought that a pack of British boys—your are all British, are you not?—would have been able to put up a better show than that—I mean.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Civilization, empire, education, all of the trappings of human progress had clothed these young innocents. Now, their faces smeared with blood, their consciences apparently inoperative, they bear the guilt of death of two playmates. When William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, the Swedish Academy declared that his novels “illuminate the human condition in the World today.” They reflect as well what Golding described as “an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system, however apparently logical or respectable.” Golding’s views sound grimly anachronistic in a culture constantly heralding human’s ability to achieve utopia through modern science, education, and technology. This notion was given impetus by, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Enlightenment writer who insisted the human misery was rooted in the structures of society. Change the structures and you can the man, he said. Rousseau looked to primitive human experience as a rosy time of innocence free of socially induced vices. From the beginning of human’s history, however, we see not guilelessness, but betrayal and evil. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

After the account of the Garden of Eden the Bible tells the story of the first four people on the planet—and before long, one of them killed his brother. This murder was committed long before the urban blight and social deprivations. There were—and are—no noble savages. Human nature has not changed since Cain. This is vividly illustrated in the memoirs of Cuban poet Armando Valladares, Against All Hope, in which he recounts his twenty-two-year imprisonment by Fidel Castro for speaking out “against Communism because it went against my religious beliefs and some of my more idealistic notions of the World.” For such treason, Valladares was thrown into the human-made hell of a Cuban prison. He was given showers of human urine and excrement by sadistic guards. During an escape attempt he broke three bones in his legal and was captured and brought back to his cell. “Guards stripped us again,” he writes. “They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. Suddenly, everything was a whirl—my head spun around in terrible vertigo…The beatings felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then I suddenly experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

One cannot read this and explain the torture, the sadism, and the evil only in terms of godless political systems. The problem is human nature. The only progress between Cain and the Communist jailers of Armando Valladares has bee the technological sophistication of cruelty. Given the wealth of such examples today, why is it so difficult for modern humans to acknowledge the inherent evil in the human heart? Why is sin an outmoded term, used only by Bible-thumping preachers, born-again zealots, or the titillating covers of paperback thrillers? The core of sadism is s passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being, whether an animal, a child, a man, or a woman. To force someone to endure pain or humiliation without being able to defend oneself is one of the manifestations of absolute control, but it is by no means the only one. The person who has complete control over another living being makes this being into one’s thing, one’s property, while one becomes the other being’s god. Sometimes the control can even be helpful, and in that case we might speak of a benevolent sadism, such as one finds in instances where one persons rules another for the other’s own good, and in fact furthers one in many ways, expect that one keeps holding one in bondage. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

However, most sadism is malevolent and orthodox psychoanalysis claims that there is a particular aspect of sexuality common in all forms of sadism. That it somehow arouses tyrants sexually to terrorize their victims. Complete control over another human being means crippling one, strangling one, thwarting one. Such control can have all forms and all degrees. Albert Camus’s play, Caligula, provides an example of an extreme type of sadistic control which amounts to a desire for omnipotence. We see how Caligula, brought by circumstances to a position of unlimited power, gets ever-more deeply involved in the craving for power. He sleeps with the wives of the senators and enjoys their humiliation when they have to act like admiring and fawning friends. He kills some of them, and those that remain have to smile and joke. However, even all this power does not satisfy him; he wants absolute power, he wants the impossible. As Camus has him say, “I want the moon.” It is easy enough to say that Caligula is mad, but his madness is a way of life; it is one solution of the problem of human existence, because it serves the illusion of omnipotence, of transcending the frontiers of human existence. In the process of trying to win absolute power Caligula lost all contact with humans. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Caligula became an outcast by casting them out; he had to become mad because, when the bid for omnipotence failed, he was left a lonely, important individual. The case of Caligula is of course exceptional. Few people ever have the chance to attain so much power that they can seduce themselves into the delusion that it might be absolute. However, some have existed throughout history, up to our time; if they are defeated, they are considered mad-humans or criminals. This extreme solution to the problem of human existence is barred to the average person. Yet in most social systems, including our, even those on lower social levels can have control over somebody who is subject to their power. There are always children, wives, or dogs available; or there are helpless people, such as inmates of prisons, patients in hospitals, if they are not well-to-do (especially the mentally sick), pupils in schools, members of civilian bureaucracies. It depends on the social structure to what degree the factual power of superiors in each of these instances is controlled or restricted and, hence, how much possibility for sadistic satisfactions these situations offer. Aside from all these situations, religious and racially marginalized groups, as far as they are powerless, offer a vast opportunity for sadistic satisfaction for even the poorest of the majority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Sadism is one of the answers to the problem of being born human when better ones are not attainable. The experience of absolute control over another being, of omnipotence as far as one, or it is concerned, creates the illusion of transcending the limitations of human existence, particularly for one whose real life is deprived of productivity and joy. Sadism has essentially no particular aim; it is not trivial but not devotional. It is the transformation of importance into the experience of omnipotence; it is the religion of psychical cripples. The misreading of the nature of human beings has resulted in the denial of personal responsibility, and is institutionalized into various social reforms; these contributed markedly to the social pathologies of American inner cities. What many of these reforms shared (in varying ways and degrees) was an assumption that people are not in control of their own behaviour and should not properly be held responsible for the consequences of their actions. The economic system is to blame; the social environment is to blame; perhaps accidents and conceivably genetics are to blame. However, there is some truth to that. If people are not raised properly and not taught right from wrong, they may not know what decisions to make. If people are born with intellectual disabilities, they may not know what is correct behaviour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

If people are oppressed by corruption, they may not have any choice but to become a criminal to survive. If politicians and their families are not held accountable by laws, they may continue down the path of evil and sin and keep hurting people because they can get away with it and think it is fun. So, there are factors in society that can contribute to corruption and sin in humans. It can be because they do not know better, or they never face civil and legal consequences for their actions. Any effort to encourage individual initiative and responsibility among America’s politicians and urban poor was derided as “blaming the victim.” Blaming the system rather than the “victim” further eradicated individual responsibility and dignity. However, the elimination of individual responsibility has encouraged the corresponding utopian belief in human’s collective perfectibility. While Christian teaching emphasizes that each person has worth and responsibility before God, utopianism argues that salvation can only be achieved collectively. Utopianism always spells disaster because the utopian holds that if the goal is goodness and perfection, then the use of force is justified. In contrast, the Christian realization that perfection eludes us in this life resists the tyranny and bloodshed of the dictator who promises a brave new World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Thus, twenty-first century men and woman have inherited a stark dilemma. With God dead or ill, they are stripped of their source of dignity and reduced to sophisticated beasts. At the same time, society denies individual sin, blaming all social ills on environment, and illogically assumes human perfectibility. Both propositions run counter to the evidence of history. Humans are neither ape nor angel. Deep down inside, humans know they are created. They desperately long to know the Power beyond us and discover a transcendent purpose for living. That is why Mrs. Winchester conducted mystic meetings with the spirits in her famous Blue Séance Room. We long as well to shed the guilt of sin, to be free people, forgiven in the sight of the God we know is there. Many search for God through bizarre spiritual journeys, attested to by the popularity of religion and tabloid psychics, reincarnation, Beverly Hills spiritual gurus, crystals, cosmic energy and symbols, seaweed, and channeling. Such contraband only intensify desire to seek contact with God and Jesus and the spiritual World. The occult is a question to discover more than the material World. Modern men and women do not want to be left to thrash about in darkness while the World worships the fake news industry and their favourite tool, politicians, as gods. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

The fake news media and politicians will only lead us to a journey that ends gruesomely and shockingly, like the piles of bones at Jonestown. The people’s frustration inevitably deepens into despair. For some, like Hemingway, who accept the logic of this age, the despair turns to tragedy; for millions of others, it fosters a brooding sense of alienation and helplessness. And so we come full circle, back to where we began. For it is this pervasive sense of impotence that has paved the way for the emergence of political saviours and the all-powerful state that promise salvation through changed structures. Before we discuss our future further, we must pray. Your arms are strong, Father; they can hug a child or restrain one from harm. Please wrap them around this planet Earth and all of your children and please heal us and protect us from harm. Please give us a sign that you are alive and love you human children. We trust You to know what is needed. The children of America shall keep the Sabbath and observe it throughout their generations as an everlasting covenant. It is a sign between our Heavenly Father and the children of American forever; for in six days the Lord made Heaven and Earth, and on the seventh day He ceased from work and rested. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the desirable of days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

The Mansion Designed by Spirits

San Jose, California

California Historical Landmark Number 868

During a Connecticut thunder storm, Mrs. Winchester’s husband and baby lost their lives in a tragic fire. Foretelling her future, one seer warned her of all the countless spirits seeking her soul and to protect herself, she was told to plan a castle and continue its building indefinitely because as long as it I was under construction, she would live; cessation would prove immediately fatal. As the massive mansion was nearing completion, the Winchester House was the midnight rendezvous for legions of ghosts, with special attention accorded those created by a Winchester rifle slug.

Frightened by the death of Mrs. Winchester, the family sought to disappear from society and go into hiding because they did not want to bare the cruse, and the gatekeeper for the spirits was no longer around to protect the family from the spirits. Rumors have it that the Winchester family died out, but others say they simply went into hiding and do not want to be found. Legends have it that they have other castles around the World, in hope of never being discovered.  It has been over three months since the doors of the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansion closed, and the spirits that walk these halls are just as restless as you are. The doors to the Winchester Mystery House are wide open once more!

Tickets on sale now! winchestermysteryhouse.com