Many of us think we want happiness out of life. However, happiness can be a distraction. With all the changes and challenges one faces each day, there has never been a greater need to take the time to determine one’s priorities, and then with renewed focus, align one’s daily actions with one’s purpose or goals. The hedonic treadmill (also known as hedonic adaption) is a theory positing that people repeatedly return to their baseline level of happiness, regardless of what happens to them. This is dew to the law of diminishing returns. It is an economic law stating that if one input in the production of a commodity is increased while all other inputs are held fixed, a point will eventually be reached at which additions of the input yield progressively smaller, or diminishing, increased of output. Since these conveniences by becoming habitual had almost entirely ceased to be enjoyable, and at the same time degenerated into true need, it becomes much more cruel to de deprived of them than to possess them was sweet, and when humans were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them. Studies have shown that our circumstances do not account for most of our happiness. Each person has a happiness set point, which refers to one’s genetically determined predisposition for happiness. This set point for happiness is responsible for about 50 percent of the difference in happiness from person to person. There is an enabling power from God that allows mortals to obtain a blessing in this life to gain eternal life and exaltation after they have exercised faith, repented, and given their best effort to keep the commandments. Such divine help or strength is given through the mercy and love of God. Every mortal person needs divine grace because of Adam’s Fall and also because of the weakness of human beings. The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

When discussing primeval lakes, which are giant precursors of living organisms, we must start by considering the phenomenon of catalysis. The phenomenon was first observed in 1822 by the German chemist J. W. Dobereiner. He even incorporated his discovery in a working device—a kind of automatic lighter—in which a jet of hydrogen would start to burn in air without the intervention of a spark or match. All that was necessary, he found, was to direct the unlighted jet against a surface covered with powdered platinum metal. For some reason, mysterious to Dobereiner and his contemporaries, this caused the hydrogen to ignite, that is, to combine spontaneously with the oxygen of the air, which it would not do at room temperature in the absence of the catalyst, platinum. Since Dobereiner’s discovery, many substances that catalyze specific chemical reactions have been found. The presence of powdered platinum, nickel, or iron oxide in the reaction chamber is essential in one stage of the preparation of commercial sulfuric acid if the process is to take place at more than a snail’s pace. Copper chromite, vanadium pentoxide, and manganese dioxide also serve as important catalysts in the chemical industry. In fact, much of the success of many industrial chemical processes depends on finding just the right catalyst for the reaction involved. What does the catalyst do? Well, one thing it does not do is get used up or chemically changed in the reaction it promotes. The same amount of catalytic material, possessing exactly the same molecular configuration, remains at the end of the process as entered the reaction chamber. This is quite different from the result of stimulating a chemical rection by the kind of energy-rich substance we have previously referred to. Such energy contributing molecules do not emerge unscathed from the chemical reactions in which they participate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Instead, their molecular structure changes under the influence of the forces set up during the reaction; it is in this way that they provide the additional energy needed to push or pull the atoms of the reacting molecules into their new configurations. However, catalysts do not contribute energy to the reacting ingredients; unless suitable energy balance is provided by other means, catalysts are powerless to act. In fact, the catalyst appears not to make possible any chemical reactions that cannot occur in its absence—it just speeds them up. Consider Dobereiner’s experiment, for example. In a mixture of hydrogen gas and air at room temperature there will be an occasional combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms (to form a water molecule), but this does not happen often enough to produce the bulk heating of the mixed gasses necessary to sustain combustion. In the presence of platinum, the combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms proceeds so much more rapidly that the gas heats up and bursts into flame. Much of the mystery that once surrounded the phenomenon of catalysis has been solved. We now know that the catalyst produces its effect by causing the molecules of the reacting ingredients to come into a form of contact with each other possessing a degree of atomic intimacy and precise orientation that would only rarely be achieved in the random, undirected encounters among these molecules in uncatalyzed reactions. In Dobereiner’s experiment, for example, hydrogen and oxygen are “adsorbed” onto the surface of the platinum—that is, the interaction of their electric charges with those of the metal is such as to bind the gaseous atoms lightly to the platinum surface. The redistribution of the electric charge of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms resulting from the surface binging turns out to be such nature as to make it easy far adjacent bound atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to slide together in an intimate configuration that would normally be difficult to achieve because of the shielding effect of the usual arrangement of their extranuclear charge. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Once one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms come together on the surface in this way, very strong forces of electrical interaction among them cause further rearrangement of their charge into the stable configuration characteristic of the water molecule. In this process the relatively small interaction forces between adsorbed atoms come together on the surface in this way, very strong forces of electrical interaction among atom cause further rearrangement of their charge into the stable configuration characteristic of the water molecule. In this process the relatively small interaction forces between adsorbed atoms and platinum are broken, and the new molecule of water escapes from the metal surface, which is then available to perform the same marriage ceremony for the next hydrogen/oxygen arrivals. In the example given, the catalyst promoted the combination of simpler into more complex chemical forms. Just as frequently, however, catalytic action encourages the breakdown of complex molecules into simpler ones. Iron, for example, will catalyze the reduction of hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, into water and oxygen. The particular reaction that will occur in any specific situation depends on the details of the interaction among catalyst and starting ingredients and on the workings of the physical laws of chemistry which determine the relative probabilities for the various possible molecular configurations. It is appropriate at this point to return to our primeval pools and relate what we have learned about catalytic activity to their chemical development. In and among the clays and sands of the lake bottoms it would be natural for some catalytically active metal ores and compounds to be occasionally exposed. Depending upon the specific nature of these materials, one or another class of possible chemical transformation would be selectively encouraged. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Because a tiny amount of catalytic material can have a large effect on the speed of a reaction, appreciable contributions to the individuality of behavior of the various pools could result from differences in their catalytic ingredients to small as to be easily overlooked in a not-too-sophisticated survey of the “starting conditions” in the pools. This is part of the explanation for the temperamental performance we are investigating. For if we eliminate the cases of individuality attributable to inorganic catalysts in the lake beds, we find much more uniformity than before in the chemical behaviour of our primordial pools. Nevertheless, some of the most dramatic exceptions to regularity in behaviour still persists. A mystery remains to be explained. Having achieved partial success in accounting for seemingly erratic chemical behaviour by recourse to the peculiarly powerful effects of catalysis, let us now look more deeply into this phenomenon in search of additional factors that might have an unsuspected influence on early chemical activity. A clue is provided by modern evidences for the unusual effectiveness of catalysts when they are incorporated in organic compounds. For reasons that are only partly understood, integration into an organic configuration frequently enhances tremendously the efficacy of a simply catalytic substance. It has already been mentioned, for example, that iron catalyzes the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen. However, if the iron is first incorporated in the compound catalase, in which it is chemically combined with a suitable protein and porphyrin, another organic substance that occurs frequently in plants and animals, its catalytic effect for the hydrogen peroxide transformation is multiplied 10 billion times! It is unlikely that large amounts of highly efficient catalysts were present in the primordial pools. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

However, it seems probable that, in the random, undirected combination of the available molecular components, occasionally a configuration that resulted served as a relatively effective catalyst for a specific mode of linking of some of the other components floating around in the pool. Each such accidentally formed catalytic molecule would then have a sizable multiplying effect on the formation of the related substance. This would account for some sudden, though probably small, changes in the course of chemical developments in the pool. However, even more interesting results would occasionally appear. For suppose that the accidentally formed catalyst we are postulating promotes a chemical reaction whose products include more of the catalyst itself (autocatalysis). The result would be a chain reaction. A small amount of catalyst A would encourage a small amount of the available raw materials to react, yielding a small amount of product B and some more A. The increased quantity of catalyst A would cause a second similar, but more extensive reaction. Still more A would lead to still larger reactions, etcetera. Increases in the rates of formation of A and B by factors of millions or billions could easily ensue. In an efficient autocatalytic chain reaction, the runway acceleration of the chemical activity would probably be limited only by exhaustion of one of the raw materials. Thus, in a few days, weeks, or months (even unlimited amounts of the most efficient catalyst would not necessarily produce more rapid, “explosive” reactions. If, as in the processes of most interest to us, energy must be supplied to sustain the reaction, its availability would probably pace the activity. This would be especially likely if the principal source of energy were random thermal interactions with surrounding molecules.), rather than in the centuries usually required for major changes in the chemical activity of a primordial pool, an apparently brand-new characteristic of the pool could appear, whereby specific types of molecules would thenceforth be formed practically instantaneously (in geologic terms, at least) to the extent permitted by the availability of the necessary raw materials. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The essential idea is that substance A may catalyze the formation of substance B, which then enters into reactions that rapidly synthesize products C, C’, and C”, for example. One of these, says C’, may be a catalyst for a reaction yielding substances D, D’, and D”. D”, then, may catalyze the formation of E, which finally reacts with available raw materials to produce A, completing the chain. The intermediate products may well include the constituents of carbohydrates, fats, oils, or nucleic acids, as well as inorganic molecules. In a particularly favourable autocatalytic chain, one of the intermediate reactions might even be of a photochemical nature, whereby a quantum of ultraviolent light excites one of the interacting molecules and permits the formation of energy-rich product. (Such photelectric effects are known to occur to facilitate many simple chemical reactions, and they should have been much more prevalent in primordial times when the absence of the shielding ozone layer permitted the sun’s high-energy ultraviolet rays to bombard the Earth’s surface.) By the participation in the reaction chain of such intermediate products, complex final products possessing a total energy content greater than that of the starting ingredients could be produced. Thus the autocatalytic principle possesses a range and versatility adequate to account for a wide variety of patterns of chemical activity in enclosed bodies of water. It was in such a manner that sudden and seemingly unpredictable individuality would have developed in the chemical “personalities” of the carious primeval pools. Of course, today’s scientist would emphasize the point that the diversity of chemical behaviour produced by autocatalysis was not fundamentally unpredictable but was instead a consequence of small differences in the starting conditions or previous histories of the pools. Such differences would then account for the sudden appearance, at some stage of development, of a particular kind of autocatalytic chain in one pool rather than in another. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

This kind of argument is, of course, sound in principle. However, the tremendously large multiplying factors involved in the chemical chain reactions, once started, mean that the differences in initial conditions responsible for substantial differences in the subsequent chemical development of two pools could be almost infinitesimal, lying well below the threshold of detection by “practical” techniques. A most rare and improbable event—the dropping from the sky of a single exotic particle or the fortuitous coming together in the pool of a number of molecules in a particular way that might not again occur in another million years—could get the process started. Thus, the kind of behaviour we are describing here would have seemed to unsophisticated human observers, if there had been any, as clear evidence of nonphysical, vitalistic purposiveness in the behaviour of the primordial pools. The stage we have reached in our narrative—characterized by large numbers of chemically active pools of warm water, each continually receiving supplies of simple organic compounds from the atmosphere, supplemented by inorganic gases and dissolved solids from the Earth, with some of the pools exhibiting remarkable efficiency in assembling these available ingredients into more complex organic molecules—represents the total accomplishment towards the development of life achieved during the first one of two billion years of the history of the newborn Earth. We still have a long way to go. In the next report, we will concern ourselves with the natural processes whereby the isolated pools of three of four billion years ago may have given birth to the progenitors of the living cells that ultimately became the principal architectural feature of plants and animals. Success is a journey, not a destination. Nothing in the World is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Athletes are—and always have—notorious for the lengths to which they will go to enhance their performance. Rigorous training, special dietary regimes, regulated sleeping patterns, performance-enhancing substances such as steroids—all have been integral parts of athletic training programs. Celibacy is another common feature of a sportsman’s discipline, necessary to avoid the debilitating consequences and wasteful emotions of pleasures of the flesh. (It may be a good idea for high school and college sports to try this, so players will not be distracted by broken hearts during the season.) Usually, its advocates promoted it as a way to store up precious vital energy, the vital bodily fluid that determinedly chaste men could transform into a God-given, performance-enhancing substance. This was true for the ancient Greeks, the Victorians, and the Cherokees, among others, and it remains true for Indian wrestlers and the footballer players, soccer stars, boxers, and other male athletes who prefer to stockpile their precious vital energy rather than yield it up in a single self-indulgent spasm. One might ask: is love also the ultimate principle for social ethics? And we must answer affirmatively, because the encounter of social groups is an encounter in which reunion of the separated is the telos, just as it is in the person-to-person encounter. However, there is a decisive difference. Social groups are power groups with no personal center. They have a changing organizational center in terms of their government. However, they have no personal center. This means that there are great differences in the way love is effective in social ethics. Any attempt to identify the problems of personal ethics and social ethics (as does legalistic pacificism, for example) ignores the reality of power in the social realm, and so confuses the organizational centeredness of historical group with the personal centeredness of a person. A discussion of the problems indicated by this statement requires the development of a philosophy of power. This we cannot do within the framework of the present study. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

The religious source of the moral demands is love under the domination of its agape quality, in unity with the imperative of justice to acknowledge every being with personal potential as a person, being guided by the divine-human wisdom embodied in the moral laws of the past, listening to the concrete situation, and acting courageously on the basis of these principles. Out of such decisions in the power of love, new insights would grow. And they might transform the given tables of laws into something more adequate for our situation as a whole as well as for innumerable individual situations. Should this occur, love as the ultimate principle of the moral demands would be powerfully vindicated. The completely moral life—that is, the meticulous observance of all of the rules—leads, for both the individual and the group, to a rigidity that falls increasingly at odds with a changing World. Yet boundary violations, if reckless—recklessness measurable, usually, only after the act and its consequences—destroy the individual and destroy the social order. The individual becomes an outlaw, the group becomes a mob. Well, then, how much? What is the rule to guide us in the judicious breaking of rules? What is the wise measure of violation? Pain is one thing. Not the worst thing. It is not even very important. Worse is to play it safe, never to risk everything for the one big thing that comes only once, that looms, for a moment only, and then is gone. Once and once only. There is just a moment when we can go for it, leap, spend it all; or be prudent, hang back, listen to the cautious voices around us, and see that one big thing disappear forever. The one big thing, that is the issue, to go for it or not. That one big thing—costing not less than everything—big enough maybe to justify a crime, our one chance to climb up and out of meaninglessness. Time is running out and I cannot see—but I dread—what lies beyond. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Am I really struggling toward a moral decision? Or am I scrambling for a credible begging of the question? What a fallible calculus this is, even to the most disinterested—and I am the most interested of all. Should I then disqualify myself, put it in the hands of a wise human? I distrust wise humans. Anyway I know I could control the outcome by knowing the leanings of the wise human in whose hands I would place it. (You see? I am a wise human myself.) Should I leave it to God? I am still building my faith in God. There is no escape from arbitrariness. In the hands of the most interested party lies the full responsibility for a disinterested decision. May God have mercy on those whose fate is in my hands. The ache of love, the unquenchable burning, one can feel it. It seeks union, will be satisfied by nothing less than everything. It will burn on and on within the human heart until one is left in ashes. The only cure is the waning of love that follows upon the fusion that love so insistently demands. Disorder rules our lives sometimes. We carry on, wander through the days like a sleepwalker. Years of longing, years of standing at the verge, inching closer. Vertigo. Dragged by desire, trying to stay the fall. Then one tries to reason one’s way out of a maze of guilt and longing. One stumbles in the dark, trying to find a way to live, knowing that anything one finds will be provisional, fallible, revocable, but knowing also there is nothing else for it unless one is willing to follow someone else’s rules. Duty, faithfulness, self-restraint, all admirable traits, but how is one to know whether biding by them bespeaks a free choice of the good or a conformity to the group driven by fear?  A caring for others or quaking at the consequences of pursuing self-interest? If we are too frightened to be bad, we would not wish our goodness to be recognized as issuing from cowardice, would derive it rather from love, courage, honour. One promises fidelity to a spouse. Is it every justified to violate that promise? When? In what circumstances? Or should one ask, rather, is it every justified, over the course of a lifetime, never to violate that promise? #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Moral rules are the tools the holders of power use to extend their power and subjugate everybody else from doing wrong; and the moral human defends, unwittingly, by way of one’s morality, the existing social order with its accrued and always increasing evils. Creative change in a society issues from violation great enough to alter the social structure, but not so great as to bring it down altogether. One wants a society of law that allows some laws to be ignored. It is those violations we let stand that organize the ongoing transformation of social structure. The observance of rules, with a wise measure of slippage, coupled with the violation of rules, with an ironic measure of prudence, created flexibility, strengthens the group, and thereby creates the possibility of nonviolent change in the social order. The luxury cruise is a bore but not an escape. Too much blue hair, too much high-pitched cackle straining from the lilt of youth, unknown or varying legal jurisdiction. The knifelike prow cuts through the dark water like a plow crossing an endless plain. A slow regular rise and fall, a steady furled-back ribbon. This furrow closes over, leaves no trace. The problem is in me, clings to me. No solution in sight. People nearby. Promenaders. Voices are lowered as they pass close to me. I do not turn from the rail, remain fixed on the dark water. Are they concerned by my posture, my trance? Do they wonder if I meditate a leap? Do I? Very deep here. Fathoms, fathoms, miles, the Marianas Trench, five miles of water straight down. I picture the deepening strata, the dolphin, the fish, the monsters, the leviathan, and on down. At five hundred feet the marlin, and on down where no light reaches and no life moves. Nothing. Nothing except some slimy, sightless, eyeless thing, and what sort of life is that? #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

And on down in eternal darkness to the final black bottom and nothing there except, perhaps, the rotting timbers of ancient shipwreck and, more modern mishap, the silent hull of a submarine with its entombed now-skeleton warriors, their bony hands on the controls of now-eternally-motionless torpedoes. The light around me fails, the water is black, a phosphorescent edge to the endless, transient furrow. Voices recede, die away. Nothing now but the rush of wind, and water. Without looking I know myself to be alone. No one would hear the splash. Or the cry. How cold would it be? How long would I last? When would I be missed? Why do I imagine this? What am I doing with these images? What is real? Am I watching flickering shadows on the wall of a cave? Are joys and sorrows but electrical currents in a network of brain cells? Is love real? The water. This dark water. That is real. And what is water? Something cold, wet, the embrace of death, the downward pull, the choking, the bursting lungs. However, someone else, some ghostlike other, standing beside me, looking down, seeing what I see, might say: “It is molecules of H2O: that is what it really is.” And if one’s interest were its chemistry, its boiling point, its dissolved salts, one would be right. And still different would be its reality for swimmers, or for a marine biologist. My interest is life—weary. Lovesick, lovesick. There is no real reality. The real from one perspective is illusion from another. Reality is made, not given. Atoms are no more final than fish, and melancholy yearning is as real as those sightless monsters in the remote depths below me. After a suicide attempt, most victims need medical care. Some are left with sever injuries, brain damage, or other medical problems. Once the physical damage is treated, psychotherapy or drug therapy may begin, on either an inpatient or outpatient basis. Unfortunately, even after trying to kill themselves, many suicidal people fail to receive systematic psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

In a random survey of several hundred teenagers, 9 percent were found to have made at least one suicide attempt, and of those, only half had received later psychological treatment. Similarly, in another study, one-third of adolescent attempter reported that they had not received any help after trying to end their lives. In some cases, health-care professionals are at fault. In others, the person who has attempted suicide refuses follow-up therapy. The goals of therapy are to keep people alive, help them achieve a nonsuicidal state of mind, and guide them to develop better ways of handling stress. Various therapies have been employed, including drug, psychodynamic, cognitive, group, and family therapies. Treatment appears to help. Studies have found that 30 percent of suicide attempters who do not receive treatment try again, compared with the 16 percent of patients in treatment. It is not clear, however, whether any one approach is more effective than others. Furthermore, there is little agreement in the sociology of delinquency. (This is because the concept itself is confused and so leads to confusing statistics.) However, one correlation that is generally agreed on is that: Juvenile delinquency, unlike adult crime, is more frequent in years of economic prosperity than in years of depression. Now, this would seem to contradict the other, and rather prima facie, theory of poverty as the important condition. The paradox is softened by pointing out that in prosperity there is more employment of women, more divorce, more money to buy drugs and liquor. These factors make sense, but let me raise some further considerations. First, there is the possibility that the prosperous well-paying jobs do not filter down evenly to the poorest groups, who tend much more to be unemployable. This certainly seems to be our situation today. Second, in a high-standard economy, there is a vast difference between having a little extra money and being accustomed to the well-paid standard. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

As our Manchester forefathers used to say, you do a disservice to the undeserving poor by giving them money, because they will get into trouble. Consider the concrete situations: Even if the parents re suddenly getting better pay, the young are getting merely a little extra spending money, and this, in a society in which there is suddenly a lot of money, must work out as follows: The underprivileged kids get around more and are exposed to the expensive glamour, but this is precisely not attainable by them unless they take short cuts. Meantime, those who have the new money are more careless with it: they leave their cars unlocked, buy pleasures of the flesh, drink too much. And the spiteful feeling is increased, that those who are better off are squares, enemies, and fair victims of the gang. In boom time, that is, there is effectually more exclusion than ordinarily. During depression, contrariwise, there is more community because many others are in the same boat. The street is occupied by kids used to other mores, to whom the gang values are pointless. This leads to friction, but also to other friendships and other “things to do.” However, above all, as everybody knows who was unemployed during the Great Depression, the recession of 2001 and 2010, and the current COVID pandemic, it is easier to be decently poor when prices are low and the pressure to maintain appearances is diminished. Things get nearer to a human scale and life makes more sense. Likewise, at such times political activity is more common, an education that increases self-esteem in a worthwhile way. This whole picture would be quite different if the underprivileged and somewhat unemployable families had a pretty good secure income over a long period. They would then be members of society at least as consumers, and would eventually become as employable as the average. Such a condition would at once diminish certain kinds of underprivileged delinquency, exempli gratia, thefts, malicious mischief, certain spiteful assaults, and maybe truancy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Simply to subsidize the poor might be the most cost-effective way of coping with their juvenile delinquency. To re-establish in general what one calls the social balance, there should be proposed a high long-time subsidy for all unemployed. This would not be inflationary, and the time director of price control for the Open Policy Agent (OPA) one should know. The popular bright idea to diminish delinquency is to penalize the parents; and perhaps the effective method would be, rather, to give them money to spend, a kind of prize! Third Wave governments and parliamentary institutions were designed to make decisions at a leisurely pace, suited to a World in which it might take a week for a message to travel from Boston or New York to Philadelphia before it is read. Today is an Ayatollah seizing hostages in Teheran or coughs in Qom, officials in Washington, Moscow, Paris, or London may have to respond with decisions within minutes. The extreme speed of change catches governments and politicians off guard and contributes to their sense of helplessness and confusion, as the press makes plain. “Only three months ago,” writes Advertising Age, “the White House was telling consumers to shop hard before spending their bucks. Now the government is going all out to prod consumers into spending more freely.” Meanwhile it is getting to the point that even the Middle-Class and Upper Middle-Class need financial support. For instance, Princeton University, one of the top Universities in the World, is increasing graduate fellowship and stipend rates by an average of 25 percent to about $40,000 for doctoral candidates during the 10-month academic years. This is the University’s largest one-year increase in graduate student stipend rates to help support graduate students. The estimated cost of attendance for 2022-23 is $79,900 and includes Tuition: $57,690. Room charge: $11,000. Not only that, but petroleum prices are exploding, but not the speed of developments. However, economists are saying when the recession hits, it will be with “stunning speed and severity.” However, home prices and rents are still expected to rise, so it is a good time to invest in a house before rates and rents continue to rise. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Social change, too, is accelerating and putting additional pressure on the political decision-makers. In the United States of America, “as long as the migration of industry and population was gradual…it helped to unify the nation. However, within the past two years the process has burst beyond the bounds that can be accommodated by existing political institutions.” The politicians’ own careers have accelerated, often catching them by surprise. As recently as 1990, Joe Biden forecast that within his lifetime, no Black woman would ever be appointed to a high political post in the American government. Perhaps this explains why what happened to Anita Hill happened and why Kamala Harris is vice president. In the United Sates, Joe Who? shot into the White House some would say by force. What is more, although President Trump seemed to be winning, but the media and democrats really took advantage of him. It was Biden, not the outgoing Trump, who was battered with questions of how he would help the American people, about national policy, the energy crisis, the pandemic, and other issues who seemed to have no coherent speeches, other than “put me in office so we can break the glass ceiling for women, Black women, and Asian woman all at the same time, and I will pay off your student loan debt and give you $2,000 a month to get through the pandemic.” Yet, most people still have student load debts, college tuitions are soaring, and no pandemic relief has come to many in a year. The lame-duck Biden instantaneously has become, for practical purposes, a dead duck, because political time is now compressed, history moving too fast to permit for the traditional delays. Similarly, the “Honey Trap” with the press that this president has been enjoying is starting to see some truncation, as people start to wonder if this political party helping Americans, does really having the first this and that, and our feelings and emotions mean more than being rational and a patriotic American and doing what is best for our country? #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The media is also starting to forecast a short career for the President because he does not seem to be coherent enough, nor display leadership skills to properly communicate with the public, handle events, deal with troubles and more information when he cannot even remember what he is saying or what team he is rooting for. This hotting up of the pace of political life, reflecting the generalized speedup of change, intensifies today’s political and government breakdown. Put simply, our leaders—forced to work through Third Wave institutions designed as fast as events require. Either the decisions come too latte or indecision takes over. Fiscal policy has been virtually unusable because it takes too long to get appropriate measures through Congress, even when a majority exits and it is sometimes because of the federal judges. The acceleration of change has overpowered the decisional capacity of our institutions, making today’s political structure obsolete, regardless of party ideology or leadership. These institutions are inadequate not only in terms of scale and structure but in terms of speed as well. And even this is not all. Not only do ordinary mortals find it hard to answer these questions, so do the experts. Corporate CEOs succeed one another like passengers pushing through a rush-hour turnstile: merging, divesting, kowtowing to the stock market; pursuing core competence one month, synergy the nest the latest management fad month later. They study the most recent economic forecasts, but many economists themselves are befuddled as they wander around in a cemetery of dead ideas. To decode this new World, we need to cut through the chatter of rear-window economists and business pundits who prattle about “business fundamentals.” We need to probe below the obsolete obvious. We must focus on the unexplored deep fundamentals, on which the so-called fundamental themselves depend. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Once we do, thing look different, les crazy, and previously unnoticed opportunities pop out of the shadows. Chaos, it turns out, is only part of the story. And chaos itself generates new ideas. Tomorrow’s economy, for example, will present significant business opportunities in fields like hyper-agriculture, neurostimulation, customized health care, nanoceuticals, bizarre new energy sources, streaming payment systems, smart transportation, flash markets, new forms of education, non-lethal weapons, desktop manufacturing, programmable money, risk management, privacy invasion sensors that tell us when we are being observed—indeed, sensors of all kinds—plus a bewildering myriad of other goods, services and experience. We cannot be sure when these will or will not turn profitable or how they will converge. However, understanding the deep fundamentals will reveal the existence, even now, of new needs and previously unidentified industries and sectors—a huge “synchronization industry,” for example, and a loneliness industry.” To forecast the future of wealth, we also need to look not just at the work we do for money but at the unpaid work all of us also do as “prosumers.” (Just think about how much unpaid output we all produce every day.) Many of us even have “third jobs” without even knowing it. Because prosuming is set to explode, the future of the money economy can no longer be understood, let alone forecast, apart from that of the prosumer economy. The two, in fact, are inseparable. Together they form a wealth system. And once we understand this—and the channels by which the two feed each other—we gain piercing insights into our private lives now and into the future. An age which has found a surer and swifter way to destroy the human species has done so because it gave so much enquiry, so much thought, to the nature of the atom. Why cannot it give fraction of that enquiry and that thought to the nature of mind, when the consequences would be so much more useful? #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Is there, can there be, such a thing on Earth as a paradise without sin? It does not now exist and it can exist in the future only if it is also a paradise without people. It was the Stocis who wrote that the wise human will not waste one’s energy and years in futile political endeavours if one fines one’s environment too corrupt. One need not be a materialist to reach the conclusion that perfect solutions of social, economic, or religious problems simply do not exist; there are only pallitives, not panaceas. The quietude on this planet grows less and less; the noise and turmoil more and more. The need of this inner life becomes greater but the possibility of realizing it becomes smaller. Yet the problem is not a new one’ only a recurring one. The course of nihilism, as travelled by the intelligent classes of our time, ends either in bitter communistic materialism or unprincipled anarchic amoralism or retrogressive Catholic or Hindu mysticism. However, do any of these neurasthenic terminals offer an adequate solution of the modern humans’ problem, comfortable home for the modern consciousness? Whoever is fully alive to twenty-first century needs and trends, cannot say tht they do. What can we gain by moving back in time? The crossroads at which we stand must be faced, not run away from. The attempt to renounce our times and leave our century will be severely defeated by the grim facts of these times, the harsh events of this century. There is probably no sanctuary in medievalism. Neither reason nor goodwill were able to force Europe to adopt a wiser and purer form of religion, so utter impoverishment and bloody war had to force her to think. Only an overwhelming realization that such a change is supremely urgent, supremely essential, and supremely fundamental, if civilized society is not to break down completely, will compel this reconstruction. And the situation created by entry into the postwar period provides this required but dearly bought realization. And what is trye of Europe, which suffered most during the war, will be true in a lesser degree of other parts of the World. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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