Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. One must have the ability to recognize success. Now we are confronted with a most interesting situation; for a folded and twisted “floating” nucleic acid molecule of the kind we discussed in the past will tend to stick to a stretched-out, surface-held molecule if it happens to approach the right part of the stretched-out molecule in just the right way. Such an affinity arises because the floating molecule has one or more “sticky” points occurring at places along the folded structure where there is a sequence of several unpaired bases. At the hairpin turn there must always be such a sequence of greater or lesser length depending upon the flexibility of the backbone—that is, no how sharply it can bend before the restoring forces set up by the distortion of the molecular structure become too large. These restoring forces would also naturally result in a rotation of the nonconjugated side chains around the backbone and out of the plane of the hairpin, thereby rendering the sequence of bases involved more freely available for coupling to another molecule. The result would be this: If the folded molecule, under the influence of random thermal motion, should bring its hairpin-curved terminus close to a surface-bound nucleic acid molecule at a place along its backbone where the sequence of several bases happened to be complementary to the sequence of bases along the hairpin curve, the attractive forces resulting from the base complementarity would pull the folded molecule into position and it would stick to the surface-bound molecule. On a long surface-bound molecule there would, on the average, be a number of places where the sequence would be complementary to that of the unpaired bases of a particular type of floating molecule; molecules of this type would tend to be found attached to such places. Other places along the backbone of the surface-bound molecule would be the natural resting points for folded and twisted floating molecules of different nucleic types with different sequences of unpaired bases featuring their hairpin turns. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The consequence of such an attraction process would be the imposition of a form of order on the otherwise random motions and locations of the floating molecules of nucleic acid. Each long and stretched-out surface-bound nucleic acid molecule would catch and hold nearby floating molecules in disciplined alignment, with the particular order of the different types of floating individuals being that required to provide a series of matches between the base sequences of the bound molecule and those of the hairpin-curved ends of the floating molecules. Although modern evidence suggests that a relatively small number of conjugated bases is available for the attachment of a single folded and twisted molecule (probably three), the resulting binding energy would probably be great enough to permit the displacement of most potentially interfering molecular fragments from the surface-bound molecule, including occasional conjugated nucleotides. To be sure, ambiguities could occur in the matching of folded to bound molecules. For example, several different types of folded molecule might have the same sequence of “connection” bases and therefore by interchangeable along the backbone of the surface-bound nucleic acid molecule. Nevertheless, on the average, the natural forces of interaction between bound and floating molecules would result in a strong tendency for a limited number of specific linear configurations to occur. There is also a further kind of ambiguity: it would appear that the folded molecules could attach themselves to the surface-bound molecule either as shown, leaning over to the right, or in opposite orientation, leaning over toward the left. Such ambiguity is, however, only apparent, not real. The hydrogen bonds that join the conjugate bases of the folded and surface-bound molecules can be established only for one of the two possible orientations of the folded molecules. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

However, we have seen that the folded and twisted molecules are often the keepers of pets—that different types of such molecules are likely to be found clutching different kinds of molecular fragments picked up from the surrounding fluid. Therefore, any tendency for these floating nucleic acid molecules to align themselves in an ordered array must imply a corresponding tendency for the parasitic molecular fragments to be similarly aligned. This could have interesting consequences. Suppose, for example, that the orderly alignment imposed by the control of the surface-bound nucleic acid molecule results in bringing together several parasitic fragments that are capable of combining to form a stable large molecule. Under such circumstances the production of this kind of large molecule is bound to occur much more rapidly than would be possible under purely random conditions; for the limitation on the rate of formation of complex molecules is usually the rarity of suitable encounters among its several components. Here, finally, is a nucleic-acid-dependent phenomenon capable of survival value. For the species of “parasitic” complex molecule for whose accelerate assembly the nucleic acid mechanisms are responsible could be important to the primary mechanisms are responsible could be important to the primary metabolism of the host cell. If so, cells equipped with a combination of the mechanism we have described and a starting quantity of nucleic acid molecules of the particular types required to promote the manufacture of the parasitic ingredient in question would grow more rapidly than other cells not so equipped. In accordance with the simple economics of evolution, this could ultimately result in a predominance of the favourably endowed organisms and in the ascendancy of the nucleic acid mechanisms to a position of importance in the control of growth and reproduction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

With this conclusion we have reached a most important stage in our speculation on the origin of the nucleic acid mechanisms. Let us briefly review the argument to this point and make sure that, in retrospect, it seems plausible. We started with a brief consideration of the molecular structure of nucleic acid—the repetitive backbone segments that hook together to form long chains and the side chains, or bases, that bestow individuality on the different segments of the molecule. We also reminded ourselves of the evidence of an earlier report for the automatic formation of simple nucleic acid molecules under the conditions that prevailed at the Earth’s surface several billion years ago. In commencing our attempt to reconstruct the chemical adventures participated in by nucleic acid molecules during the late coacervate period of evolving life, our attention was directed to the small number of different side chains appearing in nucleic acid—4 instead of 20 of protein construction. We also found ourselves at an early stage considering the consequences of the fact that in nucleic acid not only the backbone segments but also the side chains or bases have a tendency to hook together in certain ways. In particular, we learned that the unattached end of the base that projects from each nucleotide of the backbone of a nucleic acid molecule has an affinity for the corresponding end of the base projecting from one of the three other types of nucleotide. We learned, further, that the resulting two-base configurations all have about the same overall length. This coincidence, we found, permits the joining together of the sugar phosphate ends of the “captured” nucleotides, resulting in the formation of a new and complete nucleic acid molecule “complementary” to the original one and tied to it in Siamese-twin fashion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

To separate our new double-stranded molecule into two single-stranded pieces of nucleic acid, we postulated a time-varying metabolic cycle that would from time to time introduce into the fluid of the host coacervate or cell a quantity of catalyst or other ingredient capable of breaking the relatively weak hydrogen bonds holding the two strands together. Cyclical repetition of the two-stage process—accretion of nucleotides to the single-stranded molecules to form double-stranded ones, followed by splitting of the double molecules—was assumed to occur continuously and automatically as a natural consequence of the postulated time-varying metabolism. The result was a “nucleic acid factory” in the cell, with a steady output of molecules exactly like those originally present in the cellular fluid together with a corresponding output of molecules with a base sequence “complementary” to the original nucleic acid. We next considered some of the activities of the single-stranded nucleic acid molecules other than those related to reproduction. Without introducing major new postulates, we were able to see that the strong base-pairing affinity of nucleic acid, together with the flexibility of its backbone, would naturally lead to the appearance of certain kinds of folded and twisted molecules. We concluded also that some of the longer varieties of nucleic acid would be able to “lie down” in stretched-out position on membranes or solid inclusions that might be found in the cell. We were, of course, helped to these conclusions by experimental evidence for the existence in the fluid of modern cells of various types of folded and twisted molecules of the general nature described, as well as by evidence for the surface binding of extended nucleic acid molecules on the cellular microsomes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

Given the “surface-bound” and “floating” forms of nucleic acid to which we had been led by our combination of speculation and experimental evidence, two further deductions came easily. One consisted of the inference that some of our folded and twisted floating molecules of nucleic acid would probably possess three-dimensional configurations of electric charge that would provide an effective fit for other kinds of molecular fragments found in the cellular fluid; this led us to the idea that a specific type of floating nucleic acid molecule, with a characteristic folded and twisted configuration determined by the sequence of bases that embellish its backbone, would frequently carry enmeshed in its coils an equally specific “parasite,” such as a particular sugar or amino acid. The second deduction arose as one more consequence of the base-pairing affinity of nucleic acid: at the horseshoe bend of the folded nucleic molecule, limitation on the flexibility of the backbone must result in leaving several successive unpaired bases protruding from the structure; if this end of the floating molecule were to approach a region of a surface-bound nucleic acid molecule where there just happened to be a sequence of several bases complementary to the horseshoe sequence, the floating molecule would stick to the surface-bound molecule. From these two deductions we finally reached our important conclusion as to the architectural capabilities of the nucleic acid mechanisms: each cell contains specific types of long surface-bound and shorter floating molecules of nucleic acid; the specificity of the floating molecules is matched by a corresponding specificity in the parasitic molecular fragments to which they become bound as they float about in the cellular fluid; the particular sequence of unpaired bases at the horseshoe bends direct the different types of floating molecules to complementary regions of the surface-bound molecules; this in turn lines up the various types of parasitic fragments in an order that is determined by the specific base sequence of the surface-bound nucleic acid; the resulting juxtaposition then facilitates the hooking together of some of the parasitic fragments to form more complex molecules; a fortuitous set of relationships among the base sequences of the bound molecules, those of the horseshoe bends of the floating molecules, and the specific parasitic affinities of the floating molecules occasionally results in a “factory” producing substantial quantities of a type of parasitic molecule of importance to the cellular growth process; when this happens, the happily equipped cell and its progeny possess an advantage in the continuing evolutionary battle for species survival; as a consequence, cells embodying the new nucleic acid mechanism become conspicuously numerous among the organisms of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

There is probably a point of complexity at which, cut off from the country, the city ceases to advance beyond being so agricultural; it becomes impractical and begins to induce its own kind of stupefaction and ineptness. The endless city-spread of suburbs makes the real farming and open country unavailable. The city becomes the only World, getting duller and one leaves the center, through first the inner ring of blight and then the deadly dormitories and suburbs. Within the big metropolises at present, industry and commerce are shut off and concealed. The freight yards of underground. Manufacture is in great walled plants on the outskirts. In Sacramento, California, even the American River and its ships are cut off by impassable through-highways, and thoughtless planning has provided a mile of child-useless landscaping, so that few kids get down to the river any more to fish. The newer high dwellings make the streets inaccessible to small children. The automobiles make the streets dangerous. Also the streets are strange, because there is a loss of neighbourhood. This is due not only to bad planning but to the greatly increased mobility of families. Children are torn from their school chums and this destroys culture. For instance, the street games and game song that I remember, in Sacramento 1911-1921, were the ancient London (Dublin?) games; and this tradition has now considerably faded. However, it is not easily that a new child-tradition could develop, especially among marginalized populations of various cultures. Quite the contrary, history and bad social planning have conspired to create Sacramento huge income and transitional neighbourhoods—it makes no difference whether low-income or high-income; children of all classes are equally deprived of the human community. Whereas mixing sharpens intelligence, any segregated differences created prejudice and make people less well educated. The very space has been crushingly pre-empted. The cars in Sacramento seem finally to have discouraged many of the ball games; we see boys going several miles in search of a Sunday-deserted parking lot to play stickball which previously they played on their own street with the small children chosen in. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

With increasing traffic, the policing is more strict. In San Francisco 40 percent of the area has been swallowed up the cloverleaves and express highways so that people can drive bumper to bumper in and out of the Bay Area! This is certainly out of human scale and is a dead loss for skating and bicycles. In Northern cities, the snow is never allowed to pile up; city sleighing is finished. The streamlined functional architecture is bare of useful stoops. In brief, concealed technology, family mobility, loss of the country, loss of the neighbourhood tradition, and eating up of the play space have taken away the real environment. The city, under inevitable modern conditions, can no longer be dealt with practically by children. Consider the dehumanizing complexity of the city just as a problem in municipal administration. In Sacramento in charge of housing are many agencies, some for housing the less affluent, some for housing generally, some agents of the city, but other agents of the state and federal governments. They are, in part, the Housing Authority, the Mayor’s Commission on Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal, the Comptroller’s office, the Board of Estimate, the Bureau of Real Estate, the Department of Buildings, and the State and Federal Housing Agencies. Meantime, unco-ordinated with these, there are agencies in charge of location of schools (Board of Education), and playgrounds and parks (Parks). Transportation by rail falls to the Transit Authority, but if it is automotive it may fall to the Port Authority (for certain highways, tunnels, and bridges) of the Triborough Authority (for other highways, etcetera). When cars are moving or parked in the streets they belong to the Traffic Department, and safety in general belongs to the Police. Nobody as such attends to the specific relation of workers and their particular industries, the cause of all this commuting, but there are zoning laws for broad kinds of occupancy, under the City Planning Commission. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

Neighbourhood quarrels, family disruption, delinquency, etcetera, might be handled by the Police and various social agencies. Other departments, too, have a hand in the community planning of Sacramento, exempli gratia, Public Works; Gas, Water and Electricity; etcetera. It seems reasonable to ask if the integration of these function is not relevant? But nobody is in charge of that. To give a partial list: housing, slum clearance, location of industries, adequate schools and teacher, transportation, clear streets, traffic control, social work, racial harmony, master planning, recreation. The list could be long extended, not to speak of a beautiful city and local pride. A part from such a unified view, the solution of this or that isolated problems inevitably leads to disruption elsewhere. Escape thoroughfares must aggravate central traffic. Slum clearance as an isolated policy must aggravate class stratification and delinquency. New subways aggravate conurbation. “Housing” makes for double-shift and overcrowded classrooms. No master plan guarantees foolishness like the rewilding housing projects. These consequents evils produce new evils among them. Even so, confusing as these factors are and much as they cut down the available child-games and child-objects, it is hard to know what things look like from the child’s-eye view. For instance, the new public housing sites seem, after a few years, to swarm like any old-fashioned slum, disrupts the community, and creates more violent crimes, vandalisms, noise pollution, infestations, parking problems, and it perhaps developing its own jailhouse culture, without the police to manage the inmates. At first, these people are shunned from the traditional communities, but now, driven by necessity, they have agreed to ignore the dominate culture and blend in to the community, but they try to take them over and turn them to their own uses, games, adventure, necking, and battle. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

People use machines that they do not understand and cannot repair. For instance, the electric motors: one cannot imagine anything more beautiful and educative than such motors, yet there may be three or four in a house, cased our and out of sight; and when they blow, they are taken away to be repaired. Their influence is then retarding, for what the child sees is that competence does not exist in ordinary people, but in the system of interlocking specialties. This is unavailable to the children, it is to abstract. Children go shopping with Mama; but supermarket shopping for cellophane packages is less knowledgeable and bargainable than the older shopping, as well as providing tasteless Texas fruit and vegetables bred for nonperishability and appearance rather than for eating. Cooking is more prefabricated. Few clothes are sewn. Fire and heat are not made. Among poor people there used to be more sweated domestic industry, which did not do the adults any good but taught something to small children. Now, on the contrary, the man and perhaps the woman of the house work in distant offices and factories, increasingly on parts and processes that do not mean anything to a child. A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, gripping about interpersonal relations. If the kid has less confidence that one can make of fix anything, his parents cannot either; and what they do work at is beyond his grasp. Parents, especially fathers, feel that this way of life offers too little to make their children, especially the son. They tend to blame it on the city—just as many dog lovers will not keep dogs in the city. Some guilty give the kids more money to go to the movies. Other choose the suburbs, where they can putter and fix, even though they thereby limit their own lives in other ways. We must return to the meaning of this fateful movie. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

With the World as it is and in humankind’s present evolutionary condition, it would be imprudent to reject violence at all times and during all events. However, to reject the violence of nuclear weapons would be the highest prudence. In earlier eras that duty of armed resistance to armed aggression was both a practical and more one. In the present era changed conditions required a revision of this duty. The evil powers of human produce wars which, in this nuclear age, can end only in destroying both sides alike. Therefore for rulers even to talk of the possibility of taking part in such war today is sheer madness. The threat of nuclear bombing has created a situation so entirely new that the old ideas about defense have to be scrapped. Formerly it was logical and morally right to meet violence with violence, but now it is suicidal and morally wrong to do so. In the past, international aggression accompanied by force had to be met by national defense accompanied by force. The resultant war was, unhappily, inescapable. It was bad, but it was better than surrendering to evil. In the present, this is no longer true. The use of nuclear forces in war is a completely immortal act. It is so not only because the scale on which it annihilates men, women, and children alike is unheard of, but also because the aftermath which succeeds it will be so savage as to be worse than what some nations set out to destroy. The means used being wrong, the end result will be equally wrong, besides being unwanted and perhaps unexpected. What the Bomb has done is to show up for war for the evil thing that it is. Are its warnings to pass unheeded simply because we do not wish to be troubled by such sombre morbid thoughts? The greatest value of the atomic bomb, after its compulsory prevention of way, it is compulsory abolition of frontiers. It renders them meaningless. It makes a World authority inevitable. It renders a merely international league insufficient. Only a World federation and World authority will suffice to meet it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

With this change in media, all military manuals become obsolete overnight. What gunpowder did to the bow and arrow, atomic bombs have done to gunpowder. However, gun-type fission weapon exist, which are based on nuclear weapons whose design assembles their fissile material into a supercritical mass by the use of the “gun” method: shooting one piece of sub-critical material into another. Although this is sometimes pictured as two sub-critical hemispheres driven together to make a supercritical sphere, typically a hollow projectile is shot onto a spike which fills the hole in its center. Its name is a reference to the fact that it is shooting the material through an artillery barrel as if it were a projectile. Since it is a relatively slow method of assembly, plutonium cannot be used unless it is purely the 239 isotope. In order to produce a nuclear explosion, subcritical masses of fissionable material must be rapidly assembled into a supercritical configuration. The simplest weapon design is the pure fission-gen assembly device, in which an explosive propellant is used to fire one subcritical mass down a “gun barrel” into another subcritical mass. Gun-assembly weapons are made with highly enriched uranium, typically more than 9 percent uranium-235. So the political struggle to secure strategic frontiers has not lost all meaning. The goal in the future will be to mass produce nuclear weapons and laser guns that are handheld. Stun guns will be a wireless laser light, possibly making law enforcement far less deadly for officers and suspects. As there will be lasers that will move faster than the human body can run, and go a far distance. We are told that adequate means of defense must be maintained, else the evil powers arraigned against us will overwhelm the liberties, the justice, the religion, the decencies we hold dear. We are told further that the policy of unilateral nuclear renunciation is a policy of surrender to those powers. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

The answer is that those who support the traditional way of defending those liberties—the military way—are today the real enemies, since the traditional way will lead inescapably to war, which in turn will lead to their total destruction, and our partial destruction. Those who claim that the next war will not be necessarily be a nuclear on, talk like fools. When such power in made compact and put within reach of humans, they will act like human beings, with all the pride of human beings and will use the new weapons they have forged, to grasp it. If not rejected now, in the calmer atmosphere of peace, it will certainly not be rejected later in the tenser atmosphere of war. If the unilateral policy is not accepted now, the penalty will inevitably flow. War is no loner the same. The revolution which has taken place in it is so absolute that it has not merely destroyed an old form of war, but made it about global domination of one’s culture and survival of the fittest. No one or culture wants to be overcome by another, and have its boarder penetrated until their World is alien to them and their race extinct. The weapons of physical warfare are not the symbols of man’s hates or greed, suspicions or fears. It is the manifestation of the Christian Biblical Law of regeneration—“And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the Earth.’ When God says, ‘Go forth, and multiply,’ by the way, after the flood, He meant ‘Go as mate, as husbands and wives, and have children to repopulate the Earth,’” reports Genesis 1.22. And with Dr. Darwin’s interpretation, it means to make sure your race or blood life is the one that survives and rules the Earth. It is all about self-preservation, not hate. So, lack of peace and lack of law and order could send people into a frenzy and create World War III. The nonviolent way to bring peace to the World is today the only way even through the pre-atomic age it may not have been. For under this menace of nuclear weapons war cannot be prevented, nor peace attained and maintained, by the traditional arms race. The World needs a quota system to keep a racial harmony and balance. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

If people are happy with the way their communities look now, then set up a quota system to allow immigrants to come in to certain countries that will keep them balanced and not discriminate against others, so people are not worried that their race is being overwhelmed and this will allow communities to live more harmoniously. Otherwise, is it practical and realistic to turn this Earth into a gigantic incinerator? Yet that is just what those leaders who insist on making and piling up atomic weapons are doing. Nothing could be more practical than repurposing nuclear weapons to produce energy, so in the meaning of practicality we are to include actions which promote or survival. The practice of nonviolent pacifism at this juncture of history where the menace of atomic warfare is so unprecedented, is not mere surrender. It is a new way of fighting which uses spiritual weapons instead of physical one. However, whereas atomic warfare would destroy both antagonists and bring barbarism, this new way will save both. It will save their lives and their civilization. More, it will give a tremendous spiritual boost to the side which tries it first and ultimately give some uplift to the other side too. However, war is not inherently evil, as self-defense is not. Behavioral self-control training (BSCT), can also be applied to help people gain control over their substance-related behaviours. BSCT applied to alcoholism in particular therapists first have clients keep trace of their own drinking behaviour. Writing down the times, locations, emotions, bodily changes, and other circumstances of their drinking, they become more aware of the situation that place them at risk for excessive drinking. They are then taught coping strategies to use when such situations arise. They learn, for example, to set limits on their drinking, to recognize when the limits are being approached, to control their rate of drinking (perhaps by spacing their drinks or by sipping then rather than gulping), and to practice relaxation techniques, assertiveness skills, and other coping behaviours in situations in which they would otherwise be drinking. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

 Approximately 70 percent of the people who complete this training apparently show some improvement, particularly those who are young and not physically dependent on alcohol. In a related cognitive-behavioural approach, relapse-prevention training, heavy drinkers are assigned many of the same tasks as clients in BSCT. They are also taught to plan ahead of time how many drinks are appropriate, what to drink, and under what circumstances. The approach sometimes lowers the frequency of intoxication. Like BSCT, it seems most effect for people who abuse alcohol but are not physically dependent on it. The approach has also been used, with some success, in the treatment of marijuana and cocaine abuse. Joan of arc took her BSCT to another level, she was one of the World’s most celebrated virgin martyrs. She was burned at the stake for not wanting to fit in to the roles of traditional society. Of course there was an investigation to make sure that she was a chaste virgin, and it was confirmed. Her divine mentors had first spoken to her at the age of thirteen. On the spot, she had pledged her chastity to St. Catherine and St. Margaret, “for as long as it may please God.” These multiple testimonials to the young woman’s absolute purity convinced the Dauphin of her divine mission. Accordingly, he entrusted some of his best troops to her so she could accomplish her first goal: to raise the siege of Orleans and lead him to Reims to be crowned and consecrated king. She fought her way to victory and led the Dauphin and twelve thousand troops through English-occupied territory to Reims Cathedral, where he was crowned Charles VII. The Dauphin had taken a staggering risk. No woman had ever commanded troops during the Hundred Years’ War. Joan was an untrained nobody, whose main selling points were her resolute confidence, convincing story and confirmed virginity. Yet her soldiers responded enthusiastically. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

With one single exception, noted an eyewitness, “they all had great confidence in God and in the good justice of their king and their lord.” A contemporary war chronicler added, “All regarded her with much affection, men and women, as well as small children. And there was a very extraordinary rush to be near her or even the horse on which she sat.” Joan even deprived her men from looting and pillaging. On the battlefield, Joan was spectacular. Miraculously, she commanded armies and motivated her soldiers, drew up battle plans and waged war as if she had had a lifetime of military training and experience. Joan’s religious values reinforced her genius and personal courage. She refused to shed blood and carried her standard rather than her sword into battle. She refrained from fighting on Ascension Day, prayed “assiduously,” heard daily mass, and often celebrated the Eucharist. She banned blasphemy, gambling, and camp-following women of the evening. However, Joan’s career was very short. On May 23, 1430, while defending the town of Compiegne, north of Paris, the Burgundians captured her and sold her to their English allies for the substantial sum of twelve thousand crowns, and they threw her into prison. She was subject to examination, which proved, again, that she was a celibate virgin. Joan so impressed the duchess of Bedford, that she forbade all males, including the guards and soldiers, to touch their prisoner. In April of 1431, the Bishop of Beauvais and the papal deputy inquisitor tried Joan for heresy and sorcery. She was sentenced for her sin and on May 24, she made a panic-stricken recantation by singing a document of confessing to “adoring and calling up evil spirits,” “breaking divine law, Holy Scriptures, and the canon laws….[and violating] against the decency of nature.” The court, reassured, commuted her sentence of death to life imprisonment. Presumably Joan brooded and prayed in her cell, begging God and her spiritual mentors for guidance. And in the churchyard of St. Ouen, Joan, the virgin warrior, was ultimately burned at the stake. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Cultural phenomena such as Greek tragedy, with its emphasis on personal guilt and personal purification, or in later Judaism, the stress upon person responsibility before God, prepared for the rise of conscience by creating a definite ego-consciousness. The self, says a modern philosopher, has been discovered by sin. The merely logical self-consciousness does not have such a power. Without practical k knowledge about oneself, produced by the experience of law and guilt, no practical self-consciousness and no conscience could have developed. Predominately theoretical types of mentality lack a mature self. Even Nietzsche, who attacks more passionately than anyone the judging conscience, derives the birth of the “inner human” from its appearance. In pointing to the subpersonal character of guilt and punishment in primitive cultures, he praises the discovery of the conscience as the elevation of humankind to a higher level. The fact that self and conscience are dependent on the experience of personal guilt explains the prevalence of the “bad conscience” in reality, literature, and theory. It supports the assertion that the uneasy, accusing, and judging conscience is the original phenomenon; that good conscience is only the absence of bad conscience; and that the demanding and warning conscience is only the anticipation of it. Since ego-self and conscience grow in mutual dependence, and since the self discovers itself in the experience of a split between what it is and what it ought to be, the basic character of the conscience—the consciousness of guilt—is over. Shakespeare, in King Richard III, V Scene 3, gives a classic expression of the relation of individual self-coconsciousness, guilt, and conscience: “Oh coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me! What! do I fear myself? There’s none else by. Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am. Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why, lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself? Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good that I myself have done unto myself? O, no! alas, I rather hate myself…my conscience hath a thousand several tongues, crying all, Guilty! Guilty.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

In the next moment, however, Richard immerses himself in the we-consciousness of the battle, dismissing self and conscience: “Conscience is a word that cowards use. Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law. March on, join bravely, let us to ‘t pell-mell; if not to Heaven, than hand in hand to hades.” While the Old Testament describes the experience but not the notion of conscience (Adam, Cain, David, Job), the New Testament, especially Paul, has the word and the reality. Through the influence of Paul (who in this case, as in others, introduced elements of Hellenistic ethics into Christianity) conscience has become a common concept to the Christian nations, in their religious as well as secular periods. “The Lord may fulfill His promise to me, saying, If your sons take heed to their way, to walk before Me in truth with all their heart and mind and with all their soul, there shall not fail you [to have] a human on the throne of America,” reports 1 Kings 2.4. The Second Wave revolutionaries who invented today’s basic represento-kit institution were well aware of the possibilities of direct as against representative democracy. There were traced of direct, do-it-yourself democracy in the French revolutionary constitution of 1793. American revolutionists knew all about New England town halls and small-scale organic consensus formation. In Europe later on, Marx and his followers frequently invoked the Paris Commune as a model of citizen participation in the making and execution of the laws. However, the shortcomings and limitations of direct democracy were also well-known—and, at that time, more persuasive. Yet, direct democracy allows no check or delay on temporary and emotional public reactions. And, the communications of that day could not handle the mechanics. These are legitimate problems. How would a frustrated and inflamed American public in the early 2020’s, for example, have voted on whether or not to shutdown the economy, lock people in their houses, and forced them to get vaccines before returning to work? #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

Or a Middle American proposal for the creation and development of more American farms and a band on foreign produce, dairy, and meat products? What if America had held an investigation into voter fraud a weeks after Biden took power? Elected representatives are presumed to be less emotional and more deliberative than the public. The problem of overemotional public response, however, can be overcome in various ways, such as requiring a cooling-off period or second vote before implementation of major decisions taken via referendum or other forms of direct democracy. One imaginative approach is suggested by many political leaders and that is to have an actual program that allows the public to participate in the formulation of a national energy policy, like the Swedes did in the mid-1970’s. The government recognized that most citizens lacked adequate technical knowledge of the various energy options, from solar to nuclear or geothermal, the government created a ten-hour course on energy and invited any Swede who took it, or an equivalent course, to make formal recommendations to the government. Simultaneously, trade unions, adult education centers, and parties from one end of the political spectrum to the other all created their ten-hour courses. It was hoped that as many as 10,000 Swedes would participate. To everyone’s surprise, some 70,00 to 80,000 flocked to discussion in homes and community facilities—the equivalent (on the American scale) of some 2,000,000 citizens trying to think together about the national problem. Similar systems could easily be employed to cancel out the objections to “overemotionalism” in referenda or other forms of direct democracy. The other objection can also be met. For the old communication limitations no longer stand in the way of expanded direct democracy. Spectacular advances in communications technology open, for the first time, a mind-boggling array of possibilities for direct citizen participation in political decision-making. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Not long ago, I had the pleasure of keynoting an historic event—the World’s first “electronic town hall”—over the Qube cable TV system in Columbus, Ohio. Using this interactive communications systems, residents of a small Columbus suburb actually took part via electronics in a political meeting of their local planning commission. By pushing a button in their living rooms, they were able to vote instantly on proposals relating to such practical issues as local zoning, housing codes, and proposed highway construction. They were able not only to vote yes or no but to participate in the discussion and speak up on the air. They were even able, by push button, to tell the chairperson when to move on to the next point on the agenda. This is only the first, most primitive indication of tomorrow’s potential for direct democracy. Using advanced computers, satellites, telephones, cable, polling techniques, and other tools, an educated citizenry can, for the first time in history, begin making many of its own political decision. The issue is not either/or. It is not a question of direct democracy versus indirect, representation by self versus representation by others. For both systems have advantages, and there are highly creative, as yet underutilized, ways to combine direct citizen participation with “representation” into a new system of semi-direct democracy. We might, for example, decide to hold a referendum on a controversial issue like nuclear development, as California and Austria have already done. Instead of turning the ultimate decision over directly to the voters, however, we might still want a representative body—Congress for example—to debate and ultimately decide the issue. Thus if the public voted pro-nuclear, a certain predesignated “bundle” of votes could be delivered to the pro-nuclear advocates in Congress. They might, on the strength of the public response, by given an automatic “edge” of 10 percent or 25 percent in Congress itself, depending on the strength of the pro vote in the plebescite. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

In this way, there is no purely automatic implementation of the citizens’ wishes, but these wishes do carry some specific weight. This is a variation of National Plebescite proposal mention above. Many other imaginative arrangements can be invented to combine direct and indirect democracy. Right now members of Congress and most other parliaments of legislatures set up their own committees. There is no way for citizens to force lawmakers to create a committee to deal with some neglected or highly controversial issue. However, why could not voters be empowered directly, through petition, to compel a legislative body to set up committees on topics the public—not the lawmakers—deems important? I am hammer away at these “blue-sky” proposals not because I unhesitantly favour them but merely to underscore the more general point: There are powerful ways to open and democratize a system that is now near breakdown and in which few, if any, feel adequately represented. However, we must begin thinking outside the worm grooves of the past 400 years. We can no longer solve our problems with ideologies, the models, or the left-over structures of the Second Wave past. Fraught with uncertain implications, such novel proposals warrant careful local experimentation before we apply them on a broad scale. But however we may feel about this or that suggestion, the old objection to direct democracy are growing weaker at precisely the time that the objections to representative democracy are growing stronger. Dangerous or even bizarre as it may seem to some, semi-direct democracy is a moderate principle that can help us design workable new institutions for the future. Across the millennia, agriculture was the most advanced form of production, far more fruitful than hunting and gathering. By AD 1100, the heavy plough, the open fields, the new integration of agriculture and herding, three field rotation, modern horse harness, nailed horseshoes and the whippletree had combined into a total system of agrarian exploitation. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

There was a zone of peasant prosperity stretching across Northern Europe from the Atlantic to the Dnieper. This first wealth wave also brought with it a greater division of labour—hence the need for exchange in the forms of trade, barter, buying and selling. However, hunger and extreme poverty remained the norm. As late as the 1300s in parts of Europe famine might still strike every three or five years. Famine constituted an almost structural feature of reality down through the seventeenth century. Hamburg lost one quarter of its population in 1565, Venice one-third in 1575-1577, Naples nearly half in 1656. In a satirical play performed during a famine in 1528, a character declares, “I shall kill myself…And it will be even better, because I myself shall eat me, and so I shall die well-nourished.” Grim humour in even grimmer era. Camporesi’s unforgettable book Bread of Dreams quotes original, vivid sources on the ravages of hunger on the skin and organs of its victims, the putrid smells, the filth, feces, and urine, the foul odor of their neighbour’s chamber pots and the pests they attracted, the heaped bodies on piles of dung, and the cannibalism that saw mothers eating their own babies. Almost tactile association and intimacy with the products of death—corpse bones, the diseased dying. Starving peasants periodically flooded the towns, creating “semi-marginalized” populations and mass mendicancy. Today First Wave populations predominate in many countries. And while cannibalism may be rare, many of the other horrors described by Camporesi can still be found in backward agrarian regions where peasants even work and live the way their ancestors did so many centuries ago. And let me never forget, beholding providential food on the loot-loaded table. I hold at the heart, as the timeless center, all feature, all form, and am thankful to God for the food He provides. And let me never forget the globular wealth of genetic wheat crumbled to meal. Nor forget the great generational strength God has allowed nature to nurture for thousands of years. Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God Thou art very great; Thou art clothed with glory and majesty. Thou buildest Thy chambers on the waters above, Thou makest the clouds Thy chariot, Thou ridest upon the wings of the wind; Thou makest the winds Thy messengers, the flaming fire Thy ministers. Thou didst establish the Earth upon its foundations, that it should never be moved. The Lord is great. While you are sitting on your designer sofa listening to Maria Callas, count your blessings. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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