Soren Viggo, a pharmacist in South Sacramento, California, makes more than $100,000 a year and owns his own homes. However, Mr. Vigo, age 30, struggles to afford the basic necessities, including groceries, utilities, insurance, and gasoline. “When you are used to spending a couple of dollars per gallon on gasoline, and the prices nearly quadruple, then you are paying a lot more, and it stressed you out,” he said. “I actually started taking the lightrail and walking to work to save money.” With gasoline prices going from costing about $300 a month, to nearly $1,000, many people who recently bought new cars and trucks are cutting costs by driving less, getting mileage-based insurance from Metromile, and are using Repair Smith for trusted auto maintenance and reapirs to making owning the vehicle of their dreams more affordable in the high inflation economy. Several people are also asking their employers if they can continue to work at home so they do not have to quit their jobs, sales their cars, and find a job closer to home because the cost of fuel every month is significantly decreasing their actual wages and living standards. Some day the high cost of fuel and the President Biden refusing to help Americans with a stimulus program is just a ploy to force people to abandon smokestack plants, and force them to buy electric cars, which they do not want and cannot afford anyway. With about $15,000 in savings and no private retirement plan, child support and medical bills, Viggo says he contemplates every purchase, from a night out on the town, to how much he can afford to spend on food. An estimated 71 percent of Americans said they know that their paycheck is not keeping up with inflation. And approximately 35 percent of people surveyed said they expect they will not be able to make ends meet month to month because budgets suggest their spending will most likely exceed anticipated costs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

 Roughly 65 percent of the American population is living pay check to pay check. And wealthier Americans are having a difficult time paying bills. In fact, 50 percent of workers warning more than $100,000 said they have little to nothing left in their bank accounts at the end of the month. The challenges people are facing in Biden’s economy is that it requires them to deplete their savings and their retirement accounts so they can afford to live. Many Americans are becoming financially vulnerable. Wages have not kept pace with inflation, which is now rising at the fastest annual pace in approximately 40 years. There is a presumption that as the cost of goods and services increases, income tends to rise as well, but that is not true. However, by any material standards, most Americas today are far better off than, say, their grandparents and great grandparents were in the 1950s, when the “new” economy began. At that time the ordinary American paid out nearly a fifth of its disposable personal income just to feed itself. In the 1950s, the average annual family income was $3,300 (2022 inflation adjusted $40,023.93), so $660 went towards food every year (2022inflation adjust $8,004.79). If we listen closely to what ordinary Americans are saying today to one another, we hear countless gripes about the rising inequality of incomes, about too much traffic and too little time, about computers that freeze up and mobile-phone conversations that break up. Listen longer, though, and a pattern emerges. We hear complaints about the growing inefficiency, greed, corruption, fecklessness or stupidity they encounter daily in the school, the office, the hospital, the media, the airport, the police station, and the polling booth—in almost all their day-to-day interactions with America’s imploding institutions. Emotions rise, however, when talk turns to values. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

 In private conversation and in political rhetoric, we hear deafening diatribes about the death of “family values,” “constitutional rights,” “moral values,” “traditional values,” “religious values” and personal and corporate ethics. What few seem to notice, however, is the direct linkage between the implosion of institutions and the implosion of yesterday’s value system. Values arise from many sources. However, in any society institutions reflect the values of their builders, and those serving the institution justify its existence by promoting values that do so. If our key institutions cannot survive in their present form, neither can the values and norms these institutions embody and promote. We should expect some values to break down and new ones to arise. However one may define vice or virtue, why should one expect a family system that now encompasses a wide variety of formats to inculcate or express precisely the same set of values that the one-size-fits-all nuclear-family system did when America was still an industrial society? Or the values of large multigenerational families common in pre-industrial agrarian societies? Why should we expect corporations that no longer depend on muscle to reflect the macho values of those companies or industries that do? These days, most big companies in the west want to be loved. The whole vocabulary of business has changed. Bosses who were once gruff, tough, macho, dominant and bold are now expected to be open, approachable, caring, persuasive and kind. Command and control systems of management, with their rigid hierarchies and strict rules have given way to flexibility, collaboration and teamwork. The is an egalitarian approach to management. The shift in values is related to the need for physical labour and the new importance of such intangibles as brands. What more and more companies are really selling these days, is the set of emotions, ideas and beliefs that their brands convey. One may quibble, but one has an important point. So, however, do those who see more sinister implications in the implosion of the value eyes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Take institutionalized sports, for example. One played by amateurs for their own amusement, and later organized more formally into clubs and leagues, it is only in recent decades that sports have become truly global institutions, a multibillion-dollar marketing industry busy selling all kinds of products—and itself largely subordinated to the needs of the television industry. Corruption in sports, of course, is hardly new. Boxers “throwing” a match and the Black Sox scandal in baseball? Ancient history. The use of drugs by Olympic athletes? Old hat. Even bribery in the megabusiness known as the Olympics has made headlines for years. However, corruption in the Little League? Among boys too young to shave? Or the chain of arrests among top athletes for drugs, rape, violence, even murder—all loudly decried by officialdom but recognized by at least one club owner as marvelous for TV ratings and financial returns? If the institution is sick, what kind of values does it propagate? Much of the seemingly bizarre behaviour around us reflect the battle raging in society today between decay and revolutionary rebirth. Throughout history, the search for extremes has been a feature of both decadence and renaissance. Today it is reflected in the application of the adjective extreme to every imaginable noun. Thus we are offered “extreme sports,” “extreme software,” “extreme fashion,” “extreme makeovers,” “extreme pumpkin carving,” and, of course, “extreme Beyonce” online, where you can learn more about her than even she knows. All this is the prelude, as it were, to “extreme celebrity culture.” Celebrities, diversity and experiments are made more and more publicly visible. Thus television programs feature more same gender couples, and alternative lifestyles. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

In print, the Paris Hilton Guess 2009 Spring/Summer ads would not have been complete without her adorable little chihuahua lounging next to her. Paris is featured stretched out on a pristine white lounge chair in a disco gold string bikini, her cute puppy seated delicately beside her. The gallery shows some of the Paris Hilton Guess 2009 Spring/Summer pictures, as well as some from her stint as the Guess girl in 2004. This was definitely one of the most stunning campaigns in history. Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and stores aimed at teenagers and young adults subtlety recreated “Sweet Valley High” with a cast of young men who looked like surfers from Orange County, California, with golden tans, sun bleached blonde hair, wash board abs, and the bodies and faces of Michelangelo’s David. This enticed young women to visit the stores and flirt with the boys, while they bought the hottest trends for their boyfriend, and also compelled young men to not only want to buy the clothes, but get their bodies beach body perfect. Since campaigns like Guess and Abercrombie & Fitch, and with the invention of social media, many guys are now feeling their pressure that young women only felt, the need to look like the model in the store window. As a result, now you see young men on social media with perfect bodies and hair, and more women wanting the bodies and faces of Paris Hilton and Beyonce, as well as their designer looks. And no matter what skin colour the people are, they all look beautiful in these fashions. Their focus is not on colour, but having the face, body, and hair of these young women and men. The Abercrombie & Fitch models all look like Brad Pitt in with various skin tones. And with the launch of 24-Hour Fitness gone wild in 2000, more men got into bodybuilding, started eating healthier and drinking Jamba Juice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

Therefore, celebrity and pop culture can be healthy for people. Instead of sitting around envious of others, it inspired men and women to work hard, get in shape, and buy the latest fashions so they could feel good about themselves. All this, of course, aroused predictably extreme reactions from outraged religious groups and other bluestockings eager to restore Victorian virtue—which, as historians pull back the sheets, turns out to have been not so virtuous after all. Pleasures of the flesh is one thing, violence another. What should one make of the hit online game called Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, in which players win points for terminating specific groups, selling contraband and barbiturates and violently assaulting individuals until they end their lives on the screen? Or of rappers “about that life,” who record for companies with charming names like Murder, Inc., or Death Row and rose to fame by singing about killing specific groups of people or abusing women? And what about the German cannibal who, on the Internet, recruited a partner supposedly willing to be eaten alive so one or both of them could share a truly extreme experience? Bon appetite! (German legal institutions found themselves unprepared for this novelty, since there was no law actually banning cannibalism.) One does not need a Ph.D. to recognize that a lot of extreme behaviour is intended to jolt parents, society in general and any remaining rubes among us. Rubes, however, are increasingly hard to find. They form a tiny, dwindling group, having been replaced by a growing middle class immunized to shock through overexposure. The French used the term epater le bourgeois—meaning “to shock the middle classes.” What is different today is that the middle class now spits on itself and laughs uproariously about it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

These examples are part of a much broader testing of all the behavioural limits imposed by industrial-era institutions. And not just by the usual bohemians and activists. In the words of BlackBook magazine, “Movements in culture point to many people living the life of a misfit. It is not just the rebels and outcasts anymore, now it is the bankers, the Wall Streets, the suits and the blue collars. Where will it all lead?” What is reflected here is the decay or breakdown not just of yesterday’s institutional infrastructure but of the dying culture, value system and social character that grew up with it. The stench in the air is the smell of decadence. However, there is also a faint scent of renewal. Revolutions always wear two faces. And today is no exception. One is the angry face of disintegration. Old things tear apart and crash. The second is the smiling face of reintegration. Things, both old and new, are plugged together in novel ways. Today change is so rapid that both processes occur almost simultaneously. Along with anti-social trash and decadence, countless positive innovations are appearing as well—pro-social adaptations to the emergent knowledge economy. Even rap groups are having second thoughts. Having become big commercial enterprises that now peddle fashions, deodorants and numerous other products, some rappers have begun changing their names and image. Or as Anonymous put it: “Now we let our diplomas show, instead of pushin’ guns and blow. It may just be a temp’rary blip but rap is on a clean-up trip. Several rap groups have recently launched innovative campaigns to offer college scholarships and to register young voters—a far cry from urging them to terminate the lives of certain people. Some innovators reach into the distant pre-industrial past for models, then revolutionize them so that any resemblance to yesterday is more cosmetic than real. Matchmaking provides a case in point. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

In village life, couples are often brought together by a local matchmaker. Under urban-industrial conditions, daily life is more anonymous and contacts are more impersonal. Lonely young people make the bar scene in search of Mr. or Ms. Right. Millions are reduced to desperately searching classified ads to find a potential life partner. Today the village matchmaker is back in electronic form, as growing millions search for mates on the Web and online matchmaking becomes more sophisticated. Instead of throwing Kevin and Stacy together based on a handful of supposedly common traits, eHarmony requires a user to answer 480 questions designed to profile twenty-none characteristic that its psychologists regard as crucial to long-term success in marriage. This very process would seem at least in theory, to help individuals clarify and prioritize their own values. In a society torn between the values of the past and uncertainties of a fast-arriving future, such self-examination can itself prove useful to the individual. Matchmakers of the future may go farther and ask clients to play specially designed Sims-like online games to identify their thinking style and unconscious behavioural biases before introducing them to other clients. And if marriage results, they may charge a bonus, or arrange the wedding for an extra fee. Online services that help people locate friends or friends of friends may develop similar games to bring like-minded people together. Still others, perhaps marketed by travel agents, may introduce an individual prescreened traveler arriving in a new city to a family of equally prescreened “welcomers” for a home-cooked dinner and an evening of bowling or chamber music. Multiple online sites such as meetup.com are already brining together, face-to-face, all sorts of people, from political activists to poker player, foreign-language students to film buffs (of course, consult trusted guardians first). #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

Meanwhile, recognizing the widespread hunger for community and social contact, companies such as Starkbucks and Borders promote themselves as places where people can come together. This is the old Mitteleuropa coffee shop of the past—only now providing a WiFi hot spot for your laptop so that you can communicate with the World while sipping your monkey mocha. All these are efforts to heal the pain of loneliness caused in good measure by the breakdown of familiar institutions that, until recent decades, provided places, contacts and a sense of community for lonely hearts. There are today some 300 million Visa credit card holders in the World, using their cards are some 8 million retail stores, gas stations, restaurants, hotels, and other business, and running up bills at $808,191,705.07 per day, 365 days a year. Visa is only one credit card firm. When a restaurant owner transmits your card number to Visa or American Express, the credit cad company’s computers credit the restaurant account with the appropriate amount, deduct an amount from its own books, and increases the amount you owe to it. This, however, is still primitive play. With what is called a “smart card,” the very act of handing it to a cashier who runs it through an electronic device from your bank account. You do not pay at the end of the month. Your bank account pays right away. It is like a check that clears instantaneously. Patented by Roland Moreno, a French inventor, the smart card had been pushed by French banks, along with the French postal and telecommunications services. The card, made by the Bull group, has a microchip embedded in it, and is claimed to be virtually fraud-proof. Some 10 billion are already in use. Eventually, as electronic record keeping and banking become more integrated, the store’s bank. As charges are deducted from the customer they will instantly be credited to the retailer’s account and start earning interest immediately—reducing the bank’s “float” to zero. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Simultaneously, instead of customer paying bills at fixed intervals—say once a month—rents, charge accounts, and similar regular expenses may be paid, bit by bit, bleeding electronically from one’s bank account in tiny droplets, as it were, on a minute-by-minute basis. Paralleling developments in the manufacturing sector, such changes promise to move the financial system further from batch processing to continuous-flow operation and toward the ultimate goal of real-time or instantaneity. Someday, with the even smarter cards to come, you may, if you so wish, deduct the price of a meal or a new car not from your bank account but from the equity in your homes—or even, in theory, from the value of jewelry of Japanese prints you may own. Coming down the pike is the “super-smart card,” otherwise called the “electronic bank-in-your-wallet.” Made experimentally by Toshiba for Visa International, the plastic card contains a microchip that allows the user to check one’s bank balances, buy and sell shared, make airline reservations, and perform a variety of other tasks. The new technologies also make it possible a dialectical return to a condition that existed before the industrial revolution—the coexistence of multiple currencies in a single economy. Money, like breakfast foods and a thousand other artifacts of daily life, is becoming more diversified. We may be approaching the age of “designer currencies.” Supposed a country had privately issued money alongside the official stuff….Consumers in many countries already have this parallel money—otherwise known as the pre-paid magnetic card, virtual card, digital currency, whose store of value runs down as it is used. However, because of fluctuations in value, many make an enormous about off of digital currency. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

  Once can imagine many highly specialized types of para-money. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is has successfully piloted a program that replaced food stamps issued to the needy with a smart card programmed with one month’s worth of benefits and personal identification number. The use runs it through the supermarket checkout terminal, which then verifies identification before deducting the purchase from the user’s remaining balance. The system is aimed at providing better accounting while reducing fraudulent use, illegal marketing, and counterfeiting. This is only a step away from what might be called a “Basics Card” for all people receiving transfer payments. It would help reduce the need for affordable housing by eliminating the housing agencies, which would save the government and taxpayers money because they would not longer have to pay for housing staff, maintenances, construction, or renovations. Instead, people would have a card that they could use in the private rental market to pay rent with, buy food, and access public transit. And with the economy experiencing such high inflation, this could also help many renters and homeowners stay in their houses. Another example of para-money is as close as the nearest school cafeteria. Thirty-five U.S. school districts are already preparing to launch a school lunch card system designed by Prepaid Card Services, Inc., of Pearl River, New York. Paid for weekly or monthly in advance by the parent, the kiddie-card is linked to a school computer, which keeps a running account of purchases at the lunch counter. (By stretching the imagination only a little, one can also picture a programmable card, for example, that would permit parents to customize diet. One child’s car might by invalid, say, for soft drinks. If a child had a milk allergy, the card would be invalid for foods containing dairy products, and so forth.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

One can also picture special cards issued to children that could be used in movie theaters or video stores but would be electronically unacceptable for X-rated films. All kinds of custom currencies are possible, including what might be called “programmable money.” In short, once a symbol of middle-class arrival, cards are becoming ubiquitous. U.S. federal agencies also use credit cards for both buying and collecting funds. In fact, the United States of America’s Government is the largest credit card user in the World. Nowhere in any of these transactions does anything remotely like “money” in the traditional sense change hands. Not a single coin or piece of paper money is exchanged. The “money” here consists of nothing more than a string of zeros and ones transmitted by wire, microwave, or satellite. All this is now so routine, and accepted with such confidence, that we hardly stop to doubt it. On the contrary, it is when we see large sums of paper money change hands that we suspect something is fishy. We assume that cash payment is intended to cheat the tax collector or that someone is in the drug racket. While foresight is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation, it can certainly be helpful. From an individual’s point of view, the object is to score as well as possible over a series of interactions with others who are also trying to present the best person they can be. People are used to thinking about zero-sum interactions. In these settings, whatever one person wins, another loses. A good example is a job interview. In order to do well, the contestant must do better than the other applicant in the interviewing process. A win for one candidate is usually a loss of another. However, most of life is not zero-sum. Generally, both sides can do well, or both can do poorly. Mutual cooperation is often possible, but not always achieved. This is why the Prisoner’s Dilemma is such a useful model for a wide variety of everyday situations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

The object in life is to score well for the individual, as if having successful and pleasant interactions with others is like getting a dollar a point. It should not matter to an individual whether one does a better in life or a little worse than other individual, so long as they can collect as many “dollars” or reward points for themselves as possible. However, these instructions do not always work. People often like to see if they are doing well or poorly as a standard of comparison. The standard, which is readily available to them, is the comparison of their score with the score of their other individual. Sooner or later, one individual defects to get ahead, or at least to see what will happen. Then the other usually defects so as not to get behind. Then the situation is likely to deteriorate with mutual recriminations. Soon the players realize that they are not doing as well as they might have, and one of them tries to restore mutual cooperation. However, the other is not sure whether this is a ploy that will lead to being exploited again as soon as cooperation begins once more. People tend to resort to the standards of comparison that they have available—and this standard is often the success of the other player relative to their own success. This standard leads to envy. And envy leads to attempts to rectify any advantage the other individuals have obtained. In this form of Prisoner’s Dilemma, rectification of the other’s advantage can only be done by defection. However, defection leads to more defection and to mutual punishment. So envy is self-destructive. Asking how well you are doing compared to how well the other individual is doing is not a good standard unless your goal is to destroy the other individual. In most situations, such a goal is impossible to achieve, or likely to lead to such costly conflict as to be very dangerous to pursue. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

When one is not trying to destroy the other individual, comparing one’s success in life to another’s simply risks the development of self-destructive envy. A better standard of comparison is how well you are doing relative to how well someone else could be doing in your shoes. Given the strategy of the other individual, are you doing as well as possible? Could someone else in your situation have doe better with this other individual? This is the proper test of successful performance. TIT FOR TAT is so consistent at eliciting mutually rewarding outcomes that it attains a higher overall success rate in life than any other strategy. Of course that is as long as one is kind to others when they are kind to you and even kind to people who do not wish you will. One never wants to return evil with evil because it creates a dangerous cycle that could lead to serious consequences, such as time in prison or not getting into Heaven. So in a non-zero-sum World, you do not have to do better than another individual is doing, you have to do well for yourself. This is especially true when you are interacting with many different individuals. Letting each of them do the same or a little better than you is fine. As long as you tend to do well yourself. There is no point in being envious of the success of another individual, since in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma of long duration the other’s success is virtually a prerequisite of your doing well for yourself. Congress provides a good example. Members of Congress can cooperate with each other without providing threats to each other’s standing at home. The main threat to a legislator is not the relative success of another legislator from another part of the country, but from someone who might mount a challenge in the home district. Thus there is not much point in begrudging a fellow legislator the success that comes from mutual cooperation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Likewise in business. A firm that buys from a supplier can expect that a successful relationship will earn profit for the supplier as well as the buyer. There is no point in being envious of the supplier’s profit. Any attempt to reduce it through an uncooperative practice, such as by not paying your bills on time, will only encourage the supplier to take retaliatory action. Retaliatory action could take many forms, often without being explicitly labeled as punishment. It could be less prompt deliveries, lower quality control, less forthcoming attitudes on volume discounts, or less timely news of anticipate changes in market conditions. The retaliation could make the envy quite expensive. Instead of worrying about the relative profits of the seller, the buyer should consider whether another buying strategy would be better. In his novel Being There, Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski describes a man who is born and raised in a house that he never leaves. His only contacts with humans are occasional encounters with a half-crazy maid, a crippled, senile old man confined in a room upstairs, and a television set. He watches television constantly. In middle age the hero is suddenly thrown out of the house into the city. Attempting to deal with a World which he has seen only as reproduced on television, he tries to apply what he has learned from the set. He adopts television behaviour. He tries to imitate the behaviour of the people he has seen on the screen. He speaks like them, moves as they do, imitates their facial expressions. However, because these people were only images to him, and he has never experienced real people, save for the crazies in his house, he does not know anything beyond the images. He does not know about feelings, for example. He adopts the movements of the images but cannot connect this with anything deeper inside himself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Because he has not exchanged feeling with a live human, his ability to feel has atrophied. He is a mechanical person, a humanoid. He is there physically, but like the television images, he is also not there. I would if you would be willing to try another little experiment. Please go look into a mirror. As you gaze at yourself, try to get a sense of what is lost between the mirror image of you, and you. You might ask someone to join your facing the mirror. If so, you will surely feel that other person’s presence as you stand there. However, in the reflection, this feeling will be lost. You will be left with only the image, possibly an expressive one, but only an image. What is missing from the reflection is life, or essence. Finally, place an object in front of the mirror: a hair dryer, a chair, a vacuum cleaner, a comb. What is lost? I will not say nothing is lost in the reflection, a mirror image does slightly alter the dimension and the colour of an object. However, life has not dropped out, because the object did not have any life in it. Nothing enates from it. More information is lost in the reflection of a living thing than of an object. In the living creature, there is something which can be experienced only in person, no matter how vivid the attempt at visual reproduction. The inanimate object, on the other hand, has only its form. If not perfectly, this can be reflected at least very well in the mirror image. What applies to a mirror applies even more to a photograph or a film, and still more to a television reproduction. Because television cannot coney the essence of life, it makes sense for television producers to concentrate on information in which life essence is not required for the message to be communicated. You do not need to “feel” the essence of a football player or a bomber pilot or a police attack squad to follow the action. And you surely do not need to feel the life in the product that is advertised, since the product has no life to begin with. And so football games, action dramas and product commercials, in which the image can carry the story, obtain a degree of communications efficiency that is not possible with humans, animals and plants. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Fakir Musafar has done much to research and even to act upon the ancient fascination with the surgical and subtractive. His novel, Prince of the Pain, explores radical surgical alterations of the body and its concomitant erotic/altered states of awareness in the context of a hidden society whose members are bound and controlled by physiological, mental and spiritual domination, as well as by their own peculiar fleshly conditions…very much in the spirit of our central thesis. Gnosticism posits the concept of flesh as a prison, or binding of the soul. In subtractive fetishes, the removal of flesh becomes akin to the opening of prison doors. At the extremes of the subtractive, rumors persist of secret surgical clinics in Mexico, where operations of any kind can be had at the right price. Whether or not such underground surgery actually exists, the fantasy of it is strong and pervasive, as much so as the rumors of extreme cases of force-feeding and obesification. A regular column in the tabloid-style Fetish Times is entitled “Amateur Surgeon,” written especially for those who thrill to the ultimate asceticism of amputation and surgery. Fantasies of beautiful women driven by lust to get severe cosmetic surgeries performed, are the staple fare of these types of fetishists. While you would not ordinarily believe that this intensely neurotic fixation has too many devotees, there are enough to give rise to the publication of a magazine called Amputee Times. (Offended amputees have petitioned the publish to change the title of his magazine to something on the order of Physically Challenged.) One adult actress, Long Jean Silver, has carved quite a career out of her amputated foot. While this peculiar descent into the atavistic and Neolithic mentality might seem a phenomenon restricted to the dark underworld of fetishism, it has also invaded the World of “high” art. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Will has become the key word, both Right and Left. In the past it was, to be sure, thought that will is necessary but secondary—that the cause came first. Nietzsche formulated the new way most provocatively when he said, “A good war makes sacred almost any cause.” The causes have no status; they are values. It is the positing that is essential. The transformation of violence from a means to at least a kind of end helps to show the difference, and the link, between Marxism and Fascism. Georges Sorel, the author of Reflections on Violence, was a man of Left who influenced Mussolini. The crucial thought goes back to Nietzsche by way of Bergson: If creativity presupposes chaos—hence  strife and overcoming—and man is now creating an order of peace in which there is no strife, is successfully rationalizing the World, the conditions for creativity, id est, humanity, will be destroyed. Therefore chaos must be willed, as against the peace and order of socialism. Marx himself recognized that man’s historical greatness and progress came from contradictions he had to struggle to overcome. If, as Marx promises, there are to be no more contradictions after the revolution, will there be man? Older revolutionaries were willing peace, prosperity, harmony and reason, id est, the last man. The newer breed wills chaos. Hardly anyone swallowed what Nietzsche prescribed whole, but the argument was infectious. It surely was impressive to Italian and German intellectuals in whose eyes the Fascist and Nazi “movement” found favor. Self-assertion, not justice or a clear view of the future, was the crucial element. Thus determination, will, commitment, caring (here is where this now silly expression got its force), concern or what have you become the new virtues. The new revolutionary charm became evident in the U.S.A. in the sixties, much to the distaste of old Marxists. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

There is also something of this current sympathy for terrorist, because “they care.” I have seen young people, and mature people too, who are good democratic liberals, lovers of peace and gentleness, struck dumb with admiration for individuals threatening or using the most terrible violence for the slightest and tawdriest reasons. They have a sneaking suspicion that they are face to face with men of real commitment, which they themselves lack. And commitment, not truth, is believed to be what counts. Trotsky’s and Mao’s correction of Marx in calling for “permanent revolution” takes account of this thirst for the act of revolution, and its appeal lies therein. The radical students of the sixties called themselves “the movement,” unaware that this was also the language used by young Nazis in the thirties and was the name of a Nazi journal, Die Bewegung. Movement takes the place of progress, which has a definite direction, a good direction, and is a force that controls men. Progress was what the old revolutions were evidence of. Movement has none of this naïve, moralistic nonsense in it. Motion rather than fixity is our condition—but motion without any content or goal not imposed on it by man’s will. Revolution in our times is a mixture of what it was earlier thought to be and what Andre Gide called a gratuitous act, represented in one of his novels by the unprovoked and unmotivated murder of a stranger on a train. Now, as we look toward the future and explore the molecular World, we see Joel Gregory manipulating molecules in virtual reality of a simulated World using video goggles, tactile glovers, and a supercomputer. The early twenty-first century should be able to do even better. Imagine, then, that today you were to take a really long nap, oversleep, and wake up decades later in a nanotechnological World. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

In the twenty-first century, even more than in the twentieth, it is easy to make things work without understanding them, but to a newcomer much of the technology seems like magic, which is dissatisfying. After a few days, you want to understand what nanotechnology is, on a gut level. Back in the late twentieth century, most teaching used dry words and simple pictures, but now—for a topic like this—it is easier to explore a simulated World. And so you decide to explore a simulation of the molecular World. Looking through the brochure, you read many tedious facts about the simulation: how accurate it is in describing sizes, forces, motions, and the like; how similar it is to working tools used by both engineering students and professionals; how one can buy one for one’s very own home, and so forth. It explains how one can tour the human body, see state-of-the-art nanotechnology in actions, climb a bacterium, etcetera. For starters, one decides to take an introductory tour: simulations of real twentieth-century objects alongside quaint twentieth-century concepts of nanotechnology. After paying a small fee and memorizing a few key phrases (any variation of “Get me out of here!” will do the most important job), you pull on a powersuit, pocket a Talking Tourguide, step into the simulation chamber, and strap the video goggles over your eyes. Looking through the goggles, you seem to be in a room with a table you know is not really there and walls that seem too far away to fit in the simulation chamber. However, trickery with a treadmill floor makes the walk to the walls seem far enough, and when you walk back and thump the table, it feels solid because the powersuit stops your hand sharply at just the right place. You can even feel the texture of the carvings on the table leg, because the suit’s gloves press against your fingertips in the right pattern as you move. It is also like visiting the Winchester Mystery House. However, the simulation is not perfect, but it is easy to ignore the defect. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

On the table is (or seems to be) an old 1990s silicon computer chip. When you pick it up, as the beginners’ instructions suggest, it looks like it looks like the circle in the center of the spider web pattern of the Winchester Mystery House window. Then you say, “Shrink me!” and the World seems to expand. You feel as though you are falling toward the chip’s surface, shrinking rapidly. In a moment, it loos roughly like the zig zag stair case in the Winchester Mystery House, with your thumb still holding it. The World grows blurrier, then everything seems to go wrong as you approach the molecular level. First, your vision blurs to uselessness—there is light, but it becomes a featureless fog. You skin is ticked by small impacts, then battered by what feel like hard-thrown marbles. Your arms and legs feel as though they are caught in turbulence, pulling to and fro, harder and harder. The ground hits your feet, you stumble and stick to the ground like a fly on flypaper, battered so hard that it almost hurts. You asked for realism, and only the built-in safety limits in the suit keep the simulated thermal motions of air molecules and of your own arms from beating you senseless. “Stop!” gives you a rest from the suit’s yanking and thumping as you walk along the staircase, and “Standard settings!” makes the World around you become more reasonable as you move along the corridors of this mystery. The simulation changes, introducing the standard cheats. Your simulated eyes are now smaller than a light wave, making focus impossible along the uneven floor as surreal doors that open to nowhere, open to a wall, stairs that go nowhere, and hidden doors, but the goggles snap your vision into sharpness and show the atoms around you as small spheres. (Real nanomachines are as blind as you were a moment ago, and cannot cheat.) Once you get to the Y shaped staircase, you are on the surface of the 1990s computer chip, between a cell and two blocky nanocomputers. Your simulated body is 50 nanometers tall, about 1/40,000,000 your real size, and the smaller nanocomputer is twice your height. At that size, you can “see” atoms and molecules, in the most Mrs. Winchester’s favorite window. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

The simulation keeps bombarding you with air molecules, but the standard settings leave out the sensation of being pelted with marbles. A moment ago you were stuck tight to the ground by molecular stickiness, but the standard settings give your muscles the effective strength of steel—at least in simulation—by making everything around you much softer and weaker. The tourgide says that only unreal features of the simulation have to do with you—not just your ability to see and to ignore thermal shaking and bombardment, but also your sheer existence at a size too small for anything so complex as a human being. It also explains why you can see things more, something about slowing down everything around you by a factor of 10 for every factor of 10 enlargement, and by another factor to allow for your being made stronger and hence faster. And so, with your greater strength and some adjustments to make your arms, legs, and torso less sticky, you can stand, see, feel and take stock of the situation from the fourth-floor balcony. The Winchester Mystery House represents America. The American lives in a land of wonders, everything around one is in constant movement, and every movement seems as advance. Consequently, in one’s mind the idea of newness is closely linked with that of improvement. Nowhere does one see any limit placed by nature to human endeavor; in one’s eyes something that does not exist is just something that has not been tried, as with Mrs. Winchester’s architectural style. This feature of the American ethos is plain to everyone who has studied American culture, although there are wide variations of the explanation of it. Some attribute it to the immigrant nature of the population (represent by the spirits in the Winchester Mystery House Mrs. Winchester is trying to appease with the construction of her estate); some to the frontier mentality; some to the abundant nature resources of a singularly blessed land and the unlimited opportunities of a new continent; some to the unprecedented political and religious freedom afforded the average person; some to all of these factors and more. It is enough to say here that the American distrust of constraints—one might even say the American skepticism toward culture itself—offered encouragement to radical and thoughtless technological intrusion. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

Cresleigh Homes

Heaven is in your eyes. On paper, #Havenwood Model 1 is the smallest home in the community – but you’d never guess from this photo! Our homes are designed for maximum livability, and the 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home lets the whole family spread out.

Did you know all our Havenwood homes also come with a Google Home Hub and Home Mini?! “Alexa, play coffee shop jazz.” 🎶 It says, “Yes, your soul is good!”

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