In mortality we have the certain of death and the burden of sin. As the cell door slams shut behind a person who faces the prospect of having to spend 5 to 25 years withing that same four walls, what thoughts and feelings go through their mind and heart? The overall picture that emerges from our research is that of offenders caught up in a cycle of expensive, self-indulgent habits (exempli gratia, gambling, drug use, and heavy drinking) that feed on themselves and constantly call for more of the same. It would be a mistake to conclude that these offenders are being driven to crime by genuine financial hardship; few of them are doing robberies to buy the proverbial loaf of bread to feed their children. Yet, most of their crimes are economically motivated. The offenders perceive themselves as needing money and robbery is a response to that perception. Though background risk factors, such as pressing financial need, predispose persons to criminality, they fail to provide comprehensive, precise, and deep explanations of the situational pushes, urges, and impulses that energize actual criminal conduct. Nor do such factors identify the “necessary and sufficient” conditions for criminal motivation to eventuate in criminal behavior. Focusing on the foreground attends to these problems. A foreground analytic approach identifies the immediate, situational factors that catalyze criminal motivation and transforms offenders from an indifferent state to one in which they are determined to commit crime. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Although the streets were a prime focus of much early criminological work, the strong influence of street culture on offender motivation has largely been overlooked since. Street culture subsumes a number of powerful conduct norms, including but not limited to, the hedonistic pursuit of sensory stimulation, disdain for conventional living, lack of future orientation, and persistent eschewal of responsibility. Street culture puts tremendous emphasis on virtues of spontaneity; it dismisses “rationality and long-range planning…in favor of enjoying the moment.” As if there is no tomorrow, offenders typically live like confident that tomorrow will somehow take care of itself. However, Matthew 6.34 says, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” This culture tends to accentuate the negative and can thwart a person’s attempts to find meaning and direction. On the streets, “every night is Saturday night,” and the self-indulgent pursuit of trendy consumerism and open-ended street action becomes a means to this end. The pursuit of fast living is more than symbolic or dramaturgical, it cuts to the very core of offenders’ perceptions of self-identity. To be cool, hip, and “in,” one must constantly prove it through conspicuous outlays of cash. The fetishized World of street-corner capitalism dictates that fiscal responsibility be jettisoned and money burned on material objects and illicit action that assert in no uncertain terms one’s place in the street hierarchy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Carefree spending creates the “impression of affluence” by which offenders are judged; it serves to demonstrate that they have indeed “made it”—at least for the time. On the streets, the image one projects is not everything, it is the only thing. To not buy into such an approach is to abandon a source of recognition offenders can get nowhere else or, worse, to state failure full in the face. It is not hard to fathom why many offenders in our sample regarded a lack of funds as an immediate threat to their social standing. The problem becomes one of sustenance; the reputational advantages of cash-intensive living can be appreciated and enjoyed to their fullest only if participants moderate their involvement in it. This requires intermittent and disciplined spending, an anomalous and untimely untenable proposition. Offenders effectively become ensnared by their own self-indulgent habit—habits that feed on themselves and constantly call for more of the same. These habits are expensive and create a pressing and pervasive need for cash—a need remedied through robbery but only temporarily, since the proceeds of any given robbery merely “enable” more action. The seductive attractions of street life appear to take on a power logic of their own; offenders burn money only to create (albeit inadvertently) the conditions that spark their next decision to rob. This self-enclosed cycle of reinforcing behavior starts with a predisposed background with risk factors such as: strain, broken homes, neglectful parent, social capital deficits, leading to participation in street culture. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Once an individual is involved in street culture, they enter a vicious cycle of: pursuit of illicit action/conspicuous consumption, financial desperation, robbery, disposable cash. As much as these offenders sought liberation through the hedonistic, opened pursuit of sensory stimulation, such a quest ultimately is both self-defeating and subordinating. Those hooked on street action may never see it this way, but objective assessments of reality are difficult to render when rationality is severely bounded as it is here. Suffice it to say that, for those in our sample, the “choice” to rob occurs in a context in which rationality not only is sharply bounded, it barely exists. If one takes the influence of context seriously, most offenders “decide” to commit robbery in a social and psychological terrain bereft of realistic alternatives. Street-culture participation effectively obliterates, or at least severely circumscribes, the range of objectively available options, so much so as to be almost deterministic. Offenders typically are overwhelmed by their own predicament—emotional, financial, pharmacological, and otherwise—and see robbery as the only way out. Chronic isolation from conventional others and lifestyles only reinforces their insularity, driving them deeper and deeper into a “downward life trajectory” of ever-increasing criminal embeddedness called “role engulfment.” Being a street robber is more than a series of offenses that allow one to meet some arbitrarily specified inclusion criteria: it is a way of behaving, a way of thinking, an approach to life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Stopping such criminals exogenously—in the absence of lengthy incapacitation—is not likely to be successful. Getting offenders to “go straight” is analogous to telling lawful citizens to relinquish one’s history, companions, thoughts, feelings, and fears, and replace them with something else. Self-directed going-straight talk on the part of offenders more often than not is insincere—akin to young children talking about what they are going to be when they grow up: Young storytellers…criminals…do not care about the [reality]; the pleasure comes in saying the words, the verbal ritual itself brings pleasure. Gifting offenders money, in the hopes they will reduce or stop their offending is similarly misguided. It is but twisted enabling and only likely to set off another round of illicit action that plunges offenders deeper into the abyss of desperation that drives them back to their next crime. The image of prison life might conjure up words like accountability, punishment, structure, and discipline. There is truth in all of those associations. However, just as relevant are words like repentance, Atonement, Spirit, and conversation. Church helps former inmates make better use of their time, association with others who are improving their lives, learn correct behavior through the modeling of ecclesiastical leaders, and learn gospel doctrines and principles. Other benefits are less visible but may be more enduring, such as when a former inmate’s soul is enlarged or expanded. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

The Final Judgement is not just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts—what we have done. It is an acknowledgement of the final effects of our actions and thoughts—what we have become. This is good news: many within prisons, jails, and halfway houses are learning from their bad choices and are becoming what Heavenly Father would have them become. Many inmates wrestle with addictions. How they cope upon release is critical to their success. The manifestations of evil spirits through persons obtains footing and varies in character, according to the degree and kind of group they secure for possession. In one case in the Christian Bible, the only manifestation of the evil spirit’s presence was dumbness (Matt. 9.32), the spirit possibly locating in the vocal organs; in another, the person held by the spirit was “deaf and unintelligible” (Mark 9.25), and the symptoms included foaming at the mouth, grinding the teeth—all connected with the head—but the hold of the spirit was of such long standing (v.21) that he could throw his victim down and convulse the whole body (Mark 9.20-22). In other cases we find merely an “unclean spirit,” as with the man in a synagogue—probably so hidden that none would know the man was thus possessed, until, seeing Christ, the spirit cried out with fear, “Art Thou come to destroy us?” (Mark 1.24); or a “spirit of infirmity” (Luke 13.11) in a woman of whom it might be said tht she simply required a “healing” of some disease, or that she was always tired and only needed proper nutrition and rest—as some would say in the language of the twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Again, we find a very advanced case in the man with the “legion,” showing that the evil spirits’ possession reached such a climax as to make the person appear insane; for his own personality was so mastered by the malignant spirits in possession as to cause him to lose all sense of decency and self-control in the presence of others (Luke 8.27). That there are different kinds of spirits is evident not only from their manifestations recorded in the Gospels but also in later instances: in the account of the girl at Philippi, possessed by a “spirit of divination”; and in Simon the Sorcerer, who was so energized by satanic power for the working of miracles that he was considered to be “the great power of God” by the deceived people (Acts 8.10). In these cases, trickery was the game. If they really believe they are communicating with the spirits of the dead, spiritists of today are also deceived. Surely it is easy for designing spirits to impersonate dead people, including even saintly Christians: they have watched them (Acts 19.15) all their lives, and can easily imitate their personality traits and counterfeit their voices. Therefore, it is very possible that some criminals and some of the mentally ill may be possessed by evil spirits because they have some of these same traits. Some people may me tired of studying and deep in the throes of a loneliness trip—different that they have ever experienced—terrifying yet somehow good in its simple realness. The Savior is our Advocate with the Father. He knows our weaknesses. He knows how to succor those who are tempted. It is because of the Savior that all of us can make real progress—experience true conversion—in becoming what Heavenly Father wants us to become. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The answers are contained in the revelatory events on which Christianity is based and are taken by systematic theology from the sources, through the medium, under the norm. The mutual dependence of question and answers can be explained in terms of form and content. Theological answers derive their content form from the existential questions. For example, if existential analysis reveals the threat of non-being, then God must be called the power of being that overcomes this threat. If history is an incomprehensible puzzle, then the Kingdom of God must be termed the unity, meaning, and fulfilment of history. Christian symbols must always be open to, and in correlation with, the questions of existence. Contrasting with other methods, the supranaturalistic method considers revelation as a strange bundle of truth that fell from Heaven. It has nothing but answers, and from them in manufactures the questions. The naturalistic or humanistic method never gets beyond human existence. It extracts the answers from the question themselves. Lastly, the dualistic method tries to construct a correlation, but fails. By such devices as natural revelation and the proofs for the existence of God, it seeks to correlate natural answers with Christian answers, instead of questions with answers. If the proofs for God are taken as a question—as they are in the method of correlation—and not as an answer, then their use is justified. The method of correlation is not foolproof. The answers may prejudice the questions, or the questions prejudice the answers. For theology, too, is ambiguous. Nor is the method of correlation new. As a method, it is as old as theology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The U.S.A. government had a major problem trying to motivate several million teenagers to register for the military draft. Large-scale civil disobedience would make it impossible to punish everyone who violated the law. Still, the government had a big advantage: it set the rules. To see this advantage of moving first, imagine that the government is only allowed to punish one person who fails to register. How can they use this single threat to induce everyone to register? The government announces that it will go after evaders in alphabetical order. If he failed to register, the person with surname Aaron knows that he would be singled out for punishment. Then the Abrams conclude that since all of the Aarons will surely register, it is they who will be punished. And so on down the line right through to the Zhukovs and the Zweibels. A lawyer might argue that it is unconstitutional to single out people for punishment because of the alphabetical ordering of their names. However, nothing is special about the alphabet. The key point is that the order of punishment is pre-specified. A randomly chosen and announced order of birthdates, or social security numbers, does just as well. A few selective punishments go a long way in keeping everyone in line, and are much less expensive than offering market wages to attract an equal number and quality of recruits. For example, if Congress mistook appearances for reality, it might forbid that Draft Board to use alphabetical order as the means by which they choose who gets punished first, leaving open other equivalent methods. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

What is needed to stop the practice is to forbid the pre-announcement of any order. When the participants in a game are ranked in some order, it is often possible to predict what the person at one end will do. This knowledge influences the action of the next person, which in turn influences the third, and so on down the line. The story we have told is a bit extreme. By the time we get to the Zhukovs, someone will surely not register and then be punished. The Zhukovs do not really have to worry. With so many individuals, one expects a small amount of slippage. The point is that the number of punishments available need not be anywhere near the number of people to motivate. The capacity (and willingness) to jail a thousand protestors can deter several million would-be’s. From the World perspective, Chinese domestic companies have been strengthening their global position in several stages. During the 1970s to early 1980, Chinese markers established themselves as dominant players in the production and exports of a wide variety of low-tech-low-end mass product, defeating producers of similar items in the West. Myriads of Chinese-made affordable T-shirts, sneakers, lighters, toys, kitchenware, and so on and so forth conquered markets all around the World. In this segment, where price makes all the difference, Western producers were doomed to lose. Nowadays China’s dominance here is continuing, in spite of the fact that its rising labor and other costs have become a hot topic Worldwide. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

There is a lot of talk about the erosion of its cost advantage resulting in the shift of low-cost mass production to the countries of the next row like Vietnam, Bangladesh, Sir Lanka, Cambodia, or Laos. The only option for China, according to this school of thought, is to upgrade its industries and produce more high-value-added goods. This is wrong. China is unique. It will not be shifting from lower-value-added to higher-value-added products. It will handle both. In other words, China is and, for decades to come, will be moving up and up the value chain on the one hand while retaining its dominance in the low-tech-low-end segment on the other. In this regard, it is different from any other nations. Its growth pattern goes beyond the famous flying geese framework in its conventional sense. China’s ability to preserve dominance in the low-tech-low-end mass products segment can be easily explained. First, its labor and other costs are still quite low. They remain incomparable with those in the West and thus do not lose attractiveness for both western businesses and consumers. Second, no next-row country can compare with China in terms of size. Consequently, none of them is capable of replacing it as the major production platform for low-end simple products, even though their costs are lower. True, more and more often both Western and Asian businesspeople are complaining about the increase of China’s labor and other costs, and the mass media is willingly picking it up as a popular topic. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

However, read or listen to what they say attentively, word by word, and you will clearly see what it is all about. They are upset today Chinese costs are higher than in past years and higher than they initially expected them to be. Nevertheless, they continue to expand their direct investment to China on a much larger scale than to any next-row country. Actions, not talks, are serving as proof of China’s real cost competitiveness. In China, where the wages in the manufacturing have increase 75 percent in the last ten years, but it is 23 percent of USA manufacturing rates, which means that its cost advantages remain very significant. Though wage growth rates are high all across China (around 10 percent a year), labor (as well as other) costs are starting to bite, mainly in the economically advanced eastern coastal provinces. As of 2023, the average monthly wage in China’s manufacturing industry is US$1,000 a month, which is two and a half times more than it was in 2010. As of 2023, the manufacturing employees average wage in the United States of America is $2,583 a month. The average hourly wage in China’s manufacturing industry is about $6 an hour—versus $18.5 in the United States of America. Also, China does upgrade their industries and big cities in China are becoming service, logistics, education and R&D platforms, supporting industrial growth in the hinterland. No doubt, as time goes by, China will significantly enhance their international role as producers and exporters and attract a growing number of multinational companies to diversity the geography of their production activities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

In the second stage, which started in the 1990 and has been continuing into the 2000s and beyond, Chinese companies are moving fast to capture global markets of technologically advanced low-end mass products, leveraging their increasing technological capabilities and cost advantages at one and the same time. Representative examples include TVs, AV products, mobile phones, personal computers, or, in the latest development, solar batteries. Entering this sector, Chinese makers exert competitive pressure on the Western companies positioned in higher-end market niches, usually by offering simpler various of similar products at a lower price. China has emerged as the World’s number one producer of solar panels. Their manufacturing exceeds 80 percent of solar panels Worldwide. Using industry-validated figures, Chinese solar panels are 30 percent less expensive than USA solar panels. This enables China to play a leading role in the global energy revolution. In fact, China’s average share of the solar panel supply chain has gone from 55 percent to 84 percent over the past 13 years. China also continues to lead in terms of investment, making up almost 66 percent of global large-scale solar investment. In the first half od 2022, the country invested $41 billion, a 173 percent increase from the year before. With Joe Biden’s ambitious new car pollution rules that could require electric cars to make up 66 percent of new cars sold in the USA by 2032, many people are concerned. China made about 75 percent of the World’s lithium-ion batteries in 2021, compared with 7 percent for the USA. And China currently controls nearly 70 percent of all minded cobalt needed in the electric vehicle industry. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

China already has 80 to 90 percent of the global rare Earth market. By 2029 the United States of America is expected to have only 3 lithium-ion battery mega-factories compared to China’s 88—of a total 115 lithium-ion battery mega-factories planned. Net profit for Chinese manufacturer CATL jumped 93 percent in 2022 to US$4.41 billion, as the World’s largest supplier of electric vehicle batteries. With EV batteries costing approximately $4,000 to $20,000 many people fear a future with electric vehicles because the economy is unstable and most people simply cannot afford to come up with that amount of money all at once. Some may say there are financing options, but that would be like financing a car, on top of making a car payment. They also fear making China richer than it already is and the USA more dependent on China. Across the World, a green tide is gathering momentum too. This movement for ecological sanity is essential—a leading beneficial example of ordinary people around the World leading their people. Propelling ecology to the top of the World agenda have been a succession of sensational catastrophes, from Three Miles Island and Chernobyl to Bhopal and the Alaska oil spill. Clearly, more lie ahead. Industrial society has reached its outer limits, making it impossible to continue putting toxic wastes in our backyards, stripping the land of it forests, dumping Styrofoam debris in our oceans, creating plastic islands, and punching holes in the ozone. The Worldwide environmental movement is therefore a survival response to planetary crisis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

However, this movement, too, has an antidemocratic fringe. It has its own advocates of return to darkness. Some of them are ready to hijack the environmental movement in pursuit of their private political or religious agendas. The issues are so complex and recalcitrant that the Green movement is likely to split into at least four parts. One part will continue to be the very model of legal, nonviolent democratic action. However, given a succession of ecological crises and tragedies, a second wing, which already exists in embryonic form, might well step up from eco-vandalism to full-scale eco-terrorism to enforce its demands. A further split will intensify the key ideological war already dividing the environmental movement. On one side: those who favor technological and economic advance within stringent environmental constraints. Unwilling to give up on imagination and intelligence, they believe in the power of the human mind—and therefore in our ability to design technologies that will use smaller amounts of resources, emit less pollution, and recycle wastes into reusable resources. They argue that today’s crisis calls for revolutionary changes in the way the economy and technology are organized. Oriented toward tomorrow, these are the mainstream environmentalists. Battling them for ideological control of the movement, however, are self-described “fundamentalists,” who wish to plunge society into pre-technological medievalism and asceticism. They are “eco-theologues,” and some of their views dovetail with the thinking of religious extremists. The eco-theologues insist that there can be no technological relief, and that we are therefore destined to slide back into preindustrial poverty, a prospect they regard as a blessing rather than a curse. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

For many of the reversionist thinkers, the issues are not primarily ecological but religious. They wish to restore a religion-drenched World that has not existed in the West since the Middle Ages. The environmental movement provides a convenient vehicle. This group reduces the history of our relations with nature to biblical allegory. First there was an ecological “Golden Age,” when humans lived in harmony with nature and worshipped it. The species fell from this “Eden” with the arrival of the industrial age, in which the “Devil”—technology—ruled human affairs. Now we must transit to a new “Paradise” of perfect sustainability and harmony. If not, we face “Armageddon.” This imposition of a Western, indeed Christian, parable on the far more complex history of our relations with nature is common to the “eco-theologues” who glamorize life in the medieval village. Rudolf Bahro, an influential Green theorist now living in West Germany, explicitly holds that what is needed is “theology, not ecology—the birth of a new Golden Age which cultivates…the nobility in man.” He reached back into the 13^th century to quote Meister Eckhart, the founder of German mysticism, “who lived in the now despoiled Rhine River valley” and who told us that all creatures have God within them. Mr. Bahro finds the same idea in the poetic words of Mechtild of Magdeburg, another 13^th-century Christian thinker, quoting her beautiful line to the effect that all creatures are “a flash of grace.” Ecological salvation thus, for him, is a matter of religion, something the secular World will never be able to offer. Mr. Bahro even approves of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s remark to Mr. Gorbachev that the Soviet leader should look to Allah rather than economic reforms to solve Soviet problems. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Another theorist, Wolfgang Sachs of the University of Pennsylvania, attack the Worldwatch Institute, a leading environmentalist research center, for its “specifically modern outlook” and dismisses Amory Lovins, the conservationist, for urging greater energy efficiency, whereas what is wanted by Mr. Sachs is “good housekeeping” in the tradition of “subsistence-oriented households.” Ivan Illich, one of our most imaginative social critics and author of several brilliant works bearing on ecological theory, is opposed to “managerial fascism” and simple-minded Ludditism. What he proposes, however, is “sustainability without development”—in short, stasis. For Mr. Illich, poverty is the human condition, and should be accepted as such; hence, who needs development? The new system of wealth creation, he says, has “injected new life into what would otherwise have been the exhausted logic of industrialism.” He fails to see that the new knowledge-based technological system actually contradicts the old logic of industrialism at many points. For Mr. Illich, too, the argument is ultimately theological. “God was the pattern that connected the cosmos” at a time when bare subsistence was accepted as normal and natural, a state we should return. So long as God ruled the medieval mind, humanity and nature remained in balance. “Man, the agent of disequilibrium,” upset the balance after the scientific revolution. Mr. Illich regards the concept of an “eco-system which, through multiple feedback mechanisms, can be regulated scientifically” as a snare and a delusion. Clearly, he implies, a return to a God-center ascetic World would be preferable. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Theo-ecological rhetoric contains within it more than a hint of the Christian notion of retribution. As the writers Linda Bilmes and Mark Byford have noted, the theological Greens insist “consumption is sinful,” while environmental blight is seen  as “punishment for excessive consumerism, lack of spirituality, wastefulness.” As in a Sunday sermon, the implication is that we should “repent, and mend our ways.” Or, one might add, face fire and brimstone. This is hardly the place to try to resolve the profound issues raised by the ecology debate—as significant a philosophical debate as that raised by the Enlightenment thinkers at the dawn of the industrial age. What is important, however, is to note the congruence between the views of the eco-theologues and the fundamentalists revival, with its deep hostility to secular democracy. A shared emphasis on absolutes and the belief that sharp restrictions on individual choice may be required (to make people “moral,” or to “protect the environment”) point ultimately to a common attack on human rights. Indeed, many environmentalists themselves worry openly about the arrival of Green Ayotallahs or “eco-fascists” who impose their particular brand of salvation. Thus, Mr. Bahro cautions that “in the deep crises of humanity, charisma always plays a role. The deeper the crisis, the darker the charismatic figure who will emerge…Whether or not we will have a green Adolph depends…on how far cultural change advances before the next Chernobyl.” One may admire the integrity and creativity of a thinker like Mr. Illich, surely no fascist himself, while recognizing the deeply antidemocratic implications of his search for the absolute, the constant, the static, and the holy. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Criticizing the eco-theologues, the French sociologist Alain Touraine warns, “If we reject reason in the name of salvation from the ozone depletion, we will court a Green fundamentalism, an eco-theocracy of the Ayatollah Khomeini variety.” If such anxiety sounds too extreme, it may be worth recalling the Wandervogel youth movement of the 1920s in Germany, where the Green movement today is most militant. The Wandervogel were the hippie-Greens of the Weimar Republic, roaming the countryside with their rucksacks, carrying guitars, wearing flowers, holding Woodstock-life festivals, high on spirituality and preaching a return to nature. A decade later, Mr. Hitler was in control. Mr. Hitler also exalted preindustrial values, picturing the Nazi utopia as one in which “the blacksmith stands again at his anvil, the farmer walks behind his plough.” In the words of Professor J.P. Stern of University College, London, Mr. Hitler evoked “a pre-industrial rustic idyll.” Mr. Hitler’s ideologists constantly praised the “organic,” urged physical fitness, and used biological analogies to justify the vilest race hate. “Hundreds of thousands of youngsters passed through the Youth Movement,” writes George L. Mosse in The Crisis of German Ideology, “and many of them found it not very difficult to accommodate themselves to the ideological propositions of the Nazis.” Can one really imagine a Neo-Green Party, with armbands, Sam Browne belts, and jackboots, setting out to enforce its own view of nature on the rest of society? Of course not, under normal conditions. However, what if conditions are not “normal”? #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Consider the consequences of another Bhopal-like eco-catastrophe set in, say, Seattle, Stuttgart, or Sheffield…followed by back-to-back crises elsewhere…followed by confusion and monstrous corruption in the disaster relief effort…amid fundamentalists cries that the disaster was inflicted by God as punishment for “permissiveness” and immorality. Picture all this occurring in time of deep economic distress. Imagine an attractive, articulate “Eco-Adolph” who promises not just to solve the immediate crisis but to “purify” the society materially, morally, and politically—if only he is given extraconstitutional powers. Some of today’s eco-theological rhetoric has an absurdist flavor, as did that of the erstwhile Adolph and his ideologists. Nazi propagandists exalted the Middles Ages (especially the time when the Holy Roman Empire dominated Europe) as a period when Kultur reached its “highest peak.” Today, a British ecological “fundi,” or fundamentalist, writes in a letter to The Economist that “the goals of ‘fundi’ Greens like myself…[are to] return to Europe which existed in the distant past…between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne,” in which the basic unit of society “was the rural holding, scarcely larger than a hamlet…The only way for humans to live in harmony with nature is to live at a subsistence level.” What the eco-medievalists normally do not tell us is the political price. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

They seldom point out that democracy was conspicuously absent from those bucolic villages they hold up for emulation—villages ruled by the cruelest patriarchy, religious mind-control, feudal ignorance and force. This was the Kultur the Nazis glamorized. Not for nothing has the period between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne become known as the Dark Ages. By themselves the eco-theologues might be dismissed. They remain a small fringe on the far edge of the environmental movement. However, it is a mistake to view them as an isolated or trivial phenomenon. The religious revival and the Green movements alike breed ultras who would be happy to jettison democracy. At their extremes, these two movements may be converging to impose new restrictions on personal and political behavior in the name of both God and Greenness. Together they are pushing for a power shift toward the past. Society has gotten so advanced and expensive that many people feel nostalgia for the past. Nostalgia is a longing feeling for the past when things seemed better, easier, and more fun. It is the feeling behind countless number one hits. We all know the feeling. What psychological purpose does nostalgia serve? Well, for one, nostalgia serves as an emotional experience that unifies. One example of this is it helps to unite our sense of who we are, our self, our identity over time. Because over time we change constantly, we change in incredible ways. We are not anywhere near the same as we were when we were in high school. Nostalgia by motivating us to remember the past in our own life helps unite us to that authentic self and remind us who we have been and then compare that to who we feel we are today. And many people are nostalgic about the past when America was number one in manufacturing and Christianity was more accepted as the religion of America. Therefore to help America remain a superpower, please buy American cars, and appliance and other American-Made goods. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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