Money economy and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected. They share a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and with things; and in, this attitude, a formal justice is often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness. It would be erroneous to assume the rural Kentucky communities present universally supportive or even knowledgeable fronts regarding the marijuana industry. Rather, individuals in these communities can be identified as occupying one of seven primary roles. It is important to note, however, that these roles are primarily males’ roles. The primary roles of community members are as ostriches, the fringe group, the in-the-knows, the profiteers, the part-timers, the retirees, and the active participants. The Ostriches are aware that people in the community grow marijuana, but likes myths about the flightless bird, stick their hands in the sand and pretend to not know anything about illegal activities. Consequently, these persons are the least informed about the nature and scope of the marijuana industry. Their constant denial serves to protect the marijuana grower from outside scrutiny. These people portray the marijuana grower from outside scrutiny. These people portray the marijuana grower as a deviant outsider and not one of “us” even when there is evidence to the contrary. This groups attempts to project the image of a community of only good, law-abiding people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

The role of the ostriches is to promote this image to outsiders and to reassure themselves of the goodness of the people in the community. For the most part they do not profit from the marijuana grower’s enterprise. This is likely due to intimacy of community members and their awareness of the roles played by everyone in the community, including the ostriches. The Fringe group is aware that the marijuana industry is a part of their community, but these people have no connection to kinship networks that participate in the marijuana industry. These individuals will acknowledge the industry’s existence to others (while ostriches will not). However, they will rarely, if ever, inform law enforcement officials about such activity. The belief is that such knowledge should be contained within the community. They believe only insiders can and should exert social control over community and industry members. The Fringe group persistently assets that marijuana growers are a small deviant group within the community. This perspective, like that of the ostrich, offers the marijuana grower a degree of protection from outsiders. If organized crime is perceived as small and powerless, its members stand a better chance of avoiding detection and thereby enabling them to continue illegal activities (and presumably maintain community stability). For these reasons, those who disapprove of the marijuana grower facilitate his avoiding detection. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Wearing the mantle of respectability, the grower is not recognized or acknowledged as a member of the marijuana industry (or, he is not recognized as a community member). In reality, the Fringe group’s failure to publicly identify the scope of industry participation facilitates the invisibility enjoyed by many members, thus further entrenching the industry in the community fabric. The In-The-Knows differ from the Fringe group because they have friends and relatives involved in growing and selling marijuana. These persons may be present and witness others’ illegal activities or such activities may be discussed in their presence. This group is trusted by marijuana growers, and due to their strong kinship ties to those inside the marijuana industry, they never disclose information regarding illegal activities to law enforcement officials. Furthermore, kinship ties motivate these persons to protect industry participants whenever possible. Most commonly this occurs via warnings of impending raids or investigations known to individuals because of their professional and personal access to such information. By protecting others from detection and apprehension these individuals promote community cohesion and continuation of current community structures and social/economic activities. The Profiteers are those community members who, while not directly participating in the activities of the marijuana industry, indirectly benefit from the economic impact it has on the community. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The Profiteers are a group of people made up of local business people who have knowledge of, and often support the marijuana growers. Marijuana is a major part of rural Kentucky communities’ economies. Many businesses will accept cash for both large and small purchases. Large purchases, such as new cars, are not question when paid in cash. That fact that a $50,000 vehicle is paid for in cash by someone whose home lacks indoor plumbing would draw attention from most, but not in a community that supports the rural marijuana industry. Many members of organized growers, such as the Country Boys, are not full-time participants. Some work in the marijuana industry for a short period of time, others move in and out of the group. Still others retire from the group but remain willing to help out when they are needed. All, however, remain fiercely loyal to the group. The Retiree is even more difficult to detect than the part-timer. He is no longer a participant, having retired due to advancing age (which may range from 60 to 80 years old). While no longer active in growing and selling, he is willing to teach other young men his trade and introduce them to his connections. On occasion retirement may be involuntary, a result of incarceration. Retirees may be extremely difficult for the outsider to identify. They are legitimate sector businessmen and professionals or literally almost anyone in the community. However, most community residents are keenly aware of these men’s past activities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

It is rarely discussed, but community members know of these activities in the same way they know of the community’s gossip. Wearing an air of respectability, the retiree may assist the active marijuana grower in laundering his money by introducing him to legitimate business opportunities and to those willing to accept cash for goods and services as well as finding markets for his product. The retiree has connections for the sale and safe transportation of the marijuana, along with accumulated skills regarding efficient means to grow a crop. He may personally introduce novice growers within his kinship network to others who can provide information and resources. He may also teach the novice how to plant and grow marijuana or simply instruct him verbally about what is needed or how to correct problems. Retirees serve as an example to younger growers, modeling how to evade detection and achieve financial success. Those whose retirement is a result of imprisonment also serve as models, demonstrating that prison may be part of doing business within the marijuana industry. The final role available to community members encompasses all aspects of active, regular, involvement in growing and selling marijuana. These persons often have made the marijuana industry their career, and their primary source of income is generated by their marijuana crops. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

As noted above, active rural Kentucky marijuana participants are found in five forms: communal growers, hustlers, pragmatists, hipsters, and entrepreneurs. Most of the active participants, such as the pragmatist, have never been arrested and function on a limited scale. Others, such as members of the Country Boys, expand their operations and grow marijuana on a much larger scale. Most small growers do so because of perceived financial necessity. When so motivated, business operations are rarely expanded. The hustlers enjoy living on the edge and pursue their goals by increasing the size of their crops, (often venturing outside their communities to enlarge their illegal activities). This, of course, also means hustlers increase the likelihood of their detection, therefore putting the image and stability of the community in jeopardy. Young hipsters may be unable to obtain legitimate employment and so work as mules and tend the crops of the hustlers. As the economic underclass, young hipsters are cared for by those in the community who employ (exploit?) them. The most obvious similarity across the varieties of active participants is that those involved are nearly all men. Women, however, do fulfill roles in the rural marijuana industry, but their roles are significantly different from men’s roles. In order to compete our understanding of the culture of the rural Kentucky marijuana industry, we will discuss women’s roles in the days ahead. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Developing empathy is an important part of becoming a healthy adult. To be empathic is to emotionally resonate with what another is feeling. Empathy cuts through our isolation, generating a network of interconnection. Empathy brings our heart out of the cold. It makes compassion possible. Members of an authoritarian, hierarchic social system will tend to develop higher empathic responsiveness to situations of superordinate-subordinate structure and lower empathic capacity for understanding other types of relations. If the system is relatively stable and rigid, then those nearer the top exhibit the greatest empathy with persons in superior position and the least with those in subordinate roles. Family structure in such systems will tend to reflect social structure, and families are hence rendered less likely to provide the interpersonal conditions for maximizing empathic capacity. In authoritarian families, the mother becomes the pivotal, mediating person, who is more able to understand both authoritarian father and subordinate children. (This may be why such characteristics as intuitiveness, sympathetic understanding, adaptability, and interest and skill in literary and artistic production have become identified as “feminine” in cultures characterized by patriarchal-authoritarian family system.) Age, gender, religious, and socioeconomic differences tend to operate to inhibit the development of empathic capacity, and reduce its utilization where possessed, when these rankings serve as barriers to participation and communication. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Participation in activities which include members of different subcultural groups, and which are not focused on the hierarchical relations of the subcultural groups themselves but oriented to concrete solution of common problems, will increase the empathic capacity of the participants. Subgroup relations characterized by anxiety and hostility are negative in their effects on the development of empathic capacity and its utilization. Families play a major role in the orientation of the child to these subgroups differences. Persons from families where positive efforts are made to bridge subgroup barriers to communication and understanding (differences in age, gender, class, ethnic origin, religion, and values) will show a higher empathic capacity than those who do not make such beneficial efforts. There is a positive linear relation between the empathic capacity of a person at any point in one’s developmental career line and the extent to which one’s previous development had been characterized by stable, intimate communicative relations of relative equality and reciprocity with the members of his family. For the ideal type, middle-class American family, the relative importance of the specific relationships are mother, father, siblings, in that order. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Affection is a highly important positive factor but its relative effectiveness is a function of the amount of communication sustained in the relationship. Friction and conflict produce a negative effect to the extent that they impair communication. The range of empathic capacity is a function of the number of different kinds of functional positions which the person has occupied in the family interaction. (By functional position of a person we mean the part played by him in a given social act, exempli gratia, a giver or a receiver in an act of giving and receiving; leader or follower.) Unilateral acts of parental subordination to the child’s demands, or of administering rewards and punishment, minimize reciprocity and inhibit the development of empathic response. Striking the child in anger at something he had done and in other ways reacting to his acts so that he discovers that “parents too are human,” is more in the direction of reciprocity and communication than the detached and impersonal application of rules of punishment and reward. The positive effect of “acting natural” is enhanced if the parent explains his reactions to the child and encourages him to consider how he would feel under similar circumstances, and then follows this by working out with the child some new line of action as an experimental solution to the problem. Empathic capacity in children is positively related to the facility with which their parents learn to communicate and understand each other (though high empathic capacity does not insure marital harmony). #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

When the believer is in any degree deceived by psychopathological offenders, one is liable to live in the body, give way to the sensuous, and to be dominated by the physical realm. This can become the case through “spiritual” experiences felt in the physical frame, but which are not really spiritual because not from the Spirit. A sense of “fire” in the body, “glow,” “thrills,” and all exquisite bodily sensations from apparently “spiritual” causes, really feed the senses; and, unconsciously to themselves, while they have these experiences, such believers live in the sense-realm, practically walking “after the flesh,” though they call themselves “spiritual.” For this reason “I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection” is practically impossible in this state of deception, because the sense-life is aroused in all kinds of ways, and the sensations of the body are forced upon the consciousness of the man. The spirit sense is practically lost in the acute realization of all the sensations in the bodily consciousness. May I point out that a man in normal health is oblivious of the physical action of breathing going on in his physical frame. In like manner, a believer under the domination of the Spirit ceases to register his bodily sensations; but the opposite is the case when psychopathic offenders have awakened the sense-life to abnormal action, either by beautiful experiences or the contrary. The cultivation of this condition of passivity may be ignorantly and sedulously carried out for years by the surrendered believer, so that it deepens its hold upon him to an incredible extent; until, when it reaches its consummation, the man may become so under the bondage of it as to awaken suddenly to his state. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

However, then one may think that “natural causes” alone explain his condition, or else, in some unaccountable way, his acute sensitiveness to the ultimate concern and divine things have become dulled beyond power of restoration or renewal. The physical feelings become deadened or atrophied, and the affections seem petrified and stoical. This is the time when deceiving spirits suggest that he has grieved God beyond repair, and the man goes through agonies of seeking the Presence he thinks he has grieved away. The cultivation of passivity may become about from reliance upon the many helps contrived (unknowingly) by the person to counteract or obviate the inconvenience of the passive state, such as the provision of and dependence upon outward helps to the eye for assisting the passive memory, utterance in speech to assist the “thinking” of the passive mind, and what may be termed “crutches” of all kinds, known only to the individual—elaborately constructed, and multiplied to meet his particular needs, but all keeping him from recognizing his true condition, even if her has the knowledge for doing so. While autonomy insists that man is his own law, heteronomy, on the other hand, assets that man, being unable to act according to universal reason, must be subjected to a law, strange and superior to him. Substance, instead of warming cultural forms with an inner glow, smothers them like an oversized garment. Most frequently heteronomy originates in religion that has lost the ultimate concern, that has degenerated into mere religion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

A heteronomous culture subjects the forms and laws of thinking and acting to authoritative criteria of an ecclesiastical religion or a political quasi-religion, even at the price of destroying the structures of rationality. Heteronomy is imposed by an institution or a personality which arrogates itself the claim to speak in the name of the ground of being and therefore in an unconditional and ultimate way. Thus heteronomy is inevitably demonic. Like autonomy, heteronomy can be considered from several angles. Departure is primitive art: status of gods, fetishes, dance masks, and so on, which possess an artistic and religious vale often inaccessible to occidental consciousness. Those objects bear forms (men, animals, plants), we are shocked by the manner in which they shatter form. Hands, feet, teeth, eyes, “adult” organs are recognizable as such, but they also burst through and distort their natural organic form. Yet we cannot write off this impressive human production as devoid of cultural value. On the contrary, it demonstrates a truth which our form-ridden Western eyes overlook: There is something positively contrary to form that is capable of fitting into an artistic form. Call it lack of form, or contradiction of form, or the contrapositive. We call it the demonic, the actuality of that which is positively contrary of form. What primitive art reveals, the history of religions confirms by its “holy demonries”—phallic cults, ritual prostitution, laceration myths, cult of war gods, and so on. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The most fearsome example from out own times is Dostoievsky’s “Grand Inquisitor”: The religion which makes itself absolute and therefore must destroy the saint in whose name it is established—the demonic will to power of the sacred institution. These examples contain the same tension as the creations of primitive art, id est, the combination of a formative and a form-shattering element, of form-creation and form-destruction. Therefore, the history of religions verifies the definition of the demonic: the unity of form-creating and form-destroying strength. These artistic and religious manifestations of the demonic are rooted in a metaphysics. The destructiveness of form which marks the demonic is neither injected from without nor originates from within by weakness of deficiency. It arises from the depths of form itself, from the inexhaustibility of being. Being is the non-rational, non-demonstrable ground of all things. At the same time it is their abyss, for they can never exhaust it. This inexhaustibility of being, however, is not like a passive, peaceful reservoir, but an active, consuming fire which burns through the form in which it is confined. For there dwells in everything the inner inexhaustibility of being, the will to realize in itself as an individual the active infinity of being, the impulse toward breaking through its own limited form, the longing to realize the abyss in itself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The demonic is this surge of the abyss of being which tends to destroy form, but never quite succeeds, because to come into being means to come to form. Moreover, the abyss of being is also the ground of being which is creative and conservative in a beneficial way. The ontology of the demonic: Demonry is the form-destroying eruption of the creative basis of things. The phenomenon and the ontology of the demonic at first glance may seem far removed from heteronomy. A few more steps, however, and the fusion of the two becomes discernible. For instance, the demonic operates in the personality as the explosion of subconscious forces that splits the personality, with the result that it is subjugated to a new power which is not a natural power—the perfect definition of heteronomy. On the social plane, demonry does not split the personality, but causes the breaking of personality by the superindividual social structure—a heteronomous imposition. Demonry ends in heteronomy because of its abysmal, imperialistic drive to realize the unrealizable infinity of being in a finite reality. By the destruction of form it seeks to expand ever farther and thus encompass more being. Finally, it claims to have achieved the infinite in the finite, and this claim is the root of all heteronomy and of all demonry. For the demonic is something finite, something limited, which puts on infinite, unlimited dignity. Hence the existence of a machine civilization, completely timed and scheduled and regulated, does not necessarily guarantee maximum efficiency in any sense. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

The United States of America still fields twice as many active research scientists and engineers as Japan, although the Japanese total is skyrocketing and Japanese nonacademic researchers tend to be younger. The sheer size of America’s effort does not guarantee quality. Moreover, with defense cuts likely and American corporations shifting resources from basic to more product-oriented research, the directions of change are not favorable. Still, though clearly challenged, the U.S.A. lead in high technology, and especially information technology, is still significant. Japanese progress in computers and memory chips has been phenomenal, and three of its firms—Fujitsu, NEC, and Hitachi—have made dazzling progress. Today, Fujitsu nips at the heels of Digital Equipment, the World’s second-largest computer manufacturer, and NEC and Hitachi are not far behind. The Japanese control 50 percent of the market for computer components and an amazing 85 percent of the market for memory chips. When it comes to computers, as such, however, U.S.A. manufacturers dominated 69 percent of the World market, the other 31 percent being divided almost evenly by European and Japanese firms. The United States of America supplies fully 62 percent of all the World’s personal computers (PCs). Among the World’s top twenty computer firms in 1988, tend were American, six European, and only four Japanese. IBM alone was more than twice the combined size of Japan’s Big Three. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

In the increasingly important field of computer services, as distinct from machines, nine of the World’s top tend firms are America, one European, and not a single one Japanese. (The Japanese share of the service market, only 10.6 percent in 1988, is actually projected to shrink as that of the United States of America grows.) Similarly, it is true that Japanese lead in hardware; the Americans, in systems and applications software. The race is not over. In memory chip manufacture, Japanese mass production has decimated its American competition. However, IBM was the first to announce a 16-million-bit chip, four times larger than the most advanced chips, and well ahead of the Japanese competition. Moreover, the direction of change is not so much toward mass production as toward chip customization and specialization, where design skills and sophisticated software count for more—precisely the fields of Japanese weakness. As for software itself—is a $659.00 billion market, which is expected to grow to $858.10 billion by 2028. The United States of American currently has a 60 percent grip of the World market. An acknowledged disaster area for America is a school system, devasted by drugs, sex, violence, and alienation.  However, schools are also troubled around the World, especially inner cities schools. The education crisis is not an American monopoly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

What gives American schools an edge, despite everything, is that they are less centralized than those in Europe and Japan, and not subject to the dictates of a national ministry of education. This makes them, at least, potentially, more open to experiment and innovation. Unfortunately, the knee-jerk response of the American business and scientific communities is to call for more math and science, more lock-step learning, more Ph.D.’s Misinformed about actual educational conditions in Japan, most would be amazed to learn that Japan’s leap to the high-tech frontier, from 1975 to 1988, took place with only a small increase in the number of engineering and science Ph.D’s. Offsetting America’s educational wasteland, however, is a key source of America’s global power—its unquantified but enormous cultural impact on the planet. This is not a matter of quality—which can, of course, be passionately debated. It is simply fact that culture in one form or another flows outward from the United States of America. Thus, more books are translated by American publishers. From one point of view this is unfortunate, since it deprives Americans of valuable ideas and insights. However, it reflects America’s enormous surplus in cultural trade. For good or ill, vast multitudes around the planet hunger to adopt Western, but also specifically American, lifestyle, attitudes, fashions, ideas, and innovations. It has been suggested that the global appeal of American popular culture derives from its multi-ethnic origins. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

 The surging influence of these images, along with the rich flow of science and technology rather than just economic or military power, is what makes the United States of America so threatening to the hard-liners who control China today or the Ayatollahs who run Iran. American movies and television programs, not Japanese or Soviet or European, are the most watched around the World. The other major powers are simply not in the running. Broadly speaking, the United States of America continues to be a rich source of innovations in science, technology, art, business, imagery, and knowledge in its broadest sense. This advantage may dwindle in the decades ahead, but other nations or regions will find it harder to overtake this American culture lead than to build a new weapon system or to integrate their economies. A review of the power triad, therefore, suggests that while the United States of America has severe problems, it is by no means a paper tiger. In the approaching decades it will be internally racked by social, racial, and sexual protests as the pace of power-shifting accelerates at home and abroad. However, America’s internal troubles will not, in all likelihood, compared with the upheavals that are to be expected in Europe, the least stable of the three great contenders for World power. Nor will Japan escape political and social turmoil as the World around it is shaken to the core. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Such quick-stroke assessments are admittedly impressionistic, and all of them are legitimately arguable, point by point. However, taken together they suggest that the United States of America holds the most balanced power of any of the three great capitalist centers in the World, and that it still holds the lead in precisely that element of the power triad that is becoming most important—knowledge. Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordinating and interrelating complicated functions: it is also like money an independent commodity with a value of its own. Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values. High households’ indebtedness, low savings, uncontrolled expansion of credit to marginal borrowers, adventurous games with structured financial products and poor risk management, public debts hitting critical highs, terrorism, the pandemic, foreign assistance, and the urgent need to accelerate the trimming of the welfare state—this is the list of key structural problems that either drove Western economies into the crisis or are exacerbating it in its aftermath. Even the Chinese economy is not immune to all those structural diseases. A lot has been said and written about China’s structural issues. The time has come to assess its structural strengths. It may seem improbable, but compared to the West, the economy of today’s China, at the moment, seem to be a little more structurally stronger and healthier. This is one of the major reasons the global power balance is shifting in its favor. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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