As Mr. Keynes once remarked, “In the long run we are all dead,” and, as the line in the ballad says, everything is born to die. Repeated shocks will give you anxiety, and anxiety is the enemy of identity, and without identity there is no serenity. Some people can make money in the market by anticipating the business cycle. The great mature American companies do not increase their profits every year. When business is good, they make a lot of money, and when it is not so good, they make less. How well this game is played depends on perspicacity in evaluating economic intelligence. Let us say that we have had two disappointing automobile years. By determining the scrappage rates, the average age of cars on the road, the disposable personal income, the number of new buyers coming into certain age brackets, the average length of credit paper outstanding on existing cars, and a few other factors, we can have a pretty good guess that next year may be better for automobiles if the economy turns up or holds up. Some people can make money by anticipating the swings in interest rates. There is a whole group of sticks which are sensitive to fluctuations in the bond markers and to the course taken by the Federal Reserve, in which you anticipate whether money is getting cheaper or dearer. Nice profits can be made in bank stocks, finance company stocks, savings and loans, and utilities by those whose fingertips are sensitive to this sort of thing. The swings in these stocks are frequently greater than those in the base companies which are so thoroughly a part of the business cycle, but you have to know not only the anticipated actions of interest rates but the degree to which these moves have been discounted. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Speaking of World changing events, the possibility of a humanly meaningful survival after a nuclear war are remote. Yet a dependence on deterrence for safeguarding peace rests, at the very best, on guesses and nothing more. Thre is a conviction that the continuation of the arms race will inevitably doom humanity is bound to produce pressures for unilateral disarmament and therefore remove any incentive for serious negotiations on the part of the Communists. First, facts are facts; if one is convinced—as a great number of experts are—that nuclear war would doom us, how can one not have an attitude of despair if negotiations to end the arms race fail? Some believe that the answer is for universal controlled disarmament, and not for unilateral disarmament. A faction of Americans are proponents of multilateral disarmament. People around the World realize that war would be a calamity for all the peoples of the World. Imagine what will happen when bombs begin to explode over cities. These bombs will not distinguish between Communists and non-Communists….No, everything alive can be wiped out in the conflagration of nuclear explosions. It is believed by some that only an unreasonable person can be fearless of war in our day. However, has anyone one every consider that perhaps reasonable people want the conflict to stop and at any cost? Even God was tired of the sinful nature of life on Earth when he flooded the planet. One cannot say that God is unreasonable. It takes a being with great wisdom and maturity to create a World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Now, the idea of universal, unilateral disarmament is often confused with that of arms control. “Arms control” is considered by many to be the first step to disarmament, and if this were the essential function of arms control, there would be no serious objection to it. However, the fact is that most of the arms control theorists do not look at it as a real step to universal disarmament but as a substitute for disarmament. Actually, arms control can be viewed as being related to the strategy of the invulnerable deterrent. Once both sides are invulnerable, it is in the interests of both to limit stockpiles and to keep other countries from obtaining atomic weapons. Yet for the military thinkers, proposals for even such modest arms control are made not without qualms. Moreover, a feeling of despair should arms control prove unattainable would also be factually wrong. Without arms control stability will be more difficult to achieve. However, if can probably be achieved even then. In the equation of retaliatory forces, advances in mobility will probably promote a degree of invulnerability even without a negotiated agreement. It is clear that most military experts see arms control as part of a theory of armament, not disarmament. In terms of the dangers of war, arms control represents defeatism and the full acceptance of the risks of total way, even though most of the arms control theorists, like Mr. Morgenstern, recognize that there can be no victors, perhaps few survivours, if the deterrent fails. In terms of national policy and its effect on the American people, the arguments for arms control aim toward another result, that of lulling us into a feeling of false security. A feeling of despair should arms control fail, we are told, would be “factually wrong.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

As we have seen, to work at all, arms control-like the invulnerable deterrent—demands that we and our opponents act with a super-rationality, as though we were in a game. As one of the leading arms control theorists, Thomas Schelling, put it: “Threats and responses to threats, reprisals and counter-reprisals, limited war, arms races, brinkmanship, surprise attack, trusting, and cheating can be viewed either cool-headed. Rather it is asserted that the assumption of rational behaviour is a productive one in the generation of systematic theory. If the behaviour were actually cool-headed, valid and relevant theory would probably be easier to create than it actually is. If we view our results as a bench mark for further approximation to reality, not as a fully adequate theory, we should manage to protect ourselves from the worst results of biased theory. Arms control and strategic actions can be analyzed from the model of games, even though there are differences between games and these situations. It is the very nature of a game that each player, while one likes to win, is willing to accept the possibility of losing with equanimity; the loss is, by the very nature of the game, easily bearable, and far from being a threat to the existence of the players. The very thrill of the game lies, in fact, in the possibility of losing without having to fear that the loss will be devastating. If I were to put my entire future on a throw of the dice, or on the turn of a roulette wheel, I would not be playing a game—I would be a desperate man. For this very reason, the game theory can be satisfied with calculations that require plausibilities, probabilities, reasonable guesses. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

In matters of life and death, whether it is medicine or peace, one can not rely on guesses, because the consequences are too serious. The premise here is the very contrary to that of the game theory, namely that loss (which means an all-destructive war) is unacceptable, hence, here the game theory is not applicable. However, even in the unlikely case that the continuation of the arms race, controlled or not, could prevent a nuclear war within the next five years, what is the like future of the social character of humans in a bilateral or multilateral armed World, where, no matter how complex the problems or how full the satisfactions of any particular society, the biggest and most pervasive reality in any humans’ life is the poised missile, the humming data processor connected to it, the waiting radiation counters, and seismographs, the over-all technocratic perfection (overlying the nagging but impotent fear of its imperfection) of the mechanism of holocaust? To live for any length of time under the constant threat of destruction creates certain psychological effects in most human beings—fright, hostility, callousness, a hardening of the heart, and a resulting indifference to all the values we cherish. Such conditions will transform us into barbarians—though barbarians equipped with the most complicated machines. If we are serious in claiming that our aim is to preserve freedom (that is, to prevent the subordination of the individual under an all-powerful state), we must admit that this freedom will be lost, whether the deterrent works or does not work. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

A similar idea is expressed by Charles E. Osgood. “I have come to the somber conclusion,” Mr. Osgood writes, “that we would not be able to maintain a favorable position in this race without giving up our way of life as rapidly as possible. Then we could be able to channel the energies of our people into military preparation, order our young people into training in the physical sciences, and make decisions and changes in strategy without democratic processes.” George Kennan has expressed his ideas about the results of the continuation of the arms race in his Reith Lectures delivered over the BBC in England. “But beyond this,” Mr. Kennan states, “what sort of a life is it to which these devotees of the weapons race would see us condemned? The technological realities of this competition are constantly changing from month to month and from year to years. Are we to flee like haunted creatures from one defensive device to another, each more costly and humiliating than the one before, cowering underground one day, breaking up our cities the next, attempting to surround ourselves with elaborate electronic shields on the third, concerned only to prolong the length of our lives while sacrificing all the values for which it might be worth while to live at all? If I thought that this was the best the future held for us, I should be tempted to join those who say ‘Let us divest ourselves of this weapon altogether; let us stake our safety on God’s grace and our own good consciences and on that measure of commonsense and humanity which even our adversaries possess; but then let us at least walk like men, with our heads up, so long as we are permitted to walk at all.’ #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

“We must not forget that this is actually the situation in which many of the peoples of this World are obliged to live today; an while I would not wish to say that they are now more secure than we are, for the fact that they do not hold these weapons, I would submit that they are more secure than we would be if we were to resign ourselves entirely to the negative dynamics of the weapons race, as many would have us do. The beginning of understanding rests, in this appalling problem, with the recognition that the weapon of mass destruction is a sterile and hopeless weapon which may for a time serve as an answer of sorts to itself and as an uncertain sort of shield against utter cataclysm, but which can not in any way serve the purposes of a constructive and hopeful foreign policy. The true end of political actions is, after all, to affect the deeper convictions of men; this weapon renders it unsuitable both as a sanction of diplomacy and as the basis of an alliance. Such a weapon is simply not one with which one can usefully support political desiderata; nor is it one with which one readily springs to the defense of one’s friends. There can be no coherent relations between such weapons and the normal objects of national policy. A defense posture built around a weapon suicidal in its implications can serve in the long run only to paralyze national policy, to undermine alliances, and to drive everyone deeper and deeper into the hopeless exertions of the weapons race.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

It is true that the aim of universal controlled disarmament is exceedingly difficult to reach; maybe it is unrealistic, as its opponents say. However, to believe that a strategy of mutual threats with ever-more destructive weapons can, in the long run, prevent a nuclear war, and that a society following this road could preserve its democratic character, is a great deal more unrealistic. It is, indeed, one of the irrationalities of human nature that we are prone to seek for easier, short-term solutions because we are afraid of the difficulties of the fundamental and real solution. However, individual or in social life, it is the logic of facts that determines reality, not the logic of wishful thinking. People say that those who are pro war are necrophilous. However, often the only way to achieve peace is war. Many times, the necrophilous orientation is in conflict with opposite tendencies, so that a peculiar balance is achieved. An outstanding example of this type of necrophilous character was C.G. Jung. In his posthumously published autobiography, he gives ample evidence for this. His dreams are mostly filled with corpses, blood, killings. As a typical manifestation of his necrophilous orientation in real life, I will mention the following: While Dr. Jung’s house in Bollingen was being built, the corpse of a French soldier was found who had been drowned 150 years earlier at the time when Napoleon invaded Switzerland. Dr. Jung took a picture of the corpse and hung it on his wall. He buried him and fired three shots over his grave as a military salute. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

On the surface this action may appear slightly odd but otherwise as not having any significance. Yet it is one of those many “insignificant” actions which express an underlying orientation more clearly than the intentional, important acts do. Dr. Freud himself noticed Dr. Jung’s death orientation many years earlier. When he and Dr. Jung were embarking for the United States of America, Dr. Jung spoke a great deal about the well-preserved corpses which had been found in the marshes near Hamburg. Dr. Freud disliked this kind of talk, and told Dr. Jung that he spoke so much of the corpses because unconsciously he was filled with death wishes against him (Dr. Freud). Dr. Jung denied this indignantly, yet some years later, around the time of his separation from Dr. Freud, he had the following dream. He felt that he (together with a black native) had to kill Siegfried. He went out with a rifle, and when Siegfried appeared on the crest of a mountain he killed him. He then felt horror-stricken and frightened that his crime might be discovered. However, fortunately a heavy rain fell which washed away all traces of the crime. Dr. Jung woke up thinking that he must kill himself unless he could understand the dream. After some thought he came to the following “understanding”: killing Siegfried means killing the hero within himself, and thus expressing his own humility. The slight change from Sigmund to Siegfried was enough to enable a man whose great skill was the interpretation of dreams, to hide the real meaning of this dream from himself.  #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

If one asks oneself the question how such intense repression is possible, the answers is that the dream was a manifestation of his necrophilous orientation, and since this entire orientation was intensely repressed, Dr. Jung could not afford to be aware of the meaning of this dream. It fits into the picture that Dr. Jung was fascinated by the past, and rarely by the present and the future; that stones were his favourite material, and that as a child he had a fantasy about God dropping a big turd on a church and thus destroying it. His sympathies for Mr. Hitler and his racial theories are another expression of his affinity with death-loving people. However, Dr. Jung was an unusually creative person, and creation is the very opposite of necrophilia. He solved the conflict within himself by balancing his destructive powers against his wish and ability to cure, and by making his interest in the past, in death and destruction, the subject matter of his brilliant speculations. It is true that divergent features manifest in the necrophilous person, such as the wish to kill, the worship of force, the attraction to death and dirt, sadism, the wish to transform the organic into the inorganic through “order,” are all part of the same basic orientation. Yet as far as individuals are concerned, there are considerable differences with regard to the strength of these respective trends. Any one of the features mentioned here may be more pronounced in one person than in another; furthermore, the degree to which a person is necrophilous in comparison with his biophilous aspects, and finally the degree to which a person is aware of the necrophilous tendencies or rationalizes them, varies considerably from person to person. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Yet the concept of the necrophilous type is by no means an abstraction or summary of various disparate behaviour trends. Necrophilia constitutes a fundamental orientation; it is the one answer to life which is in complete opposition to life; it is the most morbid and the most dangerous among the orientations to life of which humans are capable. It is the true perversion: while being alive, not life but death is loved; not growth but destruction. If one dares to be aware of what one feels the necrophilous person expresses the motto of his life when he says, “Long live death!” Now, if the believer in the slightest degree is tempted to treat sin lightly, or attribute it to evil spirits when it is from oneself, one is equally on false ground, and lays oneself open to the old fallen nature regaining mastery over one with redoubled force. The warfare against the Ultimate Negative must be accomplished with a vigorous, unflinching warfare against sin. Any known sin must not be tolerated for a moment. Whether it be from the fallen nature of from evil spirits forcing it into the human, it must be cast off and put away, on the basis of Romans 6.6 and 12. Two misconceptions which give great advantage to the watching enemy are the thoughts in many believers’ minds that if a Christian commits sin one will at once know it oneself, or that God will tell one. They therefore expect God to tell them when they are right or wrong, instead of seeking light and knowledge according to John 3.21. Believers seeking victor over all the deceptions of the enemy must take an active part in dealing with sin. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Based upon wrong conception of “death,” they may have thought that God would remove sin out of their lives for them—with the result that they have failed actively to co-work with Him in dealing with evil within and in their environment: in others and in the World. For a life perpetual victory over the Ultimate Negative as Accuser, it is very important that the believer should understand and detect any inconsistency between the attitude of the will and the actions in one’s life. One should judge oneself from one’s actions as well as from one’s will and motives. For instance, a person is charged with doing a certain thing, which one at once denies, because the action does not agree with one’s will-attitude; and therefore, one says, it is impossible that one should have acted or spoken in the way stated. The believer is judging oneself by one’s own actions as well as by one’s will (1 Corinthians 11.31). On the Godward side, the cleansing power of the blood of Christ (1 John 1.7) is needed continuously for those who seek to walk in the light, cleansing themselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God (a Corinthians 7.1). The Ultimate Negative as an accuser also works indirectly through others, inciting them to make accusations which one wants the human to accept as true, and thus open the door to the Ultimate Negative to make them true. Or one accused the believer to others by “visions” or “revelations” about one, which cause them to misjudge one. In any case, whatever may come to the believer from human or the Ultimate Negative, LET ONE MAKE USE OF IT FOR PRAYER, and by prayer turn all accusations into steps to victory. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

The non-historical presupposed that the running ahead of historical time has no aim either within or above history, but that history is the place in which individual beings live their lives unaware of an eternal telos of their personal lives. This non-historical view appears in several versions: the tragic, the mystical, and the mechanistic. The tragic interpretation is best exemplified by the Greek view of history as an eternal cycle of genesis, greatness, and decay. The whole cycle is determined by fate, and there is no hope of an ultimate fulfilment. The mystical interpretation is more common to the East. It affirms that one must live in history, but that history itself is barren, its ambiguities unconquerable, and its motion aimless. Consequently, although characterized by a deep compassion for the universality of suffering, it retreats from a reality which it feels powerless to transform. By mystical union with the ultimate it overcomes not reality, but is own involvement in reality. The last version of non-historical interpretations is the mechanistic, a kind of “reductionistic naturalism.” Physical time is more important to it than historical time, and it ambitions to control nature through science and technology. History is the story of humans, but humans are merely the supreme challenge to its power of control. Positive, Historical Interpretations: The historical interpretation of history as opposed to the non-historical asserts that history is running toward an end which is fulfilled within history itself. It, too, comes in three versions: the progressivistic, the utopian, and the transcendental. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

The symbol of progress includes the decisive element of historical time, its running ahead toward an aim. Thus it interprets history in a genuinely historical way. However, progressivism as the belief in progress as progress without a definite end is the product of certain nineteenth-century philosophies. Its inadequacy was swiftly revealed by the World tragedies of the twentieth century, by the emphasis upon existential meaninglessness, and by insights into the non-progressive nature of freedom which begins anew in every individual. The second inadequate historical interpretation is utopianism. It is progressivism with a definite aim: arrival at that stage of history in which the ambiguities of life are conquered. Utopianism was a child of the Renaissance, but it has been adopted by revolutionary movements up to the present day. Its fatal error is demonization that ends in idolatry, for it gives the quality of ultimacy to something preliminary. A future historical situation, by the very fact that it is historical, that is, within history, remains conditioned, and hence cannot assume the dignity of the unconditional. The transcendental type is found in historical interpretation in the early church up to Augustine and in orthodox Lutheranism. According to the transcendental view, once saving revelation appears in history, nothing new can be expected until the afterlife. The difficulty with this interpretation is that salvation is for the individual alone, and the political aspect of the history-bearing group is completely ignored. Moreover, it considers the end of history as a static supranatural order into which individuals enter after their death, thus effectively severing culture as well as nature from the fulfilling process of history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

We simply have no organ for knowing, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or imagine) just as much as maybe useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called “utility” is the end only a faith, something imagined, and perhaps precisely the most disastrous stupidity that will one day do us in. Our new “infinite.” –How far the perspectival character of existence extends, or even whether it has any other character; whether an existence without interpretation, without “sense,” does not become “nonsense”; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially an interpreting existence—that cannot be decided, even by the most industrious and scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect: for in that very analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself under its perspectival forms, and only in them. We cannot see around our own corner—it I a hopeless curiosity to want to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there could be: for example, whether some creature can experience time backward, or alternatively forward and backward (which would be given along with another direction of life and another concept of cause and effect). However, today, I think, we are at least beyond the laughable immodesty of decreeing from our corner that one is allowed perspectives only from our corner. The World has instead become “infinite” for us once again inasmuch as we cannot deny the possibility that it includes in itself infinite interpretations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Once again the great shiver goes down our spine—but who would want to go on to deify this monstrosity of an unknown World in the same old way? And henceforth worship the unknown as “The Unknown”? Oh, there are too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation bound up with this unknown, too much devilry, stupidity, foolishness of interpretation—our own human, even all too human foolishness, which we know. The Kingdom of God has a double character: It has an inner-historical and a transhistorical side. As inner-historical, it participates in the dynamics of history; as transhistorical, it answers the question implied in the ambiguities of the dynamics of history. The Kingdom of God, thus conceived, has for connotations which render it an apt symbol for the aim of history. First, it is political and so corresponds to the political character of history-bearing groups; but it is also transformed into a cosmic symbol by the extension of the ruling power of God. Secondly, “Kingdom” has a social connotation of peace and justice, thus meets legitimate utopian expectations. However, it is also “of God,” and with this addition the impossibility of an Earthly fulfilment is implicitly acknowledged. Thirdly, there is the personalistic connotation, for in the Kingdom of God no individual is obliterated by identity with the ultimate, but humanity is fulfilled in every human being. Lastly, the Kingdom of God is universal in that it embraces all realms of finite being according to the multidimensional unity of life. In the New Testament the “transcendent-universal” aspects emerges more clearly as a political vision is replaced by a cosmic vision that will be realized not by historical developments, but by divine interference. In a word, the Kingdom of God is both in history and above history. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

The Winchester Mystery House

Victorians were not so many years removed from manual farm labour that they did not realize they were getting out of shape. They threw themselves into exercise body and soul. However, throughout the nineteenth century, many men and women prized pale, unburned skin. During the very late nineteenth century, there even arose a fashion for taking a particular poison (which I shall not name). Small quantities of the poison would not kill the fashionable young woman but would give her complexion a refined, blue-white pallor that simply reeked of class. For women in the 1840s and ‘50s, the Greek mode was widely favoured. A slight figure with a small bosom and narrow hips was considered very elegant. Hair parted in the center and worn close to the head forming curls or flaps in the back was the latest in Grecian fashion. Empire-waisted dresses were light, sometimes to the point of transparency, and necklines could be very low.

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