Randolph Harris II International Institute

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The Fittest Survived

Many Americans are finding in hard to make it in the economy of Bidenomics because the price of everything is rising and the wages are so low. The fast-food industry received a higher wage, and this has driven up prices and it is making it more difficult for seniors to survive because their cost-of-living increase does not keep up with inflation. Thus, several Americans have found themselves in the same situation as those who have recently migrated to America, even though they have lived here for generations and have been working with a cast-iron determination to support their families and maintain their home. Once liberating from all paralyzing prejudices of class calling, environment and tradition, they are once again finding themselves subject to discrimination because they can no longer able to provide for their families and themselves in the same capacity that they were able to just four years ago. The median income in California is $78,672, the median home price is $786,730, and the median rent is $2,850. The average American spends $475.25 a month on food, $417 on gasoline, and $137 a month on electricity, $147 a month on car insurance, and $477 a month on health insurance. Therefore, many are prices out of the housing market and a significant number of people are having a hard time finding affordable rentals. As a result, people are extra-hand ready to take any second job that turns up by chance, just for the sake of earning their daily bread. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The magic glimmer that once spread over the big cities and suburbs has been replaced by the gloomiest uncertainty of being able to earn a regular daily livelihood under this current administration. In fact, the element of uncertainty in steadily earning one’s daily bread is the bitterest feature of the whole socioeconomic system itself. Some people are even pawning and selling the last of their belongings to make ends meet. Increasing poverty in America has become evident as there is a homeless crisis. Several people have been made to mix up with a class of human beings through whom their minds are now poisoned, in addition to their physical misery. Thus, even a man who is normally of industrious habits grows careless in their whole attitude towards life and gradually becomes an instrument in the hands of unscrupulous people who exploit him for the sake of their own ignoble aim. The democratic party currently seems to be aimed at the destruction of the State, the whole social order and even civilization itself. As citizens see this process exemplified before their eyes, the longer they observe it, the greater becomes their dislike for the mammoth city which greedily attracts men to its bosom, to break them mercilessly in the end. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

In this current economic crisis, the tie with their own people is broken. They are thrown about so much in life that they feel the effects of it on their own soul. The constant loss of earnings and increase in expenditures has caused their bodies to grow accustomed to vicissitudes of food and hunger, eating heartily in good times, and going hungry in bad. Indeed, hunger shatters all plans for rationing expenditure on a regular scale in betters times when they have paid down some of their bills. Therefore, the moment bills are paid down, he forgets to regulate the expenditure of his earnings but spends them to the full without thinking of tomorrow. This leads to confusion in the little weekly housekeeping budget, because the expenditure is not rationally planned. When the phenomenon first happens, the earnings will last perhaps for give days instead of seven; on subsequent occasions they will last only for three days; as the habit recurs, the earnings will last scarcely for a day; and finally, they will disappear in one night of feasting. Often there are wife and children at home. And in many cases, it happens that these become infected by such a way of living, specially if the husband is good to them and wants to do the best he can for them and loves them in his own way and according to his own lights. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Then the week’s earnings are spent in common at home within two or three days. The family eat and drink together as long as the money lasts and at the end of the week they hunger together. Then the wife wanders about furtively in the neighbourhood, borrows a little, and runs up large debts with pay day loans and credit cards to pull through the lean days towards the end of the week. To outsiders, it appears that a middle-class family in this situation is doing well because they do not talk about how hard they are having it and appear to be keeping of their lifestyle. However, they are worried about how to pay the mortgage, how to pay insurance, how to keep gas in the cars, how to keep the lights on, and are thus hungry as they dream of the plenty that is to come. And so, the children become acquainted with misery in their early years. However, the evil culminates when the husband goes his own way from the beginning of the week and the wife protests, simply out of love for the children. Then there are quarrels and bad feelings and the husband takes to drink and drugs and according as he becomes estranged from his wife. He now becomes drunk every Saturday. Fighting for her own existence and that of the children, the wife must hound him along the road from the office to the tavern to get a few shekels from him on payday. Then finally, he comes home, maybe on the Sunday or the Monday, having partied with his last shekels and pence, pitiable scenes follow, scenes that cry out for God’s mercy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

While some were disgusted and indigent, they have come to recognize the whole tragedy of their misfortune and to understand the profound cases of it. They are the unhappy victims of evil circumstances. For several, housing conditions are unbelievably bad currently. Many live in surroundings of appalling misery. I shudder to think of the woeful dens in which people dwell, the night shelters and the slums, and all the tenebrous spectacles of ordure, loathsome filth, and wickedness. In Minnesota, we have already seen what happens when the hordes of emancipated slaves came forth from their dens of misery and swooped down on their unsuspecting men. However, this other World has not thought about the possibility of this happening on a national level, in several states, hundreds of cities, and thousands of downtowns and suburbs. The democrats have allowed these things to go on without caring and even without suspecting—in their total lack of instinctive understanding—that sooner or later destiny will take its vengeance unless it will have been appeased in time. As a nation, we pray that people will emerge from all this misfortune and misery, from this filth and outward degradation, were not human begins as such but rather lamentable results of lamentable laws. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

We need a president who will create better fundamental conditions of social development by establishing a profound feeling for social responsibilities among the public; second, we need a leader who will combine this feeling for social responsibilities with a ruthless determination to prune away all excrescences which are incapable of being improved. Just ns Nature concentrates it greatest attention, not to the maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding offspring in order to carry on the species, so in human life also it is less a matter of artificially improving the existing generation—which, owning to human characteristics, is impossible in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred—and more a matter of securing from the very start a better road for the future. The American mind has become dominated by a self-conscious, willful, iron-mailed philosophy of immoralism under President Biden. In the past, the militarists assured the Americans that they were the elite of mankind, a race of supermen destined to conquer the Americas or the World through Manifest Destiny. They preached that might makes right, that war is a biological necessity, and that conquest is justified by the survival of the fittest. The old churchmen preached of war as a just judgment of God. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The modern natural scientists see in a war a propitious mode of selection. War is not merely a necessary element in the life of nations but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a truly civilized nation finds the highest expression of strength and vitality. Since its decisions rest on the very nature of things, war gives a biologically just decision. It is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and as such, an indispensable factor in civilization. In all directions, the American people see proof that they are the Chosen People. They interpret the doctrine of evolution to draw from it a warrant for their aspirations. Evolution teaches that “the fittest survived.” The champions of the philosophy of supermania lean heavily on biology to support their creed. They have been misled by the phrase “the survival of the fittest.” You might infer, to hear them buzz, that only the fittest survive, or, to put it conversely, the fact that you survive is proof that you are the “fittest.” In the essential circularity of the Darwinian sociology,  power and strength are defined in terms of survival, and survival is in turn explained by strength and power. All changes in types of survival and kinds of fitness are considered without relation to ulterior values; there is no value beyond survival itself. Rome conquering the World by force of arms is as good as Greece conquering it by force of ideas or Judea conquering it by force of religious sentiment. Indeed, because of its biological origins, this view shows a strong tendency to favour the cruder and more violent forms of struggle, as being more unmistakably biological. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The Intellectual World and public opinion have accepted Darwinism by almost unanimous consent as an integral part of the theory of evolution. Darwin believes that the “fittest” are those who best adapt to their conditions. However, struggle is often confused with the total death of the vanquished, whereas this selective factor hardly ever operates among men. The entire phenomenon of mutual assistance is ignored by the philosophy of force. It is to this that man owes his dominant position in the Universe. In a large sense, all mankind is an association, and all wars are civils wars; yet the philosophers of force have never advocated civil war as a source of progress. American society sees its own image in the tooth-and-claw version of natural selection, and believes its dominant groups are therefore able to dramatize this vision of competition as a thing good. Ruthless business rivalry and unprincipled politics seem to be justified by the survival philosophy. If the dream of personal conquest and individual assertion motivates the middle-class, this philosophy seems tenable, and its critics remain a minority. This version of Darwinism depended for its continuance upon a general acceptance of unrestrained competition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

However, nothing is so unstable as “pure” business competition; nothing is so disastrous to the unlucky or unskilled competition; nothing is so difficult as to keep the growing number of the “unfit” reconciled to the operations of such a regime. In time the American middle-class shrank from the principle it had glorified, turned in flight from the hideous image of rampant competitive brutality, and repudiated the once heroic entrepreneur as a despoiler of the nation’s wealth and morals and a monopolist of its opportunities. The life of man in society, while it is incidentally a biological fact, has characteristics that are not reducible to biology and must be explained in the distinctive terms of a cultural analysis; the physical well-being of men is a result of their social organization and not vice versa; social improvement is a product of advances in technology and social organization, not of breeding or selective elimination; judgements as to the value of competition between men or enterprises or nations must be based upon social and not allegedly biological consequences; and there is nothing in nature or a naturalistic philosophy of life to make impossible the acceptance of moral sanctions that can be employed for the common good. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The Marxist theory, as well as the socialist movement, was radical and humanistic—radical in the sense of going to the roots, and the roots being man; humanistic in the sense that it is man who is the measure of all things, that his full unfolding must be the aim and the criterion of all social efforts. The liberation of man from the strangle hold of economic conditions which prevented his full development was the aim of all Marx’s thought and efforts. Socialism has become successful, gained power, and in this very process succumbed to its opponent—the spirit of capitalism. This development is not too surprising. Capitalism is successful beyond anything the early socialists could have visualized. Instead of leading to an ever-increasing misery of the works, the progress of technology and of the organization of capitalist society made it possible for the workers to benefit from its advances. True enough, this happened to some extent at the expense of colonial peoples; and furthermore, it happened to some extent through the fight of the socialist parties and trade unions for a greater share in the social product. However, whatever the role of these various factors may have been, the result is that the workers and their leaders were more and more captivated by the spirit of capitalism and began to interpret socialism in accordance with capitalist principles. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

While Marxism had aimed at a humanist society transcending capitalism, a society which would have as its aim the full unfolding of the individual personality, most socialists regarded socialism as a movement to improve the economic and socio-political situation within capitalism; they considered the socialization of the means of production, plus the principles of the welfare of the state as a sufficient criterion of a socialist society. The principles of this type of “socialism” were essentially the same as those of capitalism: maximum economic efficiency, large-scale bureaucratically organized industry, and subordination of the individual under this bureaucratic but economically efficient system. Basically, the majority of socialists in the West and in the East shared this capitalistic interpretation of socialism, but, according to their respective economic and political positions, they arrived at different solutions. The Western leaders began to make their peace with capitalism, the socialist leaders of both camps supported their governments claiming that they were supporting the war for the sake of freedom, because they had the good luck to be fighting the Kaiser and the Czar, respectively. When the imperial system in Germany collapsed as the result of prolonging a virtually lost war far beyond any reasonable consideration, the same leaders formed a secret alliance with the generals to defeat the revolution. They permitted first the growth of the Reichswehr, and of secret and half-secret semimilitary organizations which became the basis of Nazi power—and they virtually capitulated completely before the increasing strength and oppressiveness of the Nazi and nationalistic right-wing forces. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The French socialist leaders followed a similar direction, which led the French socialist party under the leadership of Guy Mollet to the open support of the Algerian war. In England, as in the Scandinavian countries, the situation was somewhat different. In these countries the socialist won majorities, either temporarily or continuously, and used their strength to build a welfare state. A highly developed system of social security and particularly of a social health service, brought to its full fruition the system which had been started by conservatives in Europe in the nineteenth century (Disraeli in England and Bismarck in Germany), and which was started in the United States of America under the leadership of F.D. Roosevelt in the thirties. In addition, The British Labour Party socialized some of the key industries, believing that such socialization of the means of production was the touchstone of true socialism. However, while they satisfied the economic interests of the workers, their brand of socialism ceased to be the vision of a fundamental change of the human condition. They lost one election after another and sought to recoup their losses by giving up almost all radical aims. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The same process occurred in Germany, where the Social Democratic Party not only gave up almost all socialist aims, but also accepted the principles of nationalism and rearmament to such an extent that the social democratic policy is hardly distinguishable from that of their opponents. The growing perception and responsibility of our World Age point to the new reality that the individual person and the collective person supplement and integrate each other; that the thrall of totalitarianism of both left and right has been shaken in the universal desire to recapture the authority of truth and human totality. Mankind can finally place its trust not in a proletarian authoritarianism, not in a secularized humanism, both of which have betrayed the spiritual property right of history, but in a sacramental brotherhood and in the unity knowledge. This new consciousness has created a widening of human horizons beyond every parochialism, and a revolution in human thought comparable to the basic assumption, among the ancient Greeks, of the sovereignty of reason; corresponding to the great effulgence of the moral conscience articulated by the Hebrew prophets; analogous to the fundamental assertions of Christianity; or to the beginning of the new scientific era, the era of the science of dynamics, the experimental foundations of which were laid by Galileo in the Renaissance. An important effort of this Series is to re-examine the contradictory meanings and applications which are given today to such terms as democracy, freedom, justice, love, peace, brotherhood, and God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

The purpose of such inquiries is to clear the way for the foundation of a genuine World history not in terms of nation or race or culture but in terms of man in relation to God, to himself, his fellow man and the Universe, that reach beyond immediate self-interest. For the meaning of the World Age consists in respecting man’s hopes and dreams which lead to a deeper understanding of the basic values of all peoples. The happy ending of the fairy tale is suspect, and does not occur in real life. Fairy tales are told by well-meaning parents, and the happy ending is an intrusion of a benevolent but mendacious Parental ego state; tales made up by children themselves are more realistic, and do not necessarily have happy endings; in fact, they are notoriously gruesome. A resistance that expresses itself is difficult to detect, and it will cause a loss of time. However, if one finds after a while that no progress has been made, or that one is only moving in circles in spite of having worked at the problems concerned, its presence may be suspected. It is important in self-analysis—as in any analysis—not to be deluded about the progress made. Such a delusion may life one’s spirits for a whole, but it easily prevents the discovery of a deep-seated resistance. This possibility of a wrong integration of findings is one of the reasons any an occasional checkup with an analyst is desirable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

For years, when my life was turbulent and others seemed so serene, I thought they had chosen the right way, I the wrong one. I felt that I had been rebellious, not “satisfied as I should have been.” There was one thing that I did not know about my friends: they did not talk about their troubles as I did about mine. It is only in our later life that they are beginning to reveal themselves to me. I have truly no regrets for my life, no bitterness. It would have been nice to be able to do better than I have, but without where I have been I could not be where I am now. When I say this to my friendly puppy friends, they sign. At other times, they express a bitterness, briefly but recurrently, which makes my toes curl to think of living with it. So it seems to me that I have to come off better, and there are intimations that they think so too. When the easter therapist writes “pampered” I am not sure what he means, because who means why by “pampered”? He also wrote, “able to lock what confronts him.” Is that a true statement, or an ideal? A doctor once told me, “If you cannot life it, run.” I ran. Some dragons are too much for any George. In my youth, before I had got so much loused up, and did not need someone else to tell me what to do, I enjoyed licking what confronted me, but some things looked to me like a steamroller, and it seemed a better idea to step aside than tilt with it. If “able to lock what confronts him” included being able to accept the fact that there are some things I cannot lick, then I agree. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Although sometimes it is only for the present that I run away: later, I may be able to return and lick what I could not earlier. That does not mean that I could have done it in the first place. I just had not grown up to that one yet. However, what really makes my stomach turn over is this picture of love, love, love, and I love everything you do and ever say no. That is what the words say to me. It may be wide of the mark to the man who write them. The act of disciplined thinking about one’s World, to make sense of what has been going on and to solve problems, is another way of experiencing the World with the doors of perception temporarily shut. In fact, when people want to reason and argue with themselves to arrive at some conclusion, they seek quiet surroundings. Thinking in a disciplined way, according to rules of logic, is a skill that contributes to effective action. However, we can think wishfully, and fearfully, too, when our needs and passions are aroused. Such autistic thinking may lead us to conclusions that conform to our feelings but misinform us about the way the Worldly really is. Autistic thinking calls for reality testing—a way to review the argument the thinking embodies and to check the conclusions by means of fresh perception. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Compulsive thinking interferes with living; it blocks perception and inhibits effective action. Indeed, one of the functions of meditation is to still one’s chattering mind. Such stilling is akin to learning how to discipline the act of speaking. Compulsive thinking is like a compulsive talking; it does the person no good. Disciplined thinking to solve a problem is illustrated as follows: the person carries on an inner dialogue, saying, “If I act in this way, it is likely to produce these consequences, whereas if I don not, the problem will persist.” Whether or not this type of thinking will lead to effective action can then be tested. Autistic thinking is a kind of reverie where the person’s inner dialogue is deliberately allowed to proceed unchecked by the discipline of reason, and merges into imagination; for example, “I wish I had ten people in love with me at once, would that not be grand?” and so on. Alienated thinking, or chatter, is akin to being in the company of a boring chatterbox who will not allow you to see, hear, or think as you wish because of the constant din of talk. The higher meaning of “Love thy neighbour” as revealed in meditation is to confer a blessing, and identify with his higher self. Total goodwill is, after all, only an ideal because it must be practiced towards our enemies and those we dislike not less than toward our friends and those we like. We can only try to come close to it in difficult cases. The attempt may elicit grace, which will carry us further in the same direction. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The Sacramento Fire Department provides all fire suppression, prevention, and education programs in the city as well as paramedic emergency medical services to the residents and visitors of the Sacramento community. “I was an engineer for nine years before I became a captain. I was not really excited about being an officer until my eighth or ninth year, when the captain I was working for at the time sort of pushed me. The responsibility for the lives of others doesn’t weigh too heavily on me. I’m very confident in myself and my abilities. I know the guys I work with feel that way, that I know what I’m doing. Most of the firefighters feel that way. They have a good self-image. They are confident in what they do. It’s a macho image.” The Sacramento Fire Department strives to provide excellent service to the community. By donating to the Sacramento Fire Department, you can help save lives and property. And remember parents, raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to buy American cars and American made good, to love God and Jesus Christ, to respect law and order and to treat others with respect and compassion. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. At the dawn I seek Thee, Refuge, Rock subline; set my prayer before Thee in the morning, and my prayer at even time. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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