Most people act quite decently in their narrow personal sphere, in fact surprisingly so, considering their general confusion. However, we must differentiate between intelligence and reason. By intelligence I mean the ability to manipulate concepts for the purpose of achieving some practical end. There seem to be come interesting differences between women who exchange sex for crack in crack houses and those who hustle tricks on the street for money to buy crack. These latter women were not directly addressed in this report, chiefly due to their minimal representation in the sample. However, anecdotal data from interviews and observations suggest that they may be at lesser risk for HIV infection and transmission than their crack house counterparts. This inference is based on their frequency of sexual contacts and their attitudes and practices associated with condom use. First, it appears that men and women who are street prostitutes have fewer sex partners, and considerably less frequent sexual activity, than the so-called skeezers and chicken heads who exchange sex-for-crack in the smoking and freak rooms of neighborhood resorts, brothels, and base houses. Soliciting a trick on the street, negotiating a price, going to a place to have pleasures of the flesh, engaging in pleasures of the flesh, receiving payment, and then going back to the streets to purchase and smoke crack take time. To a considerable extent, this regulates a man or woman who is a street prostitute’s aggregate number of customers. Several of the men and women, who are street prostitutes, in this study reported an average of three to six tricks each day that they worked, with most soliciting clients fifteen to thirty days during the month prior to interview. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Although this, too, results in an inordinate number of partners for pleasures of the flesh during the course of a year, or even a month, the numbers may be considerably fewer than those of the women and men who exchange pleasures of the flesh exclusively in crack houses. Recall, for example, the remarks already mentioned by the women who spent much or all of the day in crack houses, smoking crack and participating in sodomy or traditional coitus. Second, it appears that the men and women who are street prostitutes in this study were more conscious of sexually transmitted diseases and more often insisted that their customers use condoms. The following comments are representative: “If they don’t want to use a condom, they don’t go. I will not go, I will not do it. Most instances, there are very, very few where they don’t even want to wear a condom, and very few refuse to wear them. I just tell them, ‘Hey, you know I’m afraid of getting AIDS. You don’t know that you have it. I don’t know if I have it, but you never can tell you know.’ You know I tell them if you want to make love to me or whatever, you have to put one on. If you don’t you can’t. And no oral sex either.” By contrast, based on observations and the reports of numerous informants, condoms are rarely used during the activities involving pleasures of the flesh that occur in crack houses, freak, and smoke rooms. There are likely several reasons for this difference. There is a socialization process, for example, associated with becoming a prostitute. Would-be and neophyte prostitutes learn the appropriate techniques and safeguards through apprenticeships with pimps and/or more experienced prostitutes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

In some cases, there is formal or informal training on how to protect oneself from theft, violence, or disease. To further highlight this illustration, in one sociological analysis of prostitution as an occupation, it was found that the recognition of sexually transmitted disease was a specific topic of instruction for neophyte houses prostitutes: Ann [the madam of a small house of prostitution] accompanies the turnout [neophyte prostitute] and the client to the bedroom and begins teaching the woman how to check the man for any cuts or open sores on the genitals and for any signs of old or active venereal disease. She usually rechecks herself during the turn-out’s first two weeks of work. Furthermore, however loose, unstructured, and transitory they may often be, those who work the streets or in organized houses of prostitution have friendships and peer relationships through which experiences are shared, techniques are traded, warnings are communicated, knowledge is reinforced. Concern for cleanliness and signs of sexually transmitted diseases were readily apparent among several of the street prostitute/informants in this investigation—for example: “You know some of thems not clean, you know, like they haven’t washed and before I even do something I check them out first. And if I see dirt I say, ‘No, you gotta wash up first.’ And even if I put my mouth to it and I can taste like it’s not clean I just draw back from it. I say I don’t want it, you know, and if I feel like if the taste is not right I give them their money back. Ain’t no way any c*ck is goin’ into any part of my body without me checkin’ it twice. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

“An’ even after he pass inspection, then he got to put on a rubber [condom]. That’s the rule I tell him. An’ if he don’t have a rubber I sell him one for a dollar. That’s the way it been with me all along, even before AIDS. ‘Ya don’t want to take anything home to yer ole lady,’ I say, ‘and I don’t wanna take yer germs home to my old man.’ So now we both safe and sound.” There appears to be no such concern in crack houses. The women who trade pleasures of the flesh for crack in crack houses are typically not experienced prostitutes who moved from the street to the crack house. One street prostitute commented: “I picked up a date in a crack house once and I didn’t believe what I was seein’ in there. She was a little girl—19, 18, maybe 17 that’s all—doin’ stuff like in a porno film. They be doin’ anything and everything in front of anyone, and you could tell they were no b*tches [street prodtitutes]….Yeah, I feel real sorry for ‘em. They probably turned a trick now an’ then, but they’re not experienced girls [prostitutes]. If they was, they wouldn’t be on their knees givin’ heads all day in crack houses.” A second likely reason for the differences between skeezers and street prostitutes is the role that crack plays in their lives. For skeezers and house girls, crack is at the basis of their pleasures of the flesh exchanges, as clearly evidenced in such comments as “I do it for crack” and “crack is my pimp.” By contrast, although the use of crack and other drugs is the reason that many women and men engage in prostitution, their need for crack seems to be somewhat less pressing. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

To further highlight this illustration, one person who works as a prostitute remarked, “First I tend to business, you know getting dates, getting money, saving for the rent, you know, and then I go buy a couple of rocks. If another date comes along, I wait to smoke.” And associated with this is the man or woman who works as a prostitute’s strong commitment to paying for his or her won crack. People employed as prostitutes will exchange sex for money but not for a hit: “If I had money I’d get my own drugs. I don’t need nobody else. If I really wanted some more [crack] then I’d find someone to have sex with. The first time [sex was exchanged for crack] I’ll tell you was about three years ago. And I made him pay me double in drugs as if it was money. And they did it, and I got it in my hand up front as payment as I was going to make anything and I was going to buy crack with my own money anyway and since I doubled the price of the cash that I wanted I went for it. And then I don’t, very rarely do that [exchange sex for drugs rather than money].” The differences between men and women who work as prostitutes in the streets and those working in crack houses, is there are different risk assessments for the HIV virus. The potential for transmission of HIV from women to men during traditional coitus in crack houses is related to one aspect of the cocaine/sexuality connection. Cocaine has long had a reputation as an aphrodisiac, although sexuality is notoriously a playground of legend, exaggeration, and rumor. In all likelihood, much of cocaine’s reputation may be from the mental exhilaration and disinhibition it engenders, thus brining about some heightened sexual pleasure during the early stages of use. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

At the same time, however, cocaine users have consistently reported over the years that the drug tends to delay the sexual climax and that after prolonged stimulation, an explosive orgasm occurs. Users also report that chronic use of the drug results in sexual dysfunction, with impotence and the inability to ejaculate the common complaints of male users and decreased desire for pleasures of the flesh becoming the norm for both male and female users. What applies to powder cocaine with regard to sexual stimulation and functioning would also apply to crack cocaine. Male customers, as well as male and female providers, in the sex-for-crack exchange networks report the difficulties associated with ejaculating under the influence of crack. Some report that they can climax only through extremely vigorous masturbation. One house girl commented: “Some of these mens have trouble getting’ it up and keepin’ it up, and it’s hard to get a limp c*ck to come, although sometimes even that happens.” Others similarly reported: “The cracks causes problem for men. They can get a hard-on, but they don’t come quick like when they’re straight. So first they want heads, and when that don’t work, they want p*ssy sex. Then it still takes ‘em forever, pumpin’ away until his c*ck gets sore, I get sore, and then I get pissed. But I can’t say anything, because he already gave me the cracks.” It is within such a situation that the potential for femle-to-male transmission of HIV exists. During traditional coitus, the friction of the male organ against the woman’s parts causes stimulation that can generate copious amounts of vaginal secretions. And as noted, HIV has been isolated from vaginal and cervical secretions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Furthermore, since women who exchange sex for crack in crack houses do so with many different men during the course of a day or night, potentially HIV-infected semen from a previous customer can still be present in the woman’s privates. Moreover, it was reported by one crack house prostitute that a customer ruptured the skin on his male organ while having intercourse with her: “One time this dude was prongin’ my p*ssy so long that he sees blood and starts yelling: ‘What the f*ck’s goin’ on with you lady, you on the rag or something?’ But it was him that was bleedin’ in me. His c*ck was goin’ in and out of me for so long that he rubbed it raw.” Although vaginal and anal intercourse often occur, much of the sex that occurs in crack houses involves women performing oral sex on men. To date, however, evidence for an oral route of HIV has been unconvincing. In most of the investigations of homosexual practices where a full range of sexual activities were carefully considered, for example, the risk from either insertive or receptive orogenital contact was uncertain, although regarded to be quite low. The data concerning heterosexual spread of the virus by oral sex are also limited. For example, in one study of the spouses of AIDS patients, HIV serpositivity among spouses was higher for couples who practiced oral sex in addition to penile-vaginal pleasures of the flesh, as compared with couples who practiced only penile-vaginal pleasures of the flesh. (However, it is a good idea to be cautious and speak to your medical doctor and you and your partner be tested.) #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

There is another cofactor, however, apparent in crack house oral sex that may be affecting the spread of HIV: the open sores on the lips and tongues of crack users as the result of burns and other epidermal trauma caused by the heat in the crack pipe stem. Because most men and women who perform repeated acts of oral sex in crack houses refuse to swallow a customer’s semen as it is ejaculated, the potential for HIV transmission for infected semen becomes apparent. For example, the 22-year-old who claimed to have engaged in more than thirty thousand episodes of oral sex commented: “I may have swallowed a lot of c*ck in my time, but I don’t swallow nobody’s come [semen]. Ya can tell me when the man is gonna come, so ya try to get his c*ck out of yer mouth so it ends up somewhere else. Most of the time it ends up on yer face, hair, chest…Either that or he surprises me and I end up with a mouth full og gizz [seman]. So I wait ‘til he’s done pumpin’ and then I let it out all at once.” (This particular woman also reported having an open sore on the inside of her lower lip, which she assumed was from a crack pipe.) Interestingly, and not surprisingly, street prostitutes not only disdain swallowing a customer’s semen, but most of those interviewed in this study avoided having semen enter their mouths: “I don’t like them to climax in my mouth. A man will push my head because they want it deeper. And I’ll tell them, I’ll give them one warning: ‘Get your hand off my head. I know my job, and you know.’ I hate that, to push my head and I’ll give them a warning and then I’ll get out quick. They’ll just come in your hand. I won’t let them come in my mouth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The use of crack and the existence of crack houses proliferated in Sacramento throughout the 1980s, and by the end of the decade, crack and crack house sex had become the community’s major drug problems. However, in the years hence, a number of things have changed. On the basis of focus groups conducted in 2010, and 2020, it would appears that crack continues to occupy a prominent place in the culture of drug-dependent women and men in Sacramento. In fact, informants often stated that crack has become “the common denominator in Sacramento’s street drug scene.” There is consensus, as well, that the drug is “the great equalizer on the street,” in that it had forced crack-dependent women and men—regardless of age, race/ethnicity, occupation, religion, or family background—into sex trading or commercial sex work in order to support their drug-taking. The crack houses, still exist, but are not usually as prominent primarily because of vigorous law enforcement. There are still “house girls,” “house boys,” and “freak rooms,” and all of the specialized types of houses. There are also many private houses and apartments where friends and acquaintances continue to gather to make crack, smoke crack, and exchange sex for crack. The World is already beginning to reap the consequences of its abandonment of any standard of morality. As just one example, recently the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States of America warned that if a cure for AIDS is not quickly found, it could become a Worldwide epidemic that “will dwarf such earlier medical disasters as the Black Plague, smallpox, and typhoid.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Most people fall into sexual sin in a misguided attempt to fulfill basic human needs. We all have a need to feel loved and worthwhile. We all seek to have joy and happiness in our lives. Do not be misled by lies. There is no lasting happiness in immorality. There is no joy to be found in breaking the law of chastity. Just the opposite is true. There may be momentary pleasure. For a time it may seem like everything is wonderful. However, quickly the relationship will sour. Guilt and shame set in. We become fearful that our sins will be discovered. We must sneak and hide, lie and cheat. Love begins to die. Bitterness, jealousy, anger, and even hate begin to grow. All of these are the natural results of sin and transgression. On the other hand, when we obey the law of chastity and keep ourselves morally clean, we will experience the blessings of increased love and peace, greater trust and respect for our martial partners, deeper commitment to each other, and, therefore, a deep and significant sense of joy and happiness. We must not be misled into thinking these sins are minor, or that consequences are not that serious. One of the most sobering statements about being unchaste is that of Alma to his son Corianton: “Know ye not, my son,” he said, “that these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord; yea, most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost?” (Alma 39.5.) Very few of us will ever be guilty of murder or of the sin against the Holy Ghost. However, the law of chastity is frequently broken, and yet it stands next to these other sins in seriousness in the eyes of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Physical intimacy between husband and wife is a beautiful and sacred part of God’s plan for His children. It is an expression of love within marriage and allows husband and wife to participate in the creation of life. God has commanded that this sacred power be expressed only between a man and a woman who are legally married. The law of chastity applies to both men and women. It includes strict abstinence from sexual relations before marriage and complete fidelity and loyalty to one’s spouse after marriage. In addition to reserving sexual intimacy for marriage, we obey the law of chastity by controlling our thoughts, words, and actions. Jesus Christ taught, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of told time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart,” reports Matthew 5.27-28. To develop creativity, practice in make-believe and utilization of imaginary, absent, or hypothetical audiences, when real or socially present audiences are inimical or inhibitory, increases the probability of creativity. Respect for one’s own voluntary fantasy and ability to withdraw are the principal cases in point; these must of course be distinguished from compulsory fantasy and worry. Effecting self-organization and symbolic processes which enable the individual to be self-rewarding and self-validating, id est, able to provide one’s own consensual validation and social reward, increases the probability of creativity. Comparisons with historical models known through reading and drama are familiar examples. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Increasing the variety and range of a person’s experience increases one’s potentiality for creativity, providing a richer fund of materials and a broader base for creativity. The greater the variety of interpersonal experiences, the greater the probability of a cumulative growth of creativity. Extensive experiences in reading, travel, parties, games, discussion groups, interclass and intercultural exploration, and other sources of variety in interpersonal experience—both direct and vicarious—increase the development of creativity, particularly through the metaphors they provide for reinterpreting present activity. The availability or privacy and the positive valuation of its use for reverie, self-exploration, and self-experimentation increase the probability of creative growth. Creativity operates under a law of increasing returns, in that each episode of creativity increases the potentiality for future creativity. Providing people with experiences of creativity on a small scale increases the probability of more extensive creativity on a larger scale in the future. Interpersonal activities and orientations which are genuinely playful are favorable to creativity. Competition and conflict (where competitors are matched and consequences limited and not serious), satire, parody, and burlesque of cherished values; humor; the playful juxtaposition of incongruities; they playful cultivation of illogicality, fantasy, and the mixture of the real and the unreal are among the kinds of playfulness favorable to creativity. There is a serendipity of play where creativity, whilst unsought for, may emerge from useless pleasure-seeking activity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Cultivation of an aesthetic orientation toward activity (“do it because it pleases you”) as opposed to a utilitarian practical orientation (“do it because it is good for you”) increases the probability of creativity. The sense of performance before an audience, where performance is values apart from its consequences, expands potential for creativity. One is tempted at this point to look back over the above hypotheses from several points of view. For example, certain independent variables recur under each of the six components of competence. Does this mean that the six components of competence. Does this mean that the six components do not vary independently, or does it mean that conditions conducive to the growth of one will contribute to others? Any efforts to develop competence imply some theory of learning and human development; might this not be made explicit? Might it not, for example, be well to generalize that there is a triadic movement in interpersonal learning: one sees in others what they can less well see in themselves, and learns abstractly how to vary the conditions of their development, one thereby teaches the other how to create the same favorable conditions for the development of one’s self, and by identification with the other who becomes so significant, one learns (by taking the role of the other toward oneself) how to create for oneself those conditions favorable for one’s development. Applied more generally, one sees broad implications for any group which acts on the proposition that each member’s behavior is a vital condition for the development of every other. Such speculation has always been important to progress in research, but there is not space here to indulge in it further. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Regardless of how the suggested hypotheses are appraised by the reader, at the very least one should seriously consider the case for a new approach in family research which is satisfied with nothing less than explicit, testable experimental hypotheses. These should state in if-then form the conditions thought to be causally effective in producing a change in the development of those abilities required for successful handling of interpersonal situations, especially those found in families. If and when research can then go on to validate such hypotheses, then—and only then—will there really be scientific justification for publishing the procedures by which research findings can actually be applied. We make no pretense of having presented an exhaustive system of hypotheses, nor of being able to do so. Nor are we prepared to argue that the hypotheses we have listed are the best ones and should necessarily be given top priority in research on competence. However, we do content that competence a we have defined it is a top priority research problem; that the hypotheses proposed here are not mere offhand illustrations but merit serious attention; and that elaboration of significant hypotheses in all of the cells provided for, and the design and conduct of research to test them, will give to family research a unity, coherence, and impact it has not yet enjoyed. If we re wrong in our evaluation, then it is of the utmost importance that a more acceptable structuring of the problem be proposed without delay. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Suffering directly caused by psychopathological offenders may be distinguished from the true fellowship of Christ’s sufferings by its complete absence of result, either in fruit, victory, or ripening in spiritual growth. If carefully observed, it will be seen to be entirely purposeless. God does nothing without a definite object. He does not delight in causing suffering for the sake of suffering, but psychopathological offenders do. Suffering caused by the psychopaths is acute and fiendish in its character, and there will be no inward witness of the Spirit which tells the suffering self-actualized individual that it is from the hand of God. To be a discerning eye can be as clearly diagnosed to be from a psychopathological offender as can any physical pain be distinguished from a mental one by a skillful physician. The suffering caused by psychopathological offender can reach to the depths of your soul, causing acute suffering in the psyche—injecting “feelings” into the soul, repugnant or poignant; soulish, producing acute darkness, confusion, chaos, horror in the mind—anguished, knifelike emotional pain; or physical; pain in any part of the body. The ground given for the evil spirits to produce counterfeit suffering in such an acute degree as this may be traced back to the time when the self-actualized, in one’s absolute surrender to God for “the way of the cross,” deliberately willed to accept suffering from Him. Then afterwards, in fulfillment of this surrender, he gave the ground to the enemy; by accepting some specific suffering as from God which really came from the psychopathological offender, thus opening the door to them by the reception of their lie, the admittance of their actual power manifested in the suffering—continuing still further to give more ground by believing their interpretation of the suffering—and doing so as “the will of God”; until the whole life became one prolonged “yielding to suffering,” which seemed unreasonable, unaccountable in its origin, and purposeless in its results. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

God’s character is thus often maligned to His children, and the deceiving spirits do their utmost to arouse rebellion against Him for what they themselves are doing. We stand not only under judgment, but also under grace. The relation of God and the World, God and the Spirit, and God and history underlies the negative (judgment) in three areas. Theology must always speak paradoxically in a Yes and a No. The relationship of God to nature, spirit, and history in manipulating the concepts of judgment and grace resembles more an exercise in logic than a theological treatment of mysteries; and a readiness to cast the mantle of the positive paradox over everything results in a cheap universalism. It is the nature of the of the Protestant principle to resist heteronomy, to protest justification by intellectual works even though they deal with the content of faith. Theology must communicate in terms meaningful to our age. One must speak of the unconditioned instead of God, of the Logos instead of Jesus Christ. In this way, traces of the divine Yes and No can be found in all cultures. If one prefers to call this a philosophy of culture, then our era requires of us as theologians not to be theologians, but philosophers of culture. The goal is to seek an understanding of Jesus Christ in the World. Every act of submissive worship is an act of alienation and idolatry in this sense. What is frequently called “love” is often nothing but this idolatrous phenomenon of alienation; only that not God or an idol, but another person is worshipped in the way. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

We are living in one of the most important revolutions in the history of power—a change that is now reshaping our planet. Over the past generation millions of words have been devoted to upheavals in technology, society, ecology, and culture. However, relatively few have attempted to analyze the transformation in the nature of power itself—which drives many of these other changes. We have seen how, at every level of life, from business to government and global affairs, power is shifting. Power is among the most basic of social phenomena, and it is linked to the very nature of the Universe. For three hundred years, Western science pictured the World as a giant clock or machine, in which knowable causes produced predictable effects. It is a determinists, totally ordered Universe, which, once set in motion, pre-programs all subsequent actions. If this were an accurate description of the real World, we would all be powerless. For if the initial conditions of any process determine its outcome, human intervention cannot alter it. A machine-like universe set in motion by a Prime Mover, divine or otherwise, would be one in which no one has power over anything or anyone. Only, at best, an illusion of power. Power, in short, depends on cracks in the causal chain, events that are not all pre-programmed. Put differently, it depends on the existence of chance in the Universe and in human behavior. Yet power cannot operate in an entirely accidental Universe either. If events and behavior were really random, we would be equally helpless to impose our will. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Without some routine, regularity, and predictability, life would force upon us an endless series of random choices, each with random consequences, and thus make us powerless prisoners of fortune. Power thus implies a World that combines both chance and necessity, chaos and order. However, power is also linked to the biology of the individual and the role of government or, more generally, the state. This is so because all of us share an irrepressible, biologically rooted craving for a modicum of order in our daily lives, along with a hunger for novelty. It is the need for order that provides the main justification for the very existence of government. At least since Rousseau’s Social Contract and the end of the divine right of kings, the state has been seen as party to a contact with the people—a contract to guarantee or supply the necessary order in society. Without the state’s soldiers, police, and the apparatus of control, we are told, gangs or brigands would take over all our streets. Extortion, rape, robbery, and murder would rip away the least shreds of the “thin veneer of civilization.” The claim is hard to deny. Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming that in the absence of what we have earlier described as vertical power—order imposed from above—life quickly becomes a horror. Ask the residents of once-beautiful Sacramento what it means to live in a place where no government has sufficient power to govern. However, if the first function of the state is to ensure order, how much is enough? And does this change as societies adopt different systems of wealth creation? #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

When a state imposes iron control over everyday life, silences even the mildest criticism, drives its citizens into their homes in fear, censors the news, closes the theaters, revokes passports, knocks on the door at 4.00 A.M. and drags parents from their screaming children—who is served? The citizen in need of a modicum or order—or the state itself, protecting itself from outrage? When does order provide necessary stability for the economy—and when does it strangle needed development? There are, in short, to analogize from Marx, two kinds of order. One might be called “socially necessary order. The other is “surplus order.” Surplus order is that excess order imposed not for the benefit of the society, but exclusively for the benefit of those who control the state. Surplus order is the antithesis of beneficial or socially necessary order. The regime that imposes surplus order on its suffering citizens deprives itself of the Rousseanuian justification for existence. States that impose surplus order lose the Mandate of Heaven. Today they also lose their moral legitimacy in an interdependent World. In the new system now emerging, they invite not only the attention of global opinion but the sanctions of morally legitimate states. The United States of America has dispatched a secret mission to smooth over ruffled relations between China and Japan. Nevertheless, despite all the opportunism and realpolitik, the entire World, in effect, voted on the moral legitimacy of the hardliners’ regime. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Global opinion is growing more articulate, and less tolerant of surplus order. If so, there is a hidden reason. The revolutionary new element—a change brought about by the novel system of wealth creation—is a change in the level of socially necessary order. For the new fact is that, as nations make the transition toward the advanced, super-symbolic economy, they need more horizontal self-regulation and less top-down control. Put more simply, totalitarian control chokes economic advance. Student pilots often fly with white knuckles tightly gripping the controls. Their instructors tell them to loosen up. Overcontrol is just as dangerous as undercontrol. Today, as the crises in the Ukraine and other countries demonstrate, the state that attempts to overcontrol its people and economy ultimately destroys the very order it seeks. The state with the lightest touch may accomplish the most, and enhance its own power in the process. This may—just may—be bad news for totalitarians. However, enough ominous signs darken the horizon to dispel facile optimism. Those who have read this far know that we have no utopian promises. The use of violence as a source of power will not soon disappear. Students and protesters will still be shot in plazas around the World. Armies will still rumble across borders. Governments will still apply force when they imagine it serves their purpose. The state will never give up the gun. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Similarly, the control of immense wealthy, whether by private individuals or public officials, will continue to confer enormous power on them. Wealth will continue to be an awesome took of power. Nevertheless, despite exceptions and unevenness, contradictions and confusions, we are witnessing one of the most important changes in the history of power. For it is now indisputable that knowledge, the source of the highest-quality power of all, is gaining importance with every fleeting nanosecond. The most important powershift of all, therefore, is not from one person, party, institution, or nation to another. It is the hidden shift in the relationship between violence, wealth, and knowledge as societies speed toward their collision with tomorrow. This is the dangerous, exhilarating secret of the Powershift Era. Power is inherent in all social systems and in all human relationships. It is not a thing but an aspect of any and all relationships among people. Hence it is inescapable and neutral, intrinsically neither good nor bad. The power system includes everyone—no one is free of it. However, one person’s power loss is not always another’s gain. An objective examination of the relation between society and human nature must consider both the furthering and the inhibiting impact of society on man, taking into account the nature of man and the needs stemming from it. Each society is structuralized and operates in certain ways which are necessitated by a number of objective conditions. These conditions include methods of production and distribution which in turn depend on raw materials, industrial techniques, climate, size of population, and political and geographical factors, cultural traditions and influences to which society is exposed. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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This report includes some parts that are beyond the maturity of youth. This is the cruellest moment in the life of societies…I am under no illusions and do not except to wake up one morning to see the resurrection of freedom in our country, as if by a stroke of magic….No, no; decay, and decay for a period whose end I cannot fix and which will last for not less than one or two generations—is our lot…I shall witness the evil only, I shall die in the midst of the darkness. The designation graveyards, rooms in abandoned buildings, has an interesting genesis. At the corner of one of Sacramento’s housing projects, described by a local journalist in this way: “Sure, there are always problems. Its official name is Site 5, Project SA527-B, but residents began calling in ‘The Graveyard’ years ago. Poverty breeds crime, and crime bred more of itself. But when a tidal wave of cocaine rocks descended on the place ten years ago, crime seemed to put The Graveyard in a stranglehold. The pulse of the community grew faint. Residents began dying out of The Graveyard and prospective tenants refused to move. So basers [crack users and dealers] claimed the vacant apartments for themselves.” In time, The Graveyard’s abandoned apartments became overrun by crack dealers and users, the smell of drugs is vented from one apartment in to the apartment next door, and other people were unknowingly getting contact high, and being exposed to germs from their neighbor’s apartment. The problem got so bad that the county government began boarding up the project’s vacant rooms. However, the name took on a life of its own, and was renovated. People now deal crack out of the fire escapes, look outs stand out on the corner at night. There is a methadone clinic down the street. Community members fear walking by that building because of all the noise, violence and drug and alcohol abuse. Some people even run by it when the fights break out. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

To future highlight this illustration: “It’s an empty house, empty room. So somebody like go into this room, the first one there. They might put a board you know, you have cloth, you know a bucker of water to bathe and sh*t. I did it myself. Put up those boards and sh*t, sometimes curtains hanging over the door, this room had no doors, no windows, nothing like that. I know’d this one place off Capital Avenue where this lady set up in a burned out apartment. She was sort of a wh*re/crack head/skeeezer/bag lady who’d do anythin’ for crack and for food for her tick baby [a prostitute’s child fathered by a john], her base baby [a child conceived and gestated by a crack-using mother]. For a hit on the pipe or for some food or money or drug or cigarettes she’d let you smoke in her digs and she’d suck your prick too.” And finally, somewhat related to graveyards are base cars—abandoned automobiles that sever as places to smoke crack, to have sex, or to exchange sex for crack. Organized crack houses are reportedly few in number in Sacramento. The environment in these establishments is far more controlled than in any other type of crack house, with the owners more visible and closely monitoring all activities. Violence and general chaos are uncommon. The ambience is described as clam, and children are not permitted. They have more workers than other crack houses, most of whom maintain order inside or watch for police: They would have people outside, lookouts. Way up and down the street, like on the corner. And another guy sitting in the yard like he was cleaning the yard or something. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

“There would be like a bouncer at the door with a gun to watch to make sure no cops or anything would walk in. Or to make sure that there were no problems within the place itself. Just to make sure it secure for their sake.” Purchasing crack in organized houses is more structured than elsewhere. Several have specific hours of operation. Upon arrival, a customer is sold crack, seated with a pipe, and strict order is maintained. To further highlight this illustration, “You can’t come in the house after 8.00. Other than that he passes it through the window. Before 8.00 you can come in and he lays them [crack and crack pipes] on the table and you can pick what you want. Sometimes you walk in and he is sifting it [cocaine hydrochloride] with the baking soda so he can cook it and tell you to come back in fifteen minutes. When you walk in they have a person that pats you down to see if you got any weapons on you, and then you go through the doors then they have a person that brings you a torch. And they set you up to  table and OK when you first walk in the door its goin; back a little bit you buy your rocks at the door. They have a little stand. They have all the rocks you want from five dollars all the way to a fifty-dollar rock. And you pick out which one you want, whatever your money can afford and then they have someone escorts you back in the back, and that’s where we smoke at. They give you a pipe, they give you a torch, and then your own your own. It wasn’t like these abandoned burned-out houses that you see here in the city. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

“This house was very nice, very organized; he had house pipes, torches; he supplied lighters, screens, drugs; everything you needed was right there to prevent so much traffic. Once you get there if you have enough money, you can sit there and use the house pipes and everything. If you only came there to buy a nickel [five-dollar rock] or a dime [ten-dollar rock], you got it and left. Finally, direct sex-for-crack exchanges do not occur in the organized houses. One prostitute noted that “they let the hookers and skeezers in the door only if they was going to buy crack. The house is for buying and smoking only. They let us cut deals there, you know, but you can’t sex there. Got to go someplace else, usually out of the customer’s car.” Interviews with 35 women and 17 men in Sacramento revealed a progression into the drug World that for some, especially the women, ended in virtual slavery to pimps and more importantly to crack. All of the fifty-two informants had long histories of drug use. For almost all of these subjects, alcohol and tobacco use preceded their illicit drug-using careers. Marijuana use began at a mean age of 14 years. A significant proportion of the group experimented with inhalants, hallucinogens, stimulants (uppers), and depressants (downers). Some 40 percent had histories of intravenous drug use, including some cocaine, heroin, speed, and/or speedball (heroin mixed with cocaine). All of the men and all but one of the women had used cocaine (non-IV) during their teenage years, with 75 percent using the drug on a regular basis. Crack use began for both men and women by age 25. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

In terms of current drug use, defined as any use during the thirty-day period prior to the interview, crack clearly predominated. Crack was smoked for as long as it was available and users had means to purchase it—with money or sex, stolen goods, or other drugs. It was rare that someone had just a single hit. It was typical that they spent fifty to one hundred dollars in one period, with binges lasting three or four day. During these smoking cycles, users neither ate nor slept. Some informants purchased crack over two hundred times in the thirty-day period prior to student recruitment. While many of these crack users binged for several days in a row, over half (58 percent) used the drug on a daily basis. For every day they used crack, they were high from as few as three ties to as many as fifty times. Moreover, once crack was tried, it was not long before it became a daily habit. One-third of the sample used crack daily immediately after first trying it. An additional 27 percent used it daily by the end of their first month. For many of the women in this study, the craving for crack led eventually to prostitution. Once they ran out of money and things to sell, they found they could always sell themselves. The following quotation, drawn from the transcript of a 28-year-old African-American crack user legally employed as a shipping clerk, clearly illustrates a characteristic aspect of the sex-for-crack phenomenon. She details her first exchange of sex for crack and how it came about. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

“I had my last paycheck, that was $107. That day I went straight from there [work] with a friend guy and copped some drugs. I bought $25-five nickel rocks. We drunk a beer, we needed the can to smoke on. So we sat there and we smoked those five rocks and you know, like they say, one is too much and a thousand is never enough. And that’s the truth. Those five rocks went like this [snaps fingers], and I had maybe about $80 left. I had intentions of takin’ my grandmother some money home for the kid. But I had it in my mind you know I was, I was just sick. I wanted to continue to get high so push came to shove and I smoked up that whole day. OK all the money was gone, all the drugs was gone. About 0.00 we went and sat in the park. Usually when we set in the park, people will come over and they’ll have drugs. I stayed out because I couldn’t give an account for what I had did with the money. My grandmother done thought that I was goin’ to pick up my check and comin’ back. So I walked down this street—you know you got people that will pick you up. So this guy stopped, and I got in the car, and I never did any prostituting but I wanted more drugs. So this guy, he asked me: “How much would you charge me for a head?” That’s oral sex. And I told him $40. And so he say, how much would you charge me for two hours to have just sex not oral sex? And so I told him $40 so he say: “OK get in,” and he tool me to this hotel. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

“He had about six rocks. I didn’t want sex. I wanted to get high, so we smoked the rocks and durin’ the time I sexed with him. So after I sexed him, he gave me the money, and after the rocks was gone I still wanted to get high. So he gave me more money to go get more drugs. We went into another hotel. By that time it was maybe 6.00 in the morning. By that time I done spent all my $40. It wasn’t nothing I had done wasted the money.” The individuals interviewed in this study had sexual histories that began early and involved many partners. The mean age of the first sexual intercourse was 14 years, with the females being involved in sex almost a year earlier than the males. The first sex-for-money exchange occurred at a mean of 23.2 years. During the thirty-day period prior to the interview, the sexual activities of the fifty-two informants were extensive. Among the seventeen male crack users, more than half had twenty-five or more male sex partners, and five of the seventeen had a hundred or more male partners. In addition, 60 percent of these male crack users had more than twenty-five male sex partners during the same period. Moreover, 42 percent participated in vaginal sex more than twenty-five times; 88 percent participated in oral sex more than twenty-five times, just under half participated in rear end-insertive coitus at least once; and 30 percent engaged in rear end-receptive coitus during this thirty-day period. Finally, 30 percent of these men masturbated other men (“hand jobs”). #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

The women appeared to have many more sexual contacts than the men. Almost 90 percent of the women had a hundred or more male sex partners, and 11 percent had as many as twenty-five female partners. Some 39 percent of these women participated in traditional coitus more than fifty times, 57 percent engaged in sodomy more than fifty times, 20 percent participated in rear end coitus, and 29 percent provided men with hand jobs. Respondents performed a wide array of acts involving pleasures of the flesh. This might include generic sodomy (a “brain”) or a specialized variation (“slow neck” or “fast head” or a blood sucker who performs acts on women at a certain time of the month). Moreover, the majority of the respondents reported performing acts involving pleasures of the flesh that they would do while on crack and/or for crack and doing so for a penny (one hit on a crack pipe) or less. For example, a 31-year-old male prostitute reported: “As a matter of fact, when you are high on crack you’ll do almost anything. We [the respondent and his boyfriend had sex in front of other people, and one male joined us. Usually I gave the other guy head while we had anal intercourse.” Most parents would like to keep their children from strolling down this road, so they raise them in the ways of God and attend weekly church services, Bible study, and teach them to pray. When you hear the phrase “the law of chastity,” do you know what it means? You probably get a lot of mixed messages about it. All kinds of media, and sometimes even friends and family, have different opinions about it. And the World actively teaches things contrary to what the Lord teaches. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

So what exactly does the law of chastity mean? The law of chastity is the Lord’s term for His commandment to live a life of sexual purity and virtue. Living the law of chastity is for both men and women, and it means you do not have any sexual relations before marriage, and [you are] completely faithful to your spouse after marriage. However, being virtuous and chaste is about more than just pleasures of the flesh. Treat others with respect, not as objects used to satisfy lust and selfish desire. The law of diminishing returns is a principle stating that profits or benefits grained from something will represent a proportionally smaller gain as the point of optimization is exceeded. So, somethings become less desirable or useful after they are done so many times. This is why purity is important. Your body is a temple of God and not something you want to just give away, abuse or let other people abuse. Before marriage, do not participate in passionate kissing, lie on top of another person, or touch the private, sacred parts of another person’s body, with or without clothing. Do not do anything else that arouses lust. Do not arouse those emotions in your own body. Note that the Lord’s standards do not change just because two people really like each other and both agree to the behavior. When you respect other people, the Lord, and yourself, you will keep the commandments—and that means no sexual relationship or arousing sexual feeling outside of marriage. The Lord really is serious about this. “The prophet Alma taught that sexual sins are more serious than any other sins except murder and denying the Holy Ghost,” (see Alma 39.3-5). #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Creativity in interpersonal relations refers to the actor’s capacity to free him or herself from established routines of perception and action, and to redefine situations and act in the new roles called for by the new situations—in short, it means inventiveness in interpersonal relationships. Of all the components of competence we have considered, creativity is perhaps the most difficult to specify and to investigate. Nevertheless it is evident that competence in interpersonal relations requires some such group of qualities and skills. It therefore becomes necessary to develop research on the conditions for their optimal development and utilization. Participation in social relations which are permissive rather than repressive, equalitarian rather than hierarchical and authoritarian, mutual and reciprocal rather than unilateral, is favorable to creativity. Rotation of functional positions among the participants in a social relationship is a source of new experience, providing a broadening base for creativity and increasing the probability of its development. Role-reversal in role-playing is an almost universally usable substitute device when more extended rotation of roles is not feasible, as with children and parent. Participation in social relation where diversity and individuality are valued above uniformity and conformity increases the probability of creativity. Extensive and obligatory routine is unfavorable to creativity. Routine in a particular activity may be favorable to creativity insofar as it frees the individual’s attention, energy, and other resources for creative activity in another area. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

A balance between established routine, preferably flexible, varied, and of limited range and duration, and opportunity for deviation from routine is optimal for creativity. Some areas of the individual’s experience and activity must always be subject to routine, but procedures which encourage the variation of routine activities increase the probability of creativity. Situations which provide challenges that exceed the individual’s previous achievement without exceeding one’s ability are favorable to the occurrence of creativity. Even if the challenge exceeds one’s usual conception of one’s ability, a condition favorable to creativity exists, provided true ability is not overchallenged, and particularly if the support of significant others can be introduced to bolster unrealistically modest judgment of ability. The suspension of one’s own judgment regarding one’s ability is important in such a case. Resultant spontaneity may permit the individual to go ahead and act creatively, even though one’s usual conception of one’s ability would lead one to appraise the situation as threatening and demanding withdrawal. Experiences increasing self-esteem will increase the probability of creativity. A distinction between self-esteem and self-satisfaction ( a seeking for stability, permanence, perpetuation of the status quo of the self) is necessary. Self-esteem is conceived as a positive self-valuation operating independently from changes in other areas of the self-system. Involved in self-esteem is a kind of detachment which permits a person’s appraisal of one’s general worth to stand independent from particular success and failure events; critical appraisal of products is thus not seen as directed against the performer. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

If experiences are provided affecting the individual’s self-organization and symbolic processes, so that one’s threshold of stimulation is lowered and one becomes able to be more fully responsive to the stimulation of other people and interpersonal events, the probability of creativity is increased. A playful and sociable atmosphere—as created by the capable host—is the best example. Passivity caused by wrong acceptance of suffering consists when the self-actualized accepts suffering with Christ in the way of the cross. To fulfill this surrender one passively yields to suffering in whatever form it may come, believing that suffering with Christ means reward, and fruitfulness. One does not know that psychopathic offenders can produce counterfeit “suffering,” and that one may be accepting suffering from them though believing it to be from the hand of God, and, by so doing, giving ground to them. And what does one consider “suffering” to be? Both conduct disorder in the life which cannot be got rid of, and suffering in the life which cannot be explained. By recognizing the truth of deception the first can be got rid of, and the latter explained. Suffering is an obvious factor in motivating a person to take a certain course. So it is a great weapon of psychopathic offenders to use in controlling people, for by suffering they can drive an individual to do what one would not do otherwise. Not realizing this, the believer may entirely misinterpret the suffering one goes through. Self-actualized individuals are often suffering for others, perhaps even for the country as a whole. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

They look upon themselves as martyrs when they are really victims, unaware that “suffering” is one of the chief symptoms of deception. By putting a human into suffering, the psychopathic offenders gleefully ease themselves of their enmity and hatred to man. The theonomous union of religion and culture can be expressed in yet another way, by the relation of the holy to the secular. Consecration is the first principle of the secular. By this, nothing is essentially and inescapably secular. Everything has the dimension of depth, and in the moment in which the third dimension is actualized, holiness appears. Everything secular is potentially sacred, open to consecration. Nor is the mediation of the churches, of religion in the narrow sense, necessary for this consecration. For the dimension of depth in the secular is religion—religion in the large sense of ultimate concern which cannot be restricted only to an ecclesiastical sphere. Once the autonomous, self-sufficient surface of the secular is broken through by an unconditioned concern, the holy reveals itself in the depths of the secular. In that moment, the universe is God’s sanctuary. Every work day is a day of the Lord, every supper a Lord’s supper, every work the fulfillment of a divine task, every joy a joy in God. In all preliminary concerns, ultimate concern is present, consecrating them. The concrete way in which consecration is effected is symbolism. When, under the influence of ultimate concern, a thing become a symbol of the holy, then to that degree it is sacred and participates in divine holiness. No object, no person, no activity is excluded from the possibility of symbolizing the holy, for everything in the World rests on the ultimate ground of being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

The first principle, then, offers the possibility of finding the holy in the secular; the second principle, the convergence of the holy and secular, maintains its necessity. The secular resists self-transcendence, but this very resistance produces the emptiness and meaninglessness which characterized the finite when cut off from the infinite. An exhausted secularism is driven to ask the question of a meaning and power of being beyond itself; it seeks the holy. On the other hand, the holy cannot manifest itself without the secular, for it is through the finite alone that the infinite can express itself. It is through holy “objects” that holiness must become actual. Consequently, although they remain in tension, the poles of the holy-secular converge upon one another. The third and last principle is that of the essential belongingness of religion and culture to each other. In the existential, actual condition of mankind, the holy is separated from the secular, and this constitutes the state of sin. Essentially, however, they are untied in that religion is the substance of culture, and culture the form of religion. Therefore, in the essential order the holy and the secular are not found as hostile or even divided spheres; rather, together they form a union in which the autonomy of the finite is not destroyed, while at the same time it achieves transcendence by revealing in its depths the presence of the infinite. The fact that in the existential order they confront each other from behind unyielding barriers is tragic witness to the state of sin and separation in which man lives. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Religion itself, namely, a religious culture beside a secular culture, a temple beside a town hall, a Lord’s supper beside a daily supper, prayer beside work, meditation beside research, caritas beside eros is proof for all the World. This duality can never be fully overcome in history, but it should be prevented from widening into an unbridgeable chams. The poles of the holy-secular can be at least fragmentarily united. The above principles that relate the holy to the secular render intelligible the term “Protestant secularism.” The term “theonomy” may be objected to because its use by Catholics has created connotations of a clearly heteronomous character.  Therefore, it may be wise to speak, in certain cases, of “Protestant secularism.” Theonomy indicates that neither ecclesiastical heteronomy nor secular autonomy can have the last word in human culture. For the shallow creations of an autonomous culture lack substance, and heteronomy rides roughshod over secular forms. However, theonomy is more than a needle which flickers between two extremes on the culture-gauge: There is, however, a difference between a culture which is theonomous, determined by direct and intentional expression of an ultimate concern, and a culture which oscillates between an empty autonomy and a suppressive heteronomy. Ultimate concern is the positive, life-giving taproot of theonomous culture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

When it comes to the new-style global organizations, the question of whether some non-national “gladiators” ought to be represented in World bodies is closely related to the deign of new organizations on the World scene. A key question facing the architects of the new global order is whether power should flow vertically or horizontally. A clear example of vertical organization is the European Community, which seeks to build, in effect, a supra-government that would, according to its critics, reduce the present countries of Europe to the status of province rather than sovereign nations—by imposing supra-national controls over currency, central banking, educational standards, environment, agriculture, and even national budgets. This traditional vertical model seeks to solve problems by adding another echelon to the power hierarchy. It is “high-rise” institutional architecture. The model, congruent with the emerging forms of organization in the business World and the advanced economies, flattens the hierarchy rather than extending it upward. It will be based on networks of alliances, consortia, specialized regulatory agencies, to accomplish ends too large for any single state. In this system there is no higher level of top-down control, and specialized agencies are not grouped hierarchically under a nonspecialized central body. It is the equivalent of “low-rise” architecture. It parallels the flex-firm. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Around the World today, the EC is being closely watched and, very often, taken as the only model for regional organization. Thus, the proposal to clone the EC is loudly heard, from the Maghreb and the Middle East to the Caribbean and the Pacific. A more revolutionary approach would be to lace existing organizations in each of these regions together, without imposing a new layer of control. The same might be done between nations. Japan and the United States of America, for example, are so closely intertwined economically, politically, and militarily, that decisions in one have immediate high-impact consequences in the other. Under these circumstances, the day may arrive when Japan will demand actual voting seats inside the Congress of the United States of America. In return, the United States of America would no doubt demand equivalent representation in the Japanese Diet. In this way would be born the first of many potentials “cross-national” parliaments or legislatures. Democracy presupposes that those affected by a decision have a right to participate in making the decision. If this is so, then many nations should, in fact, have seats in the U.S.A. Congress, whose decisions have greater impact on their lives than the decisions of their own politicians. As the World goes global, and the new system for wealth creation spreads, demands for cross-national political participation—and even cross-national voting—will bubble up from the vast populations who now feel themselves excluded from the decisions that shape their lives. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

However, whatever form the global organizations of tomorrow assume, they will have to pay more attention, both positive and negative, to the Global Gladiators. To what extent should groups like religions and global corporations, as well as transnational trade unions, political parties, environmental movements, humans rights organizations, and other such entities from the civil society be represented in the institutions now being planned for the World of tomorrow? How can one keep a crucial separation between Church and state at the global level to avoid the fearsome bloodshed and oppression that has so often resulted from their fusion? How might terrorists or criminals, warlords and narco-killers be quarantined? What legitimate global voice might be given to national minorities oppressed at home? What missile defense or chemical-warfare defense measures should be regional or global, rather than left to purely national responsibility? No one can afford to be dogmatic in answering these dangerous questions of the not-so-far-off future. The questions themselves sound strange, no doubt, in a World that still conceives of itself as organized around nation-states. However, at the dawn of the smokestack era, nothing sounded stranger, more radical, more dangerous than the ideas for French, English, and American revolutionaries who thought that people and parliaments should control kings, rather than the reverse, and that lack of representation was cause for rebellion. In many countries, such ideas may provoke passionate objection on patriotic grounds. The proto-fascist French writer Charles Maurras in the 19^th century expressed the traditional view that “of all human liberties, the most precious is the independence of one’s country.” However, absolute sovereignty and independence have always been mythical. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Only countries willing to opt out of the new system of wealth creation forever can avoid plugging into the new global economy. Those who do connect with the World will necessarily be drawn into an interdependent global system populated not by nations alone, but by newly powerful Global Gladiators as well. We are witnessing a significant shift of power from individual or groups of nation-states to Global Gladiators. This amounts to nothing less than the next global revolution in political forms. The shift toward heterogeneity in the emerging World system will sharply intensify if giant nations splinter, as now seems eminently possible. The Soviet Union is fast-fracturing, with Gorbachev desperate to hold the parts together in a much-loosened framework. However, some pieces will almost surely flake off and assume strange new forms in the decades to come. Whether part of the Post-Soviet Union or not, some regions will inevitably be drawn into the economic vortex of a German-dominated Europe; others into the nascent Japanese sphere of influence in Asia. The backward republics, still dependent on agriculture and raw material extraction, may huddle together in a loosened federation. However, rational economic considerations could easily be swept aside by a tidal wave of republic, and Byelorussia merge into a giant mass based on Slav culture and a revivified Orthodox church. Islam could glue some of the Central Asian republics together. China, too, could split up, with its most industrially developed regions in the South and East severing their ties with the great rural-based China, and forming new kinds of entities with Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and perhaps a reunified Korea. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

The result might he a giant new Confucian Economic Community, countering the rise of Japan, while further strengthening the significance of religion as a factor in the World system. To assume that such changes will happen without civil war and other conflicts, or that they can be contained within the obsolete frame of a nation-based World order, is both shortsighted and unimaginative. The sole certainty is that tomorrow will surprise us all. What is brilliantly clear, then, is that as the new system of wealth creation moves across the planet it upsets all our ideas about economic development in the so-called South, explodes socialism in the “East,” throws allies into killer competition, an calls into being a new, dramatically different global order—diverse and risk-filled, at once hopeful and terrifying. New knowledge has overturned the World we knew and shaken the pillars of power that held it in place. Surveying the wreckage, ready once more to create a new civilization, we stand, all together now, at Ground Zero. In China, state owned companies have been put into a competitive environment where they have to rely more and more on themselves and less on the state, and to work hard to become profitable. Though they remain the core part of the Chinese economy, their status is drastically changing. The conventional perception of an SOE is that of an enterprise operating under tight supervision of a government agency and relaying on the state coffers for funding, shielded from competition, and pursuing the goals of the government’s economic and social policy (such as achieving certain numerical targets for production of particular goods, providing employment, or even supporting social welfare institutions like hospitals or kindergartens). #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

These goals are often achieved at the expense of commercial viability and profitability. Therefore the government has to provide financing to keep the enterprise going. This perception has to be reconsidered. A different, nonconventional type of SOE also exists and, furthermore, plays an increasingly important role in many emerging market countries in Asia and beyond; that is to say, SOE-market-style. Run by professional managers with a high degree of decision-making authority, they do not rely on the state’s soft financing but borrow at commercial rates or rise funds at the capital market. They full participate in competition both domestically and, more and more often, internationally. They pursue profit maximization as a major goal. In such companies, private investors often hold a minority stake. They may be listed on the stock exchanges at home and overseas. The SOEs of this kind are often more efficient, competitive, and dynamic than private companies. The SOE’s shift from the traditional to the market-style pattern is a major source of China’s structural transformation, giving its economy enormous energy to grow. This is the direction of change its major vector. In real life, many Chinese state-owned companies are currently still on their way between the two patterns described. Since the start of the market reforms, step-by-step, the government has been reducing the scope of SOEs’ products covered by the direct planning system, which kept the state responsible for financing, supply of necessary equipment and intermediate goods, price setting, and selling the products. The so-called zhenqqi fenkai policy was launched, meaning the separation of the government’s functions from enterprises’ business operations. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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People believe that failure in life is like the bankruptcy of a business in which the losses are greater than the gains. This concept is nonsensical. We may be happy of unhappy, achieve some aims, and not achieve others; yet there is no sensible balance which could show whether life is worth while living. Maybe from the standpoint of a balance life is ever worth while living. It ends necessarily with death; many of our hops are disappointed; it involves suffering and effort; from a standpoint of the balance, it would seem to make more sense not to have been born at all, or to die in infancy. Many people who have this view point often turn to drugs and prostitution as a way out. Crack houses sometimes allow on-site drug use while others do not. Some tolerate sex acts, others do not. Some facilities produce and/or sell drugs and others do not. Many crack houses are well-fortified and profit-oriented “castles.” “Base houses” are described as the all-purpose 7-11 of the crack house World. The term “resort” to describe multiroom apartments that have been converted into efficient crack houses. “Brothels” are places where sex is the order of the day and house girls or house boys, pimps, and crack users do business. A “residence house” is a private residence where the owner welcomes in partiers for extended drug and sexfests. “Graveyards” are described as free-for-all environments such as abandoned buildings and such. Finally, “organized crack houses” represent the most rule-oriented variation in which a highly present owners and staff members oversee drug sales and drug use in an orderly fashion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

When we consider life of the “crack whore,” we explore the intense sexual and drug use habits of this brand of prostitute and consider the accompanying health concerns. Important differences exist between crack whores and traditional street prostitutes. There is a valuable nexus between drug use and prostitution. Crack cocaine has brought these two Worlds dangerously close together, thus altering the behavioral and cultural aspects of the offending. “Crack was my pimp,” reports a 28-year-old Sacramento Chicken Head. When most people think of vice related crime, the two that come to mind are drugs and prostitution. Indeed, the two are intrinsically linked in both fictional and journalistic media accounts; prostitutes tend to be drug users and many female drug users tend to be prostitutes. What is less investigated are the ways in which particular patterns of drug usage affect patterns of prostitution. The crack house is a carnival of vice. It is one hell of a nasty place where kingrats and pay masters rule, where the guy buckets give slow necks for a penny, and where the freaks, rock monsters, and the blood suckers will do anything for a hit on the stem. By 2022, the Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that there were no fewer than seven hundred crack houses in the Sacramento area. The very term “crack house” and the physical characteristics that it represents can mean many different things—a place to use, a place to sell or do both, a place to manufacture and package crack—and the location may be a house, an apartment, a small shack at the back of an empty lot, an abandoned building, or even the rusting hulk of a discarded automobile. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

Close scrutiny reveals no fewer than seven distinct types of crack houses exist in Sacramento. However, we many not be able to cover all seven today in this report. Reportedly few in number, castles are fortified structures where large quantities of crack are manufactured from powder cocaine, packaged in plastic bags or glass vials, and sold both wholesale and retail. Crack users (aka “rock monsters” or “base heads”) are not permitted inside the walls of castles. Typical fortification include barred window, reinforced door and window frames, steel doors with heavy slide bolts, and walls reinforced from the inside with steel mesh and/or a layer of concrete blocks. Such heavy fortifications are not for the purpose of making police raids difficult. An 18-year-old former lookout for a crack house reported in 2020: “The whole idea [of the fortification] is to keep the cops off yer backs long enough to dump the stuff [crack] before they get in. This one rock castle I was in had all the doors and walls braced with steel bars drilled into the floor and ceiling. It has TV cameras lookin’ up and down the street Nothin’ could go down without them knowin’ about it. The only time the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] got in was when they came with a tow truck to pull down the door and a battering ram to get past a concrete barrier. It took them fifteen minutes to get in, and by then we had the place clean [free of drugs]. In addition to fortifications, most castles are well armed, with workers typically carrying semiautomatic weapons at all times. Crack sales are accomplished with little or no interaction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

In some houses of this type, exchanges are made through a slot or hole in the fortified door, with the money passed in and the crack passed out. In others, the transaction is accomplished by means of a basket or a pail lowered from a second floor or attic window. Due to the fortifications and nature of drug transactions in castles, sex-for-crack trading is generally not practiced in these houses. The base house seems to be an “all-purpose drug joint,” as one informant put it. Base houses are used by many kinds of drug users, especially intravenous users. A variety of drugs are available, including crack. However, smoking crack is not the primary activity. Intravenous drug use (typically cocaine) I more commonly seen and accepted here than in other types of crack houses, but sex-for-drugs exchanges rarely occur. In this regard, a 35-year-old crack-using prostitute commented: “You can go there and shoot drugs and she (the owner) shoot, but she didn’t smoke crack. She’ll let you smoke there as long as you…give her two dollars. If you was a smoker, a rock smoker, you can give her two dollars to smoke. If you was a cocaine shooter you give her cocaine to shoot or buy her some wine or something. The only thing she didn’t let us do there is bring customers.” Another crack users offered a somewhat different description: “OK, you go in there, and some people they have a syringe in their arm and a pipe in their mouth at the same time. You go in there and you buy crack and they rent a room or they go in the bathroom. You gotta pay fifteen dollars for this ‘cause that’s two different types of drugs that you get into your system. You can buy a syringe there too, but most of the times people bring their own syringes. And they go in there, and thy shoots up first and they leave the needle in their arm and then they put the crack on top of the pipe and they tell somebody to hit them, you know, to keep the fire on the stem while they inhale it.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

The resort is one of the more customary types of crack house in Sacramento. The physical layout is that of a small apartment adapted for crack use. The kitchen is used for cooking rock, at least one bedroom is set aside for sex, and the living space is used for selling and smoking. As one crack user described the resort: “It was just an apartment house where a lot of people that smoke crack come inside and just do drugs and smoke. One of them was his main room and the other two he would rent out, one for sexual and one for just smoking. And sometimes there wouldn’t be nobody smoking and they just come to have sex in both of them. Inside, candles burning, pillows on the floor; it wouldn’t be very good for a person in his right mind.” The owners of these crack houses (aka “kingrats,” “rock masters,” or “house men”) seem to be concerned about two things: money and crack. Many of them are addicted to crack and operate the houses to support their drug habits. Almost anything can happen in these crack houses. They were observed to be filthy, chaotic, and crowded. The crack smokers got into fights, attempted to steal each other’s drugs, and exhibited extreme paranoia. A characteristic of the resort is easy to access to crack, although each house has slightly different sales procedures. Some charge an entrance fee, and customers are free to smoke and have sex. Crack is usually on a table and purchases are informal. In other houses, the crack may not be on display, and customers pay a worker to bring them a rock. For example: “They just have it there on the table, whatever you want, give them the money for it and go in the back and then if you want another you go right to the front and buy a nickel [five-dollar rock] and then you smoke that. You have to but your stuff from them. There was one where you could bring your stuff, but you would have to pay, pay them to use their equipment.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

In resorts, the bartering of sex and crack occurs between the prostitute (aka “head hunter,” “gut bucket,” “freak,” “base whore,” “crackie,” “rock star,” “skeeter head” or “skeezer”) and her or his customer (aka “john” or “pay master”). The owner of the crack house receives a fee (crack or money) from the john for the use of the freak room. As such, the customer pays both the owner of the house and the prostitute. And finally, the crack houses known locally as resorts are termed as such because of the variety of activities that occur there. A cocaine dealer reported in this regard: “That they call it a ‘rock resort’ has nothin’ to do with music. Ha, ha. It’s because you can really get into it there—drugs, sex, rock ‘n roll, all three at once, whatever. You can smoke your brains out, f*ck your brains out, get sexed any way you want, watch sex, get paranoid, fight, watch fights, cut somebody, get high, get killed, whatever the f*ck you want.” Although prostitution and trading sex for crack are among the primary activities of many crack houses, in the brothel the owner is a dealer/pimp and the sex-for-drugs exchange system is somewhat unique. The prostitute is a house girl or house boy and is not involved in the payment process. For the sexual services she or he provides, one receives payment for the houseman or housewoman in the from of crack, room, and board. Several respondents reported having actually lived in a crack house brothel, with many more having visited such establishments. A 26-year-old-crack addict with a ten-year-career in drugs described her experience this way: “Bein’ that I been workin’ the streets since I was eleven and don’t really mind sexin’ a lot of different guys, I thought it would be a real easy deal for getting’ all the cracks [more than one rock] that I needed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

“So this bondman [drug dealer] that I’d know’d real well takes me in. He says all it is givin’ a lot of brains [oral sex]. Well man, I know’d a lot of brains. I probably done more fellatio [her emphasis] than any lady on the street. I really got my self into somethin’ bad. It wasn’t just brains like he said. It was everything. There was guys pushin’ their natures [genitals] everywhere—in my mouth, in my guts, up my a**; guys gettin’ off [climaxing] in my face; one guy goin’ down on me with five others watchin’ and jerkin’ off. Most of the time I just didn’t care, ‘cause I was gettin’ all the rock I wanted. But times I just wanted to be left alone, but I couldn’t. One time they raped me man; they raped me, cause I wouldn’t f*ck ‘em just that minute. They held me down and beat me and did all kind of terrible things. And I tried to leave but I was a prisoner there. After the rape I tried to leave, but the man at the door he’s got his orders and I can’t go. So when I try to get out he slapped me around and they rape me again. They raped me again real bad this time, f*cking me in the c*nt and the a** at the same time, slapping my face and pinching my tits, and one f*ck pissed on me after he was done. An’ then to teach me another lesson they hold back on the pipe. After a while I got sick, and I was all bruised and looked so bad, that they threw me out. They just threw me out like I was just some piece of sh*t.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

In addition to the sexual services available in the brothels, some street prostitutes use them solely as places to have sex with their customers. To further highlight the illustration, a 25-year-old woman who had been exchanging sex for money and drugs for eight years reported: “One of the rooms is for base [crack], the other three rooms are for tricking and one of the first rooms inside the door, that’s where the dude sit, that’s where the G-man [security man, bouncer] sit. When you come in the house he pat you down. They pat you down, and when you come in you say “date.” That means pat you down and let you go and have a date. See anyone was allowed to bring a date, anyone was allowed to bring a trick. When you go in you can bring a date in from the outside and use the room and get money from him and you got to do what you gotta do—five dollars to use the room, five dollars one hour, they say an hour but they only give you forty-five minutes with that mother-f*cker.” Residence houses are quite numerous in the Sacramento area and are likely the most common form of crack house. They are houses or apartments where small groups of people gather regularly to smoke crack. The operators are reluctant to call these places “crack houses,” because they are used as such only by their friends. However, the activities are the same as those in other crack houses, including sex-for-crack exchanges. The major differences revolve around the payment system. Crack is not sold in residence houses; it is only smoked there. In the more traditional crack house, such as a brothel or resort, payment for using the house can be made with money or crack, although money is preferred. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

In residence house, payment is made only with crack. Visitors give crack or more often share crack with the owner of the house or apartment in return for having a place to smoke or turn a trick. There are usually fewer people in these crack houses than in others—five or six compared to fifteen or twenty. They are also the same five or six individuals, whereas in other types there is a greater turnover of people. Finally, whereas the visitors to other types of crack houses are “customers,” only “friends” are invited to residence houses. We have two more types of houses of debauchery that we will discuss in the next few days. Life is a unique gift and a challenge, not to be measured in terms of anything else, and no sensible answer can be given to the question whether it is “worth while,” living, because the question does not make any sense. As a conception of self-effacement and loss of self-consciousness is contrary to the self-actualized person’s full use of the faculties which the ultimate concern requires for the cooperation with it, psychopathological offenders gain ground on the basis of this deception about “death.” The misconception of what death means in practice was really part of their “teachings,” subtly suggested, and received by the man who was ignorant of the possibility of deception over what looked like devoted, whole-hearted surrender to God. The teachings of offenders can, therefore, be based on truth. The effect of the deception on the self-actualized person is, in due time, an insensitivity produced by psychopathic offenders which is hard to break. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

In his state of insensitiveness he had no ability to discern, recognize, feel or know things around him, or in himself. He is unaware of his actions, ways and manners, together with a hyper-self-consciousness which he is not conscious of, and which makes him easily hurt but unaware of his own hurting of others. He had practically become stoical, and unable to see the effect of his actions in putting others into suffering. He acts without volitional thinking, reasoning, imagining, or deciding what he says and does. His actions are mechanical and automatic. He is unconscious of sometimes being a channel for the transmission of words, thoughts, or feelings which pass through him apart from the action of his will and his knowledge of the source. An illustration of theonomy is the interpenetration of morality, culture, and religion. Morality, the constitution of the person as person in the encounter with other persons, looks to culture to provide it with concrete contents such as the ideal of personality and community. Morality receives from religion the unconditional character of reunion of the separated. Morality can even be called theonomous ethics, for it is a matter of law, but not alien law (heteronomy) or superficial law (autonomy): the law given by God is man’s essential nature, put against him as law. Therefore man’s nature is not evil. If a man were not estranged from himself, if his essential nature were not distorted in his actual existence, no law would stand against him. The law is not strange to man. It is natural law. It represents his true nature from which he is estranged. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

Culture creatures a universe of meaning, but the forms it produces re valid only if morality imparts to them the force of the moral imperative. Culture accepts from religion the substance or ground which alone affords the element of ultimacy. Religion is the self-transcendence of life under the dimension of spirit, but this cannot occur without morality, id est, without the constitution of the moral self by the unconditional imperative. Furthermore, religion depends upon culture to provide the meaningful forms in which self-transcendence is expressed. Under the conditions of existence, religion, culture, and morality are ambiguously disrupted and tend to act independent of one another. However, their essential unity and interplay in the human spirt exemplify theonomy in yet another way. The depth-dimensions enters into the very definition of theonomy, for theonomy is autonomous reasons united with it own depth. In spite of the theonomous union between religion and culture, these two do not lie on the same level. Religion is the depth-dimension of culture. The abstract formulation is this: Religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion. More concretely, however, religion is ultimate concern. As such it gives meaning, seriousness, and depth to all culture. It is always effective, giving inexhaustible depth to life and inexhaustible meaning to every cultural creation. What does the metaphor depth mean? It means that the religious aspect points to that which is ultimate, infinite, unconditioned in man’s spiritual life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

The American religious revival of the 1950s was a search for the lost dimension, the religious dimension of depth. For man has lost the answer to the question of whence he comes, whither he goes, what he is doing, and what he should make of himself in the short span between birth and death. This loss of depth-dimension is reflected in the loss of symbols which traditionally convey it. The symbols of creation, original sin, the savior, salvation, and God have been interpreted on a horizontal level as reports about past events, as descriptions of things next to other things. Consequently, they have become meaningless. Rather, they must be interpreted vertically as expressions of the ground of being and meaning. The most religious currents—religious in the wide sense of ultimate concern—are found today in the modern novelists, poets, dramatists, painters, architects, and analytic and existential philosophers who penetrate to the lost dimension, who raise the ultimate question. However, what lies at the bottom of this murky dimension of depth? The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. He deplores the aimless surface activity of our lives where we speed about hither and tither, cruelly smashing ourselves and others. To avoid complete despair, we must abandon this surface-life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Let us rather plunge more deeply into the ground of our historical life, into the ultimate depth of history. The name of this infinite and inexhaustible ground of history is God. That is what the word means, and it is that to which the words Kingdom of God and Divine Providence point. And if these words do not have much meaning for you, translate them, and speak of the depth of history, of the ground and aim of our social life, and of what you take seriously without reservation in your moral and political activities. In fathoming the depths, one achieves theonomy. Judgement is to creativity as criticism is to creation. The ability to evaluate a situation, to define the problem which it presents, is antecedent to the projection of a positive response or resolution. However, after the creative response has been made, its adequacy must in turn be evaluated; in this respect criticism is also subsequent to creation. A major problem in the definition of creativity is to determine the degree to which the adequacy or quality of a novel product needs to be taken into account in assessing the creativity of an actor. The solution of this question has to be left to future research; for present purposes, judgment is conceived as the ability to evaluate the available alternative responses in problematic interpersonal situations. Whether these alternatives are novel or traditional, they must be plural for judgment to operate. Creativity can supply additional alternatives; and in this hypothetical respect, creativity itself becomes a condition conducive to judgment, while clearly distinguishable from judgement. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

If sufficient time is allowed for the completion of each sequence of decision-making, each experience can be assimilated with previous experience, and learning can occur in the sense of greater integration and efficiency in the process of judgment. Conversely, pressure of time which forbids completion of the process is disruptive of particular instances of decision-making and inhibitory of the progressive improvement of judgement. (Generous allotments of time for making up one’s mind may seem easier to obtain than the patience to utilize the time in careful weighing of alternative, where in the past patience has been punished by parental figures.) The greater one’s experience as a decision-maker, the better judgment becomes. Experience varies in both range and intensity. It may include both performance as a judge of outcomes as well as a mediator among potential alternatives, in the role of actor as well as that of critic. Age does not automatically lead to experience in decision-making. Experience in decision-making is not only to run the risk of mistakes with costly consequences, but to make the mistakes and bear the consequences. If the exercise of judgment is practiced in a playful and symbolic manner, competence in the judgment of real-life situations increases. Judgment can be practiced in such forms of play as team debating, rhetoric, mock trials, window and catalogue shopping, and academic discussions. Symbolic practice in judgement can be obtained through vicarious participation in the solution of real or prototype problems by leaders or other representatives. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Explicit training furnishes concentrated practice. Practice is increased by systematically taking the roles of others, exempli gratia, changing sides in debate. Judgment improves if responsibilities widen with the growth of judgement. Withdrawal of—or from—responsibility inhibits the growth of judgment. There appears to be a need here for the enlargement of responsibilities in a graded series at an optimal rate of increase, so the person is continually challenged and stimulated, but not overloaded and made anxious. Others must dare to trust one’s judgment if it is to grow, and must be willing to share the necessary costs of mistakes, keeping them at a reasonably low maximum but not excluding their real possibility. One’s judgment improves as one acquires a vocabulary for articulating the criteria of judgment. Self-conscious scrutiny of the judgment process, utilizing explicit criteria for identifying the points at which mistakes occur, is as important as the verbalization of the standards applied in making particular choices. Being called upon to voice opinions or defend decisions accentuates self-conscious attention to both the process of judgment and the elaboration of criteria. Freedom to criticize and to dissent is most conducive to the competent exercise of judgment when fully institutionalized in the custom and structure of the groups concerned. Counsel by others is a form of criticism easy to assimilate and conducive to judgment if freely rejectable. Explicit and systematic means for checking mistakes and errors, for comparing expected with actual outcomes, are an objective form of criticism which removes it from anxiety-provoking surveillance by others. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

As it becomes possible to note improvement in judgment, to measure its fluctuations under varying conditions and compare it with changes in others, judgment tends to improve further. Not only do success and failure predispose to more of the same, but confirmation by others tends to stabilize important changes. Ratification of process in some dramatic or ritual way by a sympathetic audience is an especially effective means of retaining and stimulating gains. As provocations to diffuse anxiety are lessened, judgment improves. The disruptive effects of anxiety upon the exercise of judgment and its growth can be considered as negative conditions to be removed, whilst self-confidence and trust in the ability to judge can be cultivated positively. Common negative conditions are extreme sanctions against failure or error in judgment, fear of punishment or stripping of responsibility for mistakes, hostile criticism or outright aggression by opponents, excessive partisanship which forbids compromise, and the treatment of values as sacred or absolute. Positive tactics include the stead widening of the values open for discussion, limited pilot commitments for trial decisions, redefinition of ultimate values as instrumental, inducements to rest and refreshment, recesses in deliberation, breakdown into smaller units of discussion, postponement of decision, and the injection of ultimate values as instrumental, inducements to rest and refreshment, recesses in deliberation, breakdown into smaller units of discussion, postponement of decision, and the injection of humor and play. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

Assurance of face-saving for defeated parties is a less honored but indispensable means, along with the rhetoric of compromise, which-like sportsmanship-promises losers another chance. As the right to exercise judgment is recognized and excellence in its practice is honored among members of a group, its possession by members is enhanced. Recognition of the possibility of sound, impartial judgment is a necessary condition of its exercise. In part, this is to say that autonomy is a condition of judgment. More particularly, it means a climate hospitable to “third parties,” to the via media, to the secure and independent status of judge and mediator. The historical identification of legal justice with equality and reciprocity finds warrant in interpersonal relations. In this atmosphere, the victor does not gloat and the vanquished is a “good loser.” Triadic concepts dissolve the irreconcilable antinomies of a more hierarchical order. Exposure to highly competent decision-makers facilitates identification with them, and thereby the acquisition of their skills, and confidence in the exercise of judgment. While exposure to just judges and inspiring critics does not guarantee identification with their example, isolation from challenging models may quite effectively thwart the growth of judgment. Furthermore, exposures to persons as models, even when only vicariously witnessed, helps to furnish persons with solutions of problems in judgment which may be valuable in future situations. To further highlight this illustration, famous legal decisions are unlikely to be literally transferable to new cases, yet they may stimulate efforts to achieve equal wisdom. Good managers of household income, or domestic crises, set standards of judgment for their children to emulate. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

The greater the quantity and reliability of relevant knowledge available to participants in problematic interpersonal situations, the more likely is improvement in their judgement. Intelligent awareness of the consequences of alternatives affects the making of decisions in numerous ways, but knowledge is not a substitute for judgment in situations presenting genuine problems; neither can general rules be devised to apply strictly and mechanically to all cases. The bearing of knowledge upon action has been an ancient philosophical problem, but it is possible that research can illuminate the relationship in new ways. Knowledge tends to accumulate with experience, and is thus one of the features of age which contributes to wisdom; again, however, it is only one necessary element in the process of judgment, and a limited influence in the growth of judgment. Judgment develops optimally among group members who hold some values or standards in common while admitting a moderate margin for interpretation and change. Without some results, situations become wholly arbitrary, fluid, and chaotic. Yet if rules are applied to situations mechanically without deviation or change, there is no room for judgment, which cannot develop without exercise. The optimal function of rules is thus analogous to that of grammar in language—they limit and facilitate, without dictating what statements will be composed by users. This margin of freedom from responsible decisions also accounts for a sense of uncertainty, for which there is an optional degree at various developmental levels. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

Problems of judgment which may terrify a child may challenge an adolescent whilst boring an adult. A group whose ultimate standards are too diverse may be unable to reach decisions; if too homogeneous, actions may become monotonous; there is an optimal ratio of variety and consensus, of innovation and assimilation. Without some rules held in common, it is unlikely that judgment could be measured, since there would be no standpoint from which decisions could be evaluated as correct or mistaken, either by actors or observers. The diagnosis of the illness of present-day Western culture is by no means new; its only claim toward furthering the understanding of the problem is the attempt to apply the concept of alienation more empirically to various observable phenomena, and to establish the connection between the illnesses of alienation and the humanistic concept of human nature and mental health. In fact, it is most remarkable that a critical view of twenty-first century society was already held by a number of thinkers living in the nineteenth century, long before the symptomatology which seems so apparent today had become fully manifest. It is also remarkable that their critical diagnosis and prognosis should have so much in common among themselves and with the critics of the twenty-first century. The prognosis of the decay and barbarism into which the twenty-first century will skin was made by people of the most varied philosophical and political views. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

Military might is one thing nation-states have had that other contenders for power typically lacked. However, if state or inter-governmental forces cannot impose order, the day may dawn when perfectly ordinary transnational corporations decide it is necessary to put their own brigades into the field. Fantastic as this may sound, it is not without historical precedent. Sir Francis Drake waged war not merely on Spanish ships laden with silver, but on towns all along the Pacific coast of South America, Central America, and Mexico. He was financed by private investors. Is it entirely fanciful to imagine 21^st-century corporate versions of the Italian condottieri? In The Apocalypse Brigade the novelist Alfred Coppel has pictured precisely this situation—one in which a mega-oil company organizes its own army to protect oil fields from an anticipated terrorist strike. The company acts on its own because it cannot get its home government to protect its interests. Extreme as this fictional scenario may seem, there is a certain logic to it. The inability of states to stop terrorism, despite all the armies at their command, has already forced some major corporations to take matters into their own hands, hiring trained drivers, armed bodyguards, high-tech security specialists, and the like. And when Iran took some of his employees hostage, billionaire Ross Perot hired ex-Green Berets to penetrate Iran and rescue them. From here it is only a short step to mercenary troops. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Clearly we are heading for chaos if new international laws are not written and new agencies created to enforce them—or if key Global Gladiators, like the transnational corporations, religions, and similar forces, are denied representation in them. Proposals are coming hot and fast for all sorts of new global institutions to deal with ecology, arms control, monetary matters, tourism, telecommunications, as well as regional economic concerns. However, who should control these agencies? Nation-states alone? The less responsive to their needs governments and inter-government organizations become, the more likely it is that transnational firms will end-run governments and demand direct participation in global institutions. It is not too hard to imagine a Global Council of Global Corporations arising to speak for these new-style firms and to provide a collective counterbalance to nation-state power. Alternatively, major corporations may demand representation in their own names, as part of a new class of membership within organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, or GATT. Given the growing diversity and power of Global Gladiators, the United Nations, which until now has been little more than a trade association of nation-states, may eventually be compelled to provide representation for nonstates, too (beyond the token consultative role now granted to certain nongovernmental groups, or NGOs). Instead of one-nation—one-vote, it may well have to create additional categories of voting membership for transnational companies, religions, and other entities, which would vastly broaden its base of support in the World. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

On the other hand, if the nation-states who own and operate the U.N. refuse to widen representation, counterorganizations may arise as global corporations multiply and gather strength. However, whether or not such speculations prove correct in the future, the new Global Gladiators—corporate, criminal, religious, and other—already share increasing de facto power with nation-states. China, with a GDP of $17.73 trillion, is the World’s second largest economy, and has the largest number of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the World—over 150,000. Low labor costs and cutting-edge technology have made China the World’s manufacturing hub. According to UN data, China was home to 28.7 percent of the global manufacturing output in 2019—the largest share by any country. Since 2020, more companies from China have made the annual Fortune Global 500 ranking than any other country, further reinforcing its status as an economic superpower. In fact, 71 percent of China’s Fortune 500 companies are state-owed. State ownership is most common in China’s strategic sectors, such as energy, telecommunications and banking.  Manufacturing is the largest revenue generator for China, followed by other sectors such as construction, real estate, e-commerce, and software development. The shares of limited-liability enterprises and foreign-funded companies are rising (the former, however, include entirely or partially state-funded companies). As far as the ownership structure is concerned, China’s economic system is not state capitalism as an antipode of the Western-style liberal market economy. It is a constantly evolving mixture of state-owned companies, private firms of various types, and the third sector. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

As such evolution gains strength, the share of the private sector is steadily rising, and so is its influence on the economy and society. In an important step, manifesting this change, at the beginning of this decade, private business-people were allowed to join the Communist Party. Although America is a capitalistic country, I do not understand how the government can survive and thrive by only collecting taxes and through consumer spending. It seems that the American government may need to revises its method of capitalism, which will allow the government to invest in businesses and make a profit to reduce the burden on taxpayers. One of China’s biggest state-owned companies is China Minmetals Corporation. Annual revenue 2021: $102.0 billion. China Minmetals Corporation is a SASAC-owned company that mines and processes metal products. Copper, tungsten, lead and zinc, rare Earth, tin, antimony, nickel, aluminum, and other products are processed and distributed by the company. It is also involved in the financial and real estate development sectors. China Minmetals Corporation acquires significant international mineral assets that China does not locally. It also controls 90 percent of the contract value in domestic metallurgical engineering and construction. The first step for the U.S.A. to compete with China is to rebuild its own financial health: bring down the debt-to-GDP ratio and stop depending on the Chinese for money and goods. People who are against the American government ought to take a look at our successful industries: aerospace, avionics, telecommunication, satellites, computer software, operating systems, applications, pharmaceutical, and agriculture. All of those industries got some substantial help in terms of R&D or protectionism from the U.S.A. government. We need to start turning around mature industries here rather than chasing growth that might appear to be there in China. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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Healthy people have the ability to form healthier personalities and maintain relationships of love and friendships in the World. This ability ensures that a healthier person will have access to relief from the existential loneliness in which we all live. Loneliness is not a disease of which one can be cured; it is an unescapable fact of human existence. Although most heroin users spend some portion of their drug-using careers as stabilized junkies and many manage to live for years with high heroin availability and highly-structured daily routines, at least two properties of the stabilized junkie’s situation tend to work against the maintenance of stability. One is the pharmacological property of heroin. It is a drug to which users tend to develop a tolerance rather rapidly, although it has been demonstrated that such tolerance is neither necessary nor universal. Moreover, as we have pointed out in previous reports, numerous factors in the social setting of heroin use mitigate the destabilizing effect of the drug. Work routines, household duties, and even subcultural roles all serve to structure drug consumption. However, in the absence of external structures of constraint, or when such routines are temporarily disrupted, the pharmacological properties of heroin tend to destabilize the lifestyle of the addict further. In sum, contrary to popular belief, heroin use does not inevitably lead to a deterioration of lifestyle. Rather, the physiological dynamics of narcotics use tend to be most destabilizing under conditions where life structure is already weak and incapable of accommodating the physiological demands imposed by increased tolerance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The other property of the stabilized junkie’s life which tends to undermine stability is the hustle the junkie uses to finance his or her habit. According to our respondents, it is not hard times of difficulties in raising money through hustlers which tend to destabilize the stabilized junkie’s life. “You can adjust yourself to a certain amount of drugs a day,” explained Belle, “that you don’t have to have but just that much.” In addition to reducing their drug consumption, stabilized junkies accommodate themselves to such lean periods by substituting other drugs for heroin, working longer and harder at their hustling, or changing the type of hustle they work. On the contrary, it is the unusual success, the “bit sting” or “big hit,” that tends to destabilize the stabilized junkie’s high degree of life structure. The “big sting” or “big hit” can come in many forms. One of our respondents—an armed robber who usually limited his robbing to street mugging, gas stations, and convenience stores—“hit” a bank, which to our respondent’s surprise, produced a “take” of over $60,000. He increased his heroin consumption dramatically and, while doing so, abandoned virtually all the stabilizing routines which marked his life prior to his windfall take. In another instance, a relatively stable junkie dealer was “fronted” several thousand dollars of heroin on consignment. Instead of selling it as he had agreed to do, he absconded with it to another state, shot up most of it himself, and gave the rest away. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

In another case, a relatively low-level burglar/thief came across $10,000 in cash in the course of one of his burglaries. He took the money to New York where he intended to cop a “big piece” that he could bring back to the city in which he lived and sell for a nice profit. However, instead of selling it, he kept it for his own use and his habit rapidly increases from a stable three bags per day to nearly a “bundle”—a5 bags per day. Although the “big hit” or “big sting” appears to be the most common precipitator of the transition from the status of stabilized or occasional heroin user to the status of free-wheeling junkie, many other variants of similar destabilizing patterns are common. The stabilized junkie may not be the one who makes the big sting. It may be his or her spouse, roommate, paramour, addict friend, or regular trick who receives a windfall of drugs or money and invites the stabilized junkie to share in the benefits of good fortune. “Goody,” a part-time street prostitute, moved in with a big-time drug dealer who provided her with all the heroin she wanted in exchange for domestic services, sexual favors, some modest help in cutting and packaging drugs. Although her supply of drugs was virtually limitless, she took her child-raising obligations and responsibilities very seriously and they kept her to a modest level of use. However, after a year of domestic living she began to miss the “street” life and the friends she had there and to resent her total (“bag b*tch”) dependence on her dealer boyfriend. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

She returned to the street and used the money she earned from “hoing,” and “ripping” her tricks to purchase drugs in addition to what she got at home for free. This behavior not only destabilized her drug use, but it also disrupted her home life to such an extent that she pated with her dealer and returned to the street full-time. Interestingly, this return to prostitution, theft, and robbery as her sole means of support forced her to develop a new life structure and abandon the free-wheeling pattern into which she had drifted when she had a dual source of supply. Unless heroin addicts are disciplined by a life structure to which they are so committed and obligated that it effectively prevents them from doing so, they will expand their consumption of heroin to whatever level of use the availability of drugs or funds to buy them makes possible. What marks the career stage of the free-wheeling junkie is the almost total absence of structures of restraint. In the word of “Little Italy,” who described a “free-wheeling” stage of his addict career: “I can remember, I wouldn’t be sick, I wouldn’t need a shot…And some of the guys might come around and get a few bags [and say] ‘Hey man, like I don’t have enough money. Why don’t you come down with me?’…I’m saying [to myself], ‘Oh-oh, here I go!’ and I would shoot drugs I didn’t even need to shoot. So I let it get out of control.” The problem for the first free-wheeling junkie is that the binge cannot last forever and is typically fairly short-lived. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

After a month or two of free-wheeling heroin use—during which time the free-wheeling junkie may have no idea of how much heroin he or she is consuming daily—not only is a modest usage level unsatisfying but the life structure within which one might support it is likely to have been completely abandoned or at least be in severe disrepair. The Street Junkie—Low Availability/Low Life Structure At the point in a free-wheeling junkie’s career when heroin availability drops precipitously and life structure does not provide the support necessary to stabilize heroin use, the free-wheeling junkie may manage to rebuild that life structure and accommodate to a new and lower level of availability. To the extent that his rebuilding and accommodation can be managed, the free-wheeling junkie may be able to return to the life of a stabilized junkie. However, if the rebuilding of life structure cannot be managed, the free-wheeling junkie may become a street junkie. Street junkies most closely approximate the public stereotypes of heroin addicts, if only because their way of life—both where and how they live—make them the most visible variety of heroin addict. Cut off from a stable source of quality heroin, not knowing from where one’s next “fix” or the money to pay for it will come, looking for any opportunity to make a buck, getting “sick” or “jonesing,” being pathetically unkempt and unable to maintain even the most primitive routines of health or hygiene, the street junkie lives a very difficult, hand-to-mouth (or more precisely arm-to-arm) existence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

It terms of our typology, the street junkie’s life may be understood as a continuous but typically unsuccessful effort to stabilize life structure and increase heroin availability. The two problems are intimately related in such a way that, unless the street junkie can solve both the problems at once, neither problem will be solved at all. That is, unless the street junkie can establish a stable life structure, one will be unlikely to increase the availability of heroin. Likewise, unless the street junkie is able to increase the availability of heroin, one will be unlikely to establish a stable life structure. To illustrate how this relationship works in les abstract terms, it is helpful to begin with a description of what low life structure means in the life of the street. If any single word can describe the essence of how street opiate users “get over,” that word is opportunism. Subjects were always alert to the smallest opportunity to earn a few dollars. The notion of opportunism is equally relevant to predatory criminality, nonpredatory criminality, employment, and miscellaneous hustling activities. The cause of the street junkie’ opportunism is one’s failure to establish a stable life structure which regularly produces enough income to support an addiction. Consequently, the street junkie’s life is a series of short-term crimes, jobs, and hustles. Street junkies steal or rob when opportunities arise to do so. For a price or in exchange for heroin, they will “cop” for an out-of-towner, “taste” for a dealer, “tip” for a burglar, rents their “work” to another junkie, sell their “clinic meth” and food stamps, or share their “crib” accommodations with a junkie who needs a place to “get off” or a “hoe” who needs a room to take her “tricks.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

They will do odd jobs, wash cars, paint apartments, stage accidents and vandalize their own cars, claim it was an accident, and get insurance money, steal and sell other peoples’ medications, deliver circulars, move furniture, carry baggage, or snitch to the police. The problem is not only that this opportunistic crime, hustling, or legitimate work pays very little, but that none of it is stable. While one or more of these activities may produce enough income today, none of them may be counted on to do so tomorrow. Moreover, because typical street addict crimes pay so little, because such crimes must be repeated frequently to produce any sizable income, and because they are so unpredictably opportunistic, the chance that the street addict will be arrested sooner or later is very, very high. This was the unfortunate experience of Little Italy who after falling out with his supplier, was forced to discontinue drug sales as a major means of income and turned to armed robbery to support his use. “I know today, I can say that is you don’t have a plan you’re gonna f*ck up man…Now those robberies weren’t no plan. They didn’t fit in nowhere…just by the spur of the moment, you know what I mean? I had to fond something to take that place so that income would stand off properly, ‘cause I didn’t have a plan or didn’t know anything about robbery.” As Little Italy’s experience demonstrates, street junkies lives are further complicated by the fact that “big dealers”—vendors of quantities of good quality heroin—often refuse to sell to them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The reasons they refuse are directly related to the instability of street junkies’ lives. Because street junkies can never be certain when and for how much they will “get over,” they are frequently unable to afford to buy enough drugs to satisfy their “jones.” In the face of such a shortage they will commonly beg drugs from anyone they know who might have them or have access to them, try to “cop short” (buy at less than the going rate), attempt to strike a deal to get drugs loaned or “fronted” (given on consignment) to them on a short-term basis, or, if necessary, engage in opportunistic hustling. Also, because street junkies are the type of addict most vulnerable to arrest they are also the most likely category of addict to be “flipped” by police into the role of an informant. Usually street junkies will be promised immunity from prosecution on the charge for which they were arrested if they “give up” somebody “big.” Given the frequency with which street addicts “come up short,” the relatively small amount of profit to be made in each individual transaction with them, and the higher-than-normal risk of police involvement, few “big dealers” are willing to put up with all of the attendant hassles and hustles that dealing with street junkies typically involves. While there are exceptions—the most common being big dealers who relatives of street junkies or their friends of long standing—street addicts are mainly limited to “street dope,” heroin that has been repeatedly “stepped on” (diluted) as it is passed from the highest-level dealer to the lowest. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

In fact, some studies have shown that as much as 7 percent of street dope may have no heroin in it at all, while other studies show a heroin concentration of from 3 to 10 percent in street dope as compared with an average concentration of nearly 30 percent in bags seized from “big dealers.” The irony in this situation is that, as a consumer of “street dope,” the street addict pays a higher per/unit price for heroin than any other person in the distribution chain. Furthermore, this very low and often unpredictable quality of heroin available to the street junkie serves to destabilize his or her life structure further. In 2020, heroin-involved overdose death rates decreased nearly 7 percent from 2019 to 2020. However, more than 13,000 people died from a drug overdose involving heroin in the United States of America, a rate of more than four deaths for every 100,000 Americans. The number of heroin-involved overdose deaths was nearly seven times higher in 2020 than in 1999. Nearly 20 percent of all opioid deaths involved heroin. Heroin is an opioid drug made from morphine, a natural substance taken from the seed pod of the various opium poppy plants grown in Southeast and Southwest Asia, Mexico, and Colombia. Heroin can be a white or brown powder, or a black sticky substance known as black tar heroin. People inject, sniff, snort, or smoke heroin. Some people mix heroin with crack cocaine, a practice called speedballing. Heroin enter the brain rapidly and binds to opioid receptors on cells located in many areas, especially those involved in feelings of pain and pleasure and in controlling heart rates, sleeping, and breathing. However, it is a very dangerous drug. In the age of fentanyl, all drugs are dangerous, as they could be mixed with it and could be immediately fatal. Even marijuana could be laced with fentanyl. Therefore, it is important to stay away from all drugs and be sober at all times. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Passivity caused by misconception of self-effacement. Under the idea that surrender of self to the Ultimate cause means self-effacement, self-renunciation, and, practically, self-annihilation, the self-actualized has aimed at unconsciousness of personality, personal needs, personal states, feelings, desires, external appearances, circumstances, discomforts, opinions of others et cetera, so as to be “conscious” of the ultimate concern only moving, working, acting, through it. To this end one has given over one’s “self-consciousness” to “death” and has prayed that one might have no consciousness of anything in the World but the presence of the ultimate concern. Then, to carry out this absolute surrender of self to death—this entire self-effacement—one consistently, in practice, “yields to death” every trace of the movement of “self” one become aware of, and sets one’s will steadily to renounce all consciousness of personal wishes, desires, tastes, needs, feelings, et cetera. All this—appearing to be so “self-sacrificing” and “righteous”—results in an entire suppression of personality, and the giving of ground to psychopathic offenders in a passivity of the whole being. This permits the powers of psychopathic offenders to work, and bring about an “unconsciousness” which becomes in time a deadness and dullness of the sensibilities, and an inability to feel—not only for oneself but for others, so as not to know when they suffer or when one oneself cases suffering. How does the Spiritual Presence attack and close the gap between subject and object in the matter of language? It does so insofar as it witnesses, it expresses, it gives voice to what transcends the subject-object structure. Under the influence of the Spirit the human word becomes the Word of the ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

This Spirit-determined human word is not bound to any particular religion or revelation. However, whenever language becomes a bearer of the Spirit, it unites the speaker with that of which one speaks by reaching beyond the subject-object structure to the power of being and meaning in which they both are grounded. Consequently, the ambiguity of poverty and abundance is overcome in that a few words become great words when they convey the Spirit. The ambiguity of particularity and universality is conquered since the Spirit-bearing word, though particular, shares in the universality of the Spirit. Ambiguous indefiniteness yields, for the word, determined by the Spiritual Presence, does not try to grasp an ever escaping object but expresses a union between the inexhaustible subject and the inexhaustible object. Finally, the ambiguity of communication and anti-communication is overcome when the word, impregnated with the Spirit, penetrates to the center of both listener and speaker so that estrangement and, with it, the possibility of deception and distortion vanish. The presence of the Spirit in human language is another Pentecost. The subject-object chasm is bridged, thus striking at the root of all linguistic ambiguities. The result is a theonomous central function. Judgment in interpersonal relations refer not to the perception of differences in quantity, though a large body of gestaltist literature in psychology includes such matters under this caption. Instead, it refers to the evaluation of alternative courses of action. There is a lively current interest in critical thinking, planning, and decision-making, for which good judgment is imperative. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Judgment is here conceived as very similar to the ancient concept of wisdom, as signified in the Greek word sophia, from which philosophy gets its name. In view of the centuries of effort which have been devoted to seeking out the mysteries of its occurrence and transmission, it will inevitably seem foolhardy to some to make further tries at identifying the conditions of its development. Yet, every wise parent must continue to instill wisdom in his offspring, and there is room for hope that contemporary social science can add something toward clarifying the conditions for cultivating this long valued ability. The operational definition of judgment must itself be the product of research; a priori definitions can at best point the way toward preliminary approximations, and distinguish judgment from some other abilities which are sometimes take for it. Thus judgment is not another name for utility, which by an assumption common to economists, all rational choices are said to maximize. Indeed, as some of the more critical economists themselves aver, many decisions among alternative values are not commensurable through resort to some imputed quasi-monetary common denominator or intervening variable; their qualitative ordering in particular situations is not reducible to universal categories and dimensions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The quality of judgment itself—construed as an ability to make correct decisions—mut be estimated in actual situations and reference to identified actors. What is a correct decision for one actor may be a mistake for another actor, or for the same actor at a different time. The level of judgement cannot be inferred simply from the content of decisions made; the decisions have to be gauged in their context. To take a concrete example: while as a rough guide home economists recommend that families spend no more than a fourth of their income on rent, it may be good judgment under extraordinary circumstances to spend two or three times that much. Whether the family is exercising good judgment depends on its total living situation and the other expenditure choices it makes. Thus the measurement of judgment is likely to require reference to a representative range of decision and considerations within the history of the actor. The interpersonal origins of judgment need heavy emphasis. A person can only be reasonable as long as the other is reasonable, and one, as one’s self is reasonable. However, each can help the other to acquire skill in being reasonable. On this account it might be useful to rename judgment in interpersonal relations—reasonableness or reasonability. That measurement of judgment is ultimately feasible and may become quite reliable and exact is suggested by the fact that people are always making appraisals of the good judgment or mistakes of others and of themselves, and are interested, at least abstractly, in the steady improvement of their judgment. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Arguments are popular, for instance, among parents as to how far children have progressed in the development of judgment, how far they can be trusted to exercise responsibility for themselves and others. Although it is generally recognized that children increase or improve in judgment as they grow older, laws are continually debated as to the age at which teenagers may drive cars, choose their own movies and reading matter, govern their own morals, spend money wisely, and depart from parental counsel. The practical bearing and importance of the optimal development of judgment on martial choice and the rearing of children seems obvious. However, the judgment does not necessarily reach a plateau at the age of twenty-one, or a peak at any other age. Its growth is not an inevitable concomitant of aging, since it can be readily arrested, and can even degenerate and decline. While paternalistic husbands restrict the responsibility of their wives, for example, their wives’ judgment deteriorates in consequence, leading to further restrictions of their responsibility. Neither is there any upper limits to judgment; it can develop progressively like the other elements of interpersonal competence. Global leaders must go beyond this basic level of interpersonal skills to effectively lead their team. Because global leadership goes beyond domestic, expatriate, and comparative leadership, as well as global management or simply a global title, and becomes “extreme leadership.” Yes, kind of like extreme sports. And like an extreme athlete who needs that higher level of resilience, endurance, willpower, fitness and courage to push themselves to the absolute limit, so must global leaders take their competencies—whether interpersonal or otherwise—to a higher level. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Just as nations are proving inept in coping with terrorist or religious frenzy, they are also finding it harder to regulate global corporations capable of transferring operations, funds, pollution, and people across borders. The liberalization of finance has encouraged the growth of some six hundred mega-firms, which used to be called “multinationals” and which now account for about one fifth of value added in agriculture and industrial production in the World. The term multinational, however, is obsolete. Mega-firms are essentially non-national. Until the recent past, globe-girdling corporations have typically “belonged” to one nation or another even if they operated all over the World. IBM was an unquestionably American firm. Under the new system for creating wealth, with companies from several countries linked into global “alliances” and “constellations,” it is harder to determine corporate nationality. IBM-Japan is, in many ways, a Japanese firm. Honda builds cars in the United States of America and ships them to Japan. Ford used own Jaguar (1999-2008) and used to own Land Rover (2000-2008) before selling both to Tata Motors in 2008. It is difficult to designate the nationality of global corporations. They fly the flag of their customers, not their country. What is the “nationality” of Visa International? Its headquarters may be in the United States of America, but it is owned by 21,000 financial institutions in 187 countries and territories. Its governing board and regional boards are set up to prevent any one nation from having 51 percent of the votes. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

With cross-national takeovers, merger, and acquisitions on the rise, ownership of a firm could, in principle, switch from one country to another overnight. Corporations are thus becoming more truly nonnational or transnational, drawing their capital and management elites from many different nation, creating jobs and distributing their streams of profit to stockholders in many countries. Changes like these will force us to rethink such emotionally charged concepts as economic nationalism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. For example, it is an article of faith among Latin Americans that Yankee imperialists siphon “superprofits” from their countries. However, if tomorrow “superprofits” from a Mexican operation were to go to investors dispersed throughout Japan, Western Europe, and, say, Brazil (or even someday China), who exactly is the neocolonislist? What if a transnational is nominally based in Macao or, for that matter, Curacao, and its stock is owned by 100,00 continually changing shareholders from a dozen countries, trading in half a dozen different stock exchanges from Bombay and Sydney to Paris and Hong Kong? What if even the institutional investors are themselves transnational? What if the managers come from all over the World? What country, then, is the “imperialist oppressor”? As they lose their strictly national identities, the entire relationships between global firms and national governments is transformed. In the past, “home” governments of such companies championed their interests in the World economy, exerted diplomatic pressure on their behalf, and often provided either the threat (or the reality) of military action to protect their investments and people when necessary. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

In the early 1970s, at the behest of ITT and other American corporations, the CIA actively worked to destabilized the Allende government in Chile. Future governments may be far less ready to respond to cries for help from firms that are no longer national or multinational but truly transnational. If so, what happens when terrorists, guerrillas, or a hostile nation threaten the people and facilities of one of the great transnationals? To whom does it turn for help? Does it meekly walk away from its investments? Perhaps the most popular definition of the economic system of today’s China is state capitalism as opposed to the Western-style liberal market economy with private companies at its core. It can hardly be denied that, at this point, compared to the West, in the Chinese economy there is more state, and compared to China, in the Western economies there is more private entrepreneurship. Still, this conceptual framework is too simplistic—first of all because it underestimates the role of change. While retaining differences from Western economic systems, especially regarding the role of the state, China is accommodating more and more elements of conventional Western capitalism, first of all Anglo-Saxon capitalism as the latter’s classical model. This process of accommodation and the ability to accommodate are the sources of China’s economic strength. Remaining different, it is becoming more and more similar to the West in many important respects. China’s economic system appears to be a mix created by this dialectical game of similarities and differences. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The increase of its economic power is supported both by market incentives, which are becoming stronger and stronger (in some respects significantly stronger than in the West) and by large-scale government intervention. It is crucially important that, when intervening in the economy, the government remains premarket enough, or pragmatic enough, not to undermine market incentives. Basically, the emergence of China as a new economic giant underlines the fact that the economic system of a nation influences its growth and power first of all not through its static condition (the way it looks at this particular moment), but through the dynamics of its evolution and adaptation to the changing internal and external environment. The economies of the West are losing their market-driven dynamism. In contrast, the Chinese economy is growing and increasing its strength exactly on the energy of its premarket drive. Within the three decades of reforms, it terms of its systemic transformation, China achieved three results of a historical importance. China is rebounding strongly following the reopening of its economy. The country’s GDP will grow 5.2 percent this year and 5.1 percent in 2024. The Chinese government has resorted to surprising measures to restore confidence among private entrepreneurs. China’s education ministry has estimated that nearly 11.6 million college graduates are looking for jobs this year. The government set a cautious growth plan for this year with a job creation target of 12 million. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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It is heartbreaking to hear that more than 115,000 Americans have died from drug overdoses in 2022. The human toll has devastated families and communities. Research shows that these two dimensions—availability and life structure—are critical to understanding the dynamics of addict careers. According to our respondents, differences in the ways addicts manage these functions and variations in these two dimensions that are beyond the control of addicts combine to produce fairly distinct patterns, periods, or stages in their careers. The interaction of availability and life structure may be understood to described addict career phases that are familiar to participants o observers of the heroin scene. Throughout their drug-crime careers, addicts typically move through periods in which they may at one time be described as one type and later another. The occasional user—low availability/high life structure: initiates into the heroin-using subculture typically begin as occasional users. For the beginning heroin users, a variety of factors typically serve to limit the availability of heroin. The initiate has usually not spent enough time in the heroin subculture to develop extensive drug connections. In addition, the beginner must be taught how and where to buy heroin, and also must learn how to use it. Moreover, the typical beginning heroin users is unlikely to have sufficient income to maintain any substantial level of heroin consumption, and is most unlikely to have either the connections or the knowledge necessary to increase availability through low-level dealing or through shrewd buying and reselling as experienced addicts sometimes do. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

In addition to these factors which tend to limit the availability of heroin to the beginning user and hold one to an occasional user role, a variety of factors related to life structure also tend to oblige the beginning heroin user to play an occasional suer role, or at least to do so until that life structure can be modified to accommodate a higher level or heroin use. In many cases beginning heroin users are young, dependent, involved in school, and bear family roles and obligations which are not easily changed. Likewise, adult role obligations, such as a full-time employment, housekeeping, and child rearing, can be altered so as to be compatible with occasional patterns of heroin use, but not without considerable difficult if those patterns include high or even moderately high levels of addiction. One of our respondents, “Belle,” explained how she and her husband, “Taps” maintained a very long period of occasional use, dule largely to Taps’ determination to keep his full-time job: “I know of people that does half a bag generally. Do you understand what I’m saying? That they automatically live off of half a bag and got a jones. Like I Said, Taps waked—and he would shoot no more than half a bag of dope at anytime he took off and wouldn’t do no wrong. He would not do no wrong. He worked each and every day. And this is what I told you before—I said I don’t know how he had a jones and worked, but he worked every day.” Moreover, Belle went on to explain that when the live structure Taps provided for her lapsed—and availability increases—she did not remain an occasional user: “Taps had me limited a long, long time. I mean a long time limited to nothing but a half a bag of drugs, until he completely stopped hisself. Then when he stopped, I went ‘Pheww!’—because I didn’t have anybody to guide me. I didn’t have to take half a bad and divine it in half for him. And I went from one bag to more.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

“Ron,” another addict in our sample, played the role of “occasional user” without interruption for nearly eight years. During this period he consumed an average of $10-15 in street heroin per day, while holding down a full-time job and living with his mother, who refused to allow him to use drugs in her home. Toward the end of the eight-year period he became a “tester” for a local drug dealer, a role which increased the availability of heroin. At about the same time, he also lost his job and moved out of his mother’s home. Having lost the support of the stable routine imposed by his job and living arrangements at the same time heroin became more readily available to him in his role of “tester,” his drug use escalated dramatically within a very short time. Interestingly, the low availability/high life structure pattern of occasional use, which typically marks the beginning addict’s entrance into the drug-using World, is characteristic of many addicts’ attempts to leave it. Many formal drug rehabilitation programs impose conditions of low (or no) heroin availability combined with high life structure upon addicts enrolled in their programs. Addicts who attempted to quit on their own often seek to do so by limiting or eliminating altogether their contacts with addict friends, self-medicating with “street” methodone, and devoting themselves intensively to some highly demanding routine activity such as full-time job or caring for young children. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

The stabilized junkie—high availability/high life structure: for the occasional users to become a stabilized junkie, heroin must become increasing available in large and regular quantities, and one’s daily structure must be modified to accommodate regular heroin use. Making heroin regularly available in sufficiently large quantities is not only a matter of gaining access to reliable sources of supply of the drug; it also involves learning new and more sophisticated techniques for using and obtaining it as well as getting enough money to be able to buy it regularly. During the time beginning addicts play occasional user roles, they typically learn the fundamentals of copping, cooking, cutting, and spiking. These are all drug-using skills that take time to learn. It was not uncommon for the addicts in our sample to report that a sharp increase in their level of heroin use followed their learning to shoot themselves. When an occasional user learns to self-inject and no longer requires the more knowledgeable drug-using friends to “get off,” this new level of skill and independence, in effect, increases the availability of heroin. Likewise, copping skills and contacts which might have been sufficient to support occasional use require upgrading to support the needs of the stabilized junkie. The would-be stabilized junkie who must rely solely on low-quality, “street” heroin, who gets “ripped” by paying high prices for “bad dope,” or who is totally dependent on what quality or quantity of heroin a single supplier happens to have available must seek to stabilize both the quantity and quality of regularly available heroin. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Doing so seems to require extending and developing contact in the drug subculture. In the words of one of our respondents: “…you got to start associating with different people. You got to be in touch with different people for the simple reason that not just one person has it all the time. You go to go from one person to the other, find out who’s got the best bag and who hasn’t….You want to go where the best bag is for your money, and especially for the money you’re spending. You got to mingle with so many different people.” Making, developing, and maintaining the contacts that are helpful if not absolutely necessary to stable heroin use seems to invite natural opportunities for the most common modification in the stabilized junkie’s search for one’s own supply of drugs and, second, it can be a source of money for the purchase of drugs or source of drugs itself. Dealing can be rather easily accommodated to the needs of both availability and life structure. All of our respondents reported that at some time in their drug-using careers they had played the role of dealer, if only occasionally. Becoming an occasional dealer is almost an inevitable consequence of becoming a competent, regular user. A stabilized junkie will not only be approached to “cop” for occasional users and addicts whose suppliers are temporarily out of stock, but the stabilized junkie will come to recognize occasions on which especially “good dope” can be purchased and resold at a profit to drug-using friends. Because the work of dealing drugs on a small scale does not require much more time or effort than that which goes into buying drugs regularly for one’s own use, dealing also had another advantage which makes it an attractive activity for the stabilized junkie. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Namely, it can be carried on as a source of drugs or income without undue interference with whatever other “hustle,” if any, constitutes the stabilized junkie’s additional source of support. This is particularly true if, in the course of carrying on the hustle—be it theft, shoplifting, pimping, prostitution, bookmaking, or dealing in stolen property—the stabilized addict is likely to come into regular contact with other drug users. The extent to which dealing can be carried on along with other hustles depends of course, both on the nature of that hustle and on the extent of the dealing. The stabilized junkie will tend to divide one’s hustling efforts between dealing and other hustles with an eye toward which one delivers the highest profit. However, dividing those efforts will also involve other considerations such as the stabilized junkie’s personal preference for one type of work, lifestyle and community reputation considerations, opportunities to practice one type of hustle or another, and the physical demands each type of hustle tends to require. Among female heroin users, a rather common accommodation to the profits and opportunities of dealing and those of other hustles is a live-together arrangement with a male user. In this division of labor each tries to conduct their outside hustle during hours when the other can be at home to handle dealing transactions. An important feature of this arrangement is that, if necessary, it can be structured so as to permit the stabilized female junkie to be at home for housekeeping and child-rearing duties as well as dealing. In the coming days, we will furnish more information on this topic. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Humans are a social species; we literally depend on collaborative interactions with others for survival. Because of our social nature, it is important to develop autonomy. Autonomy is the ability to make choices yourself rather than having them made for you by other people. Most of us desire autonomy—who wants to be a slave to another’s wishes? The ability to exercise autonomy and maintain relatedness within close relationships is one hallmark of normative relational development in adolescence and remains an important aspect of healthy functioning in adult relationships. Nonthreatening exposure to a wide range of cultural and subcultural alternatives for handling interpersonal situations enhances autonomy. Repeated categorical discrimination without regard to performance damages autonomy, whereas equivalence of opportunity facilitates development of autonomy. Customary community respect for individual differences enhances autonomy. Persistent involvement or proffering of the opportunity for involvement in group activity, without forcing it, cultivates autonomy; persistent exclusion, ostracism, or forced participation reduces it. Exclusive domination by others reduces autonomy; progressive increments of initiative and responsibility enhance it. Procedures of assignment of duties and periodic reporting are more conductive to autonomy than procedures of direct supervision. Community enforcement of voluntary agreements and nullification of agreements obtained by duress encourage autonomy. Marriage between persons regarding each other as social unequals reduces autonomy of both mates and children; social equality in marriage facilitates the development of autonomy in mates and children. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Adolescents who fail to develop the capacity to establish autonomy and relatedness appear at-risk for using hostile or autonomy-undermining methos of resolving conflict and for experiencing depression and loneliness in adulthood close relationships. The strength and persistence of autonomy are positively correlated with the number of respect responses received by the self from significant others in the person’s life situations. Possession of a family name respected by others encourages autonomy. Intimate presence of adequate models which enables the growing child to form correct gender identification is indispensable for the development of autonomy. Exposure to other highly autonomous persons who can serve as models for identification facilitates autonomy. Recognition by significant others of progressive accomplishment encourages autonomy. Correspondence between the level of performance expected by others and the capacity of the person to equal or exceed it is optimal for development of autonomy. Autonomy increases as failure is met by assistance and encouragement for the next attempt rather than with derogatory personal condemnation. Wherever accomplishment is competitive, matching of competitors is optimal for the development of autonomy. Generally speaking, emphasis upon surpassing previous performance is more conducive to development of autonomy than is stress upon competitive standards of performance. The growth of autonomy is assisted by the customary use of rituals for honoring the defeated party in situations of conflict. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Practice in the performance of roles conveying respect to others increases the autonomy of the self. Autonomy is cultivated by participation in groups where one receives open and direct but nonaggressive evaluation of one’s self by the others. Autonomy is increased as appraisals of one’s self by others come from a range of perspectives, thus giving one alternative evaluation to choose from. When parents praise their children individually for characteristics that differentiate them noncompetitively from their siblings, so that each can feel uniquely appreciated, autonomy is cultivated. When parents permit their children to compare them objectively with other parents they cultivate the autonomy both of their children and of themselves. Freedom is a marvelous name. That is why you are so anxious to make use of it. You think that, if you call imprisonment true freedom, people will be attracted to the prison. And you are quite right. Freedom has a strong emotive undertone, which enables the speaker to use this notion in the way of a persuasive definition. If you want someone to do something, you just have to make clear to one that one’s freedom lies in doing precisely this thing. Is not that the true nature of autonomy? Does not autonomy also open the possibility to use it in the way of a persuasive definition? Can autonomy not also be a seductive word which can lead to ends which are not always laid open by protagonists? Autonomy is self-government. If autonomy of a person is a good thing per se, a person’s self-determination must be the ultimate goal of education. Education as a social science has to be autonomous by itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Therefore, the notion of autonomy is the banner under which educationalists have emancipated their science from the guardianship of religion and philosophy. Rewards for expression of curiosity and critical comparisons encourage autonomy; punishment for these reduces it. Full and consistent recognition of the limitations of human knowledge, the debatability of issues, the disagreement of authorities, and the legitimacy of dissent encourage autonomy. Given a broad grasp and perspective on World history, geography, and culture, one is less likely to be oppressed by the superiority or inferiority of any provincial culture or subculture. Instruction and practice in scientific method foster autonomy. Since teachers frequently are models for identification, they affect the autonomy of pupils favorably if they can serve as autonomous models of unambiguous gender identity. If the curriculum recognizes the development of diverse skills as an objective of education this will encourage autonomy, whereas approval solely for intelligence and intellectual achievement reduces it. When questions by pupils are encouraged and welcomed, the autonomy of teachers and pupils is enhanced. A programming of educational experience which affords intervals of solitude for the assimilation and integration of new knowledge increases autonomy more than programs which maintain a steady barrage of work and participation. Participation in the pursuit of knowledge is more productive of autonomy than mere passive receipt of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Recognition and facilitation of individual intellectual interest, as they arise encourages autonomy; enforcement of conformity reduces its development. Open reciprocal criticism by fellow-students of each other’s work stimulates autonomy, provided personal aggression is minimized and objectivity of standards maintained. Access by parents to objective and thorough appraisal of their children’s performance, if done in a way to invoke their roles as audience and not their anxiety as performers themselves, assists in the growth of parental autonomy. Youth who are taught to prioritize others’ motivations and needs are likely to acquire less practice in identifying, understanding, and asserting their own autonomous way of thinking. In addition, parents’ use of psychologically controlling tactics has been linked to poorer quality parent-youth relationships, possibly the result of the youths’ resistance to the intrusive or overbearing parenting. Optimistic encouragement and provision for play encourage autonomy; scorn, discouragement, or subordination of play to serve extrinsic interests, reduces its contribution to autonomy. Games which, without threat, convey to a person appraisals of oneself by others contribute to the development of autonomy. Games which provide recognition of improvement on previous performance increase autonomy. Progressive mastery of higher skills in play correlates positively with the growth of autonomy; if new forms of play are made available as old ones are outgrown, autonomy is encouraged. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Participation in play by parents or older children, serving as models for identification rather than rivals, cultivates autonomy. Respect by others for privacy, reverie, and daydreaming facilitates autonomy. The experience of initiative, leadership, and power in organizing play—even if artificially induced-cultivates autonomy. The device of taking turns in initiating action is an apt illustration. The making and keeping of secrets and confidences develop autonomy. Drama offering heroic models of identification develops autonomy. Recreation which increases the range of experience increases perspective and thereby enhances autonomy. One way to grasp the transforming power of theonomy is to see how cultural ambiguities are resolved under the impact of the “Spiritual Presence.” As you know, the spirit (small “s”) is the actualization of power and meaning in unity and is found only in man. However, the ultimate concern can be symbolically described as “Spirit” (capital “S”), and its relation to man is metaphorically expressed in the statement that the divine Spirit dwells and works in the human spirit. The former seizes the latter in an unconditioned and ultimate concern and, in a moment of ecstasy, drive the human spirit out of itself and into a state of self-transcendence This “breaking-in” of the divine Spirit and the “going-out” of the human spirit is called the Spiritual Presence. It alone effects a theonomous culture. Language seeks to unite subject with object by creating a universe of meaning, but the inherent ambiguity of language is that, in transforming reality into meaning, it separates mind and reality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

For instance, there is a poverty of language in the midst of its own richness, in that, while grasping one facet of reality, it neglects innumerable others. Another, its universality is limited by the fact that it is tired to a particular linguistic structure. Furthermore, the definiteness of language is shot through with misleading indefiniteness. And, the communicative power of language can be so manipulated and perverted that it actually conceals instead of reveals. These ambiguities of language are ultimately explained by the ambiguous cleave between subject and object which makes language possible and, at the same time, distorts it. The condition of passivity may come about by wrong interpretations of truth. We are not supposed to participate in conduct disorder, nor psychopathological behavior. We live through the ultimate concern and purity and this energizes man’s individuality, held by him in self-control. There have in some cases been supernatural manifestations of conduct disorder and psychopathic behavior. When the truth is misunderstood, these are primary conditions for the working of psychopaths. Self-actualization brings one into conformity of the ultimate concern and conduct disorder and psychopathic behavior are defeated; for there “here-and-now” declared attitude demands active volition, active cooperation and active acceptance of the Maslow’s top tier of the model of human needs. However, when this hierarchy is interpreted to mean a loss of personality; an absence of volition and self-control, and the passive letting go of the “I myself” into a condition of machine-like, blind, automatic “obedience,” with deadness and heaviness which the self-actualized thinks is “mortification,” it makes the conditions optimal for psychopathic offenders to work, and removes the ascension of the hierarchy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Religions are not the only forces rising up to challenge the power of nation-states as such. The underground Empire today had more power, wealth, and status than many nations. It flies no flag on the terrace of the United Nations, but it has larger armies, more capable intelligence agencies, more influential diplomatic services than many countries do. The ability of a drug cartel to corrupt, terrorize, and paralyze the American government for years, having first shifted its balance of trade, suggests what other outlaw groups, not necessarily narcotic traffickers, may also be able to do before long. A measure of the cartel’s menace bedeviled the government in 2017, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents following the money from cocaine deals in Memphis, Tennessee, identified a mysterious figure in Mexico entrusted by drug lords with their millions: a Chinese American gangster named Xizhi Li. He had devised an innovative system that revolutionized the drug underworld and fortified cartels. Mr. Li was able to turn lard mountains of beautiful twenties and hundreds amassed on U.S.A. streets into legitimate fortunes to be spent on yachts, mansions, weapons, technology and bribes to pay police and politicians. For years, the Mexican cartels that supply the U.S.A. market with cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl smuggled truckloads of bulk cash to Mexico, where they used banks and exchange houses to move the money into the financial system. And they also hired middlemen—often Colombian or Lebanese specialists who charged as much as 18 percent—to launder their billions. Those methods were costly, took weeks or even months to complete and exposed the stockpiled cash to risk—damage, robbery, confiscation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Enter Mr. Li. About seven years ago, federal antidrug agents in Chicago trailed cartel operatives transporting cash to a new destination: Chinatown, an immigrant enclave in the flatlands. The cartel operatives delivered suitcases full of cash to Chinese couriers directed by Mr. Li. These exchanges took place in models and parking lots. The couriers did not have criminal records nor carry guns; they were students, waiters, drivers. Both sides used prearranged signals. After the handoff, the couriers altered their Chinese bosses in Mexico, who quickly sent pesos to the bank accounts or safe houses of Mexican drug lords. Mr. Li then executed a chain of transactions through China, the United States of America and Latin American to launder the dollars. His powerful international connections made his service inexpensive, fast, and efficient; he even guaranteed insurance on cast lost in transit. Mr. Li and his fellow Chinese money launderers married market forces: drug lords wanting to get rid of dollars and a Chinese elite desperate to acquire dollars. The new model blew away the competition. At no time in the history of organized crimes has there been an example where a revenue stream has been taken over like this, and without a shot being fired. This enriched the Mexican cartels beyond their wildest dreams. Mr. Li and others moved tens of millions of dollars among Chinese banks and companies with seeming impunity. The criminal rings exploited a landscape in which more than $4 trillion of capital has left China since 2006.  Chinese launderers had emerged at the number one underwriter of drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

China has the World’s largest and most sophisticated state security apparatus. It is estimated that $154 billion in illicit funds a year pass through China. President Xi Jinping has led a well-publicized and highly successful crusade against corruption. Xizhi Li had more then 17 aliases. At 35, Mr. Li stood 5’7”, and weighed 135 pounds. But he was intimidating. He spoke fluent, Mexican-accented Spanish, and wore a Rolex. He actually spoke many languages and also had bodyguards. Governments find it increasingly difficult to deal with these new actors on the World stage. Governments are too bureaucratic. Their response times need improvement. They are linked into so many foreign relationships that require consultation and agreement with allies, and must carter to so many domestic political interest groups, that it takes them longer to react to initiatives by drug lords or religious fanatics and terrorists. By contrast, many of the Global Gladiators, guerrillas and drug cartels in particular, and non- or even pre-bureaucratic.  A single charismatic leader calls the shots quickly, and with chilling—or killing—effect. In other cases, it is unclear who the leaders really are. Governments stagger away confused from conflicts with them. With whom can one make a deal? If a deal is possible, how is one to know if the people making it can actually deliver? Can they really return hostages, stem the flow of drugs, prevent bomb attacks on embassies, or cut down on piracy? #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

The few international laws that have reduced global anarchy in the past are totally inadequate to deal with the new global realities. In a World of satellites, lasers, computers, briefcase weapons, precision targeting, and a choice of viruses with which to attack people or computers, nations as we know them may well find themselves up against potent adversaries, some no more than a millionth their size. Contrary to the West, China’s public finance is preserved in a very healthy condition. The Communist Party and the government have put the development and expansion of the social security network on the top of their domestic policy agenda. There is a solid financial basis to raise social expenditure further, making more and more people feel that tomorrow will be better than today. Social spending increases work as a socially stabilizing factor—by making people more confident in their tomorrow, they induce them to gradually reduce savings and increase consumption. Currently, the West is trying to pass a budget to keep pandemic level spending going, which would put the government in debt another $4 trillion dollars, as to not cause social tensions, if not disturbances, undermining people’s confidence in their future. China’s social spending has accelerated—not least because its population is aging. The working population peaked in 2015, but China plans to avoid the Western trap of excessive (and unsustainable) social spending, which have resulted in a too heavy social security contributions burden. It is in a good position to create a financially sound and sustainable social security system, sticking to a healthy principle of providing just minimal basic living standards worthy of a human being at the present stage of the country’s economic development. The Chinese economy appears to be structurally stronger than major economies of the West. Structural strength, coupled with good macroeconomic condition, works as one of the major driving forces of changes in the global power balance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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