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Not in Frequently the Mafia Helped Employers “Deal With” Militant Workers
Francis Bacon, born in 1561, was the first man of the technocratic age. In saying this, one may be disputing no less an authority than Immanuel Kant, who said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed to find the law of the movement of civilization. Perhaps. However, it was Bacon who first saw, pure and serene, the connection between science and the improvement of the human condition. The principal aim of his work was to advance “the happiness of mankind,” and he continually criticized his predecessors for failing to understand that the real, legitimate, and only goal of the sciences is the “endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” He brought science down from the Heavens, including mathematics, which he conceived of as a humble handmaiden to invention. In this utilitarian view of knowledge, Bacon was the chief architect of a new edifice of thought in which resignation was cast out and God assigned to a special room. The name of the building was Progress and Power. Ironically, Bacon was not himself a scientist, or at least not much of one. He did no pioneering work in any field of research. He did not uncover any new law of nature or generate a single fresh hypothesis. He was not even well informed about the scientific investigation of his own time. And though he prided himself on being the creator of a revolutionary advance in scientific method, posterity has not allowed him this presumption. Indeed, his most famous experiment makes its claim on our attention because Bacon died as a result of it. He and his good friend Dr. Witherbone were taking a coach ride on a wintry day when, seeing snow on the ground, Bacon wondered if flesh might not be preserved in snow, as salt. The two decided to find out at once. They bought a hen, removed its innards, and stuffed the body with snow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Poor Bacon never learned the result of his experiment, because he fell immediately ill from the cold, most probably with bronchitis, and died three days later. For this, he is sometimes regarded as a martyr to experimental science. However, experimental science was not where his greatness lay. Although others of his time were impressed by the effects of practical inventions on the conditions of life, Bacon was the first to think deeply and systematically on the matter. He devoted much of his work to educating men to see the links between invention and progress. In Novum Organum he wrote, “It is well to observe the force and effect and consequence of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the World; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these changes.” In this passage, we can detect some of Bacon’s virtues and the source of his great influence. Here is so sleepwalker. He knows full well what technology does to culture and places technological development at the center of his reader’s attention. He writes with conviction and verve. He is, after all, among the World’s great essayists; Bacon was a master propagandist, who knew well the history of science but saw science not as a record of speculative opinion but as the record of what those opinions had enabled man to do. And, if not the World, he was ceaselessly energetic in trying to convey this idea to his countrymen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
In the first two books of Novum Organum, which consists of 182 aphorisms, Bacon sets out nothing less than a philosophy of science based on the axiom that “the improvement of men’s minds and the improvement of his lot are one and the same thing.” It is in this work that he denounces the infamous four Idols, which have kept man from gaining power over nature: Idols of the Tribe, which lead us to believe our perceptions are the same as nature’s facts; Idols of the Cave, which lead us to mistaken ideas derived from heredity and environment; Idols of the Market-place, which lead us to be deluded by words; and Idols of the Theater, which lead us to the misleading dogmas of the philosophers. To read Bacon today is to be constantly surprised at his modernity. We are never far from the now familiar notion that science is a source of power and progress. In The Advancement of Learning, he even outlines the foundation of a College for Inventors that sounds something like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bacon would have the government provide inventors with allowances for their experiments and for traveling. He would have scholarly journals and international associations. He would encourage full cooperation among, scientists, an idea that would have startled Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, who used some of their genius to devise ways of concealing their work from one another. Bacon also believed that scientists should be paid well to give public lectures, and that information the public of the utility of invention was as important as invention itself. In short, he conceived of the scientific enterprise as it is conceived today—organized, financially secure, public, and mankind’s best weapon in the struggle to improve his condition and to do so continuously. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
As I have said, Bacon is the first man of technocracy, but it was some time before he was joined by the multitude. He died in 1626, and it took another 150 years for European culture to pass to the mentality of the modern World—that is, to technocracy. In doing so, people came to believe that knowledge is power, that humanity is capable of progressing, that poverty is great evil, and that life of the average person is as meaningful as any other. It is untrue to say that along the way God died. However, any conception of God’s design certainly lost much of its power and meaning, with that loss went the satisfactions of a culture in which moral and intellectual values were integrated. At the same time, we must remember that in the tool-using culture of the older European World, the vast majority of people were peasants, impoverished and powerless. If they believed their afterlife was filled with unending joy, their lives on Earth were nonetheless “nasty, brutish, and short.” As C.P. Snow remarked, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, which was the fruit of Baconian science, was the only hope for the poor. And if their “true Deity became mechanism,” as Thomas Carlyle said, it is probable that by then most people would not have traded their Earthly existence for life in a Godly integrated tool-using culture. If they would, since there was little use in lamenting the past, it did not matter. The Western World had become a technocracy from which there could be no turning back. Addressing both those who were exhilarated by technocracy and those who were repulsed by it, Stephen Vincent Benet gave the only advice that made any sense. In John Brown’s Body he wrote: “If you at last must have a word to say, say neither, in their way, ‘It is a deadly magic and accursed,’ Nor ‘It is blest,’ but only ‘It is here.’” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The transfusion of this religious mythmaking or value-positing interpretation of social and political experience into the American bloodstream was in large measure effected by Max Weber’s language. His success here is, I am tempted to say, miraculous. A good example is his invention, the Protestant Ethic. I read his book of that name in my first social-science course at the University of Chicago when I was being initiated into the modern mysteries. This course was a survey of social-science “classics,” among which was also Marx—not only the Communist Manifesto but also goodly chunks of Capital. Of course, neither Locke nor Smith, the official spokesman for “capitalism,” who might very well even be considered its founders, was on the list, because we were dealing with thinkers whom a contemporary social scientist could take seriously. Marx explained the emergence of capitalism as a historical necessity, in no one’s control, the result of class conflict over material property relations. For him Protestantism was just an ideology reflecting capitalist control of the means of production. I did not see, and I am not sure that my teachers saw, that, if Weber was right, Marx—his economics and his revolution, in short, Marxism and the kinds of moral sympathies it inevitably engenders—was finished. Weber purported to demonstrate that there was no such material necessity, that men’s “Worldviews” or “values” determined their history, spirit compelling matter rather than the other way around. This has the effect of restoring the older view that individual men count for something, that there is human freedom and the need for leadership. Weber said it was Calvin’s charisma and the vision allied to it, routinized by his followers, that was decisive for the development of capitalism. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
However, how different Weber’s charismatic leader is from the rational statesmen looked to by Locke, Montesquieu, Smith and the Federalist. They strive for ends grasped by reason and self-evidently grounded in nature. No values, no creative visions are required for them to see what all reasonable men should see—that hard work is required to have sober, secure and prosperous freedom. Marx is arguably closer to the core of their belief in that respect; although men, according to him, are in the grip of the historical process, that process itself is rational and has as its end the rational freedom of man. Man remains, somehow, the rational animal. Weber, on the other hand, denies the rationality of the “values” posited by the Calvinists; they are “decisions,” not “deliberations,” imposed on a chaotic World by powerful personalities, “Worldviews” or “World-interpretations” with no foundation other than the selves of the Protestants. Those “values” made the World what it was for the Protestants. They are acts that are primarily of the will, and constitute the self and the World at the same time. Such acts must be unreasonable; they are based on nothing. In a chaotic Universe, reason is unreasonable because self-contradiction is inevitable. The prophet becomes the pure model of that stateman—with very radical consequences. This was something new in American social science and should have, but did not, make it clear that a new kind of causality—entirely different from that know to natural science—had entered the scene. In spite of this, the Weberian language and the interpretation of the World it brings with it have caught on like wildfire. I have read about the Japanese Protestant ethic, the Jewish Protectant ethic. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The manifest absurdity of such locutions appears to have struck some, so now “work ethic” is gradually replacing “Protestant ethic,” but this is merely an adjustment and barely disguises the point of view that still remains underneath it. Those interested in the free market do not seem to recognize, when they use this language, that they are admitting that this morality is not itself rational—or at least the choice of it is not rational, as they understand reason. Delay of gratification may make sense for the system as a whole, but it is unarguably good for the individual? Is increase of wealth self-evidently superior to poverty for a Christian? If the work ethic is just one choice among many equally valid choices, then the free-market system itself is also just one choice among many. So proponents of the free market should not be surprised when they see that what was once generally agreed upon no longer compels belief. One had to go back to Locke and Adam Smith in a serious way not just for a set of quotes, to find arguments for the rational moral basis of liberal society. This they no longer do; and because they have lost the habit of reading serious philosophic books or of considering them really essential, they probably could not do so. When the liberal, or what came to be called the utilitarian, teaching became dominant, as is the case with most victorious causes, good arguments became less necessary; and the original good arguments, which were difficult, were replaced by plausible simplifications—or by nothing. The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance. When the liberal economic thought or way of life was manifestly threatened, its proponents, in order to defend it, took whatever came to hand. A religion must, it seems, be wakened in order to establish it. And religion, contrary to containing capitalism’s propensities, as Tocqueville though it should do, is now intended to encourage them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
It goes without saying that Weber never for a moment considered whether Calvin might actually have had a revelation from God—which would certainly change the looks of things. Weber’s atheism was dogmatic, but he was not interested in proving that Calvin was a charlatan or a madman. He rather preferred to believe in the authenticity of Calvin and other such founding figures as representing peak psychological types who can live and act in the World, who know how to take responsibility, who have an inner sureness or commitment. The religious experience is the thing, not God. The old quarrel between reason and revelation is a matter of indifference, because both sides were wrong, had faulty self-understandings. However, revelation teaches us what man is and needs. Men like Calvin are the value producers and hence the models for action in history. We cannot believe in the ground (God) of experience, but that experience is critical. We are not interested in finding out how they understood themselves but rather in searching in the self for the mysterious substitute for their ground. We cannot have, and do not want to have, their peculiar illusions; but we do not want values and commitments. The result of this atheistic religiosity is the mysterious musings and language of Weber and many others (think of Sartre) about belief and action, which culminate in something very different from what either religious leaders or rational statesmen ever said or did. It fuses the two kinds of men, but with greater weight given to the former, to the necessity of faith and all that goes with it. The intellectual apparatus accompanying this analysis tends to obscure the alternatives to it, particularly the rational alternatives. As a result there is a continuous skewing of historical perspective towards religious explanations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Secularization is the wonderful mechanism by which religion becomes nonreligion. Marxism is secularized Christianity; so is democracy; so is utopianism; so are human rights. Everything connected with valuing must come from religion. One need not investigate anything else, because Christianity is the necessary and sufficient condition of our history. This makes it impossible to take Hobbes or Locke seriously as causes of that history, because we know that superficial reason cannot found values and that these thinkers were unconsciously transmitting the values of the Protestant ethic. Reason transmits, routinizes, normalizes; it does not create. Philosophy’s claims are ignored; religious claims are revered. Dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts. Out of this “Worldview” issues the gaudy religious word “charisma” which has had such fateful political consequences while becoming one of the most tiresome buzzwords in America. In Chicago there is a Charisma Cleaners, and every street gang leader is called “charismatic.” The origins, maintenance, and destruction of the live-and-let-live system of trench warfare are all consistent with the theory of the evolution of cooperation. In addition, there are two very interesting developments within the live-and-let-live system which are new to the theory. These additional developments are the emergence of ethics and ritual. The ethics that developed are illustrated in this incident, related by a British officer recalling his experience while facing a Saxon unit of the German Army. “I was having tea with A Company when we heard a lot of shouting and went out to investigate. We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans, when all at once a brave German got on to his parapet and shouted out ‘We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery.’” #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
This Saxon apology goes well beyond a merely instrumental effort to prevent retaliation. It reflects moral regret for having violated a situation of trust, and it shows concern that someone might have been hurt. The cooperative exchanges of mutual restraint actually changed the nature of the interaction. They tended to make the two sides care about each other’s welfare. This change can be interpreted in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma by saying that they very experience of sustained mutual cooperation altered the payoffs of the players, making mutual cooperation even more valued than it was before. The converse was also true When the pattern of mutual cooperation deteriorated due to mandatory raiding, a powerful ethic of revenge was evoked. This ethic was not just a question of calmly following a strategy based on reciprocity. It was also a question of doing what seemed moral and proper to fulfill one’s obligation to a fallen comrade. And revenge evoked revenge. Thus both cooperation and defection were self-reinforcing. The self-reinforcement of these mutual behavioral patterns was not only in terms of the interacting strategies of the players, but also in terms of their perceptions of the meaning of the outcomes. In abstract terms, the point is that not only did preferences affect behaviour and outcomes, but behaviour and outcomes also affected preferences. The other addition to the theory suggested by the trench warfare case is the development of ritual. The rituals took the form of perfunctory use of small arms, and deliberately harmless use of artillery. For example, the Germans in one place conducted “their offensive operations with a tactful blend of constant firing and bad shooting, which while it satisfies the Prussians causes no serious inconvenience to Thomas Atkins.” Even more striking was the predictable use of artillery which occurred in many sectors. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
“So regular were they [the Germans] in their choice of targets, ties of shooting, and number of rounds fired, that, after being in the line one or two days, Colonel Jones had discovered their system, and knew to a minute where the next shell would fall. His calculations were very accurate, and he was able to take what seemed to uninitiated Staff Officers big risks, knowing that the shelling would stop before he reached the place being shelled.” The other side did the same thing, as noted by a German soldier commenting on “the evening gun” fired by the British. “At seven it came—so regularly that you could set your watch by it….It always had the same objective, its range was accurate, it never varied laterally or went beyond or fell short of the mark. There were even some inquisitive fellows who crawled out…a little before seven, in order to see it burst.” These rituals of perfunctory and routine firing sent a double message. To the high command they conveyed aggression, but to the enemy they conveyed peace. The men pretended to be implementing an aggressive policy, but were not Ashworth himself explains that these stylized acts were more than a way of avoiding retaliation. “In trench war, a structure of ritualized aggression was a ceremony where antagonists participated in regular, reciprocal discharge of missiles, that is, bombs, bullets and so forth, which symbolized and strengthened, at one and the same time, both sentiments of fellow-feelings, and beliefs that the enemy was a fellow sufferer.” Thus these rituals helped strengthen the moral sanctions which reinforced the evolutionary basis of the live-and-let-live system. The live-and-let-live system that emerged in the bitter trench warfare of World War I demonstrates that friendship is hardly necessary for cooperation based upon reciprocity to get started. Under suitable circumstances, cooperation can develop even between antagonists. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
One thing the soldiers in the trenches had going for them was a fairly clear understanding of the role of reciprocity in the maintenance of the cooperation. However, there are biological examples that demonstrate that the participants are not really necessary for cooperation to emerge and prove stable. The use of force to extract wealth did not end with the age of the steam engine. In the 21th century, violence has been used on a truly grand scale. In placed like the United States of America, millions of Americans and others provide dirt-cheap labour for logging, and mining. These are used to suppress the political opposition to the 2000s revolution of hyperinflation; and they are also a means of solving purely economic tasks. Many people complain of being basically forced into slave labour in most industries in America because the wages are not keeping up with the cost of living and have not been for decades. However, not until the COVID-19 crisis sweep the World and the war in the Ukraine did these cries for help and more become widespread, but they are still not yet being acknowledged because there is no emergency relief, which leaves people feeling like the end of the World is near. All over the World, the COVID-19 Pandemic and now the Monkey Pocks are turning munitions, chemicals—and corpses. And America’s brutal treatment of every class of citizen from homeless and working class, upper middle class and wealth has been a form of labour control based on restrictions of homeless camps, panhandling, taxes, high fuel costs, high houses cost, rising food costs, low wages, truncheons, and tear gas. The history of the labour movement in the United States of America, as in other nations, is steeped in repressive violence and occasional terrorism. From the Molly Maguires, who tried to organize the Pennsylvania coal fields in the 1870s, to the Knights of Labour: from the Haymarket massacre in 1886 at the start of the campaign for an eight-hour workday, to the great textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929 and the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in Chicago in 1937, employers and police attempted to prevent the organization of unions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
As recently as the late 1930s in the United States of, companies hired strong-arm men to break strikes or to intimidate union organizers and their followers. Harry Bennett and his infamous “goon squads” were routinely called out to bust heads when Ford Motor Company employees asked for raises or threatened to organize. Not infrequently the Mafia helped employers “deal with” militant workers. In South Korea today many companies have set up “Save the Company” squads to break strikes and prevent unionization. At the Motorola plant in Seoul, violence reached the point at which two workers doused themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire to protect the company’s refusal to recognize a union. Japanese employers in the early postwar period called on the Mafia-life Yakuza to intimidate union activists. And in Japan, even today, despite its advanced stage of economic development, the Yakuza factor has not completely vanished. Yakuza-linked sokaiya—pointy-shoed hooligans and thugs—often to embarrass or to protect the management. In 1987 the first meeting of shareholders following the privatization of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company (NTT) was marked by disruption when a garishly dressed sokaiya accused a director of punching his secretary. Dozens of others leaped to their feet to drag out the discussion. One demanded to know why he had to queue up for the toilets in the building. When an officer apologized, the man asked why an NTT employee had committed an indecent act. To groans from the audience, he hit his stride with questions about missing promissory notes worth a few thousand dollars and about telephone bugging. The sokaiya did not stop this harassment, intended to embarrass rather than reform the company, until suddenly, as though from nowhere, a large number of husky young men surrounded the room—at which point the sokaiya quietly made their exit. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Not all business crime ends so peacefully, as Japan discovered when Kazuo Kengaku, a well-known investment fund manager with links to the Yakuza, was found encased in concrete in Osaka. The Yakuza are also involved deeply in real estate speculation and supply strong -arm men to frighten residents or small shop-owners reluctant to move out of the way of high-rise developments. So well known are these tactics that they provided the substance for Juzo Itami’s 1989 movie, A taxing Woman’s Return. Valuable real estate also lay behind a recent case in which the collapse of a financial deal led to fraud litigation. An American lawyer in Tokyo, Charles Stevens of Coudert Brothers, representing a U.S. firm, received threatening calls and wound hp keeping a baseball bat at his desk. Violence in the business demimonde takes on bizarre forms on occasion—especially on the fringes of the entertainment business. In South Korea local film distributors have tried to frighten customers away from theaters showing U.S. films by releasing snakes in the theaters. In France, when Saudi Arabian investors, together with the French government, built Mirapolis, a $100 million amusement park, carnival workers, fearing competition, poured sand in the gears of thrill rides. (The park turned out to be a disaster for other reasons.) Similarly, Japanese sarakin, like loan sharks the World over, sometime rely on physical “persuasion” to coerce borrowers in repaying usurious debts—the money from these activities flowing smoothly into major bans and other financial institutions. In the United States of America, as in many other countries, force is sometimes used to shut the mouth of corporate “whistle blowers”—employees who call attention to questionable practices of their bosses. This was the role of Silkwood chose for herself. Silkwood was killed in a car crash after protesting her employer’s handling of nuclear materials, and there are those who still, years after the event, question whether the crash was accidental. They will never stop believing that her company had killed her. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Of course, all these cases are dramatic precisely because they are exceptions in the advanced economies. The daily experience of an American executive with a sheaf of printout in hand, the Japanese salaryman on his telephone, or the salesperson spreading a sample on a counter is so remote from any hint of violence that even to mention it is to draw skeptical looks. Yet just because most transactions in business involve no direct violence does not mean that violence had vanished. The reality is that violence has been contained, transmuted into another form—and hidden. Although institutions in Europe, Japan, and other economies are also being shaken by changes in their deep fundamentals, it is the United States of America—precisely because it has advanced farther than other beyond the industrial age—that the need to create a new institutional infrastructure is most pressing. And nowhere, therefore, is there more loose talk of “transformation”—and so little understanding of what it implies. Take the case of education. All recent U.S.A. presidents have wanted to be known as the “education president,” Obama was the only exception—he wanted to known as a rebel and entertainer. The absolute key to any real improvement in education in the United States of America is recognition of the changes required by an economy primarily based on knowledge production and distribution. Education is more than occupational preparation, but it surely cheats students if it seeks to ready them for jobs that will not be there. Yet today’s mass-production schools—out of sync with the real economy—still mainly emphasized rote, repetitive, factory-like learning. The supposedly radical Trump plan, not only emphasized curiosity, thought, creativity, individuality and self-starting entrepreneurialism—traits needed in knowledge-based economies—but it also calls for yet more routine, standardized testing of students, teachers, and schools—tools to make obsolete schools run more efficiently. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
An equally striking example of what might be called fake “transformation” can be found in Washington’s bureaucratic response to the 9/11 attack—the creation of a Department of Homeland Security. This big-budget, cabinet-level department crunched together twenty-two preexisting pyramidal bureaucracies into a single mega-pyramid. Washington, in short, did what it knows how to do best: Construct industrial-style bureaucracies. The resultant institution is massive, vertical and hierarchical, with countless competing units, and is supposed to plug into and support tends of thousands of smaller municipal and state bureaucracies. By contrast, terrorist organizations are designed to run rings around bureaucracies. Comprising tiny, loosely networked cells whose members know the identity of only one or two other people, most can make decision quickly, are trained to hit, run, and vanish—or to blow themselves up. Compared with the Department of Homeland Security, Al Qaeda is flat as a pancake. And its members do not belong to civil-service unions. Sham transformation is not uniquely American. It is widespread in Europe, where companies and public-sector institutions at the national level are being forced to submit to growing, rigidifying constraints imposed by the European Union, itself a prime example of industrial-age bureaucratic organization. In 1965 Nitsch formed the Wiener Akitonismus group in conjunction with Otto Muhl, Gunter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Much of their work focused on the motifs of self-mutilation and self-sacrifice that were implicit, though not foregrounded, both in Klein’s career and in the OM Theatre performances. Brus, during his performing period (1964-1970), would appear in the performance space dressed in a woman’s black stockings, brassiere, and garter belt, slash himself with scissors till he ran with blood, and perform various acts ordinarily taboo in public settings, such as defecating, eating his own feces, vomiting, and so on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Schwarzkogler’s pieces presented young males as mutilated sacrificial victims, often wounded in the genitals, lying fetally contracted and partially mummy-wrapped as if comatose, in the midst of paraphernalia of violent death such as bullet cartridges and electrical wires. Not only the individual elements of these works, but their patterns of combination—specifically the combination of female imitation self-injury, and the seeking of dishonour though the performance of taboos acts—find striking homologies in shamanic activities. The same motifs reappeared, not necessarily with direct influence from the Viennese, in the works of several America performances artists who have stretched audiences’ sympathies beyond the breaking point Paul McCarthy, a major exponent of the art of the taboo gesture, first heard the calling not from the Viennese but from Klein. As a student at the University of Utah in 1968, he leapt from a second story window in emulation of Klein’s Leap into the Void. By about 1974 his work had found its own distinctive form, developing into a modernized shamanic style so difficult for audiences to bear that the pieces were usually published only as video tapes. These performances, like Schneemann’s, were often developed from dream material, indicating their intimate relation both with shamanic magic and with depth psychology. Like Brus, McCarthy has sometime appeared dressed as aw woman, and has worked, like Schwarzkogler, with the themes of self-mutilation and castration; some pieces have acted out of the basic female imitation of feigning menstruation and parturition (magical pantomimes that are common in primitive initiation rites). In others, McCarthy has cut his hand and mixed the blood with food and water in bowls, clearly echoing various sacramental rites from the Dionysian to the Christian. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
In still others that, like Nitsch’s, have sometimes been shut down by the police, he has acted out the seeking of dishonour as an exploration of the Dionysian-Freudian depths of psychobiological life. In Sailor’s Meat, a videotape from 1975, for example, he appeared in a room in a wino hotel wearing black lace panties smeared with blood and a blonde female wig and lay on the bed having pleasures of the flesh with piled of raw meat and ground hamburger with his male organ painted red and a hot dog shoved up his rear end As Old Man in My Doctor, 1978, he slit a rubber mask over his head to form a female organ—slanted opening on it and from the opening gave birth to a ketchup-covered doll. The piece was a conscious remaking of the myth of the birth of Athena from the cleft brainpan of Zeus, a myth that reverts to the age when male priests and their divinities sought to incorporate the female principle and its powers. In Baby Boy, 1982, McCarthy gave birth to a doll from between his ketchup-covered male thighs as he lay on his back with his feet in the air like a woman in missionary-style pleasures of the flesh. In these and other works self-mutilation, female imitation, and the performance of taboo acts are combined in a structure of roughly parallel to that of Brus’ work, though with a great range of expressiveness. Similar materials recur in the work of Kim Jones. In a performance in Chicago in 1981, Jones appeared naked except for a mask made of woman’s pantyhose, covered himself with mud (as both African and Australian shamans do when performing), and lay naked on the fire escape in the cold to accumulate energy (a shamanic practice knowns Worldwide but most famous from Tibet). Returning to the performance space, he produced a mayonnaise jar filled with his own feces, and smeared himself with it, embraced members of the audience while covered in it, and finally burned sticks and green plants till the smoke drove the remaining audience from the gallery. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
In another piece, Jones cut himself with a razor blade twenty-seven times in a pattern suggesting the body’s circulatory system, then pressed himself against the gallery wall for a self-portrait. Understandably, to audiences habituated to the traditional boundaries of art, to audiences for whom easel painting was still the quintessential art activity, these performances were offensive and even insulting. Of course, the point of such works when they first appeared was in part their seeming to be radically even horrifying, out of context. However, for twenty years they have been part of the art scene, if somewhat peripherally, legitimized by art World context and critical designation again and again. In order to understand the wellsprings of such works, in order to approach them with a degree of sympathy and clarity, it is necessary to frame them somewhat in cultural history, where in fact they have a clear context. Many of the artists discussed here feel that shamanic material and primitive initiation rites are the most relevant cultural parallels to their work. However, most of them feel that the tone of their work arose first, often under Freudian and Jungian influence, and was later confirmed and further shaped by some study of shamanic literature. The question of origins, then—whether from shamanic literature, or from the Jungian collective unconscious, or from the Freudian timeless repository of infantile memory, or from all these sources—though it is worthwhile to state, cannot be answered. In any case it is important in terms of any theory of the function of art that these artists have introduced into the art realm material found elsewhere only in the psychiatric records of disturbed children and in the shamanic thread of the history of religion. Western society, biased toward the objective mental mode of experience, tends to be blind not only to the power of images but also to the fact that we are nearly defenseless against their effect. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Since we are educated and thoughtful, as we like to think, we believe we can choose among the things that will influence us. We accept fact, we reject lies. We go to movies, we watch television, we see photographs, and as the images pour into us, we believe we can choose among those we wish to absorb and those we do not. We assume that our rational processes protect us from implantation, or brainwashing. What we fail to realize is the difference between fact and image. Our objective processes can help us resist only one kind of implantation. There is no rejection of images. Raise your eyes from the page for a moment. Look about your room. Can you reject what you are seeing? In Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, the main character is a visitor from another planet who arrives on Earth and is slowly transformed by what he sees. He becomes transfixed by television. At one point, in a fit of madness, he screams at the TV screen: “Stop it, get out of my mind, go back where you came from.” However, the images do not go bac. They remain. He goes crazy. You are watching Walter Cronkite. He is reporting the news. It is impossible for you to judge the truth of most of what he tells you. He reports events from a thousand miles away. You take his information on faith, or you decide that he is wrong. Then he says the bank you work in was robbed today. “Not true,” you shout, “wrong bank.” You have rejected the news. You could reject it because it came as a fact that you could check. You could halt its entry into you. However, one of the most bizarre things is allowing the news to do its own “fact checking.” They will tell you what they believe to be true, which may be misinterpreted or down right a lie. Meanwhile, however, you have ingested Cronkite. His smile, his hand movements, his tone of voice, the way he holds his head. The images enter your cells. Style is also content. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
If you are watching The Flash, or the president explaining a policy, or Brad Pitt talking to his beautiful women friends, or Fallon Carrington on Dynasty, you are receiving several levels of information at the same time. There is the verbal information and the ideas connected to this. Then there are the images, the way people behave, their movements, mannerisms, forcefulness or peacefulness, their style of emoting, their tone of voice, their way of relating to each other, the kind of people they are, their seriousness, grimness, lightness, joyfulness, heaviness and so on. We absorb these along with the objective news. They are all content. If you see Trump or Cronkite or The Flash, or slaps on the back or kisses or violence—the images of these are not in the realm of correct or incorrect. They just are. There is nothing to disagree with. There is no way to resist them. They flow inward, passing through all discernment processes. Even if you could keep your mind alive while watching—no mean feat—the images would still enter into your unconscious storage area. You have got them. They are yours. You may not believe Jimmy Carter when he speaks. However, you have got Jimmy Carter inside of you. You may believe that Brad Pitt is an actor, and your kinds may believe this too. However, they slowly become like Brad Pitt. They move and walk as he does. You may believe The Flash is fiction, but his image lives within you. If I ask you to, you can bring it to mind. It is part of your image pool. You may draw on it forever. You may watch the television and “know” those are actors performing, but the image of one person stabbing another is in you. You have got it. It is yours. Thinking will not halt its entry into you or into thirty million others. You may watch the actor playing doctor in the commercial, speaking seriously, professionally, authoritatively. You know this is an actor, but you ingest him nonetheless. His authoritativeness becomes yours. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
We all become more like Cronkite, like Carter, like The Flash. We all become more fast or more Bradlike, or display a TV-announcer authority. Once they are in your mind and stored, all images are equally valid. They are real whether they are toothpaste, Walter Cronkite, Kojak, President Carter, Mary Hartman, The Flash, Brad Pitt, Justin Bieber, Pete Rose, a BMW 3 Series, a cougar, Elvis Priestly, Mary Hartman, Anton LaVey, Rhoda, or your mother and father. Once inside your head, they all becomes images that you continue to carry in memory. They become equally real and equally not-real. Our thinking process cannot save us. To the degree that we are thinking as we watch television, a minute degree at most, the images pass right through anyway. They enter our brains. They remain permanently. We cannot tell, for sure, which images are ours and which came from distant planets. Imagination and reality have merged. We have lost control of our images We have lost control of our minds. The man—and with him his woman, who was not created till after the prohibition had been pronounced, but who appears to have become cognizant of it in some peculiar manner whilst still a rib within the body of the man—may give or withhold his obedience, for he is at liberty; they are both at liberty to acceded to their creator or to refuse themselves to Him. Yet their transgression of the prohibition is not reported to us as a decision between good and evil, but as something other, of whose otherness we must take account. The terms of the dialogue with the serpent are already strange enough. It speaks as though it knew very imprecisely what it obviously knows very imprecisely what it obviously knows very precisely. “Indeed, God has said: You shall not eat of every tree of the garden…” it says and breaks off. Now the woman talks, but she too intensifies God’s prohibition and adds to it words which he did not use: “…touch not, else you must die.” “And the chief judge stood before them, and smote them again, and said unto them: If ye have the power of God deliver yourselves from these bands, and then we will believe that the Lord will destroy this people according to your words,” reports Alma 14.24. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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By the Way of King Diamond and Diamond Baby
Black metal, as a 1990s phenomenon, is a creature with an identity largely distinct from its parent heavy metal music. Growing like a poisonous fungus away from the light of mainstream media and interest, it developed its own bizarre sounds, imagery and philosophies. Fostered upon a diet of xeroxed fanzines with names like Thanatograpy (after Thanatos, Greek god of death), Hammer of Damnation and Baphomet, its teenage male exponents were keen to make their mark with a genre too willfully obnoxious for outsiders. Visually, bands tried to outdo each other with outrageously macabre or offensive imagery: fire-breathing; tattered black clothing or robes; blood-soaked or naked flesh; medieval weaponry; bullet belts and spiked leather; insane calligraphy—spattered with profane images—which rendered band names illegible or scarcely identifiable. The most striking black-metal “fashion statement,” however, was the sepulchral black-and-white make-up worn by many bands which became known as “corpse paint”—a mutated offspring of the theatrical greasepaint worn by KISS in the 1970s, by way of King Diamond. At the movements genesis, few band members had racked up enough years of experience to excel at their instruments in the traditional fashion—instead, they concentrated on producing unearthly, crazed, bizarre sounds with guitars, drums, the human voice and keyboards. Specialist independent record labels, founded by fans or the bands themselves, sprang up as a truly international underground: Osmose Productions in France; Blackground Records 2.0 and Wild Rags in America; Candlelight Records in Spain. The list continues to proliferate to the present day, but the most influential of all was a small Scandinavian label called Deathlike Silence—of which, much more later. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
One of the more arresting rock artists of the early 1990s bridged the gap between the musical extremes of black metal and rock “n” roll’s demonic roots in the blues. Far subtler than most black metal bands, Glenn Danzig still operated at the infernal end of the spectrum. An anomaly who stubbornly refused to bow to the expectations of either purists or populists, Danzig began his career at the height of the punk revolution in 1977 as vocalist for New Jersey band the Misfits. No ordinary punk band, Danzig’s classic rock “n” roll delivery gave a quasi-1950s feel to their abrasive sound, while they spurned the usual punk look in devour of an all-year-round Halloween image. Sporting monstrous black quiffs they dubbed “devil locks,” the Misfits often took the stage in skeletal garb—indeed, Danzig’s skull make-up was prescient of the “corpse paint” popular among the 1990s black metal bands. The Misfits were one of the first punk bands whose songs possessed a strong gothic undercurrent. Many reflected their love of fascinating schlock movies, such as “Teenagers from Mars” and “Return of the Fly,” but others were genuinely disturbing explorations of hat and violence. Their second recording, Bullet, featured a song entitled “Hollywood Babylon,” inspired by magus and film-maker Kenneth Anger, while another track included an authentic Latin chant for effecting a werewolf transformation. In what was to become a familiar pattern, Danzig tired of the more tongue-in-cheek aspects of the Misfits, forming Samhain (pronounced “Sow-En”—the precursor to Halloween, a Celtic festival dedicated to fire and death) who released their first album, Initium, in 1984. This was a stark journey into primal evil, threatening rhythms and bleak guitars combining with Danzig’s lupine vocals to create a musical beast that howled at the World. It was all too bleak for most audiences and, in 1987, the vocalist dissolved the band in order to enter his third incarnation—called simply Danzig. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Danzig was in many ways the singer’s most innovative project, as well as the most overtly Satanic. Voodoo blues as deep and black as Mississippi mud met predatory heavy metal, with vocal style redolent of early rock “n” roll’s late-fifties/early-sixties crooners. Typically, Glenn Danzig’s insistence on treating his Satanic subject matter without a trace of irony did not endear him to the press. Short, powerfully built, with raven black hair and prominent side-burns, the music media dubbed him as “Evil Elvis” or, more irreverently, “Fonzig.” Some audiences were also perplexed: younger black metal fans wanted a less subtle Satanism, while rock fans who appreciated Danzig’s musical approach found his lyrical preoccupation off-putting. Nevertheless, the ban attracted a dedicated fan base, appreciative of a familiarity with demonic subject matter that most shock-horror rockers could only envy. Nietzschean howls of defiance against the Creator, such as “Godless,” complemented more traditional takes on hellish suffering like “Tired of Being Alive.” At his quietest, Danzig was at his most sinister—like the poet William Blake, Danzig identified love as “a Devil’s thing.” In 1994, when MTV picked up on the video for the anthemic “Mother, the band received mainstream attention; in the same year, an uncompromising Glenn Danzig released a solo project entitled Black Aria: an album of quasi-classical music retelling the story of Satan’s fall from grace. In 1996, after four albums of powerfully-infernal rock music, Danzig took his eponymus band in a new direction. BlackAcidDevil was predominantly an industrial record, many fans mourning the passing of the classic Danzig sound and dismissing at as “poor man’s Nine Inch Nails.” In truth, when the industrial grind is layered with the dark velvet of Danzig’s seductive tones—as on “Come to Silver,” an exploration of temptation—then the material becomes really interesting. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The indifferent sales and reviews that greeted BlackAcidDevil tested Danzig’s already-strained relationship with the music business. He let the band slip back into the cult status he was perhaps happiest with, and began spending the money he had made from his musical career on other projects—most notably a comic-book company named Verotik. As the company’s name suggests, these comics are crammed with violence and erotica, combined with the fascination for all things infernal that has become Glenn Danzig’s trademark. Scripting many of the comic-strips himself, Danzig introduced overly devilish characters, like the vamp Satanika, to stake his claim as one of the main modern contributors to Satanic popular culture. On the continent of Europe, particularly in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, things were being taken to a less subtle extreme. Deathlike Silence was an independent record label owned by a young man who re-named himself Euronymous—according to some folklore traditions, a cannibalistic demon with skin the bluish-black colour of a meatfly’s carapace—who also ran a dank, dingy specialist record store named Helvete (meaning “Hell”) and founded a band called Mayhem. Mayhem formed in 1984, just as the original black metal scene was peaking, debuting with a demo called Pure Fucking Armageddon and an album called Deathcrush. Interest in Satanic imagery, with its attendant gothic spikes-and-leather garb, was faltering among audiences at this time, but Mayhem clung onto its uncompromising style. They sounded like a rawer, more grinding version of Venom, screaming and thundering between militaristic marches and growling rage. As the tastes of young underground fans in the 1990s swung further towards the diabolical excess, Euronymous’ obsessive dedication made him a potent force on the newly-burgeoning black metal scene. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
During the early 1990s, Euronymous’ store became the focus for a small circle of likeminded Scandinavian metal fans who all started their own bands. This loose group named itself variously the Black Metal Circle, Satanic Terrorists or Black Metal Mafia, and was influenced by the supposedly Satanic doctrines of Euronymous—based around a vague reading of the biblical concept of war between Heaven and Hell. For Euronymous, siding with Satan meant endorsing everything that was considered evil, spiteful, hateful. Hate motivated his philosophy, coloured by the cold, depressive morbidity that characterizes the negative edge of the Scandinavian psyche. All of the releases on Deathlike Silence were stamped with the “Anti-Mosh” symbol (moshing is a raucously combative form of dancing common to thrash and death metal fans). Around the symbol were stamped the messages “No Mosh,” “No Core” (a reference to the hardcore punk revival), “No Trends” and “No Fun”—these sentiments taking against those metal audiences who were introducing splashes of gaudy mainstream colour, in the form of Bermuda shorts, baseball caps and skateboards. In the center of the “No Moshing” symbol was a red line struck through those figures Euronymous professed to hate most: Scott Burns, the Florida-based record producer whose work had come to dominate the death metal scene, and curiously, Anton LaVey. Euronymous divorced himself from all Satanic tradition, loathing LaVey because of the Church of Satan’s philosophy of self-empowerment and individualism. Euronymous’ simple faith expressed all that was negative: a cold core for violent code of self-destructive nihilism. Joining Mayhem in their isolated World of hate were several other extreme bands. Burzum—chiefly a vehicle for Count Grishnackh (given name Kristian Vikernes, though he legally changed his first name to Varg, Norwegian for “wolf”), who had lived in the damp, lightless cellar of the Helvete record shop for some time—were a prominent presence. Burzum were an odd blend of frustrated insanity and strange, sad, ambient mood music, pained pathos and gibbering fury—oddly effective, but distinctly disturbed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Founder member Grishnackh took his name from one of the evil “orc” characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings, while Burzum meant “darkness” in the orcish language conceived by Tolkien. Perverse as this seems, it should be remembered that The Bible is just a book of stories—in this light, perhaps using The Lord of the Rings as the basis for an (im)moral philosophical code is not wholly ludicrous. However, it does an infernal philosopher’s credibility no favours to identify too closely with “hobbits” (glorified goblin). Grishnackh’s personal mythology combined the darkness-versus-light motifs of “mystic quest”/sword-and-sorcery sagas with the violent Viking tradition he believed true Northern Europeans belonged to. While this seems symptomatic of Scandinavia’s peripheral removal from—and distorted imitation of—Western pop culture, it also has an authentic dark side. As is common among Norse pagan revivalists, the Black Metal Circle began to espouse race-based Nazi political views. (Though totalitarian-loving Euronymous also expressed admiration for communist despots and Cambodian genocidalist Pol Pot.) Also pivotal in this new movement were the bands Emperor, Immortal, Enslaved and Arcturus. The last to join Euronymous’s Norwegian cadre were Dark Throne, who had already recorded one death metal album, Soulside Journey, in 1990. In the following year, they disowned their debut, donned corpse-paint and joined the “Satanic Mafia” with their album A Blaze in the Northern Sky. If Euronymous exemplified the nihilistic hate at the heart of the Black Metal Circle, and Burzum represented its violent Norse/Nazi fantasies, then Dark Throne symbolized the Circle’s isolation and sociopathic need for solitude. Taking their country’s sombre, anti-social reputation to extremes, the band never met to record, spoke little, and spent increasing periods alone in the frost-bitten Norwegian wilderness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the spring of 1991, Mayhem’s vocalist died: a Swede who, by way of black comedy, had re-named himself “Dead.” Dead blew his head off with a shotgun, leaving a note to day that he felt he was not of this World, but belonged instead to the cold solitude of the forest. He also apologized for the mess. As in common with obsessively inward-looking groups like the Black Metal Circle, a crisis of this type either causes the grouping to dissolve, or re-enforces their convictions. The latter instance applied, and the Circle hailed Dead as a hero. Euronymous, who found the corpse, rushed out for a camera to take his final photograph of Dead before altering the authorities—claiming a morsel of brain to make into soup and a fragment of skull to fashion into a necklace. At this point, the Black Metal Circle were no longer merely a group of disaffected teens and early-twentysomethings, but a subculture who believed themselves to be at the center of significant, apocalyptic events. Euronymous’ demented, anti-social rants were making him a regular feature in the underground metal fanzines; despite the continued indifference of the global music media, black metal was rising from the grassroots across the World. The “legend of Dead” contributed to a growing international interest in extreme, Scandinavian Satanic metal, with Deathlike Silence treating the grim event as a grotesque promotional gimmick. For the first time, European countries bordering the Mediterranean also began throwing up a slew of black metal acts—most notably the Greek band Rotting Christ. In contrast to the could hatred of the Northerners, the Southern European scene was inclined to a less self-destructive, more LaVeyan approach—though Anton LaVey would have regarded many of them as blasphemy-fixated novices, struggling to topple the repressive Christianity that dominates their culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Much of black metal is supposed to be inspired by demons. They cannot be any worse than human being, right? Many of them just have never possessed a body of their own. They are souls who have been lurking around before humanity. Before the dinosaurs. They are the darkness. The reason God created life so that life could flourish and grow and rest when it is dark. Demon possession is a condition in which one or more evil spirits or demons inhabit the body of a human being and can take complete control of their victim at will. By temporarily blotting out one’s consciousness, they can speak and act through one as their complete slave and tool. The inhabiting demon (or demons) comes and goes much like the proprietor of a house who may or may not be “at home.” When the demon is “at home,” one may precipitate an attack. In these attacks the victim passes from one’s normal state of possession. The condition of the afflicted person in the “possessed” state varies greatly. Sometimes it is marked by depression and deep melancholy, sometimes by vacancy and stupidity that resemble idiocy. Sometimes the victim may be ecstatic or extremely malevolent and wildly ferocious. During the transition from the normal to the abnormal state, the victim is frequently thrown into a violent paroxysm, often falling to the ground unconscious, foaming at the mouth with symptoms similar to epilepsy or hysteria. The intervals between attacks vary greatly from an hour or less to months. Between attacks, the subject may be healthy and appear normal in every way. The abnormal or demonized stages can last a few minutes or several days. Sometimes the attacks are mild; sometimes they are violent. If they are frequent and violent, the health of the subject suffers. The chief characteristic of demon possession or demonomania is the automatic projection of a new personality in the victim. During attack the victim’s personality is completely obliterated, and the inhabiting demon’s personality takes over completely. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The inhabiting demon uses the victim’s body as a vehicle for one’s own thoughts, words, and acts. The demon even speaks out of the victim’s mouth and declares emphatically that one is a demon. Frequently one gives one’s name and dwelling place. The new personality reveals itself in a different voice and sometimes uses a different language or dialect on a completely different educational or cultural level. Pronouns are used to emphasize the new personality. The first personal pronoun consistently designates the inhabiting demon. Bystanders are addressed in the second person. The victim is referred to in the third person and looked upon during the attack as unconscious and for all practical purposes as nonexistent during this interval. Demonomania should be clearly differentiated from the insanity in which a person imagines oneself to be someone else, often a famous personality such as Liz Taylor, Julius Caesar, of William Randolph Hearst. The demoniac, when in the demonized state characterized by the new personality, speaks and acts in all respects like a completely different person. By contrast, the insane person is one’s own diseased self, one’s assumed personality being a transparent unreality. In cases of demon possession the new personality clearly and constantly recognizes the distinct existence and individuality of its “possessed” victim, speaking of that victim in the third person, an element entirely lacking in cases of insanity. Because various inadequate theories have left demon possession largely unexplained, it is quite probable that some patients in mental hospitals are demon possessed rather than insane. This was the conviction of the famous nineteenth-century specialist in mental diseases, Dr. Forces Benignus Winslow (1810-1874). He correctly recognized the demoniac by a strange duality; and by the fact that, when temporarily relived from the oppression of the demon, he is frequently able to describe the force which takes control of one and compels one to act and speak shamefully. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
While in the demonized state many persons give evidence of knowledge which cannot be accounted for naturally. The demon who takes control of the body of one’s victim is obviously the source of the superhuman knowledge. While demon possessed, many persons recognize the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and display an aversion to and a fear of Him (Mark 1.23-24; 5.7). The case of Mrs. Winchester, who lived in Santa Clara County, illustrates how a woman came under demon domination through practicing séances. Being centered within our own God like power is of utmost importance. Even when evoked to create change directly, keep in mind that you are the God that wields these powers for the cause of Counter Creation. Just be careful! As a God you will be tested and so how these powers are wielded is a powerful initiatic test in its own right. Mrs. Winchester was in her Blue Séance Room, she lite a candle on her left first, and then a candle on her right. A sacred serpent was sacrificed over the wood sigil and the blood was left to drain upon the idol. Then the body of the serpent was encircled around it, she chanted “I do invocate and conjure thee, O Spirit, Sabnock; and being with power armed from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by BERALANENSIS, BALADACHIENSIS, PAUMACHIA, and APOLOGIAE SEDES; by the most Powerful Princes, Genii, Liachidae, and Ministers of the Tartarean Abode; and by the Chief Prince of the Seat or Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee, and by invocating conjure thee. And being armed with power from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by Him Who spake and it was done, and unto whom all creatures be obedient. Also I, being made after the image of GOD, endued with power from GOD and created according unto His will, do exorcise thee by that most mighty and powerful name of GOD, EL, strong and wonderful; O thou Spirit Sabnock. And I command thee and Him who spake the Word and HIS FIAT was accomplished and by all the names of God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
“Also by the names ADONAI, EL, ELOHIM, ELOHI, EHYEH, ASHER EHYEH, ZABAOTH, ELION, IAH, TETRAGRAMMATON, SHADDAI, LORD GOD MOST HIGH, I do exorcise thee and do powerfully command thee, O thou Spirit Sabnock, that thou dost forthwith appear unto me here before this Circle in a fair human shape, without any deformity or tortuosity. And by this ineffable name, TETRAGRAMMATON IEHOVAH, do I command thee, at which being heard the elements are overthrown, the air is shaken, the sea runneth back, the fire is quenched, the Earth trembleth, and all the hosts of the celestials, terrestrials, and infernals do tremble together, and are troubled and confounded. Wherefore come thou, O Spirit Sabnock, forthwith, and without delay, from any or all parts of the World wherever thou mayest be, and make rational answers unto all things that I shall demand of thee. Come thou peaceably, visibly, and affably, now, and without delay, manifesting that which I shall desire. For thou art conjured by the name of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, HELIOREN, wherefore fulfill thou my commands, and persist thou therein unto the end, and according unto mine interest, visibly and affably speaking unto me with a voice clear and intelligible without any ambiguity. I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O thou Spirit Sabnock, to appear and to show thyself visible unto me before this Circle in fair and comely shape, without any deformity or tortuosity; by the name and in the name IAH and VAU which Adam heard and spake; and by the name of God, AGLA, which Lot heard and was saved with his family; and by the name IOTH, which Jacob heard from the angels wrestling with him, and was delivered from the hand of Esau his brother; and by the name ANAPHAEXTON which Aaron heard and spake and was made wise; and by the name ZBAOTH, which Moses named and all the rivers were turned into blood; and by the name ASHER EHYEH ORISTON, which Moses named, and all the rivers brought forth frogs, and they ascended into the house, destroying all things. #RandolpHarris 11 of 21
“And by the name ELION, WHICH Moses named, and there was a great hail such as had not been since the beginning of the World; and by the name ADONAI, which Moses named, and there came up locusts, which appeared upon the whole land, and devoured all which the hail had left; and by the name SCHEMA AMATHIA which Ioshua called upon, and the sun stayed his course; and by the name ALPHA and OMEGA, which Daniel named, and destroyed Bel, and slew the Dragon; and in the name EMMANUEL, which the three children, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, sang in the midst of the fiery furnace, and were delivered; and by the name HAGIOS; and by the SEAL OF ADONI; and by ISCHYROS, ATHANATOS; and by these three secret names, AGLA, ON, TETRAGRAMMATION, do I adjure and constrain thee. And by these names, and by all other names of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, the LORD ALMIGHTY, I do exorcise and command thee, O Spirit Sabnock, even by Him Who spake the Word and it was done, and to Whom all creatures are obedient; and by the dreadful judgments of GOD; and by the uncertain Sea of Glass, which is before the DIVINE MAJESTY, mighty and powerful; by the four beasts before the throne, having eyes before and behind; by the fire round about the throne; by the holy angels of Heaven; and by the mighty wisdom of GOD; I do potently exorcise thee, that thou appearest here before this Circle, to fulfill my will in all things which shall seem good unto me; by the Seal of BASDATHEA BALDACHIA; and by this name PRIMEUMATON, which Moses named, and the Earth Opened, and did swallow up Kora, Dathan, and Abiram. Wherefore thou shalt make faithful answers unto all my demands, O Spirit Sabnock, and shalt perform all my desires so far as in thine office thou art capable hereof. Wherefore, come thou, visibly, peaceably, and affably, now without delay, to manifest that which I desire, speaking with a clear and perfect voice, intelligibly, and to mine understanding. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
“Tbatlu! Bualu! Tulatu! Labusi! Ubisi!—Let thee also appear and being before me the Spirit of Sabnock. Sovar, merciless leader of Divs come forth! Inner eye behold the demon before me. Sovar awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Shahrewar! I stand alone as the embodiment of the Adversary known as Ahriman, the Black Dragon of Chaos and becoming! I devour the natural order of stasis brought forth by Ahura Mazda and forge my destiny through the power of the Black Sun! Taromat, beautiful Div or rebellion come forthy! Inner eye behold the demoness before me. Toramat awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Spandarmad! Ahirman, Lord of Darkness divine, I thank you for your presence within this unholy temple of counter creation. I have offered you the life of this noxious creature as a gateway to your manifestation within this realm to stand before me! You are Angra Mainyu who is the Lord of counter creation, whom has brought forth the mountains to the plains! You have brought forth the beasts to the field and the creatures of the night! Ahriman with your infernal blessing I ask that you would bring forth the baneful powers of the wolf kin to fill this oil with their essence that it may be compelled according to my will! I offer my nails as fangs which will devour that which stands in my way! I offer my hair to embody their predatory essence! I give my blood as a gateway to empower them to act within this world according to my will and purpose!” Then Mrs. Winchester heard the distant howling of wolves and she perceived their phantom shadows as they began to surround her and encroach. She was focused on Sabnock and dared not fear that which she had just conjured. SABNOCK—of course is the Forty-third Spirit of the Winchester Mansion. He is a Marquis, Mighty, Great, and Strong, appearing in the Form of an Armed Soldier with a Lion’s Head, riding on a pale-coloured horse. His office is to build high Towers, Castles and Cities, ad to furnish them with Armour, etcetera. Also he can conflict Men for many days with Wounds and with Sores rotten and full of Worms. He giventh Good Familiars at the request of the Exorcist. Commandth 50 Legions of Spirits; and his Seal is this, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Mrs. Winchester fell down unconscious, frothing at the mouth, and was carried to her room, outside where the crescent hedge is planted. A doctor was called in gave her large doses of medicine to no avail. He left and refused to have anything more to do with the case as he saw with in hours gables and towers rise, wings of the mansion extended right before his eyes, and gardens grow from sprouts and spring up to mature plants and trees before night fall. For five of six days Mrs. Winchester raved wildly, and her staff and friends were in great distress. In desperation they proposed giving Mrs. Winchester more medicine. However, the demon, speaking through her, replied: “Any amount of medicine will be of no use.” Daisy then implored, “If medicine will be of no use, what shall we do?” The demon replied, “Burn incense to me, and submit yourself to me, and all will be well.” The staff knelt down and worshiped the demon, imploring him to torment Mrs. Winchester no longer. During that time Mrs. Winchester was in a state of complete unconsciousness. A little later when the demon drove Mrs. Winchester to renewed frenzy, her distraught staff repeated their promise to worship and serve him. They also promised that they would urge their Mrs. Winchester to do likewise. When Mrs. Winchester regained consciousness, she reluctantly consented to do so. The demon gave explicit directions regarding the proposed worship. On the first and fifteenth of each month, incense was to be burned, food offered, and the require prostration made before the shrine of himself, SABNOCK. Periodically the demon came, sometimes every few days, sometimes after a month’s lapse. Each time, Mrs. Winchester felt fluttering of her heart, a sense of overwhelming fear, and inability to control herself. She would quietly as Daisy to fetch a neighboring woman whenever the demon came. The two would burn incense to the demon in Mrs. Winchester’s stead and receive his directives, which they then communicated to the possessed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Although these communications were spoken by the Mrs. Winchester’s (the victim) lips, she was completely unaware of them, since she was in the demonized state. The demon often bade the audience not to be afraid, protesting he would not harm them, but rather help them in various ways. He declared he would instruct the victim in the healing art, so that people would flock to her and be cured of their sickness. This soon proved true, although may diseases were not under the demon’s control. Apparently only those afflicted by evil spirits were completely cured. Mrs. Winchester’s long-ill child was not helped. The demon declared he controlled many inferior spirits. He also frequently outlined his plan for Mrs. Winchester’s life and work. He promised he would help her grow more proficient as a healer, and the people would compensate her for her services. Gifts thus earned were donated to the nearby ancient pagan temple. As certain parts of the Winchester mansion would appear but once every seventeen years, SABNOCK was never seen save on the eve of some awful calamity, visitors to the mansion had a very slight chance of seeing his physical body. There could be no doubt though of the existence of the mansion and SABNOCK, for everybody knows he was one of the greatest of the giants during his natural lifetime, nor could any better evidence be asked then the facts that he guided Mrs. Winchester into turning stone, wood, and class into the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansions. The door-to-nowhere was also known as Lovers’ Leap;” from which Mrs. Winchester once flung herself when she was a state of deep morning, and survived unharmed. The path SABOCK made from the door-to-nowhere to the mountains was used by him when he would leave his island and come to shore. Upon being informed of the variety and amount of legendary material collected about the Winchester mansion and Mrs. Winchester’s doings, many people unhesitatingly pronounced the entire assortment condemned all the gathered treasures as creations of the supernatural. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It was very well beknown that in them old days there were giants in plenty hereabouts, but they did not make the make an appearance at the estate very often. But everyone knows that there were giants, because if there were not, no one would know of them at all. They were just like human beings, except in the matter of size, and one of them could make a dozen like men that live now. When they walked, they carried oak trees for sticks and lived in the forest of the giants, and carved the mountain and caves. (It should be noted that spiritistic visions of this nature are quite likely to occur in the course of reading occult literature. Sometimes people mistake these visions for genuine religious experiences. However, it is again a case of Satan disguising himself as an angel of the light.) Yet, there are more than 20,000 accounts of spirits, ghost, angels and demons being seen in the Winchester mansion. The uncanny phenomena places one under a charm. The pattern of the courts during this early period in the 1800s was erratic, sometimes convicting, sometimes throwing cases out of court for lack of evidence, something awarding damages for slander to those who had been maligned as witches by accusers. This vacillation sprang from the fact that the judicial bodies that heard the causes were not religious but secular, and therefore had little competence in dealing with matters that were primarily religious. As far as control was concerned, in adhering to the principles of congregationalism, the responsibility for suppressing heresy and enforcing religious behavior within the communities went to the state. The trial judges were not the sure, steadfast, confident Dominican Inquisitors or Protestant prosecutors of the Old World, but merely secular officials of the valley who had been forced into the position of trying heresy for lack of anyone else to do it. Mary Johnson, who was hired at the Winchester mansion in 1887, as a cook, admitted have had “familiarity with the Devil” and was executed by the state. She confession to have pleasures of the flesh with demons and other sorted things. She made no mention of mass meetings; rather, her Devil seems to have been a personal one, coming to her assistance when needed. #RandolphHarri 16 of 21
Dolls were sometimes used as a means of projecting curses, and Mary said she had attended meetings with Satan and his consorts. Witches’ pact with Satan was attributed as part of God’s inscrutable plan of the Universe. The Puritan settlers in Santa Clara Valley believed in the doctrine of Original Sin wholeheartedly; their pessimistic outlook proclaimed that all men were unworthy until God saw fit to bestow His grace upon them. They believed that the God allowed the Devil to afflict not only the guilty but also anybody else that might happen to get in the way. If He had to teach misguided humans a lesson, He might punish an entire community for the sins of the most wicked in that community. And it appeared to the God-fearing Puritans that He was doing just that. The Puritans were highly intolerant and has a paranoiac distrust of other religious groups, some were farmers at the Winchester mansion, and did not always like the rituals that were performed, but they were very loyal and protective of Mrs. Winchester. Many of the people who worked at the Winchester mansion were often under suspicion of witchcraft. The Puritans came to the Winchester mansion because they felt it was a true kingdom of God on Earth, and they could help Mrs. Winchester live peacefully. However, what they found was something different. They found that the vast acres of the estate had bitterly cold winters, and the terrain could be inhospitable. They found themselves in a wilderness, surrounded by demonic tribes whom they considered to be the legions of Hell incarnate. Having come to settle in this last stronghold of the Devil, they were plagued by him constantly for the very reason that they were God’s chosen people, thus the most likely target for unholy temptation. The fact that the new settlers in the Santa Clara Valley were being attacked by Satan seemed incontestable. The estate was ravaged by smallpox, and had suffered constant harassment by envious local town’s people and demonic tribes. Mrs. Winchester wondered what she had done to offend God that He should allow the Devil such free range. She experimented with the spirits to bring peace to her life and home. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Mrs. Winchester had an answer: Judgment Day was at hand and Satan was therefore stepping up his activities in one last desperate move. It was simply the nova-like burst of the energy from a dying star. She glibly stated that “there will again be an unusual Range of the Devil among us, a little before the Second Coming of the Lord, which will be to give the last stroke in destroying the works of the Devil.” This theory found wide acceptance among the servants and laity of Santa Clara Valley, for not only did it offer a simple explanation for all their maladies and misfortunes, but it also gave them hope, promising cooly a quick end to their hardships. Satan is most able to seduce human in periods o great discontent, for human, in times of poverty and affliction, will turn knowingly to whatever hands will feed them. The valley had had a difficult time of it up to that time, and famines had reduced the population drastically. However, as if labouring under the most severe environmental handicaps was not enough, Puritan perfectionism went even further in making life unbearable. In seeking to establish a holy kingdom, according to Heaven’s law, self-indulgence in any form was strictly repressed. Severe punishments were meted out for drinking, swearing, and licentiousness; in Santa Clara, it was a punishable offense to walk on the streets on Sunday, except when going to and from church. And witches, people possessed by demons, and others also attended church to blend in and keep the peace. On top of it all, there stood the Calvinistic doctrine of election, holding that as soon as man was born, eh was judged to be headed for either Heaven or Hell, this choice being made according to God’s immutable law. However, even if a human thought oneself to be damned, the civil punishment for one’s indulgence were still exacted upon one. It was into this environment that the waters of the witchcraft flood would soon pour. The good people of Santa Clara clearly saw signs of Satanic activity in their midst, and an investigation was launched. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Mrs. Winchester confessed to having attended witches’ Sabbaths and of having met with the Devil, who was a tall, black man from New Haven, Connecticut. Soon the witch fever spread, and more people from the valley became posses by demons. The common belief was that at that time witches, when entering into a Covenant with Satan, because the owners of specters, with the help of which they could do harm to any person of their choosing. People believe that God—the Alpha and Omega was both God and Satan. That He has a soul and character. He is not just this futile entity but someone you can see many aspects to. Some people fled to Satanism because they had to deal with so much evil from Christians that they wanted another source of power to exalt them. Satanism is supposed to be something to be something secret, something people do not know anything of. One goes to America and in the telephone directory one can see “Church of God,” “Church of Jesus,” and “Church of Satan.” One calls, and a person answers: “Church of Satan, how may I help you?” One thinks, “This is not Satanism!” The Church of Satan deny Satan, they say He does not exist, yet they act as if He dd, they rebel against God. They call themselves Satanists because He also rebelled against God, but they are basically light and life worshipping individualists. Well, the phone is tapped, so I think you better write what you know. Some people have disappeared. And of course the normal grave yard desecration. Anne Winchester’s headstone was recently stolen, but replaced. Normal people just disappear and never show up again. It could have a Satanic connection. Every human is life, and some hate life, especially human life. That is why people disappeared. These people may have disappeared for some form of sacrifice. Something like that would be called a Satanic murder. The murder is the ritual sacrifice. These murders gain power from whoever was responsible. Everybody has their own aura, and auras can be stolen by sacrificing an individual, this allows one to gain more power. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Places of worship, such as churches, have their own spirit—the Winchester Mystery House, for example, has been worshipped in for maybe hundreds of years and has thus gained a lot of spirit in that time, it could qualify as a church and gain charitable tax exemption. But that is not the point. A person who sacrifices that will gains a lot of power and grows stronger. Some people fear the Winchester mansion, because there are a lot of different energies. There is fear, terror and suspense, but others feel a lot of light, happiness, and goodness. Sometimes the energy is mixed. Anton LaVey really surprises me. If your every rea his work, he seems very intelligent and not scary at all, but I guess it depends on what one reads. I have read parts of his Bible, and it is very straightforward, it is stuff people tell their kids every day. Stand up for yourself and do not let people run you over. I think that the Winchester mansion should also open on nights of a full Moon, not just Friday the 13th. During the full Moon, there is a lot of energy and symbolic value. A lot of people believe in the full Moon and a lot of people believe in virgins. That makes both the full Moon and the virgin more powerful because of belief in them. God was first and He created the World. Of course, a lot of scientists would deny that. However, I would challenge their view because I believe God used evolution, which is why it took so long, which is why we have evidence like dinosaur bones. Yet, some Gnostic Christians have suggested Satan created the World. Everybody will be taken as slaves except the warlords. Euronymus, who we talked about earlier, was murdered in August 1993, Aaliyah 2001. Some say that is a month when sacrifices are made. Grishnackh killed Euronymous, and a few hours later, he was laughing and joking, saying, “Ha ha, Euronymous is dead, I’m going to dance and piss on his grave.” It reminded of the jokes Howard Stern made about Aaliyah. It was not funny. These are not the rantings of someone who is all there. Grishnackh talked about the dynamite he had and how he was going to blow things up. Basically, they took things to illogical extremes, but it all made sense in their own heads. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
It is possible when dabbling with occultism for one to make an unconscious contract with the powers of darkness. The gift of discernment is absolutely necessary in life. It is generally not wise to lay one’s hands on a person who is occultly subjected. The retuning spirits will often attempt to creep back under the guise of some pious camouflage. It is in this way that evil can often enter unnoticed into one’s Christian life. A maid at the Winchester mansion once accepted the invitation of one of her coworkers to attend some spiritistic meetings. At first she felt as though she had gain something from going along to the meetings but later on she began to notice some psychic changes taking place in herself. She began to notice some psychic changes taking place in herself. She began to suffer from depression which resulted in her consulting a neurologist. During the course of the treatment she was committed to a lunatic asylum. However, as her condition improved, she could no longer attend the spiritistic séances. At the hospital the chaplain came to see her through his help and counsel she was able to make a complete recovery. One of the farmers at the estate wanted to see if charms actually worked, and some of them He. He practiced in the basement of the Winchester mansion. He drew a magic circle on the ground and drew some other magic symbols in the circle. He then used a charm three times in order to invoke the spirit. However, no spirit came. Yet, as he repeated, the charm he fell down in the magic circle and lay there unconscious for some time. The result was that for several weeks following this event he was semi-paralysed and drained of all his physical strength and will-power. After a few weeks, he died. Frequently identified as a common spot where the “wheelbarrow Ghost” is sighted, Steam Alley is one of the most well-known paranormal hot-spots in the mansion. Have you ever seen anything in the basement? #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Some stroll Sarah’s lovely gardens this Memorial Day Weekend. There is a beautiful parrot which Mrs. Winchester used to pet, it talks! He is supposed to be happy and impudent, and talks and laughs and screeches all the time. Maybe you may catch a glimpse at this wooded, flowery estate. It is such a beautiful spectacle, all of that life and grace and animation, and sun-smitten flash and sprinkle of rich colour.
This impressive mansion dates back to the 1880s, when it was developed by Sarah Winchester and the spirits, whose project enobed and enriched the community. It once had a nine-story military watchtower. Mrs. Winchester further developed the grounds of the 160 room mansion, introducing a Victorian garden at the hands of World renowed architect Gino Coppede around the turn of the century.
These adaptions made this idyllic mansion a unique asset, tinged with the signs and influences of eclecticism and Liberty, juxtaposed to the ancient Architectural characteristics of its medieval heritage. This mansion presents itself as impressive and spectacular. The building now spreads on four floors plus the basment, for a total of approximently 25,000 feet square.
There is lovely gift shop and cafe, and it is also an ideal venue for hosting private events, conventions and/or ballrooms are located on the back overlooking the internal garden with its panoramic position which glows thanks to its night-time lighting.
Inside the property there are splendid rooms filled with historial furniture, decorated ceilings and flamboyant fireplaces, vaulted ceilings and richly frescoes walls. In addition, there are several bedrooms, nine kitchens. and thirteen bathrooms, which made the structure a perfect luxurious accommodation for guests, and is now a tourist destination.
This mansion is located within a private park of 4 acres and elegant Nineteenth-century Victorian-gardens, that offer areas of wide lawns, and further green spaces. There is also a parking area, with free parking. Currently used to host guided tours and private events and functions. The enitre porperty sits at a close distance from the mall, hotels, and resturants. The high-fashion outlet complex and gourmet food has brought further development and tourism to Santa Clara County. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Money Power and Muscle Power is Our Very Essence
The annual inflation rate in the United States of America slowed to 8.3 percent in April 2022 from a 41-year high of 8.5 percent in March, but less than market forecasts of 8.1 percent. Energy prices increased 30.3 percent, below 32 percent in March, namely gasoline (43.6 percent vs 48 percent), while fuel oil increased more (80.5 percent vs 70.1 percent). On the other hand, food prices jumped 9.4 percent, the most since April 1981 and prices also rose faster for shelter (5.1 percent vs 5 percent) and new vehicles (13.2 vs 12.5 percent). To grasp the full meaning of this looming implosion, however, it is not enough to look inside America. For the United States of America, it turns out, is hardly alone. In fact, from Germany, France, and Britain to South Korea, and Japan, we find a similar epidemic of failure—widening cracks in key institutions, starting, as in the United States of America, with the nuclear family. In Japan, divorce rates, especially among married couples married for twenty years or more, are soaring to unprecedented high. Far more arresting, however, are results of a survey by Japan’s Youth Research Institute. It showed that 75 percent of American schoolgirls agreed with the statement “Everyone should get married”—but that “a staggering 88 percent of Japanese girls disagreed.” South Korea’s divorce rate, traditionally low, has become one of the highest in the World. In the United Kingdom, there is a steady decline in the nuclear family. In fact, the number of households headed by married couples has fallen below 50 percent for the first time, reflecting sweeping social changes in British family life. Educational crises, too, are no U.S. monopoly. “CLASSROOM COLLAPSE” GRIPPING SCHOOLS NATIONWIDE, screams a headline in the Japan Times. The New York Times reported: EDUCATORS TRY TO TAME JAPAN’S BLACKBOARD JUNGLES.
Simultaneously, as in the United States of America, Japan’s once highly admired corporate giants have been hit by scandal after scandal—“Enronitis” Japanese-style. Even as its banking system teeters under loads of nonperforming loans, Tokyo Electric Power Co. sees its president and chairman resign in disgrace because the company falsified safety data at its nuclear-power plants. Soon following TEPCO into ignominy were leaders of Mitsui, Snow Brand Food, Nippon Meat Packers, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissho Iwai and other top corporations. All these were followed by that beset the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2005. First a computer crash shut down all trading for the first time in the exchange’s fifty-six-year history. A few weeks later, observers repressed laughter when a trader from Mizuho Securities Co. mistakenly sold 610,000 shares of a stock for one yen apiece rather than one share for 610,000 yen—a minor glitch that cost his firm $340 million. And on April 19th 2022, Japan’s Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki said on Tuesday the damage to the economy from a weakening yen at present is greater than the benefits accruing to it, making the most explicit warning yet against the currency’s recent slump versus the dollar. The yen’s fall has worsened imported inflationary pressures in Japan amid a spike in global commodity and oil costs, and an increase in supply snags, which have intensified in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. “Stability is important and sharp currency moves are undesirable,” Suzuki told parliament, repeating previous comments as the Japanese currency weakened to fresh 20-year lows on the dollar. “A weak yen has its merit, but demerit is greater under the current situation where crude oil and raw materials costs are surging globally, while the weak yen boosts import prices, hurting consumers and firms that are unable to pass on costs,” Suzuki reports. The currency market shrugged off the ministers warning, sending yen to 127.80 to the dollar, its lowest level since May 2002. The yen has lost about 10 percent against the dollar so far this year.
Investors say verbal warnings will not have much of an impact as the yen’s weakness reflects fundamental, noting contrasting prospects for an aggressive streak of Federal Reserve tightening with that of the Bank of Japan’s commitment to maintain its powerful monetary easing plan. An April 1-11 poll of 5,400 Japanese firms conducted by private credit research firm Tokyo Shoko Research showed roughly 40 percent suffered a negative impact from a weak yen, with assumed dollar/yen rates being as low as 110 yen among listed manufacturers. Furthermore, a former Nissan executive Greg Kelly has been found guilty of assisting the Japanese car giant’s ex-CEO Carlos Ghosn to his part of 9.3 billion yen ($80.4 million) of his income from financial regulators. The court also fined Nissan $1.6 million USD (200 million yen) for failing to disclose Mr. Ghosn’s pay. The carmaker pledged guilty at the start of the 19-month trial. Mr. Kelly was sentenced to six months in jail suspended for three years. In 2019, Mr. Ghosn fled Japan to his home country of Lebanon hidden in a box on a private jet. There was a 30 percent drop in Nissan sales at the outbreak of this tragedy. However, recently, fugitive former car executive Carlos Ghosn, said in a recent interview from Beirut, Lebanon that Nissan’s alliance partner Renault SA is struggling because of the Japanese automaker’s lack of vision. He is not very “optimistic about the future of Nissan.” Recent corporate crises have been even more dramatic in South Korea, where scandals have led to the flight of the founder of Daewoo, the suicide of one of the sons of Hyundai’s founder and the imprisonment of the head of SK another great chaebol—the country’s megafirms. Most Korean consumers expect that normalcy will return to routines only after June 2022, yet there are signs of pre-COVID-19 routines returning. Korean customers have been less optimistic than those in other countries about the economic recovery. However, optimism in Korea is much higher now than two years ago. Half of consumers indicate a desire to splurge, with intent to do so being the strongest in Gen Z and millennials. One-eight of consumers say they have returned to out-of-home activities.
In Europe, the recent scandal list includes Volkswagen in Germany, Parmalat in Italy, Credit Lyonnais in France, Skandia in Sweden and the oil companies Elf and Royal Dutch/Shell. On top of that, a commodity crisis, and a supply chain crisis. What is next? A global recession? Markets are a total mess, with Walmart tanking 10 percent in one trading session on May 18, 2022. The last time that happened was the stock market crash of October 1987. Inflation, thanks to unpresented money printing and Universal Basic Income test-drives during an unprecedented China-style lockdown of the U.S. economy in 2020-2021, is now eroding living standards. The U.K. inflation print of May 18 was 9 percent. How transitory is this? If Europe keeps the pressure on commodities in its economic war with Russia, then the answer is—as long as Europe and Russia are sanctioning each other to smithereens. The S&P has been on a losing streak for six weeks. If it loses for 8 weeks in a row, that is a record breaker. It is down 20 percent year-to-date. The Nasdaq is in similar territory. As is China, as measured by the CSI-300. Europe can only get worse from here, barring the European Central Bank buying DAX and CAC-50 blue chips without telling us. France just went through an election, and Emmanuel Macron saw his populist opponent, Marine Le Pen win more votes of those under the age of 50, than Macron. There are parliamentary elections coming up this summer, another test for how the Macron government is handling a series of non-stop crisis since the pandemic started in 2020, and the adults and expert class returned to power in Washington. Speaking of which, the Democratic Party is worried. There is constant talk of pulling tariffs off China to fight inflation. However, this is highly unpopular. Rolling back tariffs is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on U.S. inflation. Midterm elections are expected to turn the tide in the House for the Republicans, and maybe in the Senate, as well. Pretending to fight inflation by opening the flood gates to China imports is a bad policy and against voters’ interests.
This mother Janet Yellen warned President Biden that sanctions against Russia and retaliatory sanctions imposed by Russia against the U.S. and Europe risk plunging the World into a deep global recession. No one is getting Russian fertilizer or wheat. Oil will be cut off by the end of 2022, with a few exceptions. They are still buying natural gas, but claim to be trying to buy less as they wean themselves off of it to source from elsewhere, including Qatar, Nigeria, Algeria, and mor expensive American LNG. So what does a global recession mean? Well, it would be a period when many of the World’s economies are not successful and businesses experience a lot of problems: Huge increases in World energy costs are expected. Global recession can occur more easily in modern times because the economies of most countries are interdependent. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), total Worldwide economic growth of less than 3 percent constitutes a global recession. The most widely accepted definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. The United States of America is now facing the familiar precursors of a recession, including rising interest rates on the back of high inflation. Many economists are warning of a recession and Wall Street Gurus say those fears are exaggerated, even though the signs are here. Perhaps they are just being optimistic to keep funding their stocks and paychecks. If prices to do decelerate, as anticipated, the Fed faces a difficult path to stabilizing the economy. Still, the U.S economy is quite strong at the moment, but there is indeed some risk of slipping into recession. Its length and severity will depend in large part on the Fed’s response. Some of the nation’s largest and most influential retailers reported disappointing sales and profits this week because of higher costs and overstocked inventory issues, engineered to avoid supply chain disruptions, setting off a stock market meltdown. As reported earlier, Walmart stock plunged more than 11 percent. Target shares tumbled 26 percent, following a stunning 52 percent drop in quarterly profits, which executives attributed in part to cooling demand for big-ticket items such as TV’s, kitchen appliances and outdoor furniture.
Goldman Sachs this week revised down its forecast for second-quarter U.S. economic growth, to annualized rate of 2.5 percent, citing higher prices and continued supply chain disruptions. That follows an unexpected contraction in the first three months of 2022, when the economy shrank at a 1.4 percent pace, mostly because of a trade imbalance and drop in inventory purchases. The U.S. Dollar is becoming attractive to investor because it is very strong right now. However, national claims for unemployment insurance climbed up to 218,000 last week, a four-month high although still near historic lows, but some companies report they are overstaffed. Higher prices for basics like food, energy and housing are straining Americans’ budgets and clouding their view of the economy. If that were not enough to keep the headline writers busy, all these were paralleled, as the United States, by upsets and upheavals in the health sectors of many countries. In the United States of America, some politicians routinely point to the British health service as a model to be emulated. Yet, the British Council complains, “not a day goes by without another story about the ‘crisis’ in the National Health Service.” The German health service is described in the press as “collapsing,” and Sweden’s system as in “acute financial crisis.” And Japan’s health insurance system could also collapse. As for pensions, France’s prime minister claims its impending pension disaster threatens the survival of the republic. Nor is France alone. Europe faces a retiree crisis. Japan also has a crisis with the nation’s pension system, as does Korea. Underfunded corporate pensions just in America? Try Siemens in Germany, with is $10.6 billion pension-fund deficit. The same pattern continues right down the line. Thus the American media’s critical loss of credibility is mirrored, even before President Trump exposed the “fake news.” The crises at Le Monde and Le Figaro, France’s top daily newspapers; and at Asahi Shimbun in Japan.
How about charities? Scandals at the American Red Cross and United Way were paralleled rather spectacularly not long ago in Britain, where tenor Luciano Pavarotti, rock star David Bowie and playwright Tom Stoppard made headlines by publicly ending their support of War Child UK, a charity set up to help children in war-torn countries. Having discovered that its cofounder and a consultant had taken bribes from a contractor employed by the organization, Pavarotti led the walkout to disassociate himself, as a spokeswoman put it, from “anything that was corrupt.” Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement are dismissing allegations that they mismanaged millions of dollars after a scathing New York Magazine report revealed that they had purchased a $6 million home in Southern California with donated funds. The report revealed that the group secretly bought a 6,500 square-foot mansion in October of 2020 for its members to create content promoting social justice. The report only fueled questions about the organization’s finances, just a year after the foundation revealed a detailed look at its funds for the first tie. The Associated Press reported then that the foundation said it had taken in just over $90 million in 2020 and committed $21.7 million in grant funding to both official and unofficial BLM chapters, along with 30 other Black-led grassroots organizations. The foundation puts its operating budget at $8.4 million. Along with questions about the remainder of the $90 million, leaders from local chapters who said they had received little to no funding from the organization, and they wondered where money raised before 2020 had gone. History, it goes without saying, is replete with scandals, failures and crises. Our generation did not invent them. However, today’s outbreak in country after country are qualitatively different. Never—with the possible exception of the worst days of World War II—has a generation seen so many institutional breakdowns in so many countries, occurring within the same brief time frame and coming at so rapid a pace.
Never has so many institutional crises been as tightly interrelated—with powerful feedback flows linking family, education, work, health, retirement, politics, and media—all affecting the wealth system. And never has re-globalization sent the financial effects of these crises so quickly across so many borders. What is happening, therefore, is not a series of isolated upset but a truly systemic breakdown—a challenge to the survival of whole societies that depend on these shaking and rattling institutions. Today’s institutional upheaval is historically unique for yet another crucial reason. All these crises at national levels are taking place at a pivotal moment for global institutions, too, starting with the United Nations. Even as the U.N. has rocked the World over the past 17 years with the referral of 33 cases of sexual abuse and exploitation to national authorities globally. Over that same period, it has received 120 reports of sexual abuse and exploitation in Haiti alone. The alleged perpetrators include drivers, security guards, doctors, consultants, and senior staff. United Nations agencies’ employees have been charged with sexual misconduct repeatedly. Meanwhile there have been allegations of large-scale corruption in its oil-for-food program in Iraq, and one will remember when Secretary-General Kofi Annan came under fire for his son’s involvement with a company seeking contracts in Iraq, another scandal hit the headlines. This one centered on charges of pedophilia and sexual abuse of women by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa. Earlier, Annan had warned that the entire U.N. as an institution is in a potentially terminal crisis owning to its obsolete organization structure. The International Development Association is the part of the World Bank that is meant to help the World’s poorest countries. Its explicit mission is “to reduce poverty by providing zero to low-interest loans and grants for programs that boost economic growth, reduce inequalities, and improve people’s living conditions.” However, there is an internal war raging inside the World Bank even as outside analysts slam it for “incompetence, inefficiency and irrelevance.”
The uber-arrogant International Monetary Fund grudgingly admits that it, too, faces a crisis. The World Organization, meanwhile, is losing ground, along with many other intergovernmental agencies. At the global level, too, we are moving rapidly toward systemic crisis. And when institutional crises in the major nations converge with equally systemic breakdown of institutions at the global level, as they are likely to do, the combined, self-reinforcing impact will affect not just Americans. Affluent young latte sippers on Omotesando in Tokyo will feel the effects, as will coffee farmers in Central America, women on assembly lines in Chin, and small-business people in Germany’s Mittlestand, along with financial analysts and investors from Wall Street, London and Frankfurt to Singapore and Seoul. What happens will naturally be influenced by other powerful factors—war, terrorism, immigration, ecological disasters, geopolitical shifts. However, even without these, the mutually reinforcing convergence of national and global crises could trigger something far bigger and more dangerous than the failure of any single institution of an infrastructural implosion in any one country. This concatenation of breakdowns and scandals may cheer those who hate America and the West, or who hate rich nations in general. However, it would be wise for them to defer any celebration. For, as the Chinese have long known, crisis and opportunity walk together. Instead of a historical disaster, these interlinked crises can be turned to massive advantage. And not just for the countries experiencing them. To make that happen, we need to understand why in so many countries, and at the level of the global order itself, so many of our most important, interlinked institutions teeter on the brink of collective implosion. As you know, a revolution is sweeping today’s post-Bacon World. No genius in the past—not Sun-Tzu, not Machiavelli, not Bacon himself—could have imagined today’s deepest powershift: the astounding degree to which today both force and wealth themselves have come to depend on knowledge. (A power shift is a transfer of power. A “powershift” is a deep-level change in the very nature of power.)
Military might until not long ago was basically an extension of the mindless fist. Today it relies almost totally on “congealed mind”—knowledge embedded in weapons and surveillance technologies. From satellites to submarines, modern weapons are constructed of information-rich electronic components. Today’s fighter plane is a flying computer. Even “dumb” weapons today are manufactured with the help of supersmart computers or electronic chips. The military, to choose a single example, uses computerized knowledge—“expert systems”—in missile defense. Since subsonic missiles speed along at about 1,000 feet a second, effective defense systems need to react in, say 10 milliseconds. However, expert systems may embody as many as 10,000 to 100,000 rules elicited from human specialists. The computer must scan, weigh, and interrelate these rules before arriving at a decision as to how to respond to a threat. Thus the Pentagon’s Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sent as a long-range goal the design of a system that can make one million logical inferences per second. Logic, inference, epistemology—in short, brain work, human and machine—is today’s precondition for military power. Similarly, it has become a business cliché to say that wealth is increasingly dependent on brainpower. The advanced economy could not run for thirty seconds without computers, and the new complexities of production, the integration of many diverse (and constantly changing) technologies, the de-massification of markets, continue to increase, by vast leaps, the amount and quality of information needed to make the system produce wealth. Furthermore, we are barely at the beginning of this “informationalization” process. Our best computers and CAD-CAM systems are still stone-ax primitive. Knowledge itself, therefore, turns out to be not only the source of the highest-quality of power, but also the most important ingredient of force and wealth. Put different, knowledge has gone from being an adjunct of money power and muscle power, to being their very essence. It is, in fact, the ultimate amplifier. This is the key to the powershift that lies ahead, and it explains why the battle for control of knowledge and the means of communication is heating up all over the World.
We have Caesar’s explanation of why Pompey’s allies stopped cooperating with him. “They regarded his [Pompey’s] prospects as hopeless and acted according to the common rule by which a man’s friends become his enemies in adversity.” Where a business is on the verge of bankruptcy and sells it accounts receivable to an outsider called a factor. This sale is made at a very substantial discount because once a manufacturer begins to go under, even one’s best customers begin refusing payment for merchandise, claiming defects in quality, failure to meet specifications, tardy delivery, or what-have-you. The great enforcer of morality in commerce is the continuing relationship, the belief that one will have to do business again with this customer, or this supplier, and when a failing company loses this automatic enforcer, not even a strong-arm factor is likely to find a substitute. Similarly, any member of Congress who is perceived as likely to be defeated in the next election may have some difficulty doing legislative business with colleagues on the usual basis of trust and good credit. There are many other examples of the importance of long-term interaction for the stability of cooperation. It is easier to maintain the norms of reciprocity in a stable small town or ethnic neighbourhood (which in modern times are affluent in some cases). Conversely, a visiting professor is likely to receive poor treatment by other faculty members compared to the way these same people treat their regular colleagues. A fascinating case of the development of cooperation based on continuing interaction occurred in the trench warfare of World War I. In the midst of this very brutal war there developed between the men facing each other what came to be called the “live-and-let live system.” The troops would attack each other when ordered to do so, but between large battles each side would deliberately avoid doing much hard to the other side—provided that the other side reciprocated.
The strategy was not necessarily TIT FOR TAT. Sometimes it was two for one. As a British officer wrote in his memoirs of the takeover of a new sector from the French: It was the French practice to “let sleeping dogs lie” when in a quiet sector…and of making this clear by retorting vigorously only when challenged. In one sector which we took over from them they explained to me that they had practically a code which the enemy well understood: they fired two shots for every one that came over, but never fired first. Such practices of tacit cooperation were quite illegal—but they were also endemic. For several years this system developed and elaborated itself despite the passions of the war and the best efforts of the generals to pursue a policy of constant attrition. The story is so rich in illuminating detail. Even without going further into the episode of trench warfare, the occurrence of a two-for-one strategy does suggest that one must be careful about drawing conclusions from a narrow focus on a pure TIT FOR TAT strategy. Just how broadly applicable was the proposition about TIT FOR TAT which said that it was collectively stable if and only if the future of the interaction was significantly important? The next proposition says that this result is very general indeed, and actually applies to any strategy which may be the first to cooperation. Any strategy which may be the first to cooperate can be collectively stable only when the risk is sufficiently large. The reason is that for a strategy to be collectively stable it must protect itself from invasion by any challenger, including the strategy which always defects. The interaction must last long enough for the gain from temptation to be nullified over future moves. This is the heart of the matter. The advantage of a nice rule in resisting invasion is that it attains to get the best results possible in a population consisting of a single type of strategy. It does this by getting the reward for mutual cooperation on each decision. However, both parties retaliate after a defection by the other. This observation leads to a general principle, since any collectively stable strategy which is willing to cooperate must somehow make it unprofitable for a challenger to try to exploit it. The general principle is that a nice rule must be provoked by the very first defection the other player, meaning that on some later move the strategy must have a finite chance of responding with a defection of its own.
For a nice strategy to be collectively stable, it must be provoked by the very first defection of the other party. The reason is simple enough. If a nice strategy were not provoked by a defection move, then it would not be collectively stable because it could be invaded by a rule which defected on one nonaggressive move. It is Nietzsche’s merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the questions “How is it possible to do what I am doing?” He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Dr. Freud says that men are motivated by desire for pleasures of the flesh and power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. However, if he can be a true scientist, id est, motivated by love of the truth, so can other humans, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if one is motivated by pleasures of the flesh or power, one is not a scientist, and one’s science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of thing that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners. The highly ethical economist who speaks only about gain, the public-spirited political scientist who sees only group interest, the physicist who sins petitions in favor of freedom while recognizing only unfreedom—mathematical law governing moved matter—in the Universe are symptomatic of the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the theoretical life, which has dogged the life of the mind since early modernity but has become particularly acute with cultural relativism. Nietzsche, in response to this difficulty, self-consciously made dangerous experiments with his own philosophy, treating its source as the will to power instead of the will to truth.
The underlying question (and an insoluble knot in philosophy) is that of the relation between substance and attribute; specifically, how does one tell the agent from the activity? Certain Indian text, exploring imagistically the relation between god and the World, ask how one can tell the dancer from the dance. In the visual arts the question has always seemed easier, since the painter or sculptor or photographer has traditionally made an object outside him- or herself. However, universalizing appropriation has dissolved such a conception, and in performance art, as in the dance, the agent and activity often seem inseparable. In the last seventy years various performances by artists (James Lee Bryars, Chris Burden, Linda Montano, Aaliyah Haughton, Britney Spears, Beyonce, and others) carried this category shift or semantic rotation to its limit by moving into galleries and living there for extended periods as performances. In this situation even the minutest details of everyday life are temporarily distanced and made strange—made art, that is—by the imposition on them of a new category overlay that alters the cognitive focus of both the performer and the beholder. Something parallel, though with fewer possibilities for irony, occurs when novices in ashrams are advised to regard their experiences, at every moment of the day, as sacred and special. That these creations by designation are linguistic, involving a willed change in the use of the word “art,” does not altogether rob them of mystery and effectiveness. It should be emphasized that category shift by forced designation is the basis of many magical procedures. In the Roman Catholic mass, for example, certain well-known objects—bread and “spirits”—are ritually designated as certain other objects—flesh and blood—which, in the manifest sense of every day experience, they clearly are not; and the initiate who accept the semantic rotation shifts his or her affection and sensibility accordingly. Art has often been thought of as exercising a sort of magic; around 1960, some artists adopted an actual magical procedure—basically a linguistic form of what Sir James Frazer called “sympathetic magic.” At that moment art entered an ambiguous realm from which it has not yet definitively emerged.
For the magical rite is already an appropriation of a piece of reality into a sheltered or bracketed zone of contemplation; when it is reapportioned into the realm of art, a double distancing occurs. Furthermore, the universalization of any category, or the complete submission of its ontology to the process of a metaphor, blurs or even erases its individual identity. To be everything is not to be anything in particular. In regard to the universal set, the Law of Identity has no function. The semantical coextensiveness of art and life means either that art has disappeared into life, melting into it everywhere like a new spark of indwelling meaning, or (and this departs at once into theistic metaphor) that life has dissolved into art. In short it means ultimately that the terms have become meaningless in relation to one another, since language operates not by sameness but by difference, and two sets with the same contents are the same. Seeing is believing. Like many an axiom, this one is literally true. Only since the ascendancy of the media has this been opened to question. Throughout the hundreds of thousands of generations of human existence, whatever we saw with our eyes was concrete and reliable. Experience was directly between us and the natural environment. Nonmediated. Nonprocessed. Not altered by other humans. If we saw a flock of birds flying southward, then these birds were definitely doing that We could believe in it. We might interpret this concrete information in various ways, perhaps misinterpret it, but there could never have been a question as to whether it was happening. The information itself, the birds and their flight, could not be doubted. This is the case with all sensory information. Whatever information the senses produce the brain trusts as inherently believable. If the sense could not be relied upon, then the World would have been an utterly confusing place. Humans would have been unable to make any sensible choices leading to survival. If there were no concretely true information, there could have been no sane functioning; the species could not have survived. This belief in sense perception is the foundation, the given, for human functioning. This is not to say there is no illusion.
In a desert environment, as we know, mirage can cause some to believe they are seeing things that are not there. However, the humans who are fooled in this way are the humans who are new to that environment. It is a problem of experience and interpretation. Their senses are not yet attuned to the new informational context. People who live for generations in such places learn to allow for illusions and do not actually “see” them in the way that visitors do. They learn to look at the edges of images, like the shadow spaces of Castaneda’s Don Juan, and to perceive a reality which is different from the visitor’s. In jungle environments, and among certain creatures, there is a camouflage. Animals use it to fool each other, including humans. Humans also use it, or devise image tricks, to fool animals and other humans. In this way images become processed images, deliberately altered, and may serve to fool an observer whose senses and interpretations are not sufficiently sharp. These are the classical exceptions which prove the point, because the basis of success for camouflage and illusion is that humans will believe what they see. In this sense, camouflage is a kind of sensory jujitsu that only confirms the original point; the senses are inherently believable. In the modern World, information rom the senses cannot be relied upon as before. We attempt to process artificial smells, tastes, sights and sounds as though they could reveal planetary reality, but we cannot make anything of them because we are no longer dealing directly with the planet. The environment itself has been reconstructed into an already abstracted, arbitrary form. Our sense are no longer reacting to information that comes directly from the source. They are reacting to processed information, the manifestation of human minds. Our information is confined in advance to the forms that other humans provide. Now, with electronic media, our sense are removed a step further from the source. The very images that we see can be altered and are. They are framed, ripped out of context, edited, re-created, sped up, slowed down and interrupted by other images. They arrive from a variety of places on the planet where we are not and were filmed at times which are not the present. What is more, many of the images are totally fictional. The things that we see are not happening and never happened. That is, they happened, but it is only the acting that happened, not the event.
Obviously, in the present age, we ought not rely on images to the same degree that our ancestors relied on the image of flying birds. Meanwhile, the images proceed inward as though they were the same as natural, unprocessed imagery. They move, walk, talk, and seem real. We assume they are real in the way images have always been real. We are unaware of any alteration. The change is difficult to absorb. What is required is a doubting process, a sensory cynicism that would have been profoundly inappropriate, even dangerous, for all previous human history. To assume that some sensory data could be eliminated totally and other sense information made unreliable would have left humans totally confused, lost in space, without knowledge of how to do anything, as though sensory environment itself had somehow gone mad (Solaris). The synapse would be broken. Contact lost. That is the present situation. We are only the fifth generation that has had to face the fact that huge proportions of the images we carry in our heads are not natural images which arrived as though they were connected to the planet. Like the Inuit transplanted to the city, or the Native American from the jungle who must suddenly deal with metallic birds, we do not have the ability to cope. Evolution has not arranged for us to allow for varying degrees of absorption and reliance on visual and aural information. There is nothing in the history of the species which assist our basic senses in understanding that imagery can be altered in time, speed or sequence, or that an images can arrives from a distance. Without training in sensory cynicism, we cannot possibly learn to deal with this. It will take several generations to let go of our genetically coses tendency to soak up all images as though they are 100 percent real. And think if we do manage to do that, what will we have? Since nothing can be directly experienced, we will have creatures who cannot believe in their senses and who take everything as it comes. Without the human bias toward belief, the media could not exist. What is more, because of the bias is so automatic and unnoticed, the media, all media, are in a position to exploit, the belief, to encourage you to believe in their questionable sensory information. This bias to believe has commercial value for the media since it allows them to keep your attention, as though it were south-flying birds you were seeing. The media, all media but particularly moving-image media, which present data so nearly natural, effectively convert our naïve and automatic trust in the reliability of images into their own authority.
California Scout Troop 9731 has hiked for six days, deep in the second-wilderness forests of the Pacific Northwest. “I bet we are the first people every to walk here,” says Leo, one of the youngest scouts. “Well, maybe you are right about walking,” says Scoutmaster Justin, “but look up ahead—what do you see, scouts?” Twenty paces ahead runs a strip of younger trees, stretching left and right until it vanishes among the trucks of the surrounding forest. “Hey, guys! Another old logging road!” shout Charlie, an older scout. Several scouts pull probes from their pockets and fit them to the ends of their walking sticks. Justin smiles: It has been ten years since a California troop found anything this way, but the kids keep trying. The scouts fan out, angling their path along the scar of the old road, poking at the ground and watching the readouts on the stick handles. Suddenly, unexpectedly, comes a call: “I have got a signal! Wow—I have got PCBs!” In a moment, grinning scouts are mapping and tracing the spill. Decades ago, a truck with a leaking load of chemical waste snuck down the old logging road, leaving a toxic trail. That trail leads them to a deep ravine, some rusted drums, and a nice wide path of invisible filth. The excitement is electrifying. Setting aside their maps and orienteering practice, they unseal a satellite locator to log the exact latitude and longitude of the site, then send a message that registers their cleanup claim on the ravine. The survey done, they head off again, eagerly planning a return trip to earn the now-rate Toxic Waste Cleanup Merit Badge. Today, tree farms are replacing wilderness. Tomorrow, the slow return to wilderness may begin, when nature need no longer be seen as a storehouse of natural resources to be plundered. However, there is very little that need be taken from nature to provide humans with wealth, and it is post-breakthrough technologies can remove from nature toxic residues of twentieth and twenty-first century mistakes.
The modern technocracies of the West have their roots in the medieval European World, from which there emerged three great inventions: The mechanical clock, which provided a new conception of time; the printing press with movable type, which attacked the epistemology of the oral tradition; and the telescope, which attacked the fundamental proposition of Judeo-Christian theology. Each of these was significant in creating a new relationship between tools and culture. However, since it is permissible to day that among faith, hope, and charity the last is most important, I shall venture to say that among the clock, the press, and the telescope the last is also the most important. To be more exact (since Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and to some extent Kepler did their work without benefit of the telescope), somewhat cruder instruments of observation than the telescope allowed men to see, measures, and speculate about the Heavens in ways that had not been possible before. However, the refinements of the telescope made their knowledge so precise that there followed a collapse, if one may say it this way, of the moral center of gravity in the West. That moral center had allowed people to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the Universe and therefore that humankind was so special interest to God. After Copernicus, Kepler, and especially Galileo, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in some hidden corner of the Universe, and this left the Western World to wonder if God had any interest in us at all. Although John Milton was only an infant when Galileo’s Messenger from the Stars was printedin 1610, he was able, years later, to describe the psychic desolation of an unfathomable Universe that Galileo’s telescopic vision thrust upon an unprepared theology. In Paradise Lost, Milton wrote: Before [his] eyes in sudden view appear the secrets of the horary Deep—a dark illimitable ocean, without bound, without dimension. Truly, a paradise lost. But it was not Galileo’s intention—neither was it Copernicus’ or Kepler’s—to so disarm their culture.
There were medieval men who, like Gutenberg before them, had no wish to damage the spiritual foundations of their World. Copernicus, for example, was a doctor of canon law, having been elected a canon of Frauenburg Cathedral. Although he never took a medial degree, he studied medicine, was private to his uncle, and among many people was better known as a physician than an astronomer. He published only scientific work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the first completed copy arriving from the printer only a few hours before he death, at the age of seventy, on May 24, 1543. He had delayed publishing his heliocentric theory for thirty years, largely because he believed it to be unsound, not because he feared retribution from the church. In fact, his book was not placed on the Index until seventy-three years after it was published, and then only for a short time. (Galileo’s trial did not take place until ninety years after Copernicus’ death.) Through His contact with them God draws them out of the abundance of living creatures in order to communicate with them. This “knowing” of His, this reaching out to touch and grasp, means that the human is lifted out, and it is as those who have been lifted out that they have intercourse with Him. God knows the ways of Humans. The way, the way of life of these humans is so created that at each of its stages they experience the divine contact afresh. And they experience the divine contact afresh. And they experience it as befits a real way, at each stage they experience it in the manner specifically appropriate to the stage. Their experience of the divine “knowing” is not like any experience of nature, it is a genuinely biographical experience, that is, what is experienced in this manner is experienced in the course of one’s own personal life, in destiny as it is lived through in each particular occasion. However cruel and contrary this destiny might appear when viewed apart from intercourse with God, when it is irradiated by His “knowing” it is “success,” just as every action of this human, one’s disappointments and even one’s failures, are success. O the happiness of the man who goes the way which is shown and “known” by God!
New Homes Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch Residence 3
Residence Three at Mills Station boasts approximately 2,400 square feet in this expansive two story home. There are three bedrooms, with the option for adding one more bedroom, two and a half bathrooms, and a two car garage plus workshop!
The charming front courtyard welcomes you home and the high ceilings and thoughtfully designed floor plan let you know that you’ve made the right choice with Cresleigh. You can fully embrace the indoor/outdoor lifestyle so organic to Northern California with a covered patio located right off kitchen with sliding glass doors on all three sides.
The den on the first floor provides a private office if you work from home or play room for the kids to be nearby while offering an option for a bedroom on the first floor.
The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The openness in the design allows the Great Room and kitchen to interact with each other seamlessly. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/
Thank you for your interest in this highly coveted community. While homes at Brighton Station are no longer available, its neighboring community, Mills Station, is still actively selling with two new communities coming soon.
We look forward to meeting you!
The Grounds Have their Share of Unexplained Mysteries
A mansion is not a mansion with its stately grounds, and Mrs. Winchester was just as attentive to the exterior of her estate as she was to the sprawling house. An avid gardener, she imported plans, flowers, trees, shrubs, and herbs from over 110 countries around the World. Mrs. Winchester employed eight to ten gardeners. Her head gardener was Mr. Nishiwara, who was responsible for seeing that the beautiful gardens, plus the tall hedge around the hose, were well maintained. The hedges were once so tall that only the top floor of the house was visible from the road! Mrs. Winchester loved to spend time in her gardens, and she had gazebos built where she could sit and enjoy her trees and flowers. It was a Saturday night, in January 1888, and Mrs. Winchester has, as usual, come home from the City early in the afternoon. It has been a black and foggy day, and the gas had been lighted in the streets and in the office where she worked from early morning. The fog was very bad at the time Mrs. Winchester returned home, and she congratulated herself on the fact that she had not to go out again that night. She sat with her puppy Zip in her sitting-room all the evening, with that comfortable feeling that she was able to relax until Monday morning, and that she need trouble about nothing outside the mansion. In due course, Zip went to bed, and then the maid Agnus reminded her of a letter that must be written and posted that night. Sufficient is it for Mrs. Winchester to say that the letter was to an elderly relative of some means who lived in Oakland, and who had taken great interest in her puppy Zip. The butler Martin remembered that the following day was the birthday of this relative, and that she should receive proper greeting by the Sunday morning post in the country town.
Frankly, Mrs. Winchester did not want the bother of it; but Agnus always knows best in these matters, and so Mrs. Winchester wrote the note and sealed it up. Mrs. Winchester had read nothing exciting during the evening—nothing to stir her imagination in any way. She stamped the letter and proceeded to the front door. Judge of her astonishment when, on throwing it open, she saw nothing but the gray wall of fog coming up to the very house; even the railings, not ten yards in the front of her grand estate, were blotted out completely. She called back into the house for the maid to come and look. “Don’t lose yourself, Mrs. Winchester,” she said, half laughing. “What a terrible night!” “I shall not lose myself,” Mrs. Winchester replied, laughing in turn. “The pillar-box is only at the end of the crescent; if I stick to the railing, I cannot possibly miss it. Do not wait here,” she added solicitously. “I will leave the door ajar, so that I can slip in easily when I come back. I have left my keys on my writing desk.” Angus went in, and Mrs. Winchester pulled the door close, and then stepped out boldly for the front gate. Imagine her standing there, just outside her own gate, and with her back to the crescent, knowing that she had to go to the left to find the pillar-box which was at the end of the crescent. There were thirteen Victorian cottages on her estate, so she knew she had to pass seven more before reaching the pillar-box. She also new that each cottage had an ornamental center-piece before she stepped away from the crescent at the end to reach the pillar box. That Mrs. Winchester knew would be something of an adventure, for the fog was the densest she had ever seen; she could only see the faint glow of her observation tower as she looked behind; the rest of her mansion was invisible.
Mrs. Winchester counted seven Victorian cottages, and then stood at the end of the last line of railings. She knew that the pillar-box was exactly opposite her. She took three quick steps, and literally cannoned into it. She was a little proud of her own judgment in getting it so nicely. Then she fumbled for the mouth of it, and dropped in her letter. All this may should very commonplace and ordinary. Mrs. Winchester is an observant woman, and she had noticed always that the mouth of the pillar-box faced directly along the crescent, thus standing at right angles to the road. At the moment that she had her right hand in that mouth, therefore, she argued that if she stood out at the stretch of her arm, she must be facing the crescent; Mrs. Winchester had but to move straight forward again to touch the friendly railings. She was putting that plan into operation, and had let go of the mouth of the pillar-box, when a man, coming hurriedly round the corner, ran straight into her, muttered a gruff apology, and was lost in the fog again in a moment. And in that accidental collision he had spun her round and tossed her aside—and she was lost! This is literally true. She took a step and found herself slipping of the kerbstone int the road; stumbled back again, and strove to find her way along by sticking to the edge of the pavement. After a minute or two, Mrs. Winchester was so sure of herself that she ventured to cross the pavement, and by great good luck touched in a moment one of those ornamental center-pieces of one of the gates—or so, at least, it seemed. She went on with renewed confidence until she saw certain bushes which topped the railings of one particular cottage, and then Mrs. Winchester knew that she was near her mansion’s front door. She pushed walked confidently, stepped quickly up the little path, and reached the door. She was right; the door yielded to her touch, and she went hurriedly in.
Mrs. Winchester had taken off her hat, and had held it towards the familiar hat-stand before she realized that it was not a familiar hat-stand at all; it was one she did not know. She looked round in some confusion, meaning to make good her escape without being observed, and yet wondering into what part of her mansion could she have come into, when she stopped stock still, with the hat held in her hand, listening. From a room near at hand, Mrs. Winchester heard the sound of a low, long-drawn moan, as from someone in pain. More than that, it was almost the wail of someone in acute terror. Now, Mrs. Winchester was a mild and caring soul, and her first instinct was to run. There was the door within a foot of her; she could open it again noiselessly and slip out, and leave whatever was moaning to its own trouble. Her next instinct, however, was a braver one; she might be able to help. Putting her hat on, and so leaving her hands free, she moved cautiously towards the sound, which was coming intermittently. She found that this wing of the house was unfamiliar to her; there was a 7-11 staircase built in the shape of a letter “Y,” which enabled the servants to quickly get to three different levels of the house. Then there were these stairs that lead to the ceiling, and there was also a cabinet that went straight through to the back thirty rooms of the mansion. When she went down the steps of the 7-11 staircase, slowly and cautiously, with her flesh creeping a little, the morning went on, and Mrs. Winchester was almost inclined to turn back with every step she took. However, at last, she got into the basement, and came to the door of the room from which the sound proceeded. She was in the very act of recklessly thrusting open the door when another sound broke upon her ears that held her still. The sound of someone singing in a raucous voice.
It was a sea song she remembered to have heard when she was a little girl in New Haven, Connecticut, and the words of which she had forgotten; it was something about “Boney was a warrior.” The door of the room was open a little way, and through the crack of it, Mrs. Winchester was able to peer in; and there she saw a sight that for a moment made her doubt her own eyes. She rubbed her eyes in a curious fashion and looked again, and this is what she saw: The room was in a neglected state, with strips of wallpaper hanging down from the walls and with a blackened ceiling. There was a table in the center of it, and at that table a man was seated, with a square black bottle and a glass before him, and a candle burning near his left hand. Mrs. Winchester could see the whole room now as plainly and as clearly as she saw it then. He was a man so villainously ugly that she had a thought that he was not a man at all, but some hideous thing out of a nightmare. He had very long arms—so long that they were stretched across the table, and his hands gripped the opposite edge of it; a great heavy head, crowed with a mass of red hair, was set low between enormously broad shoulders; his eyes, half closed, were high up and close together on either side of a nose that was scarcely a nose at all; the lips were thick and heavy. However, it was not the man that Mrs. Winchester looked at first, it was at two other figures in the room. These figures were seated on chairs facing the table at which the man was, and the strangeness of them lay in the fact that each was securely bound to the chair on which he and she sat, for it was a man and a woman. The man, who was quite young was not only bound, but gagged securely also; the woman was more lightly tied to her chair by the arms only, and her mouth was free. She was leaning back, with her eyes closed, and mingling with the raucous singing of the man at the table. Mrs. Winchester’s first impression was that the man at the table was some sort of unclean, bestial judge, and the others his prisoners.
He stopped his singing to pour some liquor from the square bottle into his glass and to drink it off; then he resumed his former attitude, with his fingers locked over the edge of the table. And now Mrs. Winchester noticed that while the woman, who was, by the way, quite young and very pretty, with a fair, dainty prettiness, still kept her eyes closed, the eyes of the bound man never left that dreadful figure seated at the other side of the table. Mrs. Winchester felt like she was on the eve of some awful calamity. She then unhesitatingly pronounced the entire assortment of people in the room as ghost, and condemned all the gathered treasures as the creations of petty intellect, which could not get out of the beaten track, but sought in the supernatural a reason for the explanation of every fact that seemed at variance with routine of daily experience. In her opinion the collection of people in this room had never seen at all in her day and generation, and must have been souls killed by the Winchester rifle ages ago; she did not yet believe her mansion was enchanted, however. To use her own language, “all those stories have been made by those people that set up overnight stirring out legends to entertain each other.” However, she must have known that she was in denial. For she was not insane and there were some kind of beings in this room. “Wouldn’t you like to speak, you dog?” said the red-haired man. “What would you give now to have the use of your limbs—the free wagging of your tongue? What would you say to me; what would you do to me?” The man who was bound could, of course, answer nothing. Mrs. Winchester saw his face flush and darken, and she guessed what his thoughts were. For herself, she was too fascinated by the scene before her to do anything else than peer through the crack and watch what was going one.
“Lovers—eh?” exclaimed the man at the table. “You thought I was unsuspicious; you thought I knew nothing and suspected nothing—didn’t you? While I was safely out of the way you could meet, the pair of you—day after day, and week after week; and this puppy could steal from me what was mine by right.” The woman opened her eyes for the first time and spoke. “It isn’t true,” she said, a sob breaking her voice. “It was all innocent. Martin and I have done no wrong.” “You lie!” thundered the man, brining his fist down upon the table with a blow that might have split it. “You’ve always lied—lied from the moment your father gave you to me—from the very hour I married you. You always hated me; I’ve seen you shudder many and many a time at the mere sight of me. Don’t I know it; haven’t I felt you stab me a thousand times more deeply than you could have stabbed me with any weapon? You devil! I’ve come at last to hate you as much as you hate me.” The woman turned her head slowly and looed at the younger man; a faint smile crossed her lips. In an instant the red-haired man had leapt to his feet, showing Mrs. Winchester astonishingly enough that he was a dwarf, with the shortest legs surely ever a man had. However, the bult of him was enormous, and Mrs. Winchester could guess, with a shudder, at his length. He caught up the glass, crossed the room, and flung the contents in the face of the man. “It’s a waste of good liquor—but that’s for the look she gave you. I wish there was some death more horrible than any invented yet that I could deal out to you,” he added, standing with the glass in his hand and glaring at his victim. “The death I mean for you is too easy.” He walked across to the fireplace in a curious purposeless way, and stirred a great fire that was blazing there. Then from a corner of the room he dragged with ease a great sack that appeared to contain wood and shavings; so much that Mrs. Winchester saw a rent in the side of it. As if in readiness for something, this he dropped down near the fire, and then went back to his seat, applying himself again to the drink that was on the table. And still Mrs. Winchester watched, as a woman may watch a play, wondering how it will end.
“I got the best of you tonight,” he said presently. “If I hadn’t some upon you from behind, you might have been too much for me; but I was ready and waiting. I’ve been watching longer than you think; I had everything mapped out clearly days ago. Tonight sees the end of all things for the pair of you; tomorrow sees me smiles away from here. You came in secret, you dog; you’ll go in secret.” “We have done no wrong,” said the woman again. “We loved each other years ago, when we were boy and girl; there was no sin in that.” “Bah!—I don’t believe a word of it. Don’t I know that your black heart you’ve compared the two of us every day of your life since first I saw you. His straightness for my crookedness; his sleek, black hair for my red; his prettiness for this face of mine”—he struck his own face relentlessly with one hand as he spoke—“that women shudder at. Don’t I know all that?” It was the strangest and most pitiful thing that the creature sitting there before his victims suddenly covered his face with his hands and groaned. If ever Mrs. Winchester had seen a soul in torment, she saw it then, and though she loathed him she could have wept for him. After a moment or two he dropped his hands and seized the bottle, and poured out the last drops into the glass and drank them off; then flung the bottle and glass crashing into the fireplace, as though there was an end to that business. And now, as he got down again from the chair, Mrs. Winchester saw the eyes of the woman open wide and follow his every movement with a dreadful look of terror in them. “I’ll kill you both—here in the place where you’ve met—and then I’ll seal up the house,” went on the dwarf. “I’ve planned it all. Look you last on each other, for tonight you die—and this house shall be your crypt!”
“I swear to you,” panted the woman eagerly, “by all I hold most holy and most dear, that if you let us go, we’ll never see each other again. For pity’s sake! —for the sake of Martin!” “For the sake of Martin!” sneered the dwarf. “That shows you in your true colors; that show who you are and what you are. There’s one poor satisfaction left to you; you’ll die together.” What held Mrs. Winchester then it would be impossible to say. She could only plead that in the dreadful thing that followed was a woman who sits at a play wondering what will happen next, and with never a thought in her of interfering. Mrs. Winchester’s in her anxiety has pressed the door a little to get a clearer view, so that she saw every movement of the dwarf. For herself, Mrs. Winchester had forgotten everything—in her own home, and my puppy zip, and the servants who slept in the mansion. It was as though she has stepped straight into a new World. Mrs. Winchester saw the dwarf advance towards the man in the chair, carrying his right hand stiff and straight beside him, gripping something s, she could not tell what it was that he held. Mrs. Winchester saw him come straight at her, and she saw the eyes of the woman in the opposite chair watching her as one fascinated. Then Mrs. Winchester saw two movements’ one with the left hand of the dwarf, when he struck the other man on the face; then with the right hand, when he raised something that gleamed n the light of the candle and brought it down with a sound that was new and horrible to her on the breast of the other man. And Mrs. Winchester saw the face of the man change, and start as it were into new life, and then fall as it were into death. And Mrs. Winchester saw his head drop forward, and his eyes were closed. Then, above it all, and yet seeming as a sort of dreadful chorus to it all, rang out the scream from the woman in the other chair. Mrs. Winchester did not think that the dwarf heard it; he had drawn back from what had been the living man, and was staring like one mad upon what he had done. And still piercing the air of the place rang the scream of the woman—not for her lover alone, but for herself.
That sound seemed at last to break in upon the senses of the dwarf and to call him partially to himself. Mrs. Winchester had watched him to the point where he draw himself together and crouched like a wild beast ready to spring, with that in his hand that dripped red, when, in some fashion, she flung herself round the partially open door and stumbled into the room. Mrs. Winchester thought she must have been a little made herself; otherwise, frail and commonplace creature that she was, she could not have battled with this madman. Mrs. Winchester came upon him from behind and gripped him, seizing him by the throat and by the head, and all the while shouting something to him quite unintelligible. The attack had been so sudden and so unexpected that she had him, in a sense, at her mercy. He could not know who had attacked him; he struggled madly, not alone to get away from her, but also to discover who she was. Mrs. Winchester struggled to keep his face away from her, gripped him by the neck and by the hair, and fought with him for what she knew then was her own life. And so struggling they stumbled at last horribly against that still figure bound in the chair and brought it over crashing with them to the floor. And then in a sudden Mrs. Winchester felt the dwarf inert in her hands, and knew that she had conquered him. What she must have looked like in that room, kneeling there, panting and struggling to get her breath, she could not tell; the whole business was so like a nightmare. She remembered seeing the dwarf lying there—huddled up and very still. She remembered that other figure, bound grotesquely in the chair and lying, still bound, upon its side; and she remembered, too, the woman, with her arms close fastened behind her, sitting there and sobbing wildly.
The dwarf must have been stunned; he lay there quite still, with the knife that was dreadfully red fallen from his hand, and lying beside him. When at last Mrs. Winchester staggered to her knees she saw that the girl was staring at her with a face that seemed to suggest that here, perhaps, was another ruffian come to kill her. “Who—who are you?” she asked in a frightened whisper. “A friend—one who stumbled in by accident,” Mrs. Winchester panted. “Look at the man that’s tied to the chair,” she whispered hoarsely. “He can’t be dead.” Mrs. Winchester knew that he was, but still she looked, as she bade her. Mrs. Winchester had no need to look twice; the poor fellow was quite dead. The blow had been strong and sure. On her knees beside him, Mrs. Winchester looked up and nodded slowly to her; there was no need for words. The young lady leaned back in her chair again and closed her eyes. “Set me free,” she said in a faint voice. Mrs. Winchester could not touch that knife that lay there; in a mechanical, methodical way she took from her waistcoat pocket the decent, respectable little bone handled penknife she carried always with her. With that Mrs. Winchester but the young lady’s bonds, nothing as she did so how cruelly they had cut into the white flesh; and after a moment or two she swung her arms listlessly against her sides and opened her eyes, and then, with an effort raised her hands and pressed them against her temples. “What will you do?” Mrs. Winchester asked, looking at her curiously. “I—I don’t know,” she said; and then, breaking into weeping, sobbed out: “Oh—dear God—that it should have come to this! What shall I do—what shall I do?” “You must get away,” Mrs. Winchester said, watching the dwarf, who was beginning to stie a little. “If he wakes, you know what will happen.”
“I know—I know,” she said; and got to her feet and began to move towards that bound figure still lying tied to the chair. However, at that Mrs. Winchester got before her, and with her hands against he shoulders held her back, and pleaded passionately to her that she should go, and leave the dead alone. She listened, with that strange look in her eyes of a child wakened from sleep and not clearly understanding; but she yielded to Mrs. Winchester, and stumbled under her guidance to the door. They had reached it, and Mrs. Winchester had opened it for her to pass out, when suddenly the dwarf twisted over on to his hands and knees, and then raised himself upright. He did not seem to realize for a moment what had happened; then he caught sight of the woman, and, with a snarl, crawled forward and gripped the hilt of the knife. At that she pushed suddenly past Mrs. Winchester and fled like a hare up the stairs. Mrs. Winchester heard the swift passage of her footsteps in the little hall of the house—then the slamming of the door-to-nowhere. And now Mrs. Winchester had to look to herself, for she saw in the eyes of the man that he would not let this witness escape if he could catch him. Mrs. Winchester had managed to get through the door by the time that he had got to his feet, and in a dazed fashion was stumbling toward her, knife in hand. With a sudden swoop he reached the table and blew out the candle, and at the same moment Mrs. Winchester ran up the stairs, and in the darkness stumbled along the hall and fumbled with the catch of the door. By great good fortune, Mrs. Winchester got the door open, and literally fell out into the fog. She could not see him as he tore after her; in a faintness Mrs. Winchester had fallen to her knees, and she heard him, as he raced past her, panting heavily. Then the fog swallowed him up, and she knelt there on the farm alone, shaking from head to foot.
Mrs. Winchester had, of course, no means of exactly in what part of her mansion she had had her adventure; she could only judge roughly that it must be about the middle of the crescent. She started along again, in the right direction, as she hoped, and thought to find the front door to her mansion; missed the railings, after going what seemed to be an interminable distance, and came up hard against a pillar-box. Scarcely knowing what she did, she set her right hand in the mouth of it, and performed the same maneuver she had done before; advanced three paces, and touched railings again. Stumbling along these, she came blindly what she thought was her front door, walked up the path, and pushed open the door that yielded; and there, with the face of her maid looking at her in alarm and wonderment, Mrs. Winchester feel in a dead faint at her feet. It has to be recorded that Mrs. Winchester never found that room again. She knew every square inch of her mansion. Over and over again, in clear weather, Mrs. Winchester has always around in her mansion, and had closed her eyes, and tried to remember what steps she took to get to that particular room that night, after a stranger had cannoned into her and twisted her round; but all in vain. Whether in some part of the house lies the body of a man who was foully murdered on that particular night; maybe in a hidden room the crime was committed; or perhaps, in some strange supernatural fashion, she saw that night a deed committed that had been committed long before, she shall never know. That it is no mere figment of the imagination, and that something really happened that night, is proved by one fact. Her maid, in raising Mrs. Winchester from the floor that night when she fell at her feet, found her fingers locked closed upon something, and, forcing them open, disclosed what it was. A tuft of red hair!
Such episodes may appear utterly absurd and pure superstition to people in countries comparatively free of black magic, but instead they should be warnings of the power of Satan and demons where occult literature lures readers into illicit magic. Magic as the release of special power by satanic and demon forces of evil in its character and effects. While divine help and miracles produce new strength and positive results, magic shifts the burden to another area. Small relief in one area must be paid for by terrible burdens in another. The principle of compensation prevails. The price exacted is always found to be much greater than the amount of help received. Satan drives a hard bargain and grossly cheats his victims. Usually violence, suicide, and insanity will run through a whole family line, where the magical arts have been cultivated and practiced. Such tragic events often involve as many as four generations. Many occultists and magic workers, especially those who have cultivated the black arts and signed themselves over to the devil in their own blood, die horrible deaths. When a ready successor is not provided to carry on the nefarious practice, this is especially true. The psychic bondage and oppression that traffickers in occultism themselves suffer, as well as their dupes, is horrifying to contemplate. Demon possession is represented as a vivid symbol of the prevalence of evil in the World. Other critics attempt to dismiss demon possession with theories of accommodation or hallucination. However, this view fails to meet the issue. Nor can present-day parapsychologist and psychiatrists, who refuse to recognize evil supernaturalism in the phenomenon of demon possession, either explain it or deal adequately with it. Laws defining witchcraft as having league with the Devil and prescribing the death penalty for such offenders cropped up in the colonies as early as 1636 in Plymouth. Other colonies soon followed suit—Connecticut in 1642 and Rhode Island in 1647.
The first executions took place in Boston in 1648 and in Hartford, Connecticut, in that same year. The executions were carried out by hanging, in contrast to the European practice of burning witches, which probably stemmed from the widespread fear among the European peasantry of vampire, the dead who returned from their graves to suck the blood from the living. The vampire myths never really took root in America, so the necessity of destroying the bodies of the witches was not deemed urgent. Throughout the 1650s, there appeared prosecution and attempted prosecutions in America, but these cases were infrequent, and all of them were based on the fear of maleficum, the witch’s working of evil, the accusations coming from frustrated and jealous neighbors. Few confessions were recorded in the early cases, and they did not seem to have much real validity. The few that did confess mentioned having dealings with Satan, but for the most part these admissions were confused and incoherent, and the details of the accounts differed greatly from the confessions of the witches in Europe. For example, in 1699, in Connecticut, a woman named Greensmith confessed to trafficking with the Devil, but made no mention of all-important Covenant, or pact. She further stated that the Devil had appeared to her in the form of a deer (not a goat) and that she had attended meetings at a place not far from her house. The mention of “meetings” occurred in some early confession, but the word “Sabbat” or “Sabbath,” commonly used by European witches, did not come up until later, apparently at the suggestion of the Salem judges. Some believe that Satan has a soul and a character. He is not just this futile entity but someone you can see many aspects to. Some people do not see Satan as this guy with horns who is evil, they see Him as the first rebel. Then one can see why He is so attractive to many in the Victorian ages and the young people. He is someone who is standing up to the greatest power in the Universe. “If that ‘evil’ is of a rebellious nature,” says Glenn Danzig, “then I guess, in Christian terms, that evil is the Satan in you. I don’t buy that. I believe in honesty, standing up for yourself. That’s my ‘good.’”
Thousands of people base their hopes on the statements of spiritistic practitioners and subsequently become dependent upon the advice they receive from the “other side.” There are quite a number of people who has suffered serious psychic disturbances through the misuse of such practices. Their personalities have been split and they have been utterly confused by the spirits on which they have called. People therefore who try to discover what life after death is like through spiritism and superstition may be in danger of falling prey to the dark and hidden side of their own minds and soul. If you look at the early tracts of The Christian Bible, there is really not much about Satan in there anyway. Christian religions have tried to overblow and create a whole legend around Satan which is not true to the actual scriptures we have. If you desire, you must first make yourself strong so you can help others. You should only help people who want help, a lot of times people do not really want your help. You tell people what has to be done to change their lives, they will not listen. If Satan were corporeal, He would not be something repulsive, He would be something seductive. He would want to win you over and gain your trust, and of course being repulsive or disgusting would not be the way to go. One would imagine this would be a seductive, beautiful creature. In the Gnostic account of the fall of the angels, the angels were suppsed to be watching over this flock of humans and all of a sudden, they are perpetrating acts of pleasures of the flesh with them. Eventually this created the Cyclops, the Minotaur, things of this nature. There are so many accounts of the fall of the angels, it is like a fantasy tale that you would like to believe actually happened. We, in this circle, conjure and cite this spirit Fatenovenin, with all his adherents, to appear here in this spot, to fulfill our desires, in the name of three holy Angels, Schomajen Sheziem, Roknion Averam, Kandile, Brachat Chaijdalic, Ladabas, Labul, Rargil, Bencul, in the name of God. Amen!
Winchester Mystery House
Mrs. Winchester’s estate was a little town within itself. The grounds have their share of unexplained mysteries. Mrs. Winchester outfitted her home with the finest stained glass doors, windows, and wallpaper that money could buy during her time. She had everything she needed: plumber’s shops, carpenter’s workshops, her own water and electrical supplies, and complete sewer and drainage systems. Mrs. Winchester even had her own gas manufacturing plant. It produced carbide gas by adding a small amount of water to a drum containing calcium carbide. The resulting gas was pressed through the gas lines to the house by a large piston and cylinder. The gas lights in the house were then lit by electromechanial strikers that created a spark to light each lamp.
Come see her estate, in person, for yourself this weekend! Please Click the link below for tickets and more information.
Better Call the Beast with the Red Cheeks
Antibiotics, aircraft, satellites, nuclear weapons, television, mass production, computers, a global petroleum economy—all the familiar revolutions of twentieth-century technology, with their growing consequences for human life and the Earth itself, have emerged within living memory. These revolutions have been enormous, yet the next few decades promise more. Twentieth-century technology is headed for the junk heap, or perhaps the recycling bins. It has changed life; its replacement will change life again, but differently. There are important consequences for the environment, medicine, warfare, industry, society, and life on Earth. Pollution, physical disease, and material poverty all stem from poor control of the structure of matter. Strip mines, clear-cutting, refineries, paper mills, and oil wells are some of the revolutionary twentieth-century technologies that will be replaced. Dental drills and toxic chemotherapies are others. As always, there is both promise of benefit and danger of abuse. As has become routine, the United State of America is attempting to look ahead, but some of our leaders seem to be intentionally trying to make us slip behind. As never before, foresight is both vital and possible. There is a view of the future that does not fit with the view in the newspaper. Think of it as an alternative, a turn in the road of future history that leads to a different World. In that World, cancer follows polio, petroleum follows whale oil, and industrial technology follows chipped flint—all healed or replaced. Old problems vanish, new problems appear: down the road are many alternative Worlds, some fit to live in, some not. We aim to survey this road and the alternatives, because to arrive at a World fit to live in, we will all need a better view of the open paths.
Technology-as-we-know-it is a product of industry, of manufacturing and chemical engineering. Industry-as-we-know-it takes things from nature—ore from mountains, trees from forests—and coerces them into forms that someone considers useful. Trees become lumber, then houses. Mountains become rubble, then molten iron, then steel, then cars. Sand becomes a purified gas, then silicon, then chips. And so it goes. Each process is crude, based on cutting, stirring, baking, spraying, etching, grinding, and the like. Trees, though, are not crude: To make wood and leaves, they neither cut, grind, stir, bake, spray, etch, nor grind. Instead, they gather solar energy using molecular electronic devices, the photosynthetic reaction centers of chloroplasts. They use that energy to drive molecular machines—active devices with moving parts of precise, molecular structure—which process carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and molecular building blocks. They use other molecular machines to join these molecular building blocks to form roots, trunks, branches, twigs, solar collectors, and more molecular machinery. Every tree makes leaves, and each leafy is more sophisticated than a spacecraft, more finely patterned than the latest chip from Silicon Valley. They do all this without noise, heat, toxic fumes, or human labor, and they consume pollutants as they go. Viewed this way, trees are high technology. Chips and rockets are not. Trees give a hint of what molecular nanotechnology will be like, but nanotechnology will not be biotechnology because it will not rely on altering life.
Biotechnology is a further state in the domestication of living things. Like selective breeding, it reshapes the genetic heritage of a species to produce varieties more useful to people. Unlike selective breeding, it inserts new genes. Like biotechnology—or ordinary trees—molecular nanotechnology will use molecular machinery, but unlike biotechnology, it will not rely on genetic meddling. It will be not an extension of biotechnology, but an alternative or replacement. Molecular nanotechnology could have been conceived and analyzed—though not built—based on scientific knowledge available forty years ago. Even today, as development accelerates, understanding grows slowly because molecular nanotechnology merges fields that have been strangers: the molecular sciences, working at the threshold of the quantum realm, and mechanical engineering, still mined in the grease and crudity of conventional technology. Nanotechnology will be a technology of new molecular machines, of gears and shafts and bearings that move and work with parts shaped in accord with the wave of equations at the foundation of natural law. Mechanical engineers do not design molecules. Molecular scientist seldom design machines. Yet a new field will grow—is growing today—in the gap between. That field will replace both chemistry as we know it and mechanical engineering as we know it. And what is manufacturing today, or modern technology itself, but a patchwork of crude chemistry and crude machines? Picture a World of molecular machines and molecular manufacturing. Imagine an automated factory, full of conveyor belts, computers, rollers, stampers, and swing robot arms.
Now think about something like that factory, but a million times smaller and working a million times faster, with parts and workpieces of molecular size. In this factory, a “pollutant” would be a loose molecule, like a ricocheting bolt or washer, and loose molecules are not tolerated. In many ways, the factory is utterly unlike a living cell: not fluid, flexible, adaptable, and fertile, but rigid, preprogrammed and specialized. And yet for all of that, this microscopic molecular factory emulates life in its clean, precise molecular construction. Advances molecular manufacturing will be able to make almost anything. Unlike crude mechanical and chemical technologies, molecular manufacturing will work from the bottom up, assembling intricate products from the molecular building blocks that underlie everything in the physical World. Nanotechnology will bring new capabilities, giving us new ways to make things, heal our bodies, and care for the environment. It will also bring unwelcome advances in weaponry and give us yet more ways to foul up the World on an enormous scale. It will not automatically solve our problems: even powerful technologies merely give us more power. As usual, if we hope to harness new developments to good ends, we have a lot of work ahead of us, and a lot of hard decisions to make. The main reason to pay attention to nanotechnology now, before it exists, is to get a head start on understanding it and what to do about it. Having defined tool-using cultures, two points we must avoid to not excessively oversimplify the matter of evolution need to be discussed. First, the quantity of technologies available to a tool-using culture is not its defining characteristic. Even a superficial study of the Roman Empire, for example, reveals the extent to which it relied on roads, bridges, aqueducts, tunnels, and sewers for both its economic vitality and its military conquests.
Or, take it to another example, we know that, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, Europe underwent a technological boom: medieval man was surrounded by machines. One may even go as far as Lynn White, Jr., who said that the Middle Ages gave up for the first time in history, “a complex civilization which rested not on the backs of sweating slaves or coolies but primarily on non-human power.” Tool-using cultures, in other words, may be both ingenious and productive in solving problems of the physical environment. Windmills were invented in the late twelfth century. Eyeglasses for nearsightedness appeared in Italy in 1280. The invention in the eleventh century of rigid padded collars to rest on the shoulder blades of horses solved the problem of how to increase the pulling power of horses without decreasing their ability to breathe. In fact, as early as the ninth century in Europe, horseshoes were invented, and someone figured out that, when horses are hitched, one behind the other, their pulling power is enormously amplified. Corn mills, paper mills, and fulfilling mills were part of medieval culture, as were bridges, castles, and cathedrals, The famous spire of Strasbourg Cathedral built in the thirteenth century, rose to a height of 466 feet, the equivalent of a forty-story skyscraper. And, to go further back in time one must not fail to mention the remarkable engineering achievements of Stonehenge and the Pyramids (whose construction, Lewis Mumford insisted, signifies the first example of a megamachine in action). Given the fact, we must conclude that tool-using cultures are not necessarily impoverished technologically, and may even be surprisingly sophisticated.
Of course some tool-using cultures were (and still are) technologically primitive, and some have even displayed a contempt for crafts and machinery. The Golden Age of Greece, for example, produced no important technical inventions and could not even devise ways of using horsepower efficiently. Both Plato and Aristotle scorned the “base mechanic arts,” probably in the belief that nobility of mind was not enhanced by efforts to increase efficiency or productivity. Efficiency and productivity were problems for slaves, not philosophers. We find a somewhat similar view in the Bible, which is the longest and most detailed account of an ancient tool-using culture we have. In Deuteronomy, no less an authority than God Himself says, “Cursed be the man who makes a graven or molten image, and abomination to the Lord, a thing made by the hands of a craftsman, and set it up in secret.” Tool-using cultures, then, may have many tools or few, many be enthusiastic about tools or contemptuous. The name “tool-using culture” derives from the relationship in a given culture between tools and the belief system or ideology. The tools are not intruders. They are integrated into the culture in ways that do not pose significant contradictions to its World-view. If we take the European Middle Ages as an example of a tool-using culture, we find a very high degree of integration between its tools and its World-view. Medieval theologians developed an elaborate and systematic description of the relation of man to God, man, man to nature, man to man, and man to his tools. Their theology took as a first and last principle that all knowledge and goodness come from God, and that therefore all human enterprise must be directed toward the service of God. Theology, not technology, provided people with authorization for what to do or think. Perhaps this is why Leonardo da Vinci kept his design of submarine secret, believing that it was too harmful a tool to unleash, that it would not gain favor in God’s eyes.
A revolutionary new system for creating wealth cannot spread without triggering personal, political, and international conflict. Change the way wealth is made and you immediately collide with all the entrenched interests whose power arose from the prior wealth-system. Bitter conflicts erupt as each side fights for control of the future. It is this conflict, spreading around the World today, that helps explain the present power shake-up. To anticipate what might lie ahead for us, therefore, it is helpful to glance briefly backward at the last such global conflict. Three hundred years ago the industrial revolution also brought a new system of wealth creation into being. Smokestacks speared the skies where fields once were cultivated. Factories proliferated. These “dark Satanic mills” brought with them a totally new way of life—and a new system of power. Peasants freed from near-servitude on the land turned into urban workers subordinated to private or public employers. With this change came changes in power relations in the home as well. Agrarian families, several generations under a single roof, all ruled by a bearded patriarch, gave way to stripped-down nuclear families from which the elderly were soon extruded or reduced in prestige and influence. The family itself, as an institution lost much of its social power as many of its functions were transferred to other institutions—education to the school, for example. Sooner or later, too, wherever steam engines and smokestacks multiplied, vast political changes followed. Monarchies collapsed or shriveled into tourist attractions. New political forms were introduced.
If they were clever and farsighted enough, rural landowners, once dominant in their regions, moved into the cities to ride the wave of industrial expansion, their sons becoming stockbrokers or captains of industry. Most of the landed gentry who clung to their rural way of life wound up as shabby gentility, their mansions eventually turned into museums or into money-raising lion parks. Against their fading power, however, new elites arose: corporate chieftains, bureaucrats, media moguls. Mass production, mass distribution, mass education, and mass communication were accompanied by mass democracy, or dictatorships claiming to be democratic. These internal changes were matched by gigantic shifts in global power, too, as the industrialized nations colonized, conquered, or dominated much of the rest of the World, creating a hierarchy of World power that still exists in some regions. The appearance of a new system for creating wealth undermined every pillar of the old power system, ultimately transforming family life, business, politics, the nation-state, and the structure of the global power itself. Those who fought for control of the future made use of violence, wealth, and knowledge. Today a similar, though far more accelerated, upheaval has started. The changes we have recently seen in business, the economy, politics, and at the global level are only the first skirmishes of far bigger power struggles to come. For we stand at the edge of the deepest powershift in human history. The real message that America sends, ore important than its ideological and commercial rhetoric, is Gospel of Change. It is the dominant message now being delivered to billions of people in rigid societies around the World: Change is possible—and not just in some blue-sky future but soon, in your own lifetime or that of your child.
This gospel does not specify whether change will be good or bad. That will be interpreted differently and fought over. However, the very idea that change is possible is still revolutionary for many populations on this planet—especially for the World’s poorest young people. And, as innumerable examples show, when people regard change as impossible, they seldom take the future in their hands. If the emergent generation is inspired by the Gospel of Change, the changes to come will not necessarily please America and Americans. In the Middle East, it could take the form of popularly elected theocratic-fascist regimes duly voted into power. In Africa and Latin America, it might take completely different forms. The Gospel of Change is most dangerous to established institutions and order precisely because it is not inherently right-wing or left-wing, democratic or authoritarian. Its implicit meta-message is that all our societies, all out current ways of life and even our beliefs are inherently temporary. It is not the message of Adam Smith or Karl Marx. It is not the message of the French or American revolutionists. It is the message of that most revolutionary of all philosophers, Heraclitus—whose best-know statement still sums it up: “You cannot step in the same river twice, because by the second step it will already have changed.” All is process. All is change. Heraclitus implies that all ideologies, and all religions, like all institutions, are historically transient. That is the real message emanating from the United States of America. And that is what, at the deepest level, disturbs the dreams—and triggers the nightmares—of billions of human beings. The United States of America cannot help but transmit that message because it itself exemplifies change. Many countries today have begun the transition from an industrial wealth system and civilization to a knowledge-based wealth system—without appreciating that a new wealth system is impossible without a correspondingly new way of life. America is on the razor edge of that all-encompassing change.
That is why even the present and former allies are increasingly troubled by America’s role in the World. Even as they, too, undergo significant transformation—the recent enlargement of European Union and the rejection by some countries of its proposed constitution, for example—their overall pace is slower and less revolutionary. As they struggled to build their own future, they see the United States of American pulling away, speeding into the unknown—and pulling other cultures and countries in its turbulent wake. However, if everything is in fact temporary, so is American power. The United States of American has become famous for its obsession with the next year’s elections and the next quarter’s profits, and the future be damned. Nonetheless, we are writing for normal human beings who feel that the future matters—ten, twenty, perhaps even thirty years from now—for people who care enough to try to shift the odds for the better. Making wise choices with an eye to the future requires a realistic picture of what the future can hold. What if most pictures of the future today are based on the wrong assumptions? Here are a few of today’s common assumption, some are so familiar that they are seldom stated: Industrial development is the only alternative to poverty, many people must work in factories, greater wealth means greater resource consumption, logging, mining, and fossil-fuel burning must continue, manufacturing means pollution, Third World development would doom the environment. These assumptions all depend on a more basic assumption: Industry as we know it cannot be replaced. Some further assumptions: The twenty-first century will basically bring more of the same. Today’s economic trends will define tomorrow’s problems. Spaceflight will never be affordable for most people. Forests will never grow beyond Earth. More advanced medicine will always be more expensive. Even highly advanced medicine will not be able to keep the people healthy. Solar energy will never become really inexpensive. Toxic wastes will never be gathered and eliminated. Developed land will never be returned to wilderness. There will never be weapons worse than nuclear missiles. Pollution and resource depletion will eventually bring war of collapse. These, too, depend on a more basic assumption: Technology as we know it will never be replaced.
These commonplace assumptions paint a future full of terrible dilemmas, and the notion of that a technological change will let us escape from them smacks of the idea that some technological fix can save the industrial system. The prospect, though, is quite different: the industrial system will not be fixed, it will be junked and recycled. The prospect is not more industrial wealth ripped from the flesh of the Earth, but green wealth unfolding from processes as clean as a growing tree. Today, our industrial technologies force us to choose better quality or lower costs or greater safety or cleaner environment. Molecular manufacturing, however, can be used to improve quality and lower costs and increase safety and clean the environment. The coming revolutions in technology will transcend many of the old, familiar dilemmas. And yes, they will bring fresh, equally terrible dilemmas. Molecular nanotechnology will bring thorough and inexpensive control of the structure of matter. We need to understand the molecular nanotechnology in order to understand the future capabilities of the human race. This will help us see the challenges ahead, and help us plan how best to conserve values, traditions, and ecosystems through effective policies and institutions. Likewise, it can help us see what today’s events mean, including business opportunities and possibilities for action. We need a vision of where technology is leading because technology is part of what human beings are, and will affect what we and our societies can become. The consequences of the coming revolutions will depend on human actions. As always, new abilities will create new possibilities both for good and for ill. However, our political and economic pressures can be harnessed to achieve good ends. Still, the answers will not be satisfactory, but they are at least a beginning.
Society is made up of rules. Exactly what is meant by “uncalled for” is not precisely determined. However, some people deliberately disobey the rules to see what they can get away with. TRANQUILIZER illustrates a mor subtle way of taking advantage of many rules, and hence a more subtle challenge. It first seeks to establish a mutually rewarding relationship with another individual, and only then does it cautiously try to see if it will be allowed to get away with something. By waiting until a pattern of mutual cooperation has been developed, it hopes to lull the other side into being forgiving of occasional defections. If the other individua continues to cooperate, the defections become more frequent, but still tries to avoid pressing one’s luck too far. What it takes to do well with challenging rules like these is to be ready to retaliate after an “uncalled for” defection. So while it pays to be nice, it also pays to be retaliatory. What seems to happen is an interesting interaction between people. If others are going to be nice and forgiving, it pays to tr to take advantage of them. The reason is that in trying to exploit other rules, they often eventually get punished enough to make the whole situation less rewarding for both parties than pure mutual cooperation would have been. At first, poor decisions and good decisions, in anything such as a business or in Congress, are represented in equal proportions. However, as time passes, the poorer ones begin to dropout and the good ones thrive. Success breeds more success, provided that the success derives from interactions with other successful rules. If, on the other hand, a decision rule’s success derives from its ability to exploit other rules, then as these exploited rules die out, the exploiter’s base of support becomes eroded and the exploiter suffers a similar fate.
We have to remember that the United State of America and most corporations are, in the long run, are still relatively new. By the two hundredth generation or so, things began to take a noticeable turn. Less successful programs usually become extinct, which means that there are fewer and fewer prey for them to exploit. Soon a predator cannot keep up with the successful nice rules, and by the one thousandth generation, predators become extinct as do the exploitive rules on which they preyed. This is why older societies, like the Native Americans, were able to live in harmony and protect the land. They were much older than the “New World,” and were in harmony with their people and environment. The ecological analysis shows that doing well with rules that do not score well themselves is eventually a self-defeating process. Not being nice may look promising at first, but in the long run it can destroy the very environment it needs for its own success. By the one-thousandth generation, a society is usually most successful and still growing at a faster rate than any other rule. I supposed this is why some people do not like immigration very much. The want to acclimate with the people who are already here, establish peace and prosperity before adding new people to the melting pot. Immigration does bring a lot of knowledge and technology, but it also brings some disharmony and instability with it. However, parts of its success might be that other rules anticipate its presence and are designed to do well with it. And any rule that tries to take advantage of the situation, will only hurt itself because it will upset society. For that reason, a country benefits from its own nonexploitability because mutual feelings are salient. Aggression is easy to recognize. And once recognized, mutual nonexploitability is easy to appreciate. People generally like to live in peace in the communities.
While exploitation is occasionally fruitful, over a wide range of environments the problems with trying to exploit others are manifold. In the first place, if a rule defects to see what it can get away with, it risks retaliation from the rules that are provocable. In the second place, once mutual recriminations set it, it can be difficult to extract oneself. Being able to exploit the exploitable without paying too high a cost cannot always be accomplished. Generally, for a robust success of a nation or corporation and even a family is that one needs a combination of being nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear. Its niceness prevents it from getting into unnecessary trouble. Its retaliation discourages the other side from persisting whenever defection is tried. Its forgiveness helps restore mutual cooperation. And its clarity makes it intelligible to other individuals, thereby eliciting long-term cooperation. The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil. To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is because we love it. It is our decision to esteem that makes something estimable. Man is the esteeming being, the one capable of reverence and self-contempt, “the beast with the red cheeks.” Nietzsche claimed to have seen that the object of men’s reverence in no sense compel that reverence; frequently the objects do not even exist. Their qualities are projections of what is most powerful in man and serve to satisfy his strongest needs or desires. Good and evil are what make it possible for men to live and act. The character of their judgments of good and evil shows that they are. To put it simply, Nietzsche says that modern man is losing, or has lost, the capacity to value, and therewith his humanity. Self-satisfaction, the desire to be adjusted, the comfortable solution to his problems, the whole program of the welfare state, are the signs of the incapacity to look up toward the Heaven of man’s possible perfection or self-overcoming.
However, the surest sign is the way we use the word “value,” and in this Nietzsche not only diagnosed the disease but exacerbated it. He intended to point out to men the danger they are in, the awesome task they face of protecting and enhancing humanity. If they believed God ss he understood it, men in our current decrepitude could take it easy because nature or history provides value. Such belief was salutary as long as the objectified creations of man were still noble and vital. However, in the present exhaustion of the old values, men must be brought to the abyss, terrified by their danger and nauseated by what could become of them, in order to make them aware of their responsibility for their fate. They must turn within themselves and reconstitute the conditions of their creativity in order to generate values. The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instruments of the last manhood—the skilled bow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict. Chaos, the war of opposites, is, as we know from the Christian Bible, the condition of creativity, which must be mastered by the creator. The self must also bring forth arrows out of its longing. Bow and arrow, both belonging to man, can shoot a start into the Heavens to guide man. Stripping away the illusions about values was required, so Nietzsche thought, by our situation, to disenchant all misleading hopes of comfort or consolation, thereby to fill the few creators with awe and the awareness that everything depends on them.
Nihilism is a dangerous but a necessary and a possibly salutary stage in human history. In it man faces his true situation. It can break him, reduce him to despair and spiritual or bodily suicide. However, it can hearten him to a reconstruction of the World of meaning. Nietzsche’s works are a glorious exhibition of the soul a man who might, if anybody can, be called creative. They constitute the profoundest statement about creativity, by a man who had a burning need to understand it. The development of the conceptual and performance genres changed the rules of art till it became virtually unrecognizable to those who had thought that it was theirs. The art activity flowed into the darkness beyond its traditional boundaries and explored areas that were previously as unmapped and mysterious as the other side of the Moon. In recent years a tendency has been underway to close the book on those investigations, to contract again around the commodifiable aesthetic object, and to forget the sometimes frightening visions of other side. Yet it if one opens the book—and it will not go away—the strange record is still there, like the fragmentary journals of explorers in new lands, filled with apparently unanswerable questions. When Piero Manzoni, in 1959, canned his feces and put in on sale in an art gallery for its weight in gold; when Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm and crucified to the roof of a Volkwagen (in 1971 and 1974 respectively); when two American performance artists, in separate events, had pleasures of the flesh with corpses—how did such activities come to be called art? In fact the case at hand is not unique. Similar movements have occurred occasionally in cultural history when the necessary conditions were in place. Perhaps the most striking parallel is the development, in the Cynic school of Greek philosophy, of “performance philosophy” that parallels the gestures of performance art in many respects. If this material is approached with sympathy and with a broad enough cultural perspective it will reveal its inner seriousness and meaning.
One of the necessary conditions for activities of this type is the willingness to manipulate linguistic categories at will. This willingness arises from a nominalist view of language which holds that words lack fixed ontological essences that are their meanings; meanings, rather, are seen to be created by convention alone, arbitrary, and hence manipulable. Ferdinand de Saussure pointed toward this with his perception of the arbitrariness of the link between signifier and gained. Even more, Ludwig Wittgenstein, by dissolving fixed meaning into the free-for-all of usage, demonstrated a culture’s ability to alter its language games by rotations of reshapings of the semantic field. By manipulating semantic categories, by dissolving their boundaries selectively and allowing the contents of one to flow into another, shifts in cultural focus can be forced through language’s control of affection and attitude. In the extreme instances, a certain category can be declared universal, coextensive with experience, its boundaries being utterly dissolved until its content melts into awareness itself. This universalization of a single category has at different times taken place in the areas of religion, philosophy, and, in our time, art. A second necessary condition is a culture that is hurtling through shifts in awareness so rapidly that, like the tragic hero in Sophocles just before the fall, it becomes giddy with prospects of new accomplishments hardly describable in known terms. At such moments the boundaries of things seem outworn; the contents flow into and around one another dizzyingly. In a realm like that, the art some twenty-five years ago, feels its inherited boundaries to be antiquated and ineffective, a sudden overflow in all directions can occur. Television, some might argue, is another form of art, and it is the most important single source of images in the World today. If people are ingesting television images at the rate of four hours a day, then it is clear that whatever uses people have for the images they carry in their heads, television is now the source.
When one is watching television all categories of one’s own image-making capacities go dormant, submerged in the television image. TV effectively intervenes between one and one’s personal images, substituting itself. When one is watching TV, one is not daydreaming, or reading, or looking out the window at the World. One has opened one’s mind, and someone else’s daydreams have entered. The images come from distant places one has never been, depict events one can never experience, and are sent by people one does not know and never has met. One’s mind is the screen for their microwave pictures. Once their images are inside one, they imprint upon one’s memory. They become yours. What is more, the images remain in one permanently. I can easily prove this to you. Please bring to mind any of the following: John F. Kennedy, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Howdy Doody, Justin Bieber, Captain Kirk, Archie Bunker, Johnny Carson, Tomi Lahren, Henry Kissinger. Did any of these images appear in your mind? Were you able to make a picture of them in your head? If so, that is proof that once they have entered your brain, they remain in there. They live in there together with all the memories of one’s life. Yet one does not know these people. And some of them are fictional characters. Now would you make the effort, please, to erase these TV people from your mind? Make them go away. Erase Johnny Carson or Justin Bieber. Can you do that? If so, you are a most unusual person. Once television places an image inside your head, it is yours forever. Happiness, more precisely, true happiness, they truly happy person. Happiness which is not obvious to all eyes, which is perhaps not even properly credible, since common experience knows nothing of it. There is a secret happiness hidden by the hands of life itself, which balances and outbalances all unhappiness. You do not see it, but it is true happiness, the only true happiness. That is why one can dare to explain, in face of everyday appearances, which show the abundant failures of the good, that everything done by this human succeeds.
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The United States of America, they Feel, is Seducing their Kids
The actions people take in life are not necessarily even conscious choices. A person who sometimes returns a favor, and sometimes does not, may not think about what strategy is being used. There is no need to assume deliberate choice at all. Nor is it necessary to assume, as the sociobiologist do, that important aspects of human behavior are guided by one’s genes. Many times, the approach being used is strategic rather than genetic for certainly no intelligent person should make an important choice without trying to the complicating factors of the situation into account. The value of an analysis is that one can help to clarify some of the subtle features of the interaction—features which might otherwise be lost in the maze of complexities of the highly particular circumstances in which choice must actually be made. It is the very complexity of reality which makes the analysis of an abstract interaction so helpful as an assistant to understanding. The theory of Cooperation in biological systems can occur even when the participants are not related, and even when they are unable to appreciate the consequences of their own behavior. What makes this possible are the evolutionary mechanisms of genetics and survival of the fittest. An individual able to achieve a beneficial response from another is more likely to have offspring that survive and that continue the pattern of behavior which elicited beneficial responses from others. Thus, under suitable conditions, cooperation based upon reciprocity proves stable in the biological World. Potential applications are spelled out for specific aspects of territoriality, mating, and disease. The conclusion is that Darwin’s emphasis on individual advantage can, in fact, account for the presence of cooperation between individuals of the same or even different species. As long as the proper conditions are present, cooperation can get started, thrive, and prove stable.
While foresight is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation, it can certainly be helpful. If the facts of Cooperation Theory are known by participants with foresight, the most promising finding is that the evolution of cooperation can be speeded up. The most important kingmaker is based on an “outcome maximization” principle originally developed as a possible interpretation of what human subjects do in the Prisoner’s Dilemma laboratory experiments. This rule is called DOWNING, is a particularly interesting rule in its own right. It is well worth studying as an example of a decision rule which is based upon a quite sophisticated idea. Unlike most of the others, its logic is not just a variant of TIT FOR TAT. Instead it is based on a deliberate attempt to understand the other player and then to make the choice that will yield the best long-term score based upon this understanding. The idea is that if the other individual does not seem responsive to what DOWNING is doing, DOWNING will try to get away with whatever it can by defecting. If the other individual does seem responsive, on the other hand, DOWNING will cooperate. To judge the other’s responsiveness, DOWNING estimates the probability that the other individual cooperates after it (DOWNING) cooperates, and also the probability that the other individual cooperates after DOWNING defects. For each move, it updates its estimate of these two conditional probabilities and then selects the choice which will maximize its own long-terms payoff under the assumption that it has correctly modeled the other individual. If the two conditional probabilities have similar values, DOWNING determines that it pays to defect, since the other player seems to be doing that same thing whether DOWNING cooperates or not.
Conversely, if the other individual tends to cooperate after a cooperation but not after a defection by DOWNING, then the other individual seems responsive, and DOWNING will calculate that the best thing to do with a responsive player is to cooperate. Under certain circumstances, DOWNING will even determine that the best strategy is to alternate cooperation and defection. Schizophrenic writing is not infrequently possessed of genius since it emerges from a dialogue between inner soul and outer surroundings unmediated by the burden of “correct” societal conduct. In the World of advertising and mass media, the post-hypnotic magic of the suggestive ad slogan or the metabolic programming of muzak blurs the distinction between the perceived and the perceiver. Vide the recent Citibank slogan: “We’re thinking what you’re thinking.” The schizophrenic takes this sort of programming seriously enough to believe that one is being spoken to as an individual and might even reverse the syllogism to read, “I’m thinking what Citibank is thinking.” Forgiveness of a rule can be informally described as its propensity to cooperate in the moves after the other individual has defected. Of all the nice rules, the one that scored the lowest was also the one that was least forgiving. This is FRIEDMAN, a totally unforgiving rule that employs permanent retaliation. It is never the first to defect, but once the other defects even once, FRIEDMAN defects from then on. In contrast, the winner, TIT FOR TAT, is unforgiving for one move, but thereafter is totally forgiving of that defection After one punishment, it lets bygones be bygones. One of the main reasons why the rules that are not nice do not do well is that most of the rules are not very forgiving. The cause of war is individual and collective maladjustment of men and women in social space. Release from Magnetic Straitjacket Seclusion by Gravity, Restriction, Vacuum, Constant Observation. They are free-showing me how capitalism crushes communism.
Society appears to be largely composed of extremists and habitual criminals not normal human animals subjects or citizens of respectable states. This magnetic phenomenon not only is to be viewed as the predisposing cause of way, may be considered likewise to qualify as a predisposing influence in the cause of cancer, an explanation of the galactic hiss” noted by astronomers in extraterrestrial radio reception, the source of the “voices” complained of by patients in mental institutions and certainly the “magnetic straitjacket” painfully endured by all ordinary patients in such confinement, as well as many other distressing conditions and infirmities. The single fundamental issues is: the relation between reason, or science, and the human good. When one speaks of happiness and the last man, one does not mean that the last man is unhappy, but that one’s happiness is nauseating. An experience of profound contempt is necessary in order to grasp our situation, and our capacity for contempt is vanishing. Those who have esteem or revere and are therefore not self-satisfied, those who have values or, to say the same thing, have gods, in particular those who create gods or found religion have learned that the sacred is the most important human phenomenon. “God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed. However, he did not say this on a note of triumph, in the style of earlier atheism—the tyrant has been overthrown and man is now free. Rather he said it in the anguished tones of the most powerful and delicate piety of its proper object. Man, who loved and needed God, has lost his Father and Savior without possibility of resurrection. The joy of liberation one finds in Marx has turned into terror at man’s unprotectedness. Honesty compels serious men, on examination of their consciences, to admit that the old faith is no longer compelling.
It is the very peak of Christian virtue that demands the sacrifice of Christianity, the greatest sacrifice a Christian can make. Enlightenment killed God; but like Macbeth, the men of the Enlightenment did not know that the cosmos would rebel at the deed, and the World became “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Consider the case of JOSS, a sneaky rule that tries to get away with an occasional defection. This decision rule is a variation of TIT FOR TAT. Like TIT FOR TAT, it always defects immediately after the other individuals defect. However, instead of always cooperating after the other individual cooperates, 10 percent of the time it defects after the other individual cooperates. Thus it tries to sneak in an occasional exploitation of the other individual. This decision rule seems like a fairly small variation of TIT FOR TAT, but in fact its overall performance was much worse, and it is interesting to see exactly why. A major lesson in this situation is the importance of minimizing echo effects in an environment of mutual power. When a single defection can set off a long string of recriminations and counterrecriminations, both sides suffer. A sophisticated analysis of choice must go at least three levels of analysis is the direct effect of a choice. This is easy, since a defection always earns more than a cooperation. The second level considers the indirect effects, taking into account that the other side may or may not punish a defection. This much of the analysis was certainly appreciated by many of the entrants. However, the third level goes deeper and takes into account the fact that in responding to the defections of the other side, one may be repeating or even amplifying one’s own previous exploitative choice. Thus a single defection may be successful when analyzed for its direct effects, and perhaps even when its secondary effects are taken into account. However, the real costs may be in the tertiary effects when one’s own isolated defections turn into unending mutual recriminations.
With the other play serving as a mechanism to delay the self-punishment by a few moves, this aspect of self-punishment was not picked up by many of the decision rules. Despite the fact that none of the attempts at more or less sophisticated decision rules was an improvement on TIT FOR TAT, it was easy to find several rules that would have preformed substantially better than TIT FOR TAT in the environment of the situation. The existence of these rules should serve as a warning against the facile belief that an eye for an eye is not necessarily the best strategy. Nietzsche replaces easygoing or self-satisfying atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences. Longing to believe, along with intransigent refusal to satisfy that longing, is, according to him, the profound response to our entire spiritual condition. Marx denied the existence of God but turned over all His functions to History, which is inevitably directed to a goal of fulfilling of man and which takes the place of Providence. If one is so naïve, one might as well be a Christian. Prior to Nietzsche, all those who taught that man is a historical being presented his history as in one way or another progressive. After Nietzsche, a characteristic formula for describing out history is “the decline of the West.” Nietzsche surveyed and summed up the contradictor strands of rule in culture or soul, that it cannot defend itself theoretically and that its human consequences are intolerable. This constitutes a crisis of the West, for everywhere in the West, for the first time ever, all regimes are founded on reason. Human founders, looking only to universal principles of natural justice recognizable by all humans through their unassisted reason, established governments on the basis of the consent of the governed, without appeal to revelations or tradition.
However, reason has also discerned that all previous cultures were founded by and on gods or belief in gods. Only if the new regimes are enormous successes, able to rival the creative genius and splendor of other cultures, could reason’s rational foundings be equal or superior to the kinds of foundings that reason knows were made elsewhere. However, such equality or superiority is highly questionable; therefore reason recognizes its own inadequacy. There must be religion, and reason cannot found religions. This was already implicit in the first wave of criticism of Enlightenment. Rousseau said a civil religion is necessary to society, and the legislator has appeared draped in the colors of religion. Tocqueville concentrated on the centrality of religion to America. With the failure of Robespierre’s kind of civil religion, there was a continuing effort to promote a revised or liberal Christianity, inspired by Rousseau’s Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it. Culture is a synthesis of reason and religion, attempting to hide the sharp distinction between the two poles. Nietzsche examines the patient, observes that the treatment was not successful, and pronounces God is dead. Now there cannot be religion; but inasmuch as man needs culture, the religious impulse remains. No religion but religiosity. This suffuses Nietzsche’s analysis of modernity, and, unnoticed, it underlies the contemporary categories of psychology and sociology. He brought the religious question back to the center of philosophy. The critical standpoint from which to view modern culture is its essential atheism; and that more repulsive successor of the bourgeois, the last man, is the product of egalitarian, rationalist, socialist atheism.
Thus the novel aspects of the crisis of the West is that it is identical with a crisis of philosophy. Reading Thucydides shows us that the decline of Greece was purely political, that what we call intellectual history is of little importance for understanding it. Old regimes had traditional roots; but philosophy and science took over as rulers in modernity, and purely theoretical problems have decisive political effects. One cannot imagine modern political history without a discussion of Locke, Rousseau, and Marx. Theoretical implausibility and decrepitude are, as everyone knows, at the heart of the Russian malaise. And the Free World is not far behind. Nietzsche is the profoundest, clearest, most powerful diagnostician of the disease. He argues that there is an inner necessity for us to abandon reason on rational grounds—that therefore our regime is doomed. There is, however, a much larger sense in which changes in knowledge are causing or contributing to enormous power shifts. The most important economic development of our lifetime has been the rise of a new system for creating wealth, based no longer on muscle but on mind. Labor in the advanced economy no longer consists of working on “things,” writes historian Mark Poster of the University of California (Irvine), but of “men and women acting on other men and women, or…people acting on information and information acting on people.” The substitution of information or knowledge for brute labor, in fact, lied behind the trouble General Motors (GM) once faced and the rise of Japan as well. For while GM still was tied to the economy, that is why leaders say, “What’s good for GM is Good for America.” At the same time, Japan was exploring its edges and discovering otherwise. As early as 1970, when American business leaders, and even the general public, were being bombarded by books, newspaper articles, and television programs heralding the arrival of the “information age” and focusing on the 21st century.
While the end-of-industrialism concept was dismissed with a shrug in the United States of America, it was welcomed and embraced by Japanese decision-makers in business, politics, and the media. Knowledge, they concluded, was the key to economic growth in the 21st century. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that even though the United States of America started computerizing earlier, Japan moved more quickly to substitute the knowledge-based technologies of the Third Wave for the brute muscle technologies of the Second Wave past. Robots proliferated. Sophisticated manufacturing methods, heavily dependent on computers and information, began turning out products whose quality could not be easily matched in the World markets. Moreover, recognizing that its old smokestack technologies were ultimately doomed, Japan took steps to facilitate the transition to the new and to buffer itself against the dislocations entailed in such a strategy. The contrast with General Motors—and American policy in general—could not have been sharper. If we also look closely at many of the other powers shifts cited above, it will become apparent that in these cases, too, the changed role of knowledge—the rise of the new wealth-creation system—either caused or contributed to major shifts of power. The spread of this new knowledge economy is, in fact, the explosive new force that has hurled the advanced economies into bitter global competition, confronted the socialist nations with their hopeless obsolescence, forced many “developing nations” to scrap their traditional economic strategies, and is not profoundly dislocating power relationships in both personal and public spheres. In a prescient remark, Winston Churchill once said that “empires of the future are empires of the mind.” Today that observation has come true. What has not yet been appreciated is the degree to which raw, elemental power—at the level of private life as well as at the level of empire—will be transformed in the decades ahead as a result of the new role of the “mind.”
For centuries, the word Timbuktu has been used in the West as shorthand for the remotest possible place. Not long ago or Australian friend, the renowned author/adventurer Paul Raffaele, visited Timbuktu after a two-day drive another from Bamako, the capital of Mali in West Africa. He later e-mailed of this account. Little has changed in Timbuktu for centuries…Nomads herd donkey trains to market, while turbaned Tuareg men in robes an veils, hiding all but their eyes, stride through the alleys and past the fourteenth-century mud mosque….But ahead I see something that looks like a mirage. Scores of teenagers, black, white, and brown, clad in American ghetto-style clothing, are streaming along the street. The boys wear dark gym pants, high-tech sneakers, and long, loose basketball shirts boasting the names of teams like the Lakers…The girls wear tight jeans, sneakers and T-shirts. They are heading toward City Hall, and Paul joins them. “We’re having a rap competition,” a body explains. Timbuktu’s young people, he tells Paul, “discovered rap a couple of years ago, but now it’s their favorite music…Timbuktu now has cable TV, and we see rap all the time on MTV.” Inside the hall, hundreds of similarly dressed kids—Arab, Tuareg, Fulani and Songhai—are screaming and foot-stomping as four young men clutch the mikes. Over the next two weeks, however, Paul seldom saw anything but traditional garb in the streets of Timbuktu and in the desert. “On that one afternoon,” he wrote, “when the kids of Timbuktu flaunted their addiction to modern garb and music, did I get a glimpse of the future?” Raffaele’s question echoes that millions of parents around the World who see their cultures under attack. The United States of America, they feel, is seducing their kids.
However, it might be asked, away from what? Paul offers one powerful clue: “I ask [a boy] why there seem to be no girls older than sixteen in the audience. ‘That’s when their parents marry them off and they spend most of their time inside the house.’ I ask whether the girls choose whom they marry. ‘Of course not,’ he replies. ‘Marriage is too important for the girl or boy to make the choice. Our parents always decide.’” So Paul’s account makes clear, there are strict limits on Timbuktu’s conversion to the American Way. While Hollywood sent its message that freedom means unrestrained hedonism, Wall Street was sending a parallel message contending that unrestrained business and trade offer the best path to wealth. Washington, echoing this theme, chanted the mantra that the unrestrained freed trade and a “level playing field” benefit everyone. This, as we have seen, was combined with a magic formula: liberalization + globalization = democracy. For several decades America thus told the whole World—and itself—that laissez-faire (especially privatization and deregulation) would deliver democracy—as though any mechanistic, one-size-fits-all formula would work everywhere, overriding all differences in religion, culture, history and levels of economic and institutional development. If what America represents to the World is an across-the-board lack of restraint—and if that is its definition of freedom—it is hardly surprising that adults in other culture see it not as freedom but as chaos. Unrestrained hedonism and free-marketism are not, however, inherent or inevitable accompaniments of Third Wave economic development. Instead, they reflect the fact that the process of moving from an industrial economy and society to a knowledge-based economy and society is unprecedented. No previous generation has undergone, let alone completed, a similar transition. No model exists.
America, therefore, arrogant though it often seems, is shaken and uncertain as it experiments with novel ideas, social structures and values. It may well jettison some of today’s lack of restraint as unworkable models of behavior are tried and abandoned. When critics around the World complain that the United States of America is attempting to dominate and homogenize their culture, they fail to understand that the thrust towards homogeneity comes not from the advanced Third Wave sectors of America’s economy and society but from Second Wave holdovers. The mass-media, mass-marketing and mass-distribution methods that lie behind America’s exports of mass culture and values are perfect expressions of yesterday’s industrial mass society, not tomorrow’s knowledge economy based, if anything, on the customization and de-massification. In fact, the very variety that comes with knowledge-based development ensures that other countries will adopt quite different economic, social and political pathways to the future. They will not look like America. However, then, neither will tomorrow’s America. In Myth America, Carol Wald and Judith Papachristou detail a history of the images of women from 1865 to 1945, as presented in print media. They argue that the images, created exclusively by men, formed the operative visual myths about women in America and that as the images spread and entered people’s minds, they became mirrors of reality. Men wanted their women to be that way; women, seeing only those images, attempted to and eventually did become like the images. It was a kind of alchemy in which the image finally produced the reality. “To the degree that pictures seem real, people were inclined to accept what the [male] artist saw in good faith…Through such an arrangement, the myth becomes apparent…Myths prevail. Here, all the expected roles of women are illustrated, from romatic elopement, blushing bride, and honeymoon to household drudge and nagging wife…All are expression of [male] feeling made visible through art.”
The authors are careful to point out that the images of women had little to do with the reality of women’s lives, which were filled with hardship, and the need to solve problems against enormous odds, many times on their own. Nonetheless, because the images were everywhere, they began to dominate the reality, making women wish to be like men’s images of women, encouraging men to perceive women in those terms and helping institute a power arrangement between the genders that is only now being challenged. The images become the mirror against which the whole society compared women’s behavior, and because of their power they succeeded in becoming a personal and also a political and economical reality. Yet, those were print images, which are not nearly so powerful as the moving images that have since achieved an even greater presence in everyone’s mind. The women’s movement of today, like all other movements that are interested in recovering self-definition—African American, Asian, Indian, worker, homosexual and others—has discovered that its struggle must be waged not only against the creators of the images—the people and the media who purvey them—but also against the very mental images women already carry with their own behavior. Because of this, many political movements have taken on aspects of personal therapy movements. The goal is to rid oneself of what are called “tapes.” This phrase, heard equally from political people and people involved in many therapy systems—from “radical psychiatry” to, yes, est—is used quite literally. The tape is the image, the picture one carries in one’s mind that is continually replicated, unconsciously, however useless, self-destructive, or idiotic it may be. When women carry inside their heads the image of the idealized subservient housewife-mother-secretary, they automatically tend to imitate the image. This continues until the moment when they say, “Wait, I did not create this person in my head; who did?”
When Marvin Gaye invented the image “Black is beautiful,” and “I’m Black and I’m proud,” the points were to destroy a previous image carried in the minds of Americans alike that black was not beautiful. Only then could personal change be made, leading to political results. The suppression of Indian people in this country, at first achieved with guns, was later accelerated and confirmed by the media images of the Indian savage who needed to be saved by Agent Wonder Bread, the Blue-Eyed Wonder, who was Western educated, and had morality and a lifestyle of appropriate means. The critical ingredient in this was the implantation within young Indians themselves of the belief that this image was a correct one. With that came self-hatred. Only by realizing that the image carried in the mind—the tape—is real and implanted is possible to disconnect oneself from the cycle of taped replay and subvert an otherwise inevitable process whereby the image is translated into reality. You may be among those who believe that the evolution of image into reality takes place via the mysterious process implied by Hermes, the Tantras, the Cabbala or the Rosicrucians. Or you may be impressed with the biophysiological evidence that images are carried in the cells. Or you may believe that the emulation process is the primary way image becomes reality. Or you may believe, as I do, that the evolution of image into reality involves all these routes and others. However, whichever is most important, the result is the same. We evolve into the images we carry around in our minds. We become what we see. And in today’s America, what most of us see a lot of television. However, such prejudices are not always apparent at the start of a technology’s journey, which is why no one can safely conspire to be a winner in technological change. Who would have imagined, for example, whose interests and what World-view would be ultimately advanced by the invention of the mechanical clock?
The clock had its origin in the Benedictine monasteries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The impetus being the invention was to provide a more or less precise regularity to the routines of the monasteries, which required, among other things, seven periods of devotion during the course of the say. The bells of the monastery were to be rung to signal the canonical hours; the mechanical clock was the technology that could provide precision to these rituals of devotion. And indeed it did. However, what the monks did not foresee was that the clock is a means not merely of keeping track of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men. And thus, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the clock had moved outside the walls of the monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the workman and the merchant. “The mechanical clock,” as Lewis Mumford wrote, “made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours and a standardized product.” In short, without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible. The paradox, the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. In the eternal struggles between God and Mammon, the clock quite unpredictably favored the latter. Unforeseen consequences stand in the way of all those who think they see clearly the direction in which a new technology will take us. Not even those who invent a technology can be assumed to be reliable prophets, as Thamus warned. Gutenberg, for example, was by all accounts a devout Catholic who would have been horrified to hear that accursed heretic Luther described printing as “God’s highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.”
Luther understood, as Gutenberg did not, that the mass-produced book, by placing the Word of God on every kitchen table, makes each Christian one’s own theologian—one might even say one’s own priest, or, better, from Luther’s point of view, one’s own pope. In the struggle between unity and diversity of religious belief, the press favored the latter, and we can assume that this possibility never occurred to Gutenberg. Humans must be taught to distinguish the right way from the wrong way. The right way, the way of God, is followed by “the proven ones.” Those who continue on their own way, and refuse to do that way, are called “the wicked,” those who miss that way again and again are called sinners. The real struggle of the direction is therefore with the wicked, whereas the “good” and “upright” God again and again directs sinners the way that is, helps them to find their ways back. LOOK AHEAD is inspired by techniques used in artificial intelligence programs to play chess. It is interesting that artificial intelligence techniques have inspired a rule which was in fact better than any of the riles designed by theorists specifically for the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It allows one to envision the future based on what strategy one may use to solve a problem and see what all outcomes of their choices may be. There is a lot to be learned about coping in an environment of mutual power. Even expert strategists from political science, sociology, economics, psychology, and mathematic have made the systemic errors of being too competitive for their own good, not being forgiving enough, and being too pessimistic about the responsiveness of the other wide. The effectiveness of a particular strategy depends not only on its own characteristics, but also on the nature of the other strategies with which it must interact. For this reason, the results of a single situation are not definitive. This is not a wish and not a promise. It is not that humans deserve happiness or that one may be certain of being happy whether in this Earthly life or another, future life. It is a joyful cry and a passionate statement—“how happy this person is!”
WELCOME TO CRESLEIGH RANCH
Four distinct communities in one iconic neighborhood.
Thank you for your interest in this highly coveted community. While homes at Brighton Station are no longer available, its neighboring community, Mills Station, is still actively selling with two new communities coming soon.
We look forward to meeting you!
The Time of the World Disappears Before Eternity
Revolutionary wealth is not just about money. Civilization is one of those big, stuffy words that may intrigue philosophers and historians but puts most people to sleep. Unless it is used in a sentence like “Our Civilization is threatened”—at which point large numbers of people prepare to defend themselves. Today many people do, in fact, believe that their civilization is threatened—and that the United States of America may be doing the threatening. And it is. However, not in the way most of us think. Around the World, critics of the United States of America point to its military and its economy as the main sources of its predominance. It is, however, knowledge in the broadcast sense and new technologies based on it that integrate America’s military and financial power and propel both forward. It is true that America’s technological lead is threatened. According to the National Science Board, foreign students earn nearly 50 percent of all U.S. doctorates in mathematics, computer sciences and engineering. And American youth are showing less and less interests in these fields. NASA officials complain that there are three times as many scientists over sixty as there are under thirty in the space agency. Shirley Ann Jackson, then president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has cautioned that “centers of technology-based activity, training, and entrepreneurialism are rapidly spreading throughout the globe. Thus even the status quo for the U.S. represents a declining share of the global marketplace for innovation and ideas.” Nevertheless, America still leads in most fields of digital technology, in microbiology and in science generally. It spends 44 percent of the World budget for research and development. By most criteria, the United States of America is still the undisputed leader in the performance of basic and applied research. In addition, many international comparisons put the United States of America as a leader in applying research and innovation to improve economic performance.
In the latest IMD International World Competitiveness Yearbook, the United States of America ranks first in economic competitiveness, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore. The survey compares economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency, and infrastructure. Larger economies are further behind, with Zhejiang (China’s wealthiest province), Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany ranked 20 though 23, respectively. An extensive review by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concludes that since World War II, US leadership in science and engineering has driven its dominant strategic position, economic advantage, and quality of life. And at least for now, the United States of America remains the Word’s scientific powerhouse. Perhaps even more important is the speed with which scientific and technical findings from everywhere are converted into marketable applications or products and widely dispersed into manufacturing, finance, agriculture, defense, biotech and other sectors. All of which boosts economic productivity, further accelerates change, and increasing the U.S. ability to compete at the global level. However, knowledge is not only a matter of bits and bytes or science and technology. Part of the knowledge economy is the production of art and entertainment, and America is the World’s biggest exporter of popular culture. That culture include fashion, music, TV programming, books, movies and computer games. Americans have always been told that their most important message to the World is one of democracy, individual freedom, tolerance, concern for “the rights of man” and—more recently—the rights of women. In the last three decades, however, a U.S. media spread into formerly closed or nonexistent foreign markets, a very different set of messages has been communicated. Much of it targeted at young people.
Certainly not all, but a considerable amount of this material has disgustingly glorified pimps, gangster, drug lords, drug pushers, and hollow-eyed drug users. It has celebrated extremes of violence marked by unending car chases, over-the-top special effects and songs dripping with sexist venom. The impact of all this has been further intensified in the hard-sell, over-the-edge advertising used to promote these products. Hollywood, for example, has painted a fantasy America in which adolescent hedonism reigns supreme and authority figures—police, teachers, politicians, business leaders—are routinely satirized. Film after film, and TV shows one after another, tell young viewers what many of them hunger to hear: that adults are bumbling fools; that being “dumb and dumber” is okay; that “we do not need education”; that to be “bad” is really good; and that pleasures of the flesh, in infinite variety, is or should be nonstop. In this fantasy World, women are readily available, but they can also leap over giant buildings in a single bound (like Superman), shoot and kill (like James Bond) and practice martial arts (Like Jet Li). Extremes, we are repeatedly told, are good and restraint is bad; and, by the way, America is so rich that event its secretaries, police, clerks, and other ordinary working people live in high-rise penthouse apartments or Malibu mansions—images that set adolescent glands tingling from Taipei to Timbuktu. What few foreign critics of American’s pop culture seem to know is that ironically enough, many of the ostensibly American firms producing and disseminating the interesting and unusual of these programs either are, or were financed not by America, but by European and Japanese capital. Nor is it widely understood that shows are often made by, say, a European director with an Australian stary, a Chinese martial-arts consultant, an anime cartoonist from Japan or other foreign contributors.
In the meantime, however, the influence of these intriguing programs is so powerful that other societies fear for the survival of their own culture. Only if art threatens action, then terrorism can be advanced through art. For such a phenomenon as Aesthetic Terrorism to occur, aesthetic pursuit must become symbolic not of its own decadently solipsistic pleasures (exemplified in madness of des Esseintes in Huysmans’ Against Nature), but of action taken beyond the pale of art World confines. Terrorism is art is called the avant-garde. However, if this was once the case, it is no longer. Most avant-garde art is viewed and created today as simply an enfolding reaction to its own history. This disingenuous game-playing guarantees that the avant-garde art is viewed and created today as simply an enfolding reaction to its own history. This disingenuous game-playing guarantees that the avant-garde can no longer stimulate or even provoke. Dada and Futurist actions, which attempted to lead art out of the classroom and museum and into the streets, are simply appropriated by postmodernist facsimiles which capture the letter but little of the original essence. It hardly matters anyway. Avant-garde art has evolved into nothing more than a cultural benchwarmer, corporate tax write-off and public relations smokescreen. Art which openly espouses anti-corporate ideology is embraced as long as it hews to arbitrary standards invented by those taste-making and fortune-telling hirelings, the art critics. What could be wrong, after all, with a business World that allows people to say what they want (because it does not matter)? Aesthetic Terrorism is a term more realistically applied to the faceless regime of consumer culture than the avant-garde. The onslaught of Muzak, ad jingles, billboards, top 40 tunes, commercials, corporate logos, etcetera, all fit the terrorist dynamic of intrusion and coercion.
One almost forgets that aesthetics once implied a consensual relationship between the creators and appreciators of art. How often is it that one hears someone admitting a fondness for a media product “in spite” of oneself? How many times have you heard a slogan or rancid tune ring in your ears like a brain-eating mantra? When consumer terror’s avant-garde correlative, Pop Art, became indistinguishable from the object of its supposed social satire, it erased from big business its pejorative taint. Many of today’s avant-garde stars have emerged from or entered the business World, some enormously successful in the arcane number-juggling or speculation and commodities scams. Even freeloading on the state and private foundations is fair game only for those whose bureaucratic aptitude is matched by their shameless butt-kissing. It is not surprising that most grant recipients excel in little more than lawyerristic logorrhea and ingrained artistic timidity. Critic-centered postmodernism spawned the phrase-art hybrid of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer in which an advertising-style slogan is combined with an implied message or visual cue (usually swiped from some old magazine). Their posture is a hip cynicism which is supposed to subvert the “thrall” of the advertising command. Kruger and Holzer play the market like skillful double-agents, boosting themselves into the public eye through clever steals from Madison Avenue behaviorist techniques yet simultaneously troweling on crypto-Marxist jive to secure the perks of critical and academic currency. Their self-promotions worked when they were at the sidelines of the establishment. However, not the social commentary grows increasingly hollow. Currently being groomed for jet-setting prominence by Soho millionairess Mary Boone, Kruger’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial in 1987, for which she is paid a handsome sum, featured nothing more than a socialite princess joke, “I Shop Therefore I Am.” Winking at and wagging the tail of establishment hierarchy is part of that I-rib-you-gently-you-pay-me-off confidence game artists have been playing the Renaissance courts.
These contemporary court artists, like many of the past centuries, smugly pretend t spit in the eye of the exploiters while allowing themselves to be pampered de-loused—and when they are not looking—de-clawed. There are, of course, those artists, usually fresh out of university, who are unaccomplished at filling out grant forms, and therefore consider themselves “subversives.” The majority of these art and rock magazines-styled rebels are playing out rebellion psychodramas to package and merchandize to consumerist sycophants. This strategy is (forgive them term) the simulacra of terrorism: the content seizes in the frozen attitudinizing of pose and goes no further. We must look to the true outsiders and not the would-be insiders for an artist truly capable of effective counter-terror against the insidious mantras of consumerist brainwash. Terror means a threat, and the outsider’s version of Aesthetic Terrorism belongs to those performances or arrangements of words and pictures that unleash the reactionary impulses of police and bourgeois artist/critic alike. The kind of art that evokes this wrath, fear and condemnation rejoices in its pagan spirit of schadenfreude which controverts the humanist piety of “enlightened victim.” Anti-social sadism rarely receives patronage, however. Outside the corrupting realm of societal handouts, the Aesthetic Terrorist—much as this definition may grate on him—is the last bastion of aesthetic purity. Operation Sun Devil is the name for a government action against computer wizards and assorted sharpies and super-smarts who were resourceful enough to figure out how to hack into the electronic files of Ma Bell. Those who know, claim the Sun Devil gambit as a terrified overreaction against intelligence by the plodding and stupid bureaucracy.
John Perry Barlow (Whole Earth Review, Fall 1990) describes a typical Sun Devil action against a teenage hacker: [A] father in New York […] opened the door at 6.00 a.m. and found a shotgun at his nose. A dozen agents entered. While one of the kept the man’s wife in a choke-hold, the rest made ready to shoot and entered the bedroom for their sleeping 14-year-old. Before leaving, they confiscated every piece of electronic equipment, including all the telephones. Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure are unheeded by the government agents who claim nerd computer hackers are terrorists and have “the ability to access and review the files of hospital patients. Furthermore, they could have added, deleted, or altered vital patient information, possibly causing life-threatening situations.” Meacorporate interests have staked claim to the entirety of cyberspace, and they are not about to tolerate the presence of digital interlopers. This may scare off some, but other pirates like the mysterious Legion of Doom and NuPrometheus league (who illegally circulated highly protected Macintosh computer source code) will rise to the challenge now that they have been provided a clearly delineated enemy to innovation, the individual, and personal freedom. It may come as a surprise to learn that a few artists are now producing work which finds itself classified as a thought crime, punishable by expulsion into a Siberia of non-distribution, and in some cases by litigation and imprisonment. Pure magazine, from Chicago, a xeroxed vehicle which extols child torture, murder, and extreme misogyny, tweaked too many civic-minded noses, and its editor, Peter Sotos, was tailed for nine months and underwent a lengthy trial process in which he was finally convicted for possession of some very illegal magazine. Soto’s case was the first successfully prosecuted new Illinois state law, enacted under the influence of the Meese Commission Report on pornography, an example of First Amendment revisionism par excellence.
Soto’s case is particularly disquieting because it proves that prison is in the offing for simple possession of controversial material. No doubt this legal precedent was established to open the doors for future roundups of other thought criminals. The expertly managed Gulf War (massacre), in which networks censored war casualty footage that might provoke a “Vietnam War syndrome,” provides a small window into the dynamics of mass control to come. Any thoughtful individual is undeniably malnourished by the current information diet. Whether this is due to a direct conspiracy of State or by design of the oligarchic marketplace matters little. However, it has upped the ante for a new American Samizdat in which “disreputable,” “crazy,” “hateful,” or “dangerous” topics are broached by individuals or small, autonomous groups that are not compromised or swayed by institutional priorities. Can “offensive interests become the political crime of future? Apparently so. When looking at the previous sentences one can compare and see that musicians have been arrested for obscene lyrics, anarchist individuals have been collared for burning the flag; parents have been arrested for photographing their toddlers in their birthday suits; painter and performer Joe Coleman was arrested in Boston for operating an “infernal machine” and in New York for killing a rat: museum curators were threatened with arrest for hanging homoerotic photos; G.G. Allian was jailed for some consensual sadomasochism with a girlfriend; the FBI have been “monitoring” certain groups who practice unorthodox pleasures of the flesh; and on and on. Even many of the books you read have come under widely publicized attack by authors such as Carl A. Raschke who advocated the revocation of First Amendment rights from those who spread “cultural terrorism.” Even globalization could be considered cultural terrorism.
It has become increasingly obvious that the aesthetic terrorist hobgoblins are nothing more than symbolic scapegoats to divert attention away from the real issues. For Americans, fear is not another form of awareness, it is just another form of gossip. As Charles Manson has stated, true subversive terror can only be actualized by turning off the TV sets. Until then, aesthetic terrorism will be orchestrated by those already in command against insubstantial or non-existent villains. And in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorism will be orchestrated by those already in command against insubstantial or non-existent villains. And in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity. The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in a chameleon-like stye master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime. We will not know them by name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet. Until then, there is a lot of work to be done. Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a World of egoists without central authority? This question has intrigued people for a long time. And for good reason. We all know that people are not angels, and that they tend to look after themselves and their own first. Yet we also know that cooperation does occur and that our civilization is based upon it. However, in situations where each individual has an incentive to be selfish, how can cooperation ever develop? The answer each of us gives to this question has a fundamental effect on how we think and act in our social, political, and economic relations with others. And the answers that others give have a great effect on how ready they will be to cooperate with us.
The most famous answer was given over three hundred years ago by Thomas Hobbes. It was pessimistic. He argued that before governments existed, the state of nature was dominated by the problem of selfish individuals who competed on such ruthless terms that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 1651/1962, p. 100). In his view, cooperation could not develop without a central authority, and consequently a strong government was necessary. Ever since, arguments about the proper scope of government have often focused on whether one could, or could not, expect cooperation to emerge in a particular domain if there were not an authority to police situation. Today nations interact without central authority. Therefore the requirements for the emergence of cooperation have relevance to many of the central issues of international politics. The most important problem is the security dilemma: nations often seek their own security through means which challenge the security of others. This problem arises in such areas as escalation of local conflicts and arms races. Related problems occur in international relations in the form of competition with alliances, tariff negotiations, and communal conflict places like Cyprus. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has presented the United States of American with a typical dilemma of choice. If the United States of American continued business as usual, Russian might be encouraged to try other forms of noncooperative behavior later one. On the other hand, any substantial lessening of United States of America’s cooperation risks some form of retaliation, which could then set off counter-retaliation, setting up a pattern of mutual hostility that could be difficult to end. Much of the domestic debate about international policy is concerned with problems of just this type. And properly so, since these are hard choices.
In everyday life, if they never invite us over in return, we may ask ourselves how many times we will invite acquaintances for dinner. An executive in an organization does favors for another executive in order to get favors in exchange. A journalist who has received a leaked news story gives favorable coverage to the source in the hope that further leaks will be forthcoming. A business firm in an industry with only one other major company charges high prices with expectation that the other firm will also maintain high prices—to their mutual advantage and at the expense of the consumer. For me, a typical case of the emergence of cooperation is the development of patterns of behavior in a legislative body of the United States Senate. Each senator has an incentive to appear effective to his or her constituents, even at the expense of conflicting with other senators who are trying to appear effective to their constituents. However, this is hardly a situation of completely opposing interests, a zero-sum game. On the contrary, there are many opportunities for mutually rewarding activities by two senators. These mutually rewarding actions have led to the creation of an elaborate set of norms, or folkways, in the Senate. Among the most important of these is the norm of reciprocity—a folkway which involves helping out a colleague and getting repaid in kind. It includes vote trading but extends to so many types of mutually rewarding behavior that “it is not an exaggeration to say that reciprocity is a way of life in the Senate” (Matthews 1960, p. 100; see also Mayhew 1975). Washington was not always like this. Early observers saw the members of the Washington community as quite unscrupulous, unreliable, and characterized by “falsehood, deceit, treachery” (Smith 1906, p. 190). In the 1980s the practice of reciprocity is well established. Even the significant changes in the Senate over the last two decades, tending toward more decentralization, more openness, and more equal distribution of power, have come without abating the folkway of reciprocity.
As will be seen, it is not necessary to assume that senators are more honest, more generous, or more public-spirited than in earlier years to explain how cooperation based on reciprocity has emerged or proved stable. The emergence of cooperation can be explained as a consequence of individual senators pursuing their own interest. We are investigating how individual pursuing their own interests will act, followed by an analysis of what effects this will have for the system as a whole. Put another way, the approach is to make some assumptions about individual motives and then deduce consequences for the behavior of the entire system. The case of the U.S. Senate is a good example, but the same style of reasoning can be applied to other settings. The object of this enterprise is to develop a theory of cooperation that can be used to discover what is necessary for cooperation to emerge. By understanding the conditions that allow it to emerge, appropriate actions can be taken to foster the development of cooperation in a specific setting. The Cooperation Theory that is presented here is based upon an investigation of individuals who pursue their own self-interest without the assistance of a central authority to force them to cooperate with each other. The reason for assuming self-interest is that it allows an examination of the difficult case in which cooperation is not completely based upon a concern for other or upon the welfare of the group as a whole. It must, however, be stressed that this assumption is actually much less restrictive than it appears. If a sister is concerned for the welfare of her brother, the sister’s self-interest can be thought of as including (among many other things) this concern for the welfare of her brother. However, this does not necessarily eliminate all potential for conflict between sister and brother.
Likewise a nation may act in part out of regard for the interests of its friends, but this regard does not mean that even friendly countries are always able to cooperate for their mutual benefit. So the assumption of self-interest is really just an assumption that concern for others does not completely solve the problem of when to cooperate with them and when not to. A good example of the fundamental problem of cooperation is the case where two industrial nations have erected trade barriers to each other’s exports. If barriers were eliminated, because of the mutual advantages of free trade, both countries would be better off. However, if either country were to unilaterally eliminate its barriers, it would find itself facing terms of trade that hurt its own economy. In fact, whatever one country does, the other country is better off retaining its own trade barriers. Therefore, the problem is that each country has an incentive to retain trade barriers, leading to a worse outcome than would have been possible had both countries cooperated with each other. This basic problem occurs when the pursuit of self-interest by each leads to a poor outcome for all. To make headway in understanding the vast array of specific situations which have this property, a way is needed to represent what is common to these situations without becoming bogged down in the details unique to each. Fortunately, there is such a representation available: the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, there are two players. Each has two choices, namely cooperate of defect. Each must make the choice without knowing what the other will do. No matter what the other does, defection yield a higher payoff than cooperation. If both defect, the dilemma is that both do worse than if both had cooperated. Cases typically result in one of four possible outcomes in the matrix. If both players cooperate, both do fairly well. Both get a reward for mutual cooperation.
However, if one player cooperates but the other defects, the defecting play get the temptation to defect, while the cooperating players gets the sucker’s payoff. If both defect, both get the punishment for mutual defection. What would you do in such a situation? That is basically the gamble of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is simply an abstract formulation of some very common and very interesting situations in which what is best for each person individually leads to mutual defection, whereas everyone would have been better off with mutual cooperation. The definition of Prisoner’s Dilemma requires that several relationships hold among the four different potential outcomes. The second part of the definition of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that the players cannot get out of their dilemma by taking turns exploiting each other. This assumption means that an even chance of exploitation and being exploited is not as good an outcome for a player as mutual cooperation. It is therefore assumed that the reward for mutual cooperation is greater than the average temptation and the sucker’s payoff. This assumption, together with the rank ordering of the four payoffs, defines the Prisoner’s Dilemma. We have come back to the point where we began, where values take the place of good and evil. However, now we have made at least a hasty tour of the intellectual experiences connected with modern politics that made such a response compelling. How it looked to thoughtful Germans is most revealingly expressed in a famous passage by Max Weber, about God science and the irrational: Finally, although a naïve optimism may have celebrated science—that is, the technique of the mastery of life founded on science—as the path which would lead to happiness, I believe I can leave this entire question aside in light of the annihilating critique which Nietzsche has made of “the last men” who “have discovered happiness.” Who, then, still believes in this with the exception of a few big babies in university chairs or in editorial offices?
So penetrating and well informed an observer as Weber could say in 1919 that the scientific spirit at the heart of Western democracy was dead for all serious men and that Nietzsche had killed it, or had at least given it the coup de grace. The presentation of “the last man” in Thus Spake Zarathusta was so decisive that the old-style Enlightenment rationalism need not even be discussed anymore; and, Weber implies, all future discussion or study must proceed with the certainty that the perspective was a “naïve” failure. Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion. This means, simply, that almost all Americans at that time, thinking American in particular, were “big babies” and remained so, long after the Continent had grown up. One need only think of John Dewey to recognize that he fits Weber’s description to a T, and then remember what his influence here once was. And not only Dewey, but everyone from the beginning of our regime, especially those who said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” shared the rationalist dream. Weber’s statement is so important because he made as much as more than anyone brought us into contact with the most advanced Continental criticisms of liberal democracy, and was the intermediary between Nietzsche and us Americans who were the most recalcitrant to one’s insight, perhaps because according to it we represent the worst or most hopeless and are therefore loath to see ourselves in that mirror. A very dark view of the future has been superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys. They have proved too much for us to handle. However, in our defense, we are probably not the only ones for whom they are too much. Perhaps you have caught yourself kissing another person as you first saw kissing in the movies or on television. My children have a phrase to describe this: “television kiss.”
It is fortunate for them that they have noted that there are television kisses and other kinds, because it will help protect them from absorbing it, taking it into themselves where it will come back out ten years, like a replay. Most of us did not make that distinction as we sat in darkened rooms or theaters as children. Since we did not see all that much real kissing, the media kiss became our image of kissing. We found ourselves producing that model of kiss later in life. I was fourteen-year-old when I tried to kiss for the first time. I imitated Brad Pitt’s kiss, but I did not feel it. Only later did I realize that perhaps Brad Pitt did not feel it either; he was merely kissing the way the director said he should. So there I was imitating a kiss that was never real in the first place, worried that there might be something wrong with me for lacking the appropriate feeling and failing to obtain the appropriate response. The journalist Jane Margold was driving home one night in Berkeley with her brother, Harlan. Suddenly a man crawled into the street right in front of them. They screeched to a stop and then, stunned, just sat there for a moment. They finally got out and cautiously went up to the man to find out that he had been stabbed several times in his upper body, was bleeding profusely and was in danger of dying right there. The man’s assailant was nowhere to be seen. In describing the event to me, Jane said that she instantly flipped into a media version of herself. She had never faced anything like it before and had no direct feelings. Instead, playing through her mind were images of similar events she had seen on television or in films. The media superseded her own responses, even to the point of removing her from the event. She was there, but sue did not experience herself as being there. She was seeing the event, but between her and it, floating in her mind, was an image of an implanted reality which would not get out of the way. Jane thought such thoughts as: “This is real; there is a wounded man lying here in from of me, bleeding to death, yet I have no feeling. It seems like a movie.”
In fact, it was they very movielike quality that eventually got her into action. Without feeling, she performed mechanical acts. She and her brother comforted the man, directed traffic, dispatched people to summon the police and an ambulance. She became extremely efficient, but throughout, she had the sense of performing a script. Apart from their economic implications, technologies create the ways in which people perceive reality, and such ways are the key to understanding diverse forms of social and mental life. As individual express their life, so they are. There are three stages in the development of technology: the age of technology of chance, the age of technology of the artisan, the age of technology of the technician. Cultures may be classified into three types: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. At the present time, each type may be found somewhere on the planet, although the first is rapidly disappearing: we must travel to exotic places to find a tool-using culture. If we do, it is well to go armed with the knowledge that, until the seventeenth century, all cultures were tool-users. There was, of course, considerable variation from one culture to another in the tools that were available. Some had only spears and cooking utensils. Some had water mills and coal- and horsepower. However, the main characteristic of all tool-using cultures is that their tools were largely invented to do two things: to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life, such as in the use of waterpower, windmills, and the heavy-wheeled plow; or to serve the symbolic World of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion, as in the construction of castles and cathedrals and the development of the mechanical clock. In either case, tools did not attack (or, more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced.
With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization. These beliefs, in fact, directed the invention of tools and limited the uses to which they were put. Even in the case of military technology, spiritual ideas and social customs acted as controlling forces. It is well known, for example, that the uses of the sword by samurai warriors were meticulously governed by a set of ideals known as Bushido, or the Way of the warrior. The rules and rituals specificizing when, where, and how the warrior must use either his two swords (the katana, or long sword, and the wakizashi, or short sword) were precise, tied closely to the concept of honor, and included the requirement that the warrior commit seppuku or hara-kiri should his honor be compromised. This sort of governance of military technology was not unknow in the Western World. The use of the lethal crossbow was prohibited, under threat of anathema, by Pope Innocent II in the early twelfth century. The weapon was judged to be “hateful to God” and therefore could not be used against Christians. That it could be used against Muslims and other infidels does not invalidate the point that in a tool-using culture technology is not seen as autonomous, and is subject to the jurisdiction of some binding social or religious system. This is why power, which to a large extent defines us as individuals and as nations, is itself being redefined. A clue to this redefinition emerges when we look more closely at some of the unrelated changes. For we discover that they are not as random as they seem. Whether it is Japan’s meteoric rise, GM’s impressive rebound, or the American doctor’s fall from grace, a single common thread unites them.
Take the punctured power of the god-in-a-white coat. Throughout the heyday of doctor-dominance in America, physicians kept a tight choke-hold on medical knowledge. Prescriptions were written in Latin, providing the profession with a semi-secret code, as it were, which kept most patients in ignorance. Medical journals and texts were restricted to professional readers. Medical conferences were closed to the laity. Doctors controlled medical-school curricula and enrollments. Contrast this with the situation today, when patients have astonishing access to medical knowledge. With a personal computer and a WiFi, anyone from home can access data bases like Index Medicus, and obtain scientific papers on everything from Addison’s disease to zygomycosis, and, in fact, collect more information about a specific aliment or treatment than the ordinary doctor has time to read. Copies of the 2,354-page book knows as the PDR or Physicians’ Desk Reference are also readily available to anyone. Once a week on the Lifetime cable network, any televiewer can watch twelve uninterrupted hours of highly technical television programming designed specifically to educate doctors. Many of these programs carry a disclaimer to the effect that “some of this material may not be suited toa general audience.” However, that is for the viewer to decide. The rest of the week, hardly a single newscast is aired in America without a medical story or segment. A video version of the material from the Journal of the American Medical Association is now broadcast by three hundred stations on Thursday nights. The press reports on medical malpractice cases. Inexpensive paperbacks tell ordinary readers what drug side effect to watch for, what drugs not to mix, how to raise or lower cholesterol levels through diet. In addition, major medical breakthroughs, even if television news almost before the M.S. has even taken his subscription copy of journal out of the in-box. In short, the knowledge monopoly of the medical profession has been thoroughly smashed. And the doctor is no longer a god.
This case of the dethroned doctor is, however, only one small example of a more general process changing the entire relationship of knowledge to power in the high-tech nations. In many other fields, too, closely held specialists’ knowledge is slipping out of control and reaching ordinary citizens. Similarly, inside major corporations, employees are winning access to knowledge once monopolized by management. And as knowledge is redistributed, so, too, is the power based on it. A human is a “beast” and purifies one’s heart, and behold, God holds one by the hand. That is not a kind of humans. Purity of heart is a state of being. A man is not pure in kind, but one is able to be or become pure, rather one is only essentially pure when one has become pure, and even than one does not thereby belong to a kind of humans. The “wicked,” that is, the bad, are not contrasted with good humans. The good is to draw near Hod. One does not say that those near to God are good. However, one does call the bas those who are far from God. In the language of modern thought that means that there are humans who have no share in existence, but there are no humans who possess existence. Existence cannot be possessed, but only shared in. One does not rest in the lap of existence, but one draws near to it. Nearness is nothing but such a drawing and coming near continually and as long as the human person lives. The dynamic of fairness and nearness is broken by death when it breaks the life of the person. With death there vanished the heart, that inwardness of humanity, out of which arises the pictures of the imagination, and which rises up in defiance, but which can also be purified. Separate souls vanish, separation vanished. Time which has been lived by the soul vanished with the soul, we know of no duration in time. Only the rock in which the heart is concealed, only the rock of human hearts does not vanish. For it does not stand in time. The time of the World disappears before eternity, but existing humans die into eternity as into the perfect existence.
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
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Restore to Him the Throne of the Universe
I would not necessarily say we have conjured demons that have entered members of the audience, but I would not deny it either. Every mythology has its good and evil spirits which are objects of adoration and subjects of terror, and often both classes are worshipped from opposite motives; the good, that the worshipper may receive benefit; the evil, that one may escape harm. Sometimes good deities are so benevolent that they are neglected, superstitious fear directing all devotion towards the evil spirits to propitiate them and avert the calamities they are ready to bring upon the human race; sometime the malevolent deities have so little power that they prayer of the pious is offered up to the good spirits that they may pour out still further favors, for man is a worshipping being, and will prostrate himself with equal fervor before the altar whether the deity be good or bad. Midway, however, between the good and evil beings of all mythologies there is often one whose qualities are mixed; not wholly good nor entirely evil, but balanced between the two, sometimes doing a generous action, then descending to a petty meanness, but never rising to nobility of character nor sinking to the depths of depravity; good from whim, and mischievous from caprice. As enshrined in legend, there are many mysteries to be solved involving the Winchester Mansion. Believe it or not, the key to the massive front door was made of solid gold and diamonds and the keys for the other 2,000 doors of this Eight Wonder of the World filled two water buckets. Mrs. Winchester never disclosed the spot where the “pot o’ goold” was concealed, but it was certainly not in her safe. Travellers who would go to her mansion, which was not often visited, at once became objects of intense suspicion. You are driving along a retired country road; at the turn of the hill a policeman heaves in sight. He speaks pleasantly, and if nothing arouses his suspicion, he will pass on and you see him no more; but if the slightest distrust of you or your business finds lodgment in his mind, he marks you as a possible victim.
He temporarily vanishes; look round you proceed on your journey, and you may, by chance, catch a glimpse of him a mile or two away, peeping over a wall after you, but when you appear at the Winchester mansion, he reappears, and the local policeman, after his coming, will be sure to observe you with some degree of attention. Step out on the street, and here comes the policeman, ascertains your name, takes a mental inventory of your effects, makes a not of the railway and hotel labels on your trunks, and goes away to report. A sharp detective is the policeman. He knows articles of American manufacture at a glance, and need only to see your satchel to tell whether it came from America or was made in England. Talk with him, and he will chat cordially about the weather, the crops, the state of the markets, but all the time he is trying to make out who you are and what is your business. His eyes ramble from your hat to your shoes, and by the time the conversation is ended, he has prepared for the “sergeant” who many say was the very Mrs. Winchester, a report of your personal appearance and apparel. There was also a legend that he was one of the spirits from the mansion, but no one can say for sure. From the day he puts on his neat blue uniform and saucerlike cap, the constable, on or near the mansion, carries his life in his hand. Every hedge he scrutinized with a careful eye; behind it may lurk an assassin. Every division wall is watched for suspicious indications, his alertness being quickened by the knowledge that he is guarding his own life. He watched the mansion with a love stronger than death, knowing that Mrs. Winchester was a widow, and the gentle soul, with an untiring devotion, spent her life reciting the prayers for the dead. Mrs. Winchester often times wondered who was she? What was she? And where was she? Those questioned remained unanswered. It was no matter for her to let them go.
“It was lonely,” said Mrs. Winchester. “Monotonous Tedious, in fact. The birds and horses and things are pleasant company, and they love me and I love them; but here lately they seem somehow insufficient. I lack something, I do not know what it is. If only they could see how pretty I am, and how rounded and smooth, and how daintily formed are my limbs. Possibly they do; sometimes I think they do; but at most they only look it, they do not say it—at least in any language that I can understand. I begin to feel sure that that is what I lack—to hear it said. So I am happier than I once was. I try to put away from me that thought—the thought of my husband and new born daughter—and in the day I succeed, and am content, and do not feel my pain. But at night I dream—and dream.” By the late 1880s, practices of sorcery in California had become so widespread. A long list of canons forbade the use of sacraments or holy objects in magical rituals or divination with holy water or blessed candles. The practice of sorcery with profane objects, it was decided, did not come under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition but was to be handled by secular authorities. There were some priests who were especially noted for their corruption and for their singular devotion to money. Members of the group were often found to be conducting rites too wild for the Catholic hierarchy to condone and were excommunicated. It was from this body of clergy that the modern Black Mass was to emerge. Monks who were renegades of the Franciscan order, were reported to have held nocturnal conventicles at which, after the service, indiscriminate events took place. When a baby was the inadvertent product of one of these gatherings, its body was supposedly burned, the ashes being mixed with blood that was served as a sacrament during the admission ceremonies of new members of the church. Such reports of disaffected renegade priests conducting illicit Masse were not infrequent at the time.
Sometimes the victims were obtained either by outright abduction or by buying them from their peasant parents, who were glad enough to sell the children, thinking that they were being taken as servants and would have a much easier life on the estate of a rich nobleman than plowing the fields. Now one may see why the Winchester mansion and Mrs. Winchester were so heavily guarded. In one church in particular, at the altar stood a statue of a hideous demon, presumably Satan. One room contained copper vessels filled with the blood of his sacrificial victims, the vessels all bearing neat labels revealing the dates of execution. In the center of the room was a black marble table, upon which was the body of a child who have been freshly slaughtered. These ritual Masses called from blood sacrifices to Astaroth and Asmodue, demons of love and lust. The blood was poured into a chalice. To that blood, flour was assed and a wafer made. The operators, seeking personal gain, sought to get what they wished from any source that would give it to them, and they were willing to prostrate themselves before any deity, good or evil, to accomplish their goals. It seems obvious that officials within the Church and without believed in the existence of such practices by renegade priests, which caused a sharp break in man’s attitude toward man and toward religion to occur. For the first time in centuries man began to look at himself and his society less seriously. With this new perspective, man’s religion also changed, and Satanism did, too. Therefore, it is no wonder that Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s arrival to the valley was a sensational event. People were thrilled by this dramatic entrance of a millionairess; by those freight cars sidetracked in Satan Clara, uploading rich imported furnishing; by building activity that mushroom a farm house into a mansion with over 500 rooms, and as many as 125,000 square feet.
Here was fair came for all! They talked about Mrs. Winchester! Talk begat rumor and as the years passed and new towers and wings arouse, so did the colossal, ominous figure of Satan, which had struck men dumb with terror and awe. The people of the valley could not tell if it was an optical illusions or material. When President Theodore Roosevelt’s entourage passed the Winchester House in 1903 to plant the City of Campbell’s famous redwood tree, he expressed desire to visit this now World-famous dwelling. At the great front door our nation’s leader was more than astonished when the ominous figure told him, “Mrs. Winchester is not at home!” As he left, a procession of white-and-red-robed, torch-bearing monks were seen floating down the misty nine-story tower of the Winchester Mansion. The ubiquitous inverted crucifix and black candles were present. There was a Mass taking place before an altar surmounted by a cross, on top of which was the sign of the tetragram, a traditional magical symbol representing the four elements and used in the conjuration of the elementary spirts. Mrs. Winchester was locked in her mansion in a life-and-death struggle with evil, spirits killed by the Winchester rifle. A cross was made in the fields. There was a goat trampling on the crucifix and a ghostly priest wearing a black robe and performing a ceremony. That night, passers by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. It was described as unholy sounds as the Devil’s Tritone. While God had invented music, Satan was the first musician, and many claimed to feel his presence. Classical music composers who were supposedly in attendance that night, he been denounced by the Church for making actual pacts with the Devil. And that night, these spirits in black and red robes insisted on all genuine creativity, including the music, which was the result of an implicit pact with the infernal. Shortly after the music started, witches assembled on the estate, there to jabber and disport themselves pending Satan’s arrival. When he appeared, they formed a circle around his throne and glorified him.
When he felt sufficiently stimulated by the praise, he gave the signal for the sabbath to begin. But this dark exuberance proved too much for the party. The night ended when the bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled at an ungodly hour to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchres. Mrs. Winchester felt such a demonic force that night…she dreamt of witches. She woke up screaming and screaming…and said, “I have seen the Devil.” And still a ghostly violin was playing as legions of restless souls still wandered in the mansion. The very act of hearing this music indicates that its intended purposes worked. This particular exercise was also intended to awaken dormant regions of the human mind. Ghosts playing certain frequencies would make unbelievable things happen the next day. It released adrenal energy, and the next day dead bodies were discovered mining in a cave in San Francisco. Mrs. Winchester fainted when she saw that the walls in her Daisy bedroom were done in scarlet black, and black candles surrounded the altar, on which a figure of Satan majestically sat. She found that her Bible was partially destroyed, there was a broken chalice, and inverted cross craved into the floor. Similar events took place all over the Bay Area that night. Weird animal sacrifices turned up with alarming frequency. Churches were vandalized, graves disturbed, and mysterious magical symbols were inscribed on church wall. It was as if the dead had been risen. I remember Mrs. Winchester telling me once of a visitation she had from her husband, William Wirt Winchester, deceased nearly ten years, and the shock of seeing him again, nearly killed her. This true story of these awful and inexplicable events—an experience that in one short day changed the colour of her hair from brown to white, and carved lines on her face that nothing would ever erase, haunted her with the recollection of the most fearful ordeal she ever went through and emerged alive to speak of it. Mrs. Winchester invited a Medium to her home to conduct a séance in the blue séance room. They heard such a melody as the World had never yet heard the equal to, note by note. A sort of ecstatic trance, and the most wonderful tunes ravished the air as if invisible hands swept over piano keys.
It seemed to tell her an unearthly story, faintly imagined and seen, shadow-like as in a dream, and awe-struck and bewildered, she crouched down on the cold stone floor, covering her ears, for she knew such a melody was never meant for human ears to hear. How long it lasted, she could not say, but it gradually died away as gently and imperceptibly as a summers breeze, and as it did so, the clock in the tower slowly struck 1.13 A.M. Then action came to her, and Mrs. Winchester sprang to her feet, she flew to the door and fumbled with the key. The rain was falling heavily without as she tore open the door, and she felt that strange soft wind she had felt thirteen times before pass her from behind! It passed her—passed her into the night was gone. But the sequel to that strange night’s experience came two hours later. A telegram came for Mrs. Winchester, that Reuben Gallon, a police officer known for guarding her estate was found dead outside her estate near the six-foot hedge with his horse laying by his side. The cause of death was apparently from fright. A priest who possessed a great deal of occult literature and practiced magic resented Mrs. Winchester because his mansion was much vaster and more beautiful than his church. He was envious of Mrs. Winchester’s zeal and determined to silence her and stop her building. He threated to cast a spell upon her which would upset her mentally, and perhaps this night of horrors was the result. Many charms are used to stir up love or hate, and some magicians specialize in this area of magic. Causing the death of human beings and animals. This type of black magic belongs to the darkest sphere of occultism. Such episodes may appear utterly absurd and pure superstition to people in countries comparatively free of black magic, but instead they should be warnings of the power of Satan and demons where occult literature lures readers into illicit knowledge. The satanists worshipped Lucifer, the fallen angel, who they believe has always had more power on Earth than God. Their goal is to restore him to “the throne of the Universe,” these strains echoing the tenets of the old Luciferins. In an honest moment, the priest confessed: “I didn’t want to curse Mrs. Winchester, but I was driven to do it. The devil drives me. I can never find rest.” By sympathy of your hearts for sin, more evil impulses inexhaustively than human power have stained the Earth. Such tragic events oftehn involve as many as four generations.
Unlock the secrets of these dark halls, where the magical arts have been cultivated and praticed.
A Guided tour through 110 of the 160 rooms. Guests will be able to see the infamous rooms of Sarah’s stately mansion, known around the world as the Winchester Mystery House®, and see the bizarre attributes that give the mysterious mansion its name.
Tour Duration: 1 Hour, 5 Minutes
Prices: $41.99 adults, $34.99 seniors 65+, $19.99 children 5-12.
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I Never Found a Man Who Knew How to Love Himself
It is important to look at the error in which one has lived in, and it will reveal so much to one. When the heart rises up in one, and one is pricked in one’s reins, often it is discovered how brutish one was and ignorant has been as a beast before the World. In todays highly professionalized World, the term amateur invites a brush-off from business executive and economists. Yet throughout history, unpaid amateurs, working for themselves, their families or their communities, have made remarkable achievements in a wide variety of fields, including science and technology. Because science had not become a paying profession, early scientists were almost all amateurs. Many gained a living as paid professionals in one field but made their greatest contributions to history as part-time prosumers. Joseph Priestley, who in 1774 discovered oxygen, was a minster. Pierre de Fermat, whose “last theorem” puzzled mathematicians for centuries, was a lawyer. And Benjamin Franklin, paid as a printer, media mogul and politician, studied ocean currents on the side, inventing bifocals along the way and demonstrating that lightning was a form of electricity. He, too, was a prosumer. Today prosuming amateurs are collecting huge amounts of valuable environmental information—for example, seismological data in the Philippines. However, it is astronomy and space that, often in collaboration with professionals, amateurs are making really important finds. They started early. When the World’s first artificial satellite, Sputink, blasted into orbit in 1957, amateurs all over the globe who had been organized by astronomer Fred Whipple, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, were waiting to track it across the Heavens. There effort was dubbed Moonwatch demonstrated what amateurs could do when properly inspired and led.” Today amateur astronomers are, among other things, charting asteroids and other potentially dangerous objects in space.
Brigadier General Simon “Pete” Worden, a former astronaut, not long ago told the U.S. House Committee on Science that small objects “at the nuclear weapons scale” smash into Earth’s upper atmosphere at a rate of once about every two weeks. In June 2002 one such event occurred over the Mediterranean and released twenty to thirty kilotons of energy—more than that of the Hiroshima blast. “Has this occurred over India or Pakistan,” Worden suggested, “it could have triggered a nuclear war.” Urging more attention to such low-probability, but potentially devastating, dangers, he paid tribute to amateur monitors, pointing out that “some of them are not so amateur.” According to Richard Nugent, himself an amateur asteroid hunter and a contributor to Starscan, a newsletter to the Johnson Space Center Astronomical Society, “Amateurs are catching up with the pros in certain fields, and surpassing them in others [such as] asteroid discoveries, novae, supernovae, variable stars, occultation events, fireballs, meteors, planetary observations, satellite passes, and other unique events.” As research tools become smaller, cheaper, smarter and more powerful, making possible further changes in our relationships to the deep fundamental of knowledge, amateurs will no doubt enter new fields. And this takes us to another overlooked contribution made by prosumers. Every single day around the World, countless volunteers get behind the wheel of their cars and drive to schools, churches, mosques, synagogues, hospitals, playgrounds or community centers to provide free services. Or they add to their odometers by picking up groceries for neighbors or taking a sick relative to a doctor. Nobody knows how many millions of miles they drive in aggregate over the course of year, or how much gas they use, or how much wear and tear they add to their autos in the course of creating unpaid value.
In addition, therefore, to delivering free lunch to the money economy by donating their unpaid time and labor, they are also contributing what amounts to a prosumer capital asset—the use of a vehicle—that makes possible or increases the value they created for others. That is more free lunch. (If they go to the trouble, tit is true that, in the United States of America, they may be able to reclaim some small part of their expenses as a tax deduction, but it is doubtful that in practice most volunteers do.) Car use, however, is not the only example of prosumer capital at work. As we have already seen, prosumers, as a group, spend large sums buying machines and tools—or, more accurately, investing in capital goods for use in prosuming. These tools range from telescopes, sewing machines and digital cholesterol testers all the way up to automobiles and other vehicles. And, in a new, fast-spreading practice, another pattern is emerging: Busy prosumers now sometimes volunteer their machines, instead of their labor. Only by taking account of practices likes these can we uncook the economic books. Now, Hobbes blazed the trail to the self, which has grown into the highway of a ubiquitous psychology without the psyche (soul). However, he, like Locke, did not develop the psychology of the self in its fullness, just as neither went very deeply into the state of nature, because the solution seemed to be on the surface. Once the old virtues were refuted—the piety of the religious or the honor of the nobles—Hobbes and Locke assumed that most men would immediately agree that their self-preservative desires are real, that they come from within and take primacy over any other desire. The true self is not only good for individuals but provides a basis for consensus not provided by religious or philosophies.
Locke’s substitute for the virtuous man, the rational and industrious one, is the perfect expression of this solution. It is not an ethic or a morality of a Protestant or any other kind of believer, but a frank admission of enlightened selfishness (selfishness that has learned from modern philosophy which goals are real and which imaginary), or self-interest rightly understood. Locke develops the opposite, the idle and the quarrelsome man—who, we see, may be the priest or the noble (id est, pretenders to a higher morality)—to debunk virtue in a less provocative way than Hobbes did. Lock’s rational and industrious man partakes, as a prototype, of the charm of the sincere man who acts as he thinks and, without fraudulent pieties, seeks his own good. Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism. The taste of the sincere expresses itself more in blame of Tartufferie than in praise of virtue. Terror in the face of death, an immediate and overwhelming subjective experience of the self and what counts most for it, and the imperative following from this experience that death must be avoided, were confirmed by the new natural philosophy which sees in nature only bodies in motion, bodies blindly conserving their motion by the necessity of inertia. All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared. Nature tells us nothing about man specifically and provides no imperatives for his conduct. However, man can be seen to behave as all other bodies behave, and the imaginary constraints on his following his powerful inclinations—constraints which would cause him to behave differently from natural bodies—vanish.
Irrational passion and rational science cooperate in a new way to establish natural law: Pursue peace. Man’s passionate subjectivity gives assents to the premises of natural philosophy—nay, takes them as its principles of action—and philosophy finds that that assent accords with nature. Man remains somehow a part of nature, but in a different and much more problematic way than in, say, Aristotle’s philosophy, where soul is at the center and what is highest in man is akin to what is highest in nature, or where soul is nature. Man is really only a part and not the microcosm. Nature has no rank order or hierarchy of being, nor does the self. Lockean natural man, who is really identical to his civil man, whose concern with comfortable self-preservation makes him law-abiding and productive, is not all that natural. Rousseau quickly pointed out that Locke, in his eagerness to find a simple or automatic solution to the political problem, made nature do much more than he had a right to expect a mechanical, nonteleological nature to do. Natural man would be brutish, hardly distinguishable from any of the other animals, unsociable and neither industrious nor rational, but, instead, idle and nonrational, motivated exclusively by feelings or sentiments. Having cut off the higher aspirations of man, those connected with the soul, Hobbes and Locke hoped to find a floor beneath him, which Rousseau removed. Man tumbled down into what we called the basement, which now appears bottomless. And there down below, Rousseau discovered all the complexity in man that, in the days before Machiavelli, was up on high. Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one.
The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to one’s real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in one, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise one perfection or salvation but merely buys one off. Rousseau explodes the simplistic harmoniousness between nature and society that seems to be the America premise. Rousseau still hoped for a soft landing on nature’s true grounds, but one not easily achieved, requiring both study and effort. The existence of such a natural ground has become doubtful, and it is here that they abyss opened up. However, it was Rousseau who founded the modern psychology of the self in its fullness, with its unending search for what is really underneath the surface of rationality and civility, its new ways of reaching the unconscious, and its unending task of constituting some kind of healthy harmony between above and below. Rousseau’s intransigence set the stage for a separation of man from nature. He was perfectly willing to go along with the modern scientific understanding that a brutish being is true man. However, nature cannot satisfactorily account for his difference from the other brutes, for his movement from nature to society, for his history. Descartes, playing his part in the dismantling of the soul, had reduced nature to extension, leaving out of it only the ego that observes extension. Man is, in everything but his consciousness, part of extension. Yet how he is a man, a unity, what came to be called a self, is utterly mysterious. This experienced whole, a combination of extension and ego, seems inexplicable or groundless. Body, or atoms in motion, passions, and reason are some kind of unity, but one that stands outside of the grasp of natural science.
If there were no place to hold them, Locke appears to have invented the self to provide unity in continuity for the ceaseless temporal succession of sense impressions that would disappear into nothingness. We can know everything in nature except that which knows nature. To the extent that man is a piece of nature, he disappears. The self gradually separates itself from nature, and its phenomena must be treated separately. Descartes’ ego, in appearance invulnerable and godlike in its calm and isolation, turns out to be the tip of an iceberg floating in a fathomless and turbulent sea called the id, consciousness an epiphenomenon of the unconscious. Man is self, that now seems clear. However, what is self? Our gaily embraced psychology leaves us with this question. If we are to abandon ourselves to it, it is important for us to know the unbearably complicated story behind it. If this psychology is to be believed, one thing is certain: it came to us belatedly, in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected in out liberal society, and it opens up a Pandora’s box, ourselves. Like Iago it tells us, “I never found a man who knew how to love himself.” Modern psychology has this in common with what was always popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it. The ambiguity of human life always requires that there be distinctions between good and bad, in one form or another. The great change is that a good man used to be the one who cares for others, as opposed to the man who cares exclusively for oneself. Now the good man is the one who knows how to care for himself, as opposed to the man who does not. This is most obvious in the political realm.
For Aristotle, good regimes have rulers dedicated to the common good, while bad ones have rulers who use their positions to further their private interest. For Locke and Montesquieu there is no such distinction. A good regime has the proper institutional structures for satisfying while containing the selfish men who make it up, while a bad one does not succeed in doing this. Selfishness is presupposed; men are not assumed to be as they ought to be, but as they are. Psychology has distinctions only between good and bad forms of selfishness, like Rousseau’s deliciously candid distinctions between amour de soi and amour–propre, untranslatable into English because we would have to use self-love for both terms. For us the most revealing and delightful distinctions—because it is so unconscious of its wickedness—is between inner-directed and other-directed, with the former taken to be unqualified good. Of course, we are told, the healthy inner-directed person will really care for others. To which I can only respond: if you can believe that, you can believe anything. Rousseau knew much better. The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of the most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things. Socrates too thought that living according to the opinions of others was an illness. However, he did not urge men to look for a source for producing their own unique opinions, or criticize them for being conformists. His measure of health was not sincerity, authenticity or any others necessarily vague criteria for distinguishing a healthy self. The truth is the one thing most needful; and conforming to nature is quite different from conforming to law, convention or opinion.
Socrates was always among the Athenians but was not quite one of them, apparently never made uncomfortable by the fact that they did not trust him. He was neither solitary nor citizen. Rousseau, a figure of similar stature in the new tradition, was distressed by the hatred of mankind, and was both, at least in speech, the perfect citizen and the complete solitary. He was torn between the extremes, and there was no middle ground. Although a very great reasoner, his preferred means of learning about himself were the reverie, the dream, the old memory, a stream of associations unhampered by rational control. In order to know such an amorphous being as man, Rousseau himself and his particular history are, in his view, more important than is Socrates’ quest for man in general, or man in himself. The difference is made apparent by comparing the image of Socrates talking to two young men about the best regime, with the image of Rousseau, lying on his back on a raft floating on a gently undulating lake, sensing his existence. Did you know that slow, synchronous brainwave activity is ordinarily associated with lack of eye movement, fixation, lack of definition, idleness, inactivity, overall body inertness? No organized thought is possible in these phasic states and selective associations are replaced by non-selective association, deprived of their purposeful character. Alpha is the mental state most commonly associated with meditation, but before anyone equates meditation with television, it is important to make a critical distinction. In the former, you produce your own material and in the latter it comes from outside; it is not internally generated. People who are good at meditation are among the most difficult to hypnotize. They start going into hypnotic trance, but at a certain point they begin producing their own material and cannot be influenced by outside instruction unless they choose to be.
These individuals have their own thing going. We doubt that any good meditators watch much television and that meditation might be an excellent ability to develop in people who are bothered by television addiction. In fact, television addiction might itself be symptomatic of an inability to produce one’s own mental imagery. When we compared brainwave activity while watching television with brainwave activity while reading magazines, it appears that the mode of response to television is very different from the responses to print the basic electrical responses of the brain is clearly to the medium and not to the content differences. The response to print may be fairly described as active, while the response to television may be fairly described s passive. Television is not communication as we have known it. Our subject was trying to learn something from a print ad, but was passive about the television. Television is a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure. This indicates that one gets a decease in beta [fast waves] and an increase in slow activity with a large percentage of alpha. Alpha wave patterns, recorded over the occipital areas of the scalp, disappear at the moment when a person gives visual commands (focuses, accommodates, and verges), when one takes charge of the process of seeking information Any orienting outward to the World increases one’s brainwave frequencies and blocks [halts] alpha wave activity. Alpha occurs when you do not orient to. You can sit back and have pictures in your head, but you are in a totally passive condition and unaware of the World outside of your pictures. The right phrase for alpha is really “spaced-out.” Not orienting. When a person focuses visually, orients to anything, notices something outside oneself, then one gets an immediate increase in faster wave activity and alpha will block [disappear].
Many meditators are in alpha but in meditation you are learning self-control and how to call upon your own internal processes. There is no such discipline with television. You are not training your mind to control itself, which biofeedback, and also meditation, accomplish; television trains people only for being zombies. Instead of training active attention, television seems to suppress it. Ten kids were asked to watch their favorite television programs. Our assumption was that since these programs were their preferred shows, the kids would be involved in them and we would find there would be an oscillation between alpha slow-wave activity and beta. The prediction was that they would go back and forth. However, they did not do that. They just sat back. They stayed almost all the time in alpha. This mean that while they were watching they were not reacting, not orienting, not focusing, just spaced-out. Also, children who are watching television are far slower to react to an emergency than children who are doing something else. And, that is predictable because when they are watching television, they are being trained not to react. To really learn anything, you have to interact with the source of the data. With television you do not really think. If I get engaged, I know that speaking for myself, I can only really learn, as in the Socratic method of teaching. The best teaching is an interactive form. Some people learn best, for example, by writing notes because the notes are a feedback system. (Like a journal or a diary.) Television watching is only receiving, no longer reacting. It cannot do anything but hold your attention; you are receiving, not looking. The key for why they are in alpha is that when they are watching they are not looking at, not orienting.
If you have a light which is not really being attended to, you can get an infinite amount of alpha. Perhaps it is that the TV target is so far away, the screen so small that your eyes need not move; you are looking at infinity, in a way, like looking at the hypnotist’s flashlight. If you look at moving targets, you have at least a little active interaction; that would tend to put into beta. However, with television though there seems to be movement, you stay all the in alpha. Reading produces a more active learning process and a higher amount of beta activity. You would expect abnormality in anyone who produces alpha while reading. The horror of television is that the information goes in, but we do not react to it. It goes right into our memory pool and perhaps we react to it later but do not know what we are reacting to. When you watch television you are training yourself not to react and so later on, you are doing things without knowing why you are doing them or where they came from. Because of the implications of this study, computer programmers might want to design their software to be less helpful in order to force users to think harder so that televisions and computers do not wipe out their brain functions. That may well be good advice, but it is hard to imagine the developers of commercial computer programs and Web applications taking it to heart. One of the long-standing trends in software programming has been the pursuit of ever more “user-friendly” interfaces. That is particularly true on the Net. Internet companies are in fierce competition to make people’s lives easier, to shift the burden of problem solving and other mental labor away from the user and onto the microprocessor. A small but telling example can be seen in the evolution of search engines. It its earliest incarnation, the Google engine was a very simple tool: you entered a keyword into the search box, and you hit the search button.
However, Google, facing competition from other search engines, like Microsoft’s Bing, has worked diligently to make its service enter more solicitous. Now, as soon as you enter the first letter of your keyword into the box, Google immediately suggests a list of popular search terms that being with that letter. Their algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. By suggesting more refined searches up front, Google can make your searches more convenient and efficient. Automating cognitive processes in this way has become the modern programmer’s stock-in-trade. And for good reason: people naturally seek out those software tools and Web sites that offer the most help and guidance—and shun those that are difficult to master. They want friendly, helpful software. Why would they not? Yet, as we cede to software more of the toil of thinking, they are likely diminishing our own brain power in subtle but meaningful ways. When a ditchdigger trades his shovel for a backhoe, his arm muscles weaken even as his efficiency increases. A similar trade-off may well take place as we automate the work of the mind. Another recent study, this one on academic research, provides real-World evidence of the way the tools we use to sift information online influence our mental habits and frame our thinking. After exanimating an enormous database on 34 million scholarly articles published in academic journals from 1945 through 2005, then analyzing citations included in the articles to see if patterns of citation, and hence of research, have changed as journals have shifted from being printed on paper to being published online; considering how much easier it is to search a digital text than printed text, the common assumption has been that making journals available on the Net would significantly broaden the scope of scholarly research, leading to a much more diverse set of citations.
However, that is not all that was discovered. As more journals moved online scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information leads to a narrowing of science and scholarship. With these counterintuitive finds, it as also been noted that automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what is not. The ease of following hyperlinks, moreover, leads online researchers to bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers would routinely skim as they flipped through the pages of a journal or a book. The quicker that scholars are able to find prevailing opinion, the more likely they are to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Though much less efficient than searching the Web, old-fashion library research probably served to widen scholars’ horizons: By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. The easy way may not always be the best way, but the easy way is the way our computers and search engines encourage of to take. Before Frederick Taylor introduced his system of scientific management, the individual laborer, drawing on his training, knowledge, and experience, would make his own decisions about how he did his work. He would write his own script. After Taylor, the laborer began following a script written by someone else. The machine operator was not expected to understand how the script was constructed or the reasoning behind it; he was simply expected to obey it.
The messiness that comes with individual autonomy was cleaned up, and the factory as a whole became more efficient, its output more predictable. Industry prospered. What was lost along with the messiness was personal initiative, creativity, and whim. Conscious craft turned into unconscious routine. Even if the hidden codes were revealed to us, when we go online, we, too, are following scripts written by others—algorithmic instruction that few of us would be able to understand. When we search for information through Google or other search engines, we are following a script. When we look at a product recommended to us by Amazon or Netflix, we are following a script. When we choose from a list of categories to describe ourselves or our relationships Facebook, we are following a script. These scripts can be ingenious and extraordinarily useful, as they were in Taylorist factories, but they also mechanize the messy processes of intellectual exploration and even social attachment. As the computer programmer Thomas Lord has argued, software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless “rituals” whose steps are “encoded in the logic of web pages.” Rather than acting according to our own knowledge and intuition, we go through the motions. Now, society is constantly always undergoing influx and change. Decades after it electrified, horrified, revitalized, and transformed Western society, North America’s revolution of the pleasures of the flesh is now firmly entrenched as a mainstream way of life. By now, its effects are showing—for one thing, it has probably cropped years off the age of the average virgin. Today, the median age of losing virginity is 17.4 for girls, and 16.6 for boys, about three years earlier than in the late, staid 1950s. Broken down, these figures are actually more startling: 19 percent of adolescents between the ages of thirteen and fifteen are nonvirgins. By age sixteen and seventeen, this rises to 55 percent, and fully 72 percent of all high-school seniors have had intercourse, at least half with more than one partner.
These figures do not paint a picture of uninhibited, liberating, and rewarding sexuality. To the contrary, they are adrip with poisonous consequences: a rash of pregnancies—by the time American women reach twenty, 43 percent will have become pregnant once (one every twenty-six seconds)—among mainly unmarried, ill-prepared mothers. Another way to understand this is to compare it with the situation in 1960: then, 33 percent of teenage mothers were unmarried at the birth of their first child; by 1989, this percentage had shot up to 81 percent. Rates of sexually transmitted disease (STD) have also skyrocketed, so much today, by the age of twenty-one years, about one in four is infected with such STDs as chlamydia, syphilis, or gonorrhea. More frighteningly, AIDS and COVID are making inroads of many young people. Despite impassioned warnings from such famous figures as basketball player Magic Johnson, who admitted his reckless promiscuity had caused his tragic diagnosis, many young people still engage in unprotected pleasures of the flesh. However, these same people were demanding that others get vaccinated and were a mask. I guess the difference is this new cancel culture gets to take their rage out of others just for thinking they are being exposed to others, while using a prophylactic requires self-responsibility, and people do not want to take preventative measures. Also, the government is not, nor are celebrities or politicians reminding people that it is dangerous and potentially deadly to have unprotected pleasures of the flesh. Perhaps people also may need abstinence from alcohol so they do not make irresponsible decisions and to play more sports and get more physical activity. If humans degrade it, it is perfectly normal for a natural function to become degraded. If elevated, noble. If sublimated, changed.
Where excessive erotic thinking accompanies physical continence, the result may be a mental disorder or bodily sickness. Equally sobering is that teenagers do not practice what they preach: despite their own early indulgence in pleasures of the flesh, few consider it reasonable to first have pleasures of the flesh before the age of sixteen or seventeen. Why, then, do they so blatantly jump the gun? Curiosity is the leading reason, and being in love is a distant second—63 percent of girls and 50 percent of boys surrendered their virginity to consummate their love. Alarmingly, even more girls (but only 35 percent of boys) succumbed to pressure from their sweethearts, while 58 percent of both were driven by the desire to impress their friends and become more popular. This, despite the ever-hardy double standard by which they judge themselves: two-thirds agree that pleasures of the flesh experiences enhance a boy’s reputation while it damages a girl’s. However, the children who would be born to parents whose matings are few, whose minds are pure, and whose hearts are aspiring, would be markedly superior in every way. An enforced chastity, which is the product of rigid circumstances or lack of temptation, is not the philosophic chastity. The power of pleasures of the flesh to make or mar happiness or equanimity is formidable. Left to run amok in savage lust it harms and degrades a human but, redeemed and transmuted, it serves one’s best interests. One knows, by theory and practice, logic and experience, that chastity may conserve energy—physical and mental, emotional and spiritual. However, one knows also that it creates undesired and undesirable effects in mind and character. Chasity is not the same as purity, although the two are often confused. The one is a way of outward life; the other a state of inner life.
If the energies needed for mastering the mind are to become powerful enough, such chastity cannot be avoided. In most men pleasures of the flesh is the largest diversion of these energies. The true union between man and woman is tantric. However, it cannot be brought about without developed qualities on both sides. Pleasures of the flesh, ought to be a natural controlled urge, between a married couple, but has all-too-often become a disease, a fever, an obsession. Once upon a time, before the revolution of pleasures of the flesh, chastity was easier for girls to maintain. For one thing, they menstruated later, at fourteen rather than twelve, as they do now, and married earlier, at twenty-one rather than today’s twenty-five. Then, a young woman could reasonably calculate that she had only seven years of chastity to conquer before she married, at which point she could surrender her virginity with the full approval of parents, religious authorities, and mainstream society. Today, both she and her brother are under sever pressure from hormones, a sex-driven society that scorns virgins as geeks, friends and classmates who taunt virgins and boast of their own sexual prowess, and the personal pain of dealing with boyfriends who coax or coerce them to have sex when they would prefer not to. Yet despite today’s rampant sexual experimentation even among the very young, about 20 percent of all teenagers remain chaste until adulthood. Why do these young men and women defy the norm? How do they handle the forces that defeat most of their peers? In what fundamental ways are they different from them? And, having achieved chaste maturity, do they regret deferring their sexual initiation? These issues must be examined against the backdrop of today’s complicated social and moral climate, in particular the media and music World dedicated to millions of young people and the power of the purses they control.
In those Worlds, hedonistic values, sex-driven advertising, and musical presentations blare out the message that pleasures of the flesh are good, natural, cool, and ubiquitous. Those physical and passional conditions which pass for love among the young—with their uncontrollable sensuality, their total unconcern with higher values, their puppet-like copulation—all show that they have still to outgrow the close ties which they still have to the animal stage of evolution. Pleasures of the flesh, as they portray it is a physical maneuver preceded by seductive, flirtatious behavior and cloaked in suggestive clothing, come-hither stances, and an aroma for animal musk. In this sex-sated World, feminists interpret the sexual act from the perspective of power politics, revealing how it, too, is integrally linked to the inequities between men and women. Unfortunately, their analyses have inspired some other women to conclude that righting the wrongs of the damnable double standard means adopting more dominant sexual standards. Translated into action, this has led to belt-notching, score-keeping, power-play pleasures of the flesh, initiated and controlled by women. They see nothing ironic about defining independence and equality as gaining mastery of infinite varieties. In their combative version of the pleasures of the flesh revolution, real women carry prophylactics in their jeans, grade (out of ten, for instance) the hard curves of men’s rear ends, and initiate pleasures of the flesh with partners who arouse their transient lust. However, in these vary same Worlds, vying with that overwhelming vision of life, in another powerful force, the aggressively proselytizing Moral Majority of the Christian right wing. It, too, has its youth wing and sponsors a counter-cultural movement that preaches sexual abstinence until marriage and heterosexuality as the only legitimate form of orientation, and it provides converts with accessories as trendy and upbeat as those of the rival ethic of sex-is-almighty. The best-known organization within this framework, once whose reach extends Worldwide, is the aptly named True Love Waits.
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 