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The Effect of Witchcraft or Devils

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One must recognize that over the course of centuries the ideas about witches and their activity have changed. The medieval notion of witchcraft is far different from that of the Christian Bible, and today’s self-styled witches usually resemble the ancient concept more than that of the Middle Ages. The Old Testament word which denotes a witch is kashaph. It is used in various forms, and most often is translated “sorcerer,” “sorcery,” or “sorceries. This means that a witch was a person who used magical formulas, incantations, or mutterings to exercise control over the unseen World. Other kinds of occultism, though equally condemned, were not regarded in the Old Testament as witchcraft. The individual who sought to communicate with the dead was called a necromancer, and this practice was not synonymous with sorcery. Similarly, foretelling the future by means of “reading” the livers of animals, the signs in the Heavens, the flight of birds, or the movements of particles in a liquid, though also forbidden, were not considered equivalent to witchcraft. Strictly speaking, the term “sorcerer” or “witch” referred to any person who summoned invisible powers to help in casting spells or performing feats of magic. It is not easy for us to accurately define and completely separate the specific practices Moses names. In general, it may be said that the enchanter (worker of magic), the witch (incantation-using sorcerer), the charmer (snake-handling hypnotist), and the wizard (the psychically gifted person who appeared to possess extra-sensory perception) came under the general Old Testament heading of witchcraft. In medieval times the concept of sorcery was different from that of the Old Testament. A witch was considered to be a person who sold her soul to Satan in exchange for magical powers. She was said to engage in pleasures of the flesh with demons and people thought she cast evil spells upon animals and people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

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These witches were always looked upon as dangerous and malevolent, while those of the Biblical times, through practicing a craft forbidden by God, often were regarded by the heathen as benefactors of society. The medieval idea that some women actual sold themselves to the devil led to events which are a dark blot in church history. The combination of superstition, cruelty and mass hysteria brought about the persecution and execution of many women on charges of witchcraft. Some historians estimated that in Europe alone more than nine million suspected witches were put to death upon the flimsiest of evidence. Today we realize that the vast majority of these unfortunates never made a pact with the devil, and did not possess magical powers, and did not harm anyone. Most of them were naïve women who came under suspicion because their words and actions departed from what was considered the norm. Some no doubt were brain-damaged, while others suffered from neuroses or psychotic conditions. The concept of witchcraft today differs in some details from both that of Biblical and medieval times. In contrast to the sorcerers of antiquity who believed in many gods, a large percentage of today’s witches are not deeply religious and do not consider their powers to be attributable to the supernatural. Most of these self-proclaimed witches do not speak of making a covenant with Satan, although this dedication to the devil is basic to black magic, as we shall see later. Contemporary witches do insist, however, that they are able to contact and utilize powers that come from the unseen World. Witchcraft today emulates that of the pre-Christian era in many respects. Its practitioners often organize into covens, a group of six males and six female witches with a high priest or priestess. They meet monthly at the time of the full moon, and at eight other festivals called sabbats throughout the year. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

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The Halloween sabbat—first the witches remove their clothes and bathe in salt water to purify themselves. Then, still nude (sky-clad, as they call it) they descend to the basement and step inside a 9-foot circle that is drawn about them with a 400-year-old sword by Mrs. Buckland (wife of Raymond Buckland, a Britisher with a Ph.D. in anthropology), who is known in the craft as Lady Rowen. A bewitching ambience is provided by music from a tape recorder and incense burned in a brass censor. Once inside the circle, the witches sing, chant, dance with broomsticks, in commemoration of an ancient fertility rite, drink tea and wine, and listen to the high priestess read from the Book of Shadows. The ceremony ends after Lady Rowen, dressed in only a silver crown, bracelet, necklace, and green leather garter belt, takes a horned helmet and places it on the head of her husband, the high priest, who is known as Robat. This signifies that power has been transferred from the high priestess who reigns during the six months of summer, to the high priest, who rules during the six winter six months. It is obvious that this is a return to ancient pagan practices, and that witchcraft its own religious system. It even has its own Bible, called The Book of Shadows, a compilation of rituals and chants drawn from various books of magic by which the practitioners produce their spells and charms. Witchcraft is therefore a religion that denies or distorts holy Scriptures, ignores or perverts the doctrine of Christ, and offers no deliverance from the guilt and power of sin.  However, the very existence of magic is strongly contested. Psychiatry sees the question of magic as being the symptom of mental illness. Psychology would say that when people are subjected to magic it is only the result of an incorrect upbringing, and that such people are superstitiously maladjusted and have a false conception of life. Liberal theology would even, in its modern form, regard magic simply as a system of traditional customs and ideas. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

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The ethical character of magic is also a battle ground of opinion. Some praise it as a gift of God while other see in it just neutral forces of nature which can be used either for good or evil. Again others, especially the Christians, know of the demonic character of magic. Why are events involving magic so difficult to judge? Going back to our definition we see that magic is practised through extrasensory forces being called into play. Our five senses have only a limited range. On the physical level people are ready to admit this, since science furnishes us with ample proof of the existence of areas that are beyond our human senses. However, in the spiritual realm such a mathematical demonstration is not possible. Hence the shortsighted rationalist simply deny the very existence of the divine as well as the demonic. We will point out how these extrasensory forces reveal themselves by means of a few example. The two Seiler brothers in Ottenheim, Baden, run a non-professional medical practice. One of the brothers put himself into a trance and in this state, he is able to identify diseases of the patients. The process is always successful. In Alsace a Catholic priest heals by magic. His nickname is Father Slipper. The reason behind this is that all those who desire his help must send him one of their slippers. Through concentrating on the slippers, he can discover what is wrong with the people. During counselling sessions in Austria, I happened to come across a so-called urine taster. The patient’s urine was not examined medically to discover the albumen, sugar and hemoglobin content etcetera, but was used as a psychometrical means of contact for a clairvoyant diagnosis. Such urine tasters are also known in Switzerland, France, Germany and other European countries. The strange thing is that in spite of such curious methods the diagnosis often proves to be correct. These magic healing methods depend on mediumistic and extrasensory forces! Herein lies the reason for their success. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

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In the definition the various aims of magic were mentioned. Whereas spiritism seeks to communicate with and to dominate the spirit World, magic enlarges this aim to cover people, animals, plants, and the material World. The black magician endeavours to subjugate and to dominate one’s enemy through magic. Some examples of this will follow later. Others try through magic to influence the animal and the plant Worlds as we see in the next examples. A man dabbled in black magic for many years. He specialized in stealing mile from the neighbouring farmer. He would tie a towel to a door knob, then murmur his magic phrases and squeeze the milk out of the towel. I have heard of similar examples in my counseling work, but was unable to investigate them personally. A missionary told me that on several occasions when she had tried to visit a magician some wild animals had approached her. She felt at once that demonic powers were at work. She had commanded the animals to go in the name of Jesus. They had gone. After this she heard that the magician had boasted that he was able to send out wild animals to kill any foreigner who came to see him. A young man, who a doctor described as schizophrenic, confessed to me during counselling that he had the ability to kill small animals at some distance away from him, merely through using his powers of magic. In Toggenburg, Switzerland, on several occasions in my counselling sessions people confessed that they had the power to kill horses, cows and pigs with the help of black magic. In reply to my question how they had received this ability, they told me that they had subscribed themselves with their own blood to the devil. One actual case of animal killing was examined by some scientists but they could find no natural cause of death. A farmer who had had several bad crops in a row was given the following advice by a magician. He should place three grains of corn under his tongue while sowing, then, having sowed the field, say a magic charm and end by calling on the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

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Calling on the Holy Trinity would then encourage growth and protect the crops from bad weather. As a matter of fact, the farmer was convinced that the charming of his field had been beneficial. Since that time through, his desire to read the Word of God disappeared, ad besides this there was an enormous increase in accidents in his stables. It is not only the organic World, the World of living creatures, that falls within the sphere and influence of magic, but also the inorganic World of dead matter. The following are some examples of this. For years three sisters slept in a single room. From time-to-time stones would fall from the ceiling of this room. When the eldest sister became engaged and finally left the house, this rain of stones stopped. I head of the incident from one of the sisters. Such magical falls of stones are not so rare as one might imagine. I have on several occasions had eyewitness accounts of them. For many years, a man practiced black magic. One of these specialties which he often demonstrated was thrusting a knife into the ground. He would murmur some magical words and several pints of blood would then come out of the place where the knife had been stuck in. The sister of this man was also an expert in the same field. The question is, was this just a clever trick or a genuine piece of magic? This case is very reminiscent of a fakir trick. Nevertheless similar incidents have been reported to me in my pastoral work. In the sphere of magic some of the most unreasonable things take place. Yet even if it were simply all a case of superstition and imagination, if it had no real foundation, the area would still be an abyss of human aberration and need, demanding enlightenment and conselling help. Other questions arising from the definition will come under discussion later. The Christian Bible presents demons as spiritual beings or spirit personalities. The specific attribute of “spirit” is incorporeality of immateriality. “A spirit hath not flesh and bones,” reports Luke 24.39; that is, demons do not possess a material body. #RandolphHaris 7 of 18

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On the other hand, they can act upon the human body, as well as the human soul and spirit. They are capable of entering and assuming control of a human body, speaking and acting through it from time to time and even possessing it, as if it were their own property. That demons are spirits is clear from numerous references in the Gospels. “When the even was come, they brought unto him in many that were possessed with demons: and He cast out the spirits with his word,” Matthew 8.16. When the seventy returned and joyfully declared, “Lord, even the demons are subject unto us,” reports Luke 10.17, or Lord replied, “Nevertheless in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you,” reports Luke 10.20. “The demon” who went out of the lunatic boy, as described in Matthew 17.18, is also called a “foul spirit” in Mark 9.25, The Apostle Paul emphatically declares that Satan and his demons are spirits. In describing the believers’ conflict against the powers of darkness, he indicated that the intense warfare “is not again flesh and blood” but against evil spirits, described as “principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness,” and “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the Heavenly places,” Ephesians 6.12. The Apostle John also indicates that demons are spirits. He describes the three unclean spirits issuing from the mouth of the dragon, of the best, and of the false prophet, as the “spirits of demons,” reports Revelation 16.14. The expression may be interpreted either as a common genitive of descriptions, defining the spirits as “demonic,” or better as a genitive of apposition, more particularly defining the general term “spirits,” which may be either good or bad, as bad, or “demon-spirits.” The fact that demons are spirits, and thus immaterial and incorporeal, does not in the least suggest that they lack individuality, with all the elements of personality such as will, feelings, and intellect. Like all God’s creatures, they were constituted with self-determining choice. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

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Created originally sinless, demons joined Satan in chosen course of rebellion. Their decision was deliberate and in the full knowledge of the infinite goodness and holiness of their Creator. This is why they are incorrigible and confirmed in their depravity with no hope of repentance or change. Like Satan’s, their choice is irretrievable; their doom is sealed (Luke 8.31; Revelation 20.1-2 and 10-15). That demons are individuals is attested by their intelligent and voluntary actions. They think, they speak, they act (Acts 19.15-16) through spiritistic medium or through a person over whom they have acquired control. In the case of the demon possessed, the domination is almost complete (Marl 5.10; Luke 4.34). In the case of demon influence, their control is less complete and direct (1 Timothy 4.1-2; 1 John 4.1-2). Because demons are spirit personalities, they can act upon and influence human’s body and mind. Counselors, parapsychologists and psychiatrists who deny or ignore this sphere of reality render themselves unequipped to deal with patients who may be suffering from occult oppression and subjection in a day when disturbances of both mind and body from this source are becoming more numerous and more pronounced. In the following tale the ghostly portion is rather dwarfed by the strong fairy element which appears in it, and, as we have already shown, many witchcraft cases in Scotland were closely interwoven with the older belief in the “good people”; Lord Orrery, when giving the account to Baxter, considered it to be “the effect of Witchcraft or Devils.” The reader is free to take what view one likes of the matter! The Lord Orrery mentioned therein is probably Roger, the second Earl, who Lodge in his Peerage describes as being “of a serious and contemplative disposition, which led him to seek retirement.” If this identification be correct the following event must have occurred between 1679 and 1682, during which years the Earl held the title. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

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The butler of a gentleman living near the Earl was sent to buy a pack of cards. As he was crossing a field, he was surprised to see a company of people sitting down at a table loaded with all manner of good things, of which they invited him to partake, and no doubt he would have accepted had not someone whispered in his ear, “Do nothing this company invites you to,” upon which he refused. After this they fell to dancing, and playing on musical instruments, then to work, in both of which occupations they desired the butler to join, but to no purpose. The night following the friendly spirit came to his bedside and warned him not to stir out of doors the next day, for if he did so the mysterious company would obtain possession of him. He remained indoors the greater part of that day, but towards evening he crossed the threshold, and hardly had he done so when a rope was cast about his waist, and he was forcibly dragged away with great swiftness. A horseman coming towards him espied both the man and the two ends of the rope, but could see nothing by pulling. By catching hold of one end, he succeeded in stopping the man’s headlong course, through a punishment for so doing he received a smart blow on his arm from the others. This came to the ears of the Earl of Orrery, who requested the butler’s master to send him to his house, which the latter did. There were then staying with the Earl several persons of quality, two Bishops, and the celebrated Healer, Valentine Greatrakes. Here the malice of the spirits of fairies manifested itself in a different manner. The unfortunate man was suddenly perceived to rise from the ground, and the united efforts of Greatrakes and another were unable to check his upward motion—in fact all that the spectators could do was to keep running under him to protect him from being hurt if the invisible power should suddenly relax its hold. At length he fell, but was caught by them before he reached the ground, and so received no harm. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

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That night the spectre, which had twice proved so friendly, appeared at his bedside with a wooden platter full of some grey liquid, which it bade him drink, as he had brought it to him to cure him of two sorts of fits he was subject to. He refused to drink it, and it would appear from another part f the narration that his refusal was based on the advice of the two Bishops, who he had consulted in the matter. At this the spirit was very angry, but told him he had a kindness for him, and that is he drank the juice of plantain-roots he would be cured of one sort of fit, but that he should suffer the other one till his death. On asking his visitant who he was, he replied that he was the ghost of a man who had been dead seven year, and who in the days of his flesh had led a loose life, and was therefore condemned to be born about in a restless condition with the strange company until the Day of Judgment. He added that “if the butler had acknowledged God in all His ways, he had not suffered such things by their means,” and reminded him that he had not said his payers the day before he met the company in the field; and thereupon vanished. Had this story rested alone on the evidence of the butler the “two sorts of fits” would have been more than sufficient to account for it, but what are we to say to the fact that all the main points of the narrative were borne out by the Earl while Mr. Greatrakes (according to Dr. More, the author of Collections of Philosophical Writings) declared that he was actually an eye-witness of the man’s being carried in the air above their heads. By now I see spiritualism in a very different light. However, many people think that spirit phenomena are accomplished by trickery, sleight of hand, or black magic. I agree that many mysterious happenings associated with prominent psychics and small-town fortune-tellers are hoaxes—perhaps 85 percent of them, but I believe the rest are actual deeds of evil spirits counterfeiting the power of the Holy Spirit. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

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At one of her golden skeleton key séances, to prove that there was no hocus-pocus involved, the control spirit sent the key sailing between the rungs of the chair on which Mrs. Winchester was sitting. Since she was in her own her, she knew there were no props and no strings were attached. The question, then, is just what are these spirits and how do these spiritualist phenomena occur? Some believe they are part of Satan’s strategy to deceive Christians and to enslave those who as yet do not know God. Many Christians are drawn into spiritualism because they assume all spiritual phenomena are produced by God—these people simply may not know their Christian Bibles. I have no adequate explanation of the marvels produced by spirits…but I cannot explain Christ’s miracles, either. However, since everything is energy in one form or another—this is a basic fact of physics—our bodies, too, are composed of energy. I believe that Satan, who is the temporary prince in control of this World (Ephesians 2.2; 6.12-17), is able to convert body energy that is yielded to him into a spiritual force. This spirit then manifests itself in the bizarre happenings associated with séances. I do affirm the reality associated with spiritualist phenomena. Who are the spirits that attend séances? Are they spirits of deceased people, as they claim? The Christian Bible teaches that the spirits of the departed dead do not become either angels or demon spirits. These spirits are either with the Lord, waiting for the day of resurrection of their bodies (1 Thessalonians 4.14-17), or they are in hell. There is much evidence in Scripture that the spirits who appear at séances are rebel angels. Jude 6 speaks about “angels which kept not their first estate.” Many Bible scholars interpret Ezekiel 28.17, “I will cast thee to the ground,” as indicating that the Earth is the realm of Satan’s powerful operations, with the help of his fallen colleagues, the demons. Satan is called the “god of this World,” in 2 Corinthians 4.4. And Christians are under attack by “rulers…. powers…World forces of darkness,” reports Ephesians 6.12. God tells us that hell was “created for the devil and his angels (demons)” reports Matthew 25.41. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

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It is important to realize that the spirit World exists as another dimension all around us, not in some far-off place. When the medium at a séance enters a trance, a control spirit takes over and allegedly introduces the spirit of a dead person. In reality, the unseen visitor is a “familiar spirit” who intimately knows the dead person. Apparently these familiar spirits accompany a person throughout life, becoming so well acquainted that they can convincingly imitate the dead person’s mannerisms and knowledge of personal details when called upon at a séance. In this way even close relatives are ticked into believing they are hearing their dead loved one. I believe this was what happened to the late James A. Pike. He went to several mediums who told him they had contracted his dead son, Jim, Jr., and that father and son could communicate in a séance. Mr. Pike supposedly did so on a number of occasions, as he described in his book, The Other Side. Actually Mr. Pike talked to a spirit who was familiar with his son. This spirit impersonated his son so well and favourably that Mr. Pike overcame his remorse about his son’s suicide, and looked forward to rejoining his son. Bishop Pike was a rather easy convert to spiritualism, since he, like the spiritualists, rejected the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and if Jesus is not God, he cannot be man’s Saviour—nor does man need a Saviour in Mr. Pike’s view. Mr. Pike’s third wife, Diane, was a secretary in a Methodist church before she married Mr. Pike. Her Christian beliefs were shallow also, as revealed in her book, Search. She describes a vision given her while her husband was dying in the Israeli wilderness, and she says she saw him being welcomed in the sky by Christ and a “host of witnesses.” She confesses: “The strangest part for me was to see so literally what I had supposed to be symbolic expressions of meaning.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

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Diane Pike, and hundreds of thousands of other people, have difficulty believing the extraordinary claims of the Christian Bible, yet they unhesitatingly accept the vagaries of personal fancy or the mysterious manifestations of spirits. This reminds us of the prophecy in 1 Timothy 4.1 about “giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of demons.” A well-known parapsychologist, Hans Holzer, tells in his book, The Psychic World of Bishop Pike, that he made contact with Mr. Pike through a medium named Ethel Meyers. The television publicity linked to the release of the book excited World interest in communicating with the dead. The familiar spirit contacted at a séance will say remarkable things about the dead person to connive loved one that they really are speaking to the one who has departed to the “other side.” The spirits will even say things long forgotten by the listener. The spirits Mrs. Winchester encountered as séances were, for the most part, very moralistic. They encouraged her not to smoke or drink or do anything nor do anything that would harm her mind and body. Ministers during the 19th century were told to preach morality, good manners, and civic pride. There were ministers who actually has spirit messages taken down by their secretaries and then used them from the pulpit! The spirits often talked about an ethical Jesus, but never about a Saviour who died a sacrificial death for sins. In contrast to the high and moral and ethical tone of the séances in the Winchester mansion, Mrs. Winchester attended some where the spirits were blasphemous and sensual. Spiritualist call them Earthbound demons, and they served to reinforce Mrs. Winchester’s conviction that the spirits in her Blue Séance Room were truly from God. However, some believe that Satan uses blasphemous séances as another subtle trick to convince people that there are “good” spirits and “bad” spirits, and that Mrs. Winchester and others were indeed communicating with God or their loved ones. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

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Supposedly even the spirits who tell people to improve themselves morally and spiritually were doing so to gain their allegiance for themselves and keep them from God. Even mediums are often unaware that they are dealing with the kingdom of Satan. Certain “psychic” persons, having developed their powers, may very well be able to make accurate or partially accurate revelations about coming events. These clairvoyance, mystics, readers, astrologer, or fortune-tellers use various means to foretell the future for individuals. Usually the revelation will be in very general terms, but sometimes it is specific enough to make people shiver after the predicted event has occurred and they remember in awe: “She predicted it would happen!” As is has been said, it is possible that much astrology and fortune-telling is sometimes of satanic spiritualism. Some people like Jeane Dixon believe her gifts of prophecy and visions are from God, but one no one is willing to acknowledge these supernatural gifts could come from Satan. Mrs. Winchester who built the Winchester Mansion which is now 4-stories tall and over 25,000 square feet had a 13-piece tableware set made entirely of pure gold. The set included goblets, plates, chopsticks, and cutlery, each engraved with a daisy which symbolized eternal youth and health. How magnificent they were! However, they say Mrs. Winchester starved herself to death. She was so besotted by the loss of her precious family members that she forgot—absolutely forgot to eat. There was certainly a glance of mysterious around, they also found the butler dead, seated at the table, with a meal in from of him, as he held a gold fork, which was made for a king. There was an odour of sanctity about the affair—a whiff of air from the land of the ghosts. Before the Winchester mansion was emptied out, one of the movers decided to take advantage of this fancy dinner set and some of the delicious food in the ice box. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

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Jed sat down to a nice steak dinner in the venetian dining room and clarence joined him. As Jed was about to smother his steak with steak sauce, he felt his wrist grasped by—well, by what felt uncommonly like an invisible hand. He was so startled. He dropped the steak sauce and drew his hand back, and was conscious of the slight detaining pressure of unseen fingers. Of course, it was hallucination, but it seemed so real, and was so expected, that—well, how could he not cut into this tender, juicy steak. As Jed was grappling with his meal, it must not have looked very appetizing. However, he felt an unusual degree of excitement—sort of feeling of do or die. Intending to keep complete control over his muscles, he held his knife in his right hand and his fork in his left. His index finger extended down the back of the utensils, as he used the fork to pin through the meat and, with the knife he cut enough for a single bite. Jed realized that clenching the knife and fork in his fist was not classy enough for such a fine dinner service in the beautiful mansion, which seem to require the guest to eat properly and enjoy their ambiance. He was just about to cut another piece of steak, when that unseen grasp fastened on his wrist. He paused with something of the feeling which induces the wrestler to pause before entering on the veritable tug of war. For one thing, he was desirous to satisfy himself as to the nature of the grasp—what it was that seemed to grasp him. It seemed to be a hand. The fingers went over the back of his wrist, and the thumb beneath. The fingers were long and thin—it was altogether a slender hand. However, it seemed to be a man’s hand, and an old man’s hand at that. The skin was tough and wrinkled, clammy and cold. On the little finger there was a ring, and on the first, abut the region of the first joint, appeared to be something an opened wound. It was anything but a beautiful hand, it was altogether too attenuated and clawlike, and it was yellow with age. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

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He said, “This is a devil or a ghost!” He moved his hand toward the plate to try to eat without the gold utensils. His hand instantly was grasped. With his left hand, Jed made several passes in the air up and down, behind and before, in every direction so far as he could. It was met with no resistance. There seemed to be nothing tangible but those invisible fingers which grasped his wrist—and he moved his left had towards the streak. That is when something slapped the steak out of his hand. “It is enough. Indeed it is too much. This ribaldry must cease,” he said. Jed was sure it was a ghost. He rose from his seat, and said, “If there is any other person with me in this room, may I asked that person to let me hear his voice, or hers? Just speak one word.” Not a sound. For some reason, almost contemptuous coldness fired his blood. He became suddenly enraged. “I shall not leave! Do you think I am going to be fooled by a conjuring trick which would disgrace a shilling séance? Drive out of the mansion at this time of night by a ghost! And such a ghost! If it were something like a ghost one would not mind; but a fool of a ghost like this!” His passion was ridiculous—children even. However, then the circumstances were exasperating—usually so, one might plead. He was standing three or food feet from the table. Jed dashed forward. As he did so a had was fastened on his throat. Instantly it was joined by another. They gripped him tightly. They madded Jed. With a madman’s fury, he still pressed forward towards that steak. He might as well had fought with fate. They clutched him as with bands of steel, and flung him to the ground. When he recovered consciousness, he found he was laying on the floor. That was a night of dreams. Jed did not know if her was awake or sleeping, but all sorts of strange things presented themselves to his mental eye. He could not shut them from his sight. One figure was prominent in all he saw—the figure of a man. “It must be Mrs. Winchester’s late butler, but how?” Jed said to himself. He was a lean old man, and what Jed noticed chiefly were his hands. Such ugly hands! In some fantastical way he seemed to be contending with them all through the night. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

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And yet in the morning when he woke—for Jed did wake up, and that from as sweet refreshing sleep as one might wish to have—it was all gone. The dinner service, the steak, the dinning room table, the chairs—all the furniture was gone. For now, the idea of there being anything supernatural going on in the mansion was funny. The sun was shinning into the great, unfurnished room. He did not realize he had died. As Jed walked around the room, he found a menu. The first course was Vermicelli soup, prepared with tomatoes, onion, and garlic. The second course was baked salmon and oysters. The Entrée was braised beef with broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, and carrots. With baked bread, a thick gravy and Yorkshire pudding. The final course was Neapolitan cakes with a layer of yellow, chocolate, n strawberry cake with glazed butter cream and coffee. The purpose of a Victorian banquet was to flaunt status, and the best way to do this was through an elaborate expensive dinner. Courses were brought out and carved in from of the hostess, then passed around to each guest at the dinner table. Maybe Jed should have allowed the spirit to stop him from eating. Of course, at all Victorian parties, guest had to be invited. Perhaps if Jed had just taken heed from the spirits, he would not be another of the Winchester’s ghost in the House Built by Spirits. Divine revelation uniformly views demons or evil spirits as denizens of the World of evil supernaturalism operating above the natural law. Spirits are not normally subject to human visibility or other sensory perception. Demons have superhuman intellect and it is accompanied by superphysical strength. However, the superphysical strength of demons is not limited to their physical energy they impart to their victim. Their power is broad enough to cause occult oppression of mind and body. They can produce physical disabilities and sickness unrelated to organic disorders and which medicine or natural therapy cannot alleviate it. Perhaps the most terrible power of demons is to derange the mind by upsetting the nervous system. In this way they can afflict the body with a psychosomatic disease. Demons are aware of the close relation between physical and mental health. By jangling the nerves and the emotions, they can cause mental instability (Luke 8.26-36), producing suicidal mania (Mark 9.22). Their purpose is to drive their occult-enslaved victims to destruction. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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We Wanted it to Last Forever—We Made Promises

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The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Life often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong. The time is three or four billion years ago—one or two billion years after the Earth was formed. The scene is the open sea; it covers most of the Earth’s surface, just as it will continue to do for eons to come. The principal characters are the coacervates: small, membrane-enclosed bags of organic and inorganic compounds, including catalytic substances that contribute a high level of chemical activity to what would otherwise be inert, uninteresting drops of oily material. The plot, like that of all good dramatic productions, is based on conflict. Indeed, only a small fraction of our initial cast of characters will survive to the end of the play; they rest must die. Despite the superficial similarity of the coacervates, the conflict is essentially a struggle among different “species.” A particular series of reactions that happened to develop in primordial pool number 543 resulted in the formation of droplets of chemically active compounds of adequate stability to work their way to the open sea and there continue their metabolic process. However, a substantially different set of reactions had occurred in pool number 279, and this had led to injection into the ocean of an essentially different species of coacervate. Similarly for pools 59, 176, 798, and all the rest. The tremendous variety of combinations permitted by the basic versatility of organic and inorganic substances had resulted in a correspondingly wide variety of species among the initial cast of character in the drama to consider. As befits the relative simple nature of the members of the cast, the issues that sets them into conflict is a simple one—food. Initially the problem is not serious, for only a few coacervate individuals are widely scattered throughout vast expanses of ocean. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

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Under these circumstances their ability to grow and reproduce their kind is limited only by their own internal chemistry and a level of concentration of organic and inorganic nutrients in the surrounding water that is insignificantly influenced by the existence of other coacervates. Eventually, however, all this changes. A time comes when the absorption by the growing coacervate population of the nutrients of the ocean is extensive enough to start cutting down on the density of the available food. It is then that the interspecies conflict begins in earnest. For those types of coacervates that have the most effective metabolism, in the sense of being able to assimilate the available nutrients to grow and reproduce most rapidly, then begin to starve the less hardy species out of existence. From the beginning of the conflict, the tactics employed by the successful species are designed to make effective use of the numerical superiority they achieved in the fast-growing early years, while there was still enough food for all. When the era of overpopulation sets in, the continued eating and proliferating of these hungry hordes cause matters to go rapidly from bad to worse, and what started as a minor recession in the coacervate economy quickly becomes a disastrous depression. Of course, all species are affected by the growing food shortage, for each faces extinction if its birth rate falls below its death rate. And this can occur, be cause the decreasing availability of food curtails the birth rate more than it does the death rate. Ultimately, the small and undernourished coacervate droplets of a slowly growing species must get broken up by agitation, collision, and wear, with their contents spilling into the sea to provide food for the more hardy types. Thus the plot becomes clear. As our imaginary play continues for the millions of years that must elapse between opening and final curtain, the abundance of nutrients gradually decreases and the less prolific species, one by one, become extinct. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

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At this point we can foresee the final outcome of the drama—the ultimate triumph of the strong over the weak, the emergence from the herd of the species possessed of the qualities most suitable for survival. We may as well anticipate the ending, quit the theater, and reflect on the meaning of what we have seen. Obviously, Charles Darwin, if not actually the author of our imaginary play, is at least entitled to credit for inspiring the theme. Of course, it is unlikely that he had in mind as primitive a conflict for existence as this when he formulated his principles of evolution, but there is no reason why his doctrine of “survival of the fittest” would not have applied to our primeval cast of characters. In fact, as we have seen, nothing could have prevented it. The principles involved are exactly the same as those underlying any number of physical and chemical phenomena in which parallel processes of different and self-aggrandizing rates of activity simultaneously have access to the same source of supply of basic ingredients. “Evolution” may be widely considered to be a law of biology but, like all other biological principles we have encountered, its roots are firmly implanted in the ordinary laws of physics. The ultimate result of the interspecies struggle for existence among the primordial coacervates had to be the same as the ultimate result of all evolutionary competitions—the suppression of the poorly adapted and the proliferation of the well adapted. The seas must have come to abound in droplets containing a mixture of catalysts and other ingredients that supported a variety of internal chemical activities which not only made rapid and effective use of the raw materials then available in the waters of the Earth but also maintained an internal organization and membrane properties that contributed to balanced growth and reproduction. However, despite our imaginary dramatic production, it is not necessary to conclude that only one species finally survived. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

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Differences in climate and local chemical conditions among different regions of the seas would result in different relative survival values for the competing species and would lead to strong geographical influences on the nature of the local population. Changes in the chemistry of the sea resulting from gradual changes in the Earth’s atmosphere and surface composition would also have preserved a larger number of species than could otherwise have coexisted by preventing the evolutionary processes from going to completion and becoming static. In any event, the principles of evolution would not have led to a static situation, even if the environmental conditions of the coacervates had been uniform and unchanging. For the perpetual random jostling of the organic and inorganic constituents inside the coacervates would frequently result in the formation of new types of molecules. Perhaps one of these molecules out of a million would help catalyze some new chain of reactions within the coacervate. And, in one of a million of these new rection chains, one of the products might be the newly invented molecule. If son, autocatalysis could occur, the new molecular form could be abundant, and the associated set of chemical reactions it facilitated could become part of the standard metabolism of succeeding generations of coacervates. To be sure, in our hypothetical example this would occur only once for every million million random formations of new molecular types, but this would be more than often enough to provide for the coacervates a dynamic pattern of evolutionary development. The time between successive events at the molecular level is so few millionths of a second and the time available is so many millions of years that the raw material of evolutionary change can easily consist of such seemingly unlikely accidental molecular juxtapositions or rearrangements. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

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In fact, because of the “trying out” of new combinations that must occur ceaselessly in substance that is not held at the absolute zero of temperature, we can be sure that sooner or later pure chance will lead to the formation of any arrangement of the available materials that the laws of physics and chemistry will permit to hold together. Thus, new and improved molecular types, with their associated autocatalytic chains of chemical reactions, would have been continually “sought out” and incorporated into the architecture and metabolism of the coacervates to improve their growth and reproduction characteristics. The cumulative results of these natural-selection processes would ultimately have included the appearance of other new structural and metabolic features. For example, occasionally a chain reaction that got started would have produced, among other things, substances that tended to coagulate and thus form solid inclusions or membranes within the coacervate. Because of the physical adhesive forces, these new inclusions would have trapped and bound, in an extended two-dimensional configuration, some of the molecules floating in the surrounding fluid. In some instances, the surface-bound configuration of the trapped molecules would have had a higher chemical reactivity than the unbound configuration, thereby increasing the growth rate of the coacervate. Ultimately, therefore, evolutionary selection would have made common place coacervates with composition leading to include membranes. Another likely early aberration in coacervate structure would have been the formation of droplets within droplets. It will be recalled that organic materials in the primeval pools spontaneously coalesced into spherical droplets because of strong attractive forces between their molecules and that this was followed by the development of more or less permanent enclosing membranes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

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In the same way, certain products of the coacervate metabolism could coalesce into “inclusions” separated from the bulk of the coacervate fluids by enclosing their own. (“Inclusion” is used here in a general sense. Modern descendants such coacervate structures would probably include not only the nuclei common to the cells of most organisms but also the smaller anatomic “organelles” that are found in the more primitive bacteria as well as in the cells of more advanced organisms.) The differential permeability of the membranes would block the transmission of certain molecules while allowing others to interpenetrate freely. This would result in the concentration of certain substances within the inclusions and different ones outside. Different series of reactions could then occur in the two regions of the coacervate. Among the countless millions of times that such inclusions spontaneously formed billion of coacervates, there would occasionally be a combination having above-average survival value. The special conditions preserved in the semi-isolated inclusion would support chemical reactions having a certain product that would not only be able to penetrate the enclosing membrane but, once on the outside, would be unusually effective in accelerating the external pattern of chemical reactions. These reactions, in the surrounding “body” of the coacervate, would then have as one product a substance that could enter the inclusion and further stimulate its synthesizing processes. Such a mutually facilitating interaction would contribute above-average growth characteristics to the complex coacervate, with the inevitable ultimate evolutionary popularizing among the coacervate population of an inclusion/body structure and associated chemistry that started out as a rare and improbably combination. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

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Even time-varying metabolic processes would be expected to result from the operation of the physical principles of evolution. Consider, for example, a complex coacervate similar to that just described but in which the ingredients that accelerate the growth reactions are not catalysts but instead get “used up” in the reactions thy promote. Suppose further that the body reaction must go on for a substantial period of time before the production of the ingredient that then migrates to the inclusion to participate in its internal chemistry and that the resulting reaction in the inclusion also requires a substantial period before it can generate and send the other accelerating ingredient back to the body. This is a “positive-feedback system” with time lags. Such a system, familiar to electronic engineers, results in oscillatory behaviour. In such a coacervate, in both body and inclusions, the chemical conditions would change periodically. In sophisticated coacervates, comparatively high on the evolutionary scale, the cyclic process would probably not be so simple as merely a successive acceleration and deceleration of a single chain of chemical reactions in body and inclusions. Instead, in addition to the “main chain” of chemistry involved in the cyclic process, there could be “side chains” of secondary reactions with various products, possibly including some useful for the main reaction chain. For example, the periodic exhaustion of the special inclusion-originating ingredient needed in the body of the coacervate could permit new reactions that would not be possible in the presence of the special ingredient. These other reactions might produce a substance needed in some subsequent step of the coacervate chemistry. Thus, temporal cycling of the coacervate chemical activity could have survival value and gradually become “standard equipment” in successive generations of coacervates. Such evolutionary processes would have resulted in a gradual but inexorable speeding up of the rate of development of new species of lifelike structures. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

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As natural selection brought to prominence forms of organization of matter characterized by greater and greater efficiency in the use of the raw materials of the seas, the increasing rates of growth and reproduction of these new forms finally must have compressed into centuries of a degree of evolutionary development that had previously required hundreds of millenniums. If the first billion years of the Earth’s history was required for the tortuous development of a handful of coacervate droplets rugged enough to leave their pools of incubation and survive in the open seas, the second billion years must have witnessed increases in chemical and structural sophistication that were fantastic, compared with the accomplishments of the earlier era. Earlier, in our recognition of the lifelike characteristics of the primitive coacervates, we had to ask ourselves whether our discussion had carried us over the line dividing the realm of inanimate mechanism from that of animate organism. As we now contemplate the tremendous increase of sophistication that natural forces of evolution must have brought to the chemistry and structure of the coacervates, the question becomes even more insistent. In fact, from this point on, we should find it awkward if we could not start employing more of the language of biology in discussing the aggregations of matter we must deal with. We must soon start talking about “single-celled organisms” rather than coacervate droplets. However, if the property of “life” has really attached itself to our curious bags of chemicals, this would appear to be a development that no author should allow to slip unheeded into one’s text. After all, there can be no accomplishment more significant than establishing that the prosaic operation of the ordinary laws of physics on the materials and in the environment of the primordial Earth ultimately leads to the appearance of living organisms. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

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It would appear that the author would have the responsibility of calling the reader’s attention to the point at which the transition from nonlife to life occurs, so that due notice could be taken of this most important development. The trouble is that no one has designed a definition of life that permits clear-cut distinction between living and nonliving forms of matter. Most would say that a single-celled amoeba is alive and that a primeval pool of hot dilute soup is not. It terms of the organization of this report, there would probably be general agreement that the subject matter of the past was inanimate and that the subject matter even further back on is animate. However, there would be little agreement on precisely where the line between nonlife and life is crossed. This makes it difficult for an author to achieve the dramatic effect to which one feels an event of such importance entitles one. One’s defense must be that the colourlessness of the treatment is a consequence of the peculiarity of the subject matter rather than of one’s own literary inadequacy. Let us therefore take up again the thread of our narrative. We shall do so by exploring the continuing evolutionary development of what we shall now call this single-celled organisms of the late primeval World. As we encounter more evidence of the almost explosive accelerating power of the forces of evolution, we shall, of course, keep constantly in mind the fact that nothing vitalistic or even uniquely “biological” is involved. The appearance of effective evolutionary processes awaited only the development of the competitive conditions fundamental to the operation of the principle of natural selection. When these conditions appeared, so did evolution. The basic rules of the game we are playing are still the laws of physics. Education is about discovering the special skills and talents of students and guiding their learning according to high standards. Education is also about teaching our community basic American values and uncorking that World-renowned American ingenuity that has characterized our country. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

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So we had our season in Heaven, we were not cheated. Heaven is never more than a glance and it is gone. We wanted it to last forever. We made our promises. Our lives are operatic. However poorly we sing, we are faithful to our one refrain: love, betrayal, revenge. We cannot settle on love alone, the other two are equally and inalienably our nature. The most we can hope for is to love a lot and go light on the other two. This splendid project has long been a shambles; but the failure, which a palace in ruins, still is grand and has some dignity, yet it has somehow been trivialized. What is left is a very little thing, and what still is possible for us in not very much, nothing that might call for passion or anguish or hope. The pain in our hearts is the meaning. And what does that pain say? Nothing stays. Temples, palaces, and pyramids, and stone heroes on stone horses all swirling into the void. And continents that split apart and drift, and stars that collapse and implode, and we are a flicker of desire in a torrent of fire and ice; it does not mean anything, it all slides away. Once a mysterious and hidden problem, hardly acknowledged by the public and barely investigated by professionals, suicide today is the focus of much attention. During the past 50 years in particular, investigators have learned a great deal about this life-or-death problem. In contrast to most other problems, suicide has received much more examination from the sociocultural model than from any other. Sociocultural theorists have, for example, highlighted the importance of societal change and stress, national and religious affiliation, martial status, gender, race, and the mass media. The insights and information gathered by psychological and biological researchers have been more limited. Although sociocultural factors certainly shed light on the general background and triggers of suicide, they typically leave us unable to predict that a given person will attempt suicide. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

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When all is said and done, clinicians do not yet fully understand why some people kill themselves while others in similar circumstances manage to find better ways of addressing their problems. Psychological and biological insights must catch up to the sociocultural insight if clinicians are truly to explain and understand suicide. Treatments for suicide also pose some difficult problems. Clinicians have yet to develop clearly successful therapies for suicidal persons. Although suicide prevention programs certainly reflect the clinical field’s commitment to helping people who are suicidal, it is not yet clear how much such programs actually reduce the overall risk or rate of suicide. At the same time, the growth in the amount of research on suicide offers great promise. And perhaps most promising of all, clinicians are now enlisting the public in the fight against this problem. They are calling for broader public education about suicide—programs aimed at both young and old. It is reasonable to expect that the current commitment will lead to a better understanding of suicide and to more successful interventions. Such goals are of importance to everyone. Although suicide itself is typically a lonely and desperate act, the impact of such acts is very broad indeed. Let us return now to our alert young man of average to good attainments and imagine him growing up in and into this arena. Most likely he will go to work for an organization, in a factory or service job, manual or clerical, with the corresponding job attitude and way of life. However, if he has been to college, he will likely be in the second status of the organized system, in business management, communications, sales or technology, with its job attitude and way of life. After a few years, many such young men will perceive that they are in a Rat Race. The young workers will perceive it as the work speeds up, when they get married, as their installment payments fall due. The Organization Man will perceive it as competition, company pressure to conform, etcetera. Of these, most will race on, but a few will balk and stop running. Now what becomes of these few? #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

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They are not likely to choose the other, motely, alternative of trying to remain in society independent of the organization. For their experience has been disillusioning. They have become hip. (We shall see later that this is profoundly organizational attitude.) They know that the independent unorganized are up against it; for they have learned techniques of promotion and they do not think much, or much think, of other methods and kinds of results. However, to be hip and cynical are not attitudes that prompt one to make a go on one’s own. It is not surprising then that many of those who balk in the Rat Race will voluntarily choose the other remaining possibility, poverty “outside” society (whether they choose it, of fall into it, comes to the same thing). These, not boys, but early disillusioned, hip, and resigned young men, are the Fourth Wave Generation. The organization they have quit may be the armed forces or a university that they cannot compound with; these tend to be more naïve. Those who have had experience of working for a firm and making a pretty good living tend to be more cynical. Naturally this cataclysmic transition, between being in and being “outside” society, does not occur without strong accompanying emotional moments: betrayals in love, binges, blow-up at the boss, addiction to forbidden haunts and vices. However, at this point let us stick to the social structure of it. Some men actually treasure their “vital energy,” it is a precious store of God-given fluid one has to dispense frugally enough to last one’s entire virile lifetime. The negative side of this vital energy: how to avoid debilitating/exhausting/weakening one’s manly self. Even the prescribed regimen—wholesome and spiceless food, purity of body and soul—was designed to dodge trouble. However, how is one to energize oneself? Well, one could throw oneself into a sport, which by midcentury, was being touted as an ideal way to stimulate the physical man. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

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One delightful consequence of sport was that it would not merely invigorate or reroute a man’s pleasures of the fleshing longings but recharge one’s strength at the same time. This ideology of the “vital energy economy”—budget your seed and spend it wisely—endured for over half a century. A man’s body, unlike his finite volume of seed, could thereby become a renewable resource. One would be a walking, flexing, pulsating specimen of Muscular Christianity. From 1850 to 1890, schools in both North America and England made playing games an important part of their curriculum, and the obsessive role sports in these cultures dates from that period. It became a major instrument in male bonding and in teaching men to be men. It also inculcated in them the notion that they were biologically superior to women and to other, effete breeds of man. (Unlike the Greeks, however, the Victorians were too modest to prove this by competing in the nude.) The vital energy played an equally vital role in this sport-mindedness, partly through seminal sublimation, partly through unexplained physical process. Sports, this vital energy-efficient activity, became associated as well with moral asceticism—temperance, in the nineteenth-century sense of avoiding all evils such as liquor and women. “What are you running here, a Sunday school or a baseball team?” demanded Chicago Cubs star player King Kelly of puritanical manager A.G. Spalding. Spalding’s answer might have been that the two were inseparably connected, moral purity and sportsmanship being two sides of the same coin. In fact, he hired Pinkerton detectives to tail his players and report on their extracurricular movements. At playgrounds, schools, and professional ball fields everywhere, the sportsman’s code applied: no tobacco, booze, gambling, womanizing, or ungentlemanly behaviour. Underlying these strictures was the most outlawed of all sins—onanism, casting irreplaceable vital energy into a moral void. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

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In 1889, the Brooklyn Bridegrooms baseball team put their collective celibacy into the headlines when they adopted it as a talisman and won that year’s pennant. This was, admittedly, a desperate measure for a desperate team. However, despite the above-average number of newlywed team members who gave the Bridegrooms their nickname, the players cooperated and avoided their wives until after the play-offs. Pitcher Bob Carruthers went so far as to decline visiting his newborn baby, presumably a consequence of his preseason unchastity. The ideology of Muscular Christianity faded slowly. Today, it still permeates some sports, notably boxing and soccer, and some football teams, all manned by players seeking every possible physical and psychic advantage. Everywhere in the World, men have pondered their physical makeup. Often, the result of such meditations had been the conclusion that the vital energy is an immeasurably important substance and that it plays a role in men’s activities from the cognitive to the carnal, of which sports are arguably the most widespread and beloved. Nonetheless, most contemporary is the psychotherapeutic discovery that the least effective way of treating a person under a destructive compulsion—alcoholism, for example—is to direct one in terms of a moral command, “Stay sober at all times!” No psychoanalyst worthy of one’s profession would commit this destructive error. The law, as stated by the analyst, would produce a tremendous resistance in the patient, and justly so. The patient would withdraw to one’s freedom to contradict oneself, even though one might then destroy oneself. The patient, in this action, defends a decisive element in human freedom. Psychoanalysts who (according to the latest fashion) being to moralize to their patients, however cautiously, should remember that it is precisely the pathological loss of power to respond to moral commands that makes these persons patients. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

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Most analysts are still conscious of this, preserving one of the deepest insights of psychotherapy, namely, that the law cannot break compulsions, that the “thou shalt” does not liberate. Instead of encountering the law, the patient encounters acceptance on the part of the effective analyst. One is accepted in the state in which one is, and one is not told to change one’s state before becoming acceptable. In some cases, especially in pre-analytic counseling, the acceptance can express itself in a description by the counselor of how one oneself was or still remains in a similar predicament, so that one ceases to be merely the subject, and the patient merely the object, in the healer-patient relationship. One has accused psychotherapy of permissiveness. In particular cases this criticism is just—formerly, even more so. However, so far as the method is concerned, this permissiveness is a result of a simple confusion between acceptance and permission. In the analytic situation there is neither command nor permission, but acceptance and healing. If the power of the compulsion is broken, a counseling exchange between the healer and the healed may take place, and the question may arise as to what the patient should do with one’s newly regained freedom. Only then should the problems of morality, its content, and its motivation come into focus, and the analyst may become a friend or a priest to the patient. However, then the further question for both of them must be raised whether the moral law, appealing to their freedom, has motivating power, or whether it is powerless without a religious element in it—the religious element being an acceptance that transcends the psychotherapeutic distinction between the healer and healed. With all the changes and challenges you face each day, there has never been a greater need to take the time to determine your priorities, and then with renewed focus, align your daily actions with your purpose goals. Since you cannot know it all or do it all, it is vital that you learn to take the time to contemplate what it is you need to know and what you need to do. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

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Too many decisions, too fast, about too many strange and unfamiliar problems—not some imagined “lack of leadership”—explain the gross incompetence of political and governmental decisions today. Our institutions are reeling from a decisional implosion. Working with out-of-date political technology, our capacity for effective governmental decision-making is deteriorating rapidly. When all the decisions have to be made in the White House, there is often little time for considering fully any one of them. In fact, the White House is so squeezed for decisions—on everything from air pollution, hospital costs, and nuclear power to the elimination of hazardous toys (!)—that one presidential adviser confided to me, “We are all suffering from future shock here!” Nor are the executive agencies much better off. Each department is crushed under the mounting decision load. Each is compelled to enforce countless regulations and to generate vast numbers of decisions daily, under tremendous accelerative pressures. Thus, a recent investigation of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) found that its council spent all of four and a half minutes considering each class of grant applications. “The number of applications…have far outstripped the ability of the NEA to make quality decisions,” the report declared. Few good studies of this decisional logjam exist. One of the best is Trevor Armbrister’s analysis of the 1968 Pueblo incident involving the capture of a U.S.A. spy ship by the North Koreans and dangerous showdown between the two countries. According to Armbrister, the Pentagon official who performed the “risk evaluation” on the Pueblo mission, and approved it, had only a few hours to appraise the risks of 76 different proposed military missions. The official subsequently refused to estimate how much time he had actually spent considering the Pueblo. The way in probably worked is that he got the book on his desk one morning at nine o’clock with orders to return it by noon. That book is the size of a Sears, Roebuk catalogue. It would be a physical impossibility for him to study each mission in detail. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

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Nevertheless, under the pressure of time, the risk on the Pueblo mission was termed “minimal.” This could mean that every military mission evaluated that morning received less than two and a half minutes’ consideration. No wonder things do not work. In the years following the 9/11 attacks in the United States of American and its allies have fought a continuous war on terror. The taxpayer tab for the war totals about $5 trillion, or around $16 per person. Reports from the Inspector Generals’ offices of Ira and Afghanistan estimated that the United States of America’s military has lost $60 billion to waste and fraud in Iraq, $100 billion to Afghan reconstruction efforts, and billions more in wasted equipment either burned or left behind after the withdrawal forces. Part of the problem may be that the Pentagon has 1.7 million contracts open, which makes oversight difficult, if not impossible. In Iraq and Afghanistan there was a huge waste, fraud, and abuse on the part of companies like Halliburton and others that [these companies] were able to get away with in the fog of war because there was not enough scrutiny into what they were doing. In some cases billions of dollars went missing; contractors were overcharging for everything from simple task like doing the laundry for the troops and providing meals to building shoddy facilities for schools and things for water and electricity. Another impetus for fraud stems from the blank checks that the Pentagon write to contractors. The most common method of winning contracts is through the “cost-plus” contracting system, in which the government reimburses contractor expenses and tacks on a commission as profit. The system works in such a way that the more work contractors do, the more profit they get, even if their work is inefficient. It basically says, “If you spend a billion dollars building a weapons system, you will get a 10 percent profit or $100 million.” Essentially, for contractors, “you do better if you are wasteful.” Such spending has swelled the military industry to become the eighth-largest lobbying sector in the nations, spending over $100 million on lobbying the government when the troops all deserve more and maybe even a house for risking their lives, but you know they do it for love of America and the people and not for money. However, paying them more would make sure they get adequate health care and buying them a home would make sure they would not end up homeless after risking their lives. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

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This multibillion-dollar bungle, according to a Department of Defense comptroller, has the “lethal potential of a loose cannon rolling around our deck.” He confesses, “The sad fact is that we do not really know how big this [confusion] really is. It will probably be five more years before we will be able to sort it all out.” However, you recall, President Trump wanted to audit budgets and decrease, if not stop, government spending on most foreign aid program. Nonetheless, if the Pentagon, with its complex to manage properly, as may well be the case, what about the government as a whole? The old decision-making institutions increasingly mirror the disarray in the outside World. The fragmentation of society into interest groups and the corresponding fragmentation of congressional authority into subgroups makes it difficult for a president to easily impose his will on Congress. Traditionally, an incumbent president could cut a deal with half a dozen elderly and powerful committee chairmen, and expect them to deliver the votes necessary to approve his legislative program. Today congressional committee chairmen and women can no more deliver the votes to the junior members of Congress than the AFL-CIO or the Catholic Church can deliver the votes of their followers. Unfortunate as it may seem to old-timers and hard-pressed presidents, people—including members of Congress—are doing more of their own thinking, and taking orders less submissively. All this makes it impossible, however, for Congress, as presently structured, to devote sustained attention to any issue or to respond quickly to the nation’s needs. Nonetheless, the roots of revolutionary wealth can be traced to 1956—the year when, for the first time, white-collar and service workers outnumbered blue-collar workers in the United States of America. This sea change in the composition of the labour force was arguably the kickoff point for the transition from an industrial economy based on manual labour to one based on knowledge or mind work. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

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The knowledge-based wealth system is till called the “new economy”—and for convenience we will at times continue to call it that here—but the first computers, still huge and expensive, actually were migrating from government offices into the business World by the mid-1950s. And Princeton economist Fritz Machlup, as early as 1962, showed that in the 1950s knowledge production in the United States of America was already growing faster than the gross national product. The 1950s are often pictured as deadly dull decade. However, on October 4, 1957, Russia launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, triggering a great space race with the United States of America that radically accelerated the development of systems theory, information science, software programming and training in project-management skills. It also promoted an emphasis on science and mathematics in the United States of America’s schools. All this began pumping new, wealth-relevant knowledge into the economy. Culture and politics began to change as well. Just as the industrial revolution centuries ago brought new ideas, art forms, values and political movements, along with new technology, so did the knowledge economy in the United States of America. Thus the 1950s saw the universalization of television and the introduction of Elvis Presley, the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, and rock ‘n’ roll. Hollywood shifted from heroes and happy endings to surely anti-heroes played by actors like James Dean, Sir Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, Antonio Espino y Mora, Anna May Wong, and Marilyn Monroe. The literary Beats and their hippie followers glorified “doing your own thing”—a precision attack on the conformity values in industrial mass societies. By 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was pointing out that “today’s technology has…virtually eliminated the quality of muscular strength as a criterion for filling most jobs, while intensifying American industry’s need for creative intelligence.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

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NOW demanded the right of women to participate on fair terms in the “revolution created by automation” and in the economy generally. While the World’s media focused on these dramatic events, almost no attention was paid to the work of top scientists, funded by the Pentagon, on an obscure new technology called ARPANET—a forerunner of what became the World-changing Internet. Given this history, the common belief that the “new” economy was the products of a 1990s stock-market bubble, and that it is going to go away, is ridiculous. A highly exaggerated mystically sponsored Golden Age of the remote past is as supposititious as a materialistically sponsored one of the near future is unrealizable. It is a silly mistake which some mystically minded enthusiasts fall into, that everybody is soon going to follow mysticism! The only basis they have for this assertion would appear to be that they move within a tiny circle where everybody is following mysticism and that they are judging the larger World outside by what is happening inside the circle. The pathway of greedy acquisition upon which humanity now stands must be left for wise co-operation. The old motives will not work today. Destiny is at work and all the multitude of prayers to God are not going to save humanity from what it creates for itself. Nothing could have been more devastating than the bombs falling on Warsaw Cathedral when more than a thousand worshippers were inside praying for God’s protection on Poland. Many in America do not realize how serious, threatening a dangerous war is. There is no battle ground, where no one lives, like the moon, where troops have a video game style show down. People get hurt, populated cities and suburbs are attacked. National defense is very serious. The war period has shown how uncertain are all materialistic standards, how much they are at the mercy of military political and economic shifts. It must therefore articulate in thoughtful minds a quest of higher standards which shall transcend such uncertainties and shifts. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

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Because humanity must find the solution to their troubles within themselves, all the so-called solutions offered from without have proved disappointing. And because the attempt to find scapegoats in other humans, other political parties, other doctrines of belief, and other nations is really an attempt to relieve themselves of this personal responsibility, they have so far failed to find an end to their troubles. Those inspirers of evil-doing and racial animosity who fondly believe that they can protect themselves against the forces of spiritual evolution which are stirring within the consciousness of humankind, are dwelling in an atmosphere of futile make-believe. To outgrow the instinctive cravings of the primitive terrestrial human and to try to supplant them by the noble aspirations of the well-advanced truly human being, is the only way to guarantee peace on Earth. We shall have to renounce this fetish of achieving absolute agreement and fully unity among those who differ from each other in fundamentals. Human nature and human mentality being in the present unregenerate and diverse conditions as they are, it is futile to purpose an unrealizable ideal. The attempts to prevent war and unify the nations can meet with no success while we make no attempt to discipline the violent impulses and greedy calculations which cause war. Only when human evolution has gone father, and the brute’s instincts have been sufficiently disciplined in us, shall we drop war. However, the clash of egoisms will still remain. Our frictions and battles will continue; their outer form will, however, change for the better and be lifted to a place more truly human and beyond the merely terrestrial. If present-day World misery demonstrates anything at all, it demonstrated the failure of the materialistic outlook, the futility of expecting peace and prosperity from purely material sources, the danger of ignoring the stubborn fact that personal character counts most in the making of a people’s happiness. The old way of sheer materialism has been tried and found to end in a dangerous morass. The new way of a nobler life and deeper faith does not look so tempting. Yet other way there is not except to sink in a still deeper morass. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

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Types of government that are anti-capitalistic could be defeated and avoided if the appeal they make to the discontented could be eliminated. This in turn requires the cause of discontentment be itself eliminated. That cause is the too unequal distribution of profits, income, and capital. The remedy for profits is to make labour an equal partner with capital in the sharing profits by a system of co-partnership. The remedy to fix income is to correct maximum and minimum incomes. The remedy for capital is inheritance reform. Whatever benefit has come from politics physically has to be paid for spiritually, for it has poisoned human relationships. In the end society is only a society of separate persons; in the end we come back to the individual human problem. There is much demand today for various rights in their totality. Can the right to freedom be fully given to maniacs and those who pose a danger to living beings? Can the right to free expression in speech and writing be given at a level beyond the capacities of those who make it? If life is to be orderly, if crime is to be contained, then there must be limits as well as rights? There is no other way left for us today than the way of looking right through the facts of the contemporary situation, to their underlying significance, their foundational cause, if we are to understand it aright. We must have the courage to acknowledge them for what they are. We must have the strength to be pessimistic if pessimism is required by truth. We must have the humility to confess or errors. When we understand the forces which work being the curtain of history, we stop groping. The punishment of crime should be of such a nature as to be materially useful to society and morally useful to the criminal. When humans misuse their liberty to commit crime, we withdraw it and put them in prison However, legal punishment has two grave defects: it makes no provision for more re-education alongside of the physical punishment, and it makes no difference between the repentant sinner and the nonrepentant one. The criminal is simply a human who has misinterpreted life, failed in self-discipline, accepted the suggestions of an evil environment, or been hurt by a hard social system. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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Can there be Such a thing on Earth as a Paradise without Sin?

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Many of us think we want happiness out of life. However, happiness can be a distraction. With all the changes and challenges one faces each day, there has never been a greater need to take the time to determine one’s priorities, and then with renewed focus, align one’s daily actions with one’s purpose or goals. The hedonic treadmill (also known as hedonic adaption) is a theory positing that people repeatedly return to their baseline level of happiness, regardless of what happens to them. This is dew to the law of diminishing returns. It is an economic law stating that if one input in the production of a commodity is increased while all other inputs are held fixed, a point will eventually be reached at which additions of the input yield progressively smaller, or diminishing, increased of output. Since these conveniences by becoming habitual had almost entirely ceased to be enjoyable, and at the same time degenerated into true need, it becomes much more cruel to de deprived of them than to possess them was sweet, and when humans were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them. Studies have shown that our circumstances do not account for most of our happiness. Each person has a happiness set point, which refers to one’s genetically determined predisposition for happiness. This set point for happiness is responsible for about 50 percent of the difference in happiness from person to person. There is an enabling power from God that allows mortals to obtain a blessing in this life to gain eternal life and exaltation after they have exercised faith, repented, and given their best effort to keep the commandments. Such divine help or strength is given through the mercy and love of God. Every mortal person needs divine grace because of Adam’s Fall and also because of the weakness of human beings. The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

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When discussing primeval lakes, which are giant precursors of living organisms, we must start by considering the phenomenon of catalysis. The phenomenon was first observed in 1822 by the German chemist J. W. Dobereiner. He even incorporated his discovery in a working device—a kind of automatic lighter—in which a jet of hydrogen would start to burn in air without the intervention of a spark or match. All that was necessary, he found, was to direct the unlighted jet against a surface covered with powdered platinum metal. For some reason, mysterious to Dobereiner and his contemporaries, this caused the hydrogen to ignite, that is, to combine spontaneously with the oxygen of the air, which it would not do at room temperature in the absence of the catalyst, platinum. Since Dobereiner’s discovery, many substances that catalyze specific chemical reactions have been found. The presence of powdered platinum, nickel, or iron oxide in the reaction chamber is essential in one stage of the preparation of commercial sulfuric acid if the process is to take place at more than a snail’s pace. Copper chromite, vanadium pentoxide, and manganese dioxide also serve as important catalysts in the chemical industry. In fact, much of the success of many industrial chemical processes depends on finding just the right catalyst for the reaction involved. What does the catalyst do? Well, one thing it does not do is get used up or chemically changed in the reaction it promotes. The same amount of catalytic material, possessing exactly the same molecular configuration, remains at the end of the process as entered the reaction chamber. This is quite different from the result of stimulating a chemical rection by the kind of energy-rich substance we have previously referred to. Such energy contributing molecules do not emerge unscathed from the chemical reactions in which they participate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

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Instead, their molecular structure changes under the influence of the forces set up during the reaction; it is in this way that they provide the additional energy needed to push or pull the atoms of the reacting molecules into their new configurations. However, catalysts do not contribute energy to the reacting ingredients; unless suitable energy balance is provided by other means, catalysts are powerless to act. In fact, the catalyst appears not to make possible any chemical reactions that cannot occur in its absence—it just speeds them up. Consider Dobereiner’s experiment, for example. In a mixture of hydrogen gas and air at room temperature there will be an occasional combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms (to form a water molecule), but this does not happen often enough to produce the bulk heating of the mixed gasses necessary to sustain combustion. In the presence of platinum, the combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms proceeds so much more rapidly that the gas heats up and bursts into flame. Much of the mystery that once surrounded the phenomenon of catalysis has been solved. We now know that the catalyst produces its effect by causing the molecules of the reacting ingredients to come into a form of contact with each other possessing a degree of atomic intimacy and precise orientation that would only rarely be achieved in the random, undirected encounters among these molecules in uncatalyzed reactions. In Dobereiner’s experiment, for example, hydrogen and oxygen are “adsorbed” onto the surface of the platinum—that is, the interaction of their electric charges with those of the metal is such as to bind the gaseous atoms lightly to the platinum surface. The redistribution of the electric charge of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms resulting from the surface binging turns out to be such nature as to make it easy far adjacent bound atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to slide together in an intimate configuration that would normally be difficult to achieve because of the shielding effect of the usual arrangement of their extranuclear charge. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

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Once one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms come together on the surface in this way, very strong forces of electrical interaction among them cause further rearrangement of their charge into the stable configuration characteristic of the water molecule. In this process the relatively small interaction forces between adsorbed atoms come together on the surface in this way, very strong forces of electrical interaction among atom cause further rearrangement of their charge into the stable configuration characteristic of the water molecule. In this process the relatively small interaction forces between adsorbed atoms and platinum are broken, and the new molecule of water escapes from the metal surface, which is then available to perform the same marriage ceremony for the next hydrogen/oxygen arrivals. In the example given, the catalyst promoted the combination of simpler into more complex chemical forms. Just as frequently, however, catalytic action encourages the breakdown of complex molecules into simpler ones. Iron, for example, will catalyze the reduction of hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, into water and oxygen. The particular reaction that will occur in any specific situation depends on the details of the interaction among catalyst and starting ingredients and on the workings of the physical laws of chemistry which determine the relative probabilities for the various possible molecular configurations. It is appropriate at this point to return to our primeval pools and relate what we have learned about catalytic activity to their chemical development. In and among the clays and sands of the lake bottoms it would be natural for some catalytically active metal ores and compounds to be occasionally exposed. Depending upon the specific nature of these materials, one or another class of possible chemical transformation would be selectively encouraged. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

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Because a tiny amount of catalytic material can have a large effect on the speed of a reaction, appreciable contributions to the individuality of behavior of the various pools could result from differences in their catalytic ingredients to small as to be easily overlooked in a not-too-sophisticated survey of the “starting conditions” in the pools. This is part of the explanation for the temperamental performance we are investigating. For if we eliminate the cases of individuality attributable to inorganic catalysts in the lake beds, we find much more uniformity than before in the chemical behaviour of our primordial pools. Nevertheless, some of the most dramatic exceptions to regularity in behaviour still persists. A mystery remains to be explained. Having achieved partial success in accounting for seemingly erratic chemical behaviour by recourse to the peculiarly powerful effects of catalysis, let us now look more deeply into this phenomenon in search of additional factors that might have an unsuspected influence on early chemical activity. A clue is provided by modern evidences for the unusual effectiveness of catalysts when they are incorporated in organic compounds. For reasons that are only partly understood, integration into an organic configuration frequently enhances tremendously the efficacy of a simply catalytic substance. It has already been mentioned, for example, that iron catalyzes the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen. However, if the iron is first incorporated in the compound catalase, in which it is chemically combined with a suitable protein and porphyrin, another organic substance that occurs frequently in plants and animals, its catalytic effect for the hydrogen peroxide transformation is multiplied 10 billion times! It is unlikely that large amounts of highly efficient catalysts were present in the primordial pools. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

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However, it seems probable that, in the random, undirected combination of the available molecular components, occasionally a configuration that resulted served as a relatively effective catalyst for a specific mode of linking of some of the other components floating around in the pool. Each such accidentally formed catalytic molecule would then have a sizable multiplying effect on the formation of the related substance. This would account for some sudden, though probably small, changes in the course of chemical developments in the pool. However, even more interesting results would occasionally appear. For suppose that the accidentally formed catalyst we are postulating promotes a chemical reaction whose products include more of the catalyst itself (autocatalysis). The result would be a chain reaction. A small amount of catalyst A would encourage a small amount of the available raw materials to react, yielding a small amount of product B and some more A. The increased quantity of catalyst A would cause a second similar, but more extensive reaction. Still more A would lead to still larger reactions, etcetera. Increases in the rates of formation of A and B by factors of millions or billions could easily ensue. In an efficient autocatalytic chain reaction, the runway acceleration of the chemical activity would probably be limited only by exhaustion of one of the raw materials. Thus, in a few days, weeks, or months (even unlimited amounts of the most efficient catalyst would not necessarily produce more rapid, “explosive” reactions. If, as in the processes of most interest to us, energy must be supplied to sustain the reaction, its availability would probably pace the activity. This would be especially likely if the principal source of energy were random thermal interactions with surrounding molecules.), rather than in the centuries usually required for major changes in the chemical activity of a primordial pool, an apparently brand-new characteristic of the pool could appear, whereby specific types of molecules would thenceforth be formed practically instantaneously (in geologic terms, at least) to the extent permitted by the availability of the necessary raw materials. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

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The essential idea is that substance A may catalyze the formation of substance B, which then enters into reactions that rapidly synthesize products C, C’, and C”, for example. One of these, says C’, may be a catalyst for a reaction yielding substances D, D’, and D”. D”, then, may catalyze the formation of E, which finally reacts with available raw materials to produce A, completing the chain. The intermediate products may well include the constituents of carbohydrates, fats, oils, or nucleic acids, as well as inorganic molecules. In a particularly favourable autocatalytic chain, one of the intermediate reactions might even be of a photochemical nature, whereby a quantum of ultraviolent light excites one of the interacting molecules and permits the formation of energy-rich product. (Such photelectric effects are known to occur to facilitate many simple chemical reactions, and they should have been much more prevalent in primordial times when the absence of the shielding ozone layer permitted the sun’s high-energy ultraviolet rays to bombard the Earth’s surface.) By the participation in the reaction chain of such intermediate products, complex final products possessing a total energy content greater than that of the starting ingredients could be produced. Thus the autocatalytic principle possesses a range and versatility adequate to account for a wide variety of patterns of chemical activity in enclosed bodies of water. It was in such a manner that sudden and seemingly unpredictable individuality would have developed in the chemical “personalities” of the carious primeval pools. Of course, today’s scientist would emphasize the point that the diversity of chemical behaviour produced by autocatalysis was not fundamentally unpredictable but was instead a consequence of small differences in the starting conditions or previous histories of the pools. Such differences would then account for the sudden appearance, at some stage of development, of a particular kind of autocatalytic chain in one pool rather than in another. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

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This kind of argument is, of course, sound in principle. However, the tremendously large multiplying factors involved in the chemical chain reactions, once started, mean that the differences in initial conditions responsible for substantial differences in the subsequent chemical development of two pools could be almost infinitesimal, lying well below the threshold of detection by “practical” techniques. A most rare and improbable event—the dropping from the sky of a single exotic particle or the fortuitous coming together in the pool of a number of molecules in a particular way that might not again occur in another million years—could get the process started. Thus, the kind of behaviour we are describing here would have seemed to unsophisticated human observers, if there had been any, as clear evidence of nonphysical, vitalistic purposiveness in the behaviour of the primordial pools. The stage we have reached in our narrative—characterized by large numbers of chemically active pools of warm water, each continually receiving supplies of simple organic compounds from the atmosphere, supplemented by inorganic gases and dissolved solids from the Earth, with some of the pools exhibiting remarkable efficiency in assembling these available ingredients into more complex organic molecules—represents the total accomplishment towards the development of life achieved during the first one of two billion years of the history of the newborn Earth. We still have a long way to go. In the next report, we will concern ourselves with the natural processes whereby the isolated pools of three of four billion years ago may have given birth to the progenitors of the living cells that ultimately became the principal architectural feature of plants and animals. Success is a journey, not a destination. Nothing in the World is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

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Athletes are—and always have—notorious for the lengths to which they will go to enhance their performance. Rigorous training, special dietary regimes, regulated sleeping patterns, performance-enhancing substances such as steroids—all have been integral parts of athletic training programs. Celibacy is another common feature of a sportsman’s discipline, necessary to avoid the debilitating consequences and wasteful emotions of pleasures of the flesh. (It may be a good idea for high school and college sports to try this, so players will not be distracted by broken hearts during the season.) Usually, its advocates promoted it as a way to store up precious vital energy, the vital bodily fluid that determinedly chaste men could transform into a God-given, performance-enhancing substance. This was true for the ancient Greeks, the Victorians, and the Cherokees, among others, and it remains true for Indian wrestlers and the footballer players, soccer stars, boxers, and other male athletes who prefer to stockpile their precious vital energy rather than yield it up in a single self-indulgent spasm. One might ask: is love also the ultimate principle for social ethics? And we must answer affirmatively, because the encounter of social groups is an encounter in which reunion of the separated is the telos, just as it is in the person-to-person encounter. However, there is a decisive difference. Social groups are power groups with no personal center. They have a changing organizational center in terms of their government. However, they have no personal center. This means that there are great differences in the way love is effective in social ethics. Any attempt to identify the problems of personal ethics and social ethics (as does legalistic pacificism, for example) ignores the reality of power in the social realm, and so confuses the organizational centeredness of historical group with the personal centeredness of a person. A discussion of the problems indicated by this statement requires the development of a philosophy of power. This we cannot do within the framework of the present study. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

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The religious source of the moral demands is love under the domination of its agape quality, in unity with the imperative of justice to acknowledge every being with personal potential as a person, being guided by the divine-human wisdom embodied in the moral laws of the past, listening to the concrete situation, and acting courageously on the basis of these principles. Out of such decisions in the power of love, new insights would grow. And they might transform the given tables of laws into something more adequate for our situation as a whole as well as for innumerable individual situations. Should this occur, love as the ultimate principle of the moral demands would be powerfully vindicated. The completely moral life—that is, the meticulous observance of all of the rules—leads, for both the individual and the group, to a rigidity that falls increasingly at odds with a changing World. Yet boundary violations, if reckless—recklessness measurable, usually, only after the act and its consequences—destroy the individual and destroy the social order. The individual becomes an outlaw, the group becomes a mob. Well, then, how much? What is the rule to guide us in the judicious breaking of rules? What is the wise measure of violation? Pain is one thing. Not the worst thing. It is not even very important. Worse is to play it safe, never to risk everything for the one big thing that comes only once, that looms, for a moment only, and then is gone. Once and once only. There is just a moment when we can go for it, leap, spend it all; or be prudent, hang back, listen to the cautious voices around us, and see that one big thing disappear forever. The one big thing, that is the issue, to go for it or not. That one big thing—costing not less than everything—big enough maybe to justify a crime, our one chance to climb up and out of meaninglessness. Time is running out and I cannot see—but I dread—what lies beyond. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

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Am I really struggling toward a moral decision? Or am I scrambling for a credible begging of the question? What a fallible calculus this is, even to the most disinterested—and I am the most interested of all. Should I then disqualify myself, put it in the hands of a wise human? I distrust wise humans. Anyway I know I could control the outcome by knowing the leanings of the wise human in whose hands I would place it. (You see? I am a wise human myself.) Should I leave it to God? I am still building my faith in God. There is no escape from arbitrariness. In the hands of the most interested party lies the full responsibility for a disinterested decision. May God have mercy on those whose fate is in my hands. The ache of love, the unquenchable burning, one can feel it. It seeks union, will be satisfied by nothing less than everything. It will burn on and on within the human heart until one is left in ashes. The only cure is the waning of love that follows upon the fusion that love so insistently demands. Disorder rules our lives sometimes. We carry on, wander through the days like a sleepwalker. Years of longing, years of standing at the verge, inching closer. Vertigo. Dragged by desire, trying to stay the fall. Then one tries to reason one’s way out of a maze of guilt and longing. One stumbles in the dark, trying to find a way to live, knowing that anything one finds will be provisional, fallible, revocable, but knowing also there is nothing else for it unless one is willing to follow someone else’s rules. Duty, faithfulness, self-restraint, all admirable traits, but how is one to know whether biding by them bespeaks a free choice of the good or a conformity to the group driven by fear?  A caring for others or quaking at the consequences of pursuing self-interest? If we are too frightened to be bad, we would not wish our goodness to be recognized as issuing from cowardice, would derive it rather from love, courage, honour. One promises fidelity to a spouse. Is it every justified to violate that promise? When? In what circumstances? Or should one ask, rather, is it every justified, over the course of a lifetime, never to violate that promise? #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

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Moral rules are the tools the holders of power use to extend their power and subjugate everybody else from doing wrong; and the moral human defends, unwittingly, by way of one’s morality, the existing social order with its accrued and always increasing evils. Creative change in a society issues from violation great enough to alter the social structure, but not so great as to bring it down altogether. One wants a society of law that allows some laws to be ignored. It is those violations we let stand that organize the ongoing transformation of social structure. The observance of rules, with a wise measure of slippage, coupled with the violation of rules, with an ironic measure of prudence, created flexibility, strengthens the group, and thereby creates the possibility of nonviolent change in the social order. The luxury cruise is a bore but not an escape. Too much blue hair, too much high-pitched cackle straining from the lilt of youth, unknown or varying legal jurisdiction. The knifelike prow cuts through the dark water like a plow crossing an endless plain. A slow regular rise and fall, a steady furled-back ribbon. This furrow closes over, leaves no trace. The problem is in me, clings to me. No solution in sight. People nearby. Promenaders. Voices are lowered as they pass close to me. I do not turn from the rail, remain fixed on the dark water. Are they concerned by my posture, my trance? Do they wonder if I meditate a leap? Do I? Very deep here. Fathoms, fathoms, miles, the Marianas Trench, five miles of water straight down. I picture the deepening strata, the dolphin, the fish, the monsters, the leviathan, and on down. At five hundred feet the marlin, and on down where no light reaches and no life moves. Nothing. Nothing except some slimy, sightless, eyeless thing, and what sort of life is that? #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

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And on down in eternal darkness to the final black bottom and nothing there except, perhaps, the rotting timbers of ancient shipwreck and, more modern mishap, the silent hull of a submarine with its entombed now-skeleton warriors, their bony hands on the controls of now-eternally-motionless torpedoes. The light around me fails, the water is black, a phosphorescent edge to the endless, transient furrow. Voices recede, die away. Nothing now but the rush of wind, and water. Without looking I know myself to be alone. No one would hear the splash. Or the cry. How cold would it be? How long would I last? When would I be missed? Why do I imagine this? What am I doing with these images? What is real? Am I watching flickering shadows on the wall of a cave? Are joys and sorrows but electrical currents in a network of brain cells? Is love real? The water. This dark water. That is real. And what is water? Something cold, wet, the embrace of death, the downward pull, the choking, the bursting lungs. However, someone else, some ghostlike other, standing beside me, looking down, seeing what I see, might say: “It is molecules of H2O: that is what it really is.” And if one’s interest were its chemistry, its boiling point, its dissolved salts, one would be right. And still different would be its reality for swimmers, or for a marine biologist. My interest is life—weary. Lovesick, lovesick. There is no real reality. The real from one perspective is illusion from another. Reality is made, not given. Atoms are no more final than fish, and melancholy yearning is as real as those sightless monsters in the remote depths below me. After a suicide attempt, most victims need medical care. Some are left with sever injuries, brain damage, or other medical problems. Once the physical damage is treated, psychotherapy or drug therapy may begin, on either an inpatient or outpatient basis. Unfortunately, even after trying to kill themselves, many suicidal people fail to receive systematic psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

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In a random survey of several hundred teenagers, 9 percent were found to have made at least one suicide attempt, and of those, only half had received later psychological treatment. Similarly, in another study, one-third of adolescent attempter reported that they had not received any help after trying to end their lives. In some cases, health-care professionals are at fault. In others, the person who has attempted suicide refuses follow-up therapy. The goals of therapy are to keep people alive, help them achieve a nonsuicidal state of mind, and guide them to develop better ways of handling stress. Various therapies have been employed, including drug, psychodynamic, cognitive, group, and family therapies. Treatment appears to help. Studies have found that 30 percent of suicide attempters who do not receive treatment try again, compared with the 16 percent of patients in treatment. It is not clear, however, whether any one approach is more effective than others. Furthermore, there is little agreement in the sociology of delinquency. (This is because the concept itself is confused and so leads to confusing statistics.) However, one correlation that is generally agreed on is that: Juvenile delinquency, unlike adult crime, is more frequent in years of economic prosperity than in years of depression. Now, this would seem to contradict the other, and rather prima facie, theory of poverty as the important condition. The paradox is softened by pointing out that in prosperity there is more employment of women, more divorce, more money to buy drugs and liquor. These factors make sense, but let me raise some further considerations. First, there is the possibility that the prosperous well-paying jobs do not filter down evenly to the poorest groups, who tend much more to be unemployable. This certainly seems to be our situation today. Second, in a high-standard economy, there is a vast difference between having a little extra money and being accustomed to the well-paid standard. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

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As our Manchester forefathers used to say, you do a disservice to the undeserving poor by giving them money, because they will get into trouble. Consider the concrete situations: Even if the parents re suddenly getting better pay, the young are getting merely a little extra spending money, and this, in a society in which there is suddenly a lot of money, must work out as follows: The underprivileged kids get around more and are exposed to the expensive glamour, but this is precisely not attainable by them unless they take short cuts. Meantime, those who have the new money are more careless with it: they leave their cars unlocked, buy pleasures of the flesh, drink too much. And the spiteful feeling is increased, that those who are better off are squares, enemies, and fair victims of the gang. In boom time, that is, there is effectually more exclusion than ordinarily. During depression, contrariwise, there is more community because many others are in the same boat. The street is occupied by kids used to other mores, to whom the gang values are pointless. This leads to friction, but also to other friendships and other “things to do.” However, above all, as everybody knows who was unemployed during the Great Depression, the recession of 2001 and 2010, and the current COVID pandemic, it is easier to be decently poor when prices are low and the pressure to maintain appearances is diminished. Things get nearer to a human scale and life makes more sense. Likewise, at such times political activity is more common, an education that increases self-esteem in a worthwhile way. This whole picture would be quite different if the underprivileged and somewhat unemployable families had a pretty good secure income over a long period. They would then be members of society at least as consumers, and would eventually become as employable as the average. Such a condition would at once diminish certain kinds of underprivileged delinquency, exempli gratia, thefts, malicious mischief, certain spiteful assaults, and maybe truancy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

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Simply to subsidize the poor might be the most cost-effective way of coping with their juvenile delinquency. To re-establish in general what one calls the social balance, there should be proposed a high long-time subsidy for all unemployed. This would not be inflationary, and the time director of price control for the Open Policy Agent (OPA) one should know. The popular bright idea to diminish delinquency is to penalize the parents; and perhaps the effective method would be, rather, to give them money to spend, a kind of prize! Third Wave governments and parliamentary institutions were designed to make decisions at a leisurely pace, suited to a World in which it might take a week for a message to travel from Boston or New York to Philadelphia before it is read. Today is an Ayatollah seizing hostages in Teheran or coughs in Qom, officials in Washington, Moscow, Paris, or London may have to respond with decisions within minutes. The extreme speed of change catches governments and politicians off guard and contributes to their sense of helplessness and confusion, as the press makes plain. “Only three months ago,” writes Advertising Age, “the White House was telling consumers to shop hard before spending their bucks. Now the government is going all out to prod consumers into spending more freely.” Meanwhile it is getting to the point that even the Middle-Class and Upper Middle-Class need financial support. For instance, Princeton University, one of the top Universities in the World, is increasing graduate fellowship and stipend rates by an average of 25 percent to about $40,000 for doctoral candidates during the 10-month academic years. This is the University’s largest one-year increase in graduate student stipend rates to help support graduate students. The estimated cost of attendance for 2022-23 is $79,900 and includes Tuition: $57,690. Room charge: $11,000. Not only that, but petroleum prices are exploding, but not the speed of developments. However, economists are saying when the recession hits, it will be with “stunning speed and severity.” However, home prices and rents are still expected to rise, so it is a good time to invest in a house before rates and rents continue to rise. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

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Social change, too, is accelerating and putting additional pressure on the political decision-makers. In the United States of America, “as long as the migration of industry and population was gradual…it helped to unify the nation. However, within the past two years the process has burst beyond the bounds that can be accommodated by existing political institutions.” The politicians’ own careers have accelerated, often catching them by surprise. As recently as 1990, Joe Biden forecast that within his lifetime, no Black woman would ever be appointed to a high political post in the American government. Perhaps this explains why what happened to Anita Hill happened and why Kamala Harris is vice president. In the United Sates, Joe Who? shot into the White House some would say by force. What is more, although President Trump seemed to be winning, but the media and democrats really took advantage of him. It was Biden, not the outgoing Trump, who was battered with questions of how he would help the American people, about national policy, the energy crisis, the pandemic, and other issues who seemed to have no coherent speeches, other than “put me in office so we can break the glass ceiling for women, Black women, and Asian woman all at the same time, and I will pay off your student loan debt and give you $2,000 a month to get through the pandemic.” Yet, most people still have student load debts, college tuitions are soaring, and no pandemic relief has come to many in a year. The lame-duck Biden instantaneously has become, for practical purposes, a dead duck, because political time is now compressed, history moving too fast to permit for the traditional delays. Similarly, the “Honey Trap” with the press that this president has been enjoying is starting to see some truncation, as people start to wonder if this political party helping Americans, does really having the first this and that, and our feelings and emotions mean more than being rational and a patriotic American and doing what is best for our country? #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

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The media is also starting to forecast a short career for the President because he does not seem to be coherent enough, nor display leadership skills to properly communicate with the public, handle events, deal with troubles and more information when he cannot even remember what he is saying or what team he is rooting for. This hotting up of the pace of political life, reflecting the generalized speedup of change, intensifies today’s political and government breakdown. Put simply, our leaders—forced to work through Third Wave institutions designed as fast as events require. Either the decisions come too latte or indecision takes over. Fiscal policy has been virtually unusable because it takes too long to get appropriate measures through Congress, even when a majority exits and it is sometimes because of the federal judges. The acceleration of change has overpowered the decisional capacity of our institutions, making today’s political structure obsolete, regardless of party ideology or leadership. These institutions are inadequate not only in terms of scale and structure but in terms of speed as well. And even this is not all. Not only do ordinary mortals find it hard to answer these questions, so do the experts. Corporate CEOs succeed one another like passengers pushing through a rush-hour turnstile: merging, divesting, kowtowing to the stock market; pursuing core competence one month, synergy the nest the latest management fad month later. They study the most recent economic forecasts, but many economists themselves are befuddled as they wander around in a cemetery of dead ideas. To decode this new World, we need to cut through the chatter of rear-window economists and business pundits who prattle about “business fundamentals.” We need to probe below the obsolete obvious. We must focus on the unexplored deep fundamentals, on which the so-called fundamental themselves depend. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

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Once we do, thing look different, les crazy, and previously unnoticed opportunities pop out of the shadows. Chaos, it turns out, is only part of the story. And chaos itself generates new ideas. Tomorrow’s economy, for example, will present significant business opportunities in fields like hyper-agriculture, neurostimulation, customized health care, nanoceuticals, bizarre new energy sources, streaming payment systems, smart transportation, flash markets, new forms of education, non-lethal weapons, desktop manufacturing, programmable money, risk management, privacy invasion sensors that tell us when we are being observed—indeed, sensors of all kinds—plus a bewildering myriad of other goods, services and experience. We cannot be sure when these will or will not turn profitable or how they will converge. However, understanding the deep fundamentals will reveal the existence, even now, of new needs and previously unidentified industries and sectors—a huge “synchronization industry,” for example, and a loneliness industry.” To forecast the future of wealth, we also need to look not just at the work we do for money but at the unpaid work all of us also do as “prosumers.” (Just think about how much unpaid output we all produce every day.) Many of us even have “third jobs” without even knowing it. Because prosuming is set to explode, the future of the money economy can no longer be understood, let alone forecast, apart from that of the prosumer economy. The two, in fact, are inseparable. Together they form a wealth system. And once we understand this—and the channels by which the two feed each other—we gain piercing insights into our private lives now and into the future. An age which has found a surer and swifter way to destroy the human species has done so because it gave so much enquiry, so much thought, to the nature of the atom. Why cannot it give fraction of that enquiry and that thought to the nature of mind, when the consequences would be so much more useful? #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

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Is there, can there be, such a thing on Earth as a paradise without sin? It does not now exist and it can exist in the future only if it is also a paradise without people. It was the Stocis who wrote that the wise human will not waste one’s energy and years in futile political endeavours if one fines one’s environment too corrupt. One need not be a materialist to reach the conclusion that perfect solutions of social, economic, or religious problems simply do not exist; there are only pallitives, not panaceas. The quietude on this planet grows less and less; the noise and turmoil more and more. The need of this inner life becomes greater but the possibility of realizing it becomes smaller. Yet the problem is not a new one’ only a recurring one. The course of nihilism, as travelled by the intelligent classes of our time, ends either in bitter communistic materialism or unprincipled anarchic amoralism or retrogressive Catholic or Hindu mysticism. However, do any of these neurasthenic terminals offer an adequate solution of the modern humans’ problem, comfortable home for the modern consciousness? Whoever is fully alive to twenty-first century needs and trends, cannot say tht they do. What can we gain by moving back in time? The crossroads at which we stand must be faced, not run away from. The attempt to renounce our times and leave our century will be severely defeated by the grim facts of these times, the harsh events of this century. There is probably no sanctuary in medievalism. Neither reason nor goodwill were able to force Europe to adopt a wiser and purer form of religion, so utter impoverishment and bloody war had to force her to think. Only an overwhelming realization that such a change is supremely urgent, supremely essential, and supremely fundamental, if civilized society is not to break down completely, will compel this reconstruction. And the situation created by entry into the postwar period provides this required but dearly bought realization. And what is trye of Europe, which suffered most during the war, will be true in a lesser degree of other parts of the World. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Poverty Becomes Misery and the Poor Belong to Society Less and Less!

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Integrity is honesty carried through the fibers of the being and the whole mind. The most certain way to succeed is always be in touch with the unlimited potential and the expanse of this marvelous instrument called the human kind. We have already found our attention drawn to isolated bodies of water as the possible sites of chemical activity basic to the aggregation of the simplest organic molecular units into more complex forms. We shall find further concentration on these primeval lakes to be profitable; for we have not yet exhausted the possibilities they offer for the development of organizations of matter leading toward life. There is a question that is sure to bother many readers as we continue to focus attention upon isolated bodies of water as the sites of major events of early chemical history. From what has gone before, it is clear that we are going to speak glibly of processes continuing for many millions of years. Yet geological evidence, at least that pertaining to more recent eras, would hardly justify our assigning a longevity of more than a few thousand years at the most to a typical enclosed body of water. The resolution of this seeming contradiction is one familiar to geologists. It is assumed that the actual sequences of events was an intermittent one: periods of hundreds or a few thousand years of chemical activity in the favourable environment of an enclosed pool were interspersed among dormant periods of hundreds of thousands or millions of years during which the partially developed organic sediments of earlier times were “out of action”—perhaps covered by volcanic material or trapped in the interior of a newly extruded mountain range. (This may well be an oversimplification. It is possible that important steps in the chemical development of complex from simpler organic forms occurred during these “inert” stages—under the influence of heart, pressure, and the juxtaposition of previously processed organic materials.) Initiation of new activity occurred when the restless stirrings of the Earth’s crust exposed some of this material again. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Perhaps circumstances then led to the formation of a new lake that dissolved the old deposits and introduced them into a further round of chemical processing; perhaps instead the old organic material, on reexposure, was picked up by the wind or by streams and carried to remote regions, part of it settling in existing lakes and seas and there by affecting the course of chemical history in these new domains. Thus, while for simplicity the follow discussion will treat the situation as though a typically chemically active body of water had indefinite longevity, the reader must understand that a long series of successive periods of activity and dormancy is in fact implied. The existence of such a pattern of sporadic activity will not affect our argument except to emphasize again that the processes with which we are concerned must have required an extremely long period of time for their completion. Fortunately, the one or two billion years that geologists allow us for these developments is also an extremely long period of time. In addition to the pattern of intermittency, some other features need to be added to the picture of an organically active lake. The concentration of the simple organic molecules that rained down from the sky and their ensuing gradual combination into more complex forms is only part of what must have gone on in these ancient chemical plants. There must also have been much activity involving inorganic materials. Dissolved minerals from the lake bed and nearby mountains must have introduced metallic compounds into water; volcanic gases escaping from the Earth’s interior must have contributed substantial quantities of hydrogen sulfide, H2S, and carbon dioxide, CO2. Under the accelerating influence of heat from volcanic activity presumably existing near the more interesting early pools, a bewildering variety of chemical transformations must have slowly occurred. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Certain chemical transformations would have had especial importance for the developments that lay ahead. This would have been true, for instance, of reactions resulting in the formation of energy-rich molecules. Very frequently such energy-supplying components are needed to cause small molecules to join and form the larger ones that we know are of major importance in the lifelike structures whose development we are attempting to trace. Reference has already been made, for example, to their role in providing the motive power required to hook amino acids together. It is, of course, unlikely that random interactions in the primitive lakes would have resulted in significant quantities of anything as effective as the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecules that provide most of the energy for the metabolism of modern organisms. However, some kinds of configurations capable of transferring energy to other interacting substances would have occasionally formed. We shall have more to say later on about such important energy-rich molecules. Of course, there was nothing very biological about any of this early activity. Most of the transformation yielded compounds that we would regard as uninteresting by-products, in the sense of not contributing to the development of forms of organization of matter pertinent to life. Even so interesting a process as the linking together of several amino acids, for all its pioneering importance, still fell far short of the creation of the gigantic, precisely designed protein molecules of modern times. It the period of which we are speaking sophisticated molecular architecture could have hardly have existed. Countless primitive, proteinlike and nucleic acid-like molecules must have been formed, but surely nothing that would be accepted today as suitable construction material by any self-respecting living cell. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

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With this general view of the “starting conditions,” let us see if we can trace some of the early developments that led to the gradual appearance of more complex organic materials. If we have such mobility in time and space that we could go back and determine the chemical composition of, say, a thousand of the primordial pools and repeat the measurements every hundred years, we would soon be struck by a curious circumstance: we would find the pools developing “individualities” of their own. Among the almost limitless number of possible chemical combinations of the simple organic and inorganic constituents present in the pools, we would find that some pools would “specialize” in some of these combinations and other pools would specialize in others. As inquiring scientists, we would then find it necessary to search for a nonvitalistic, purely physical explanation of this unexpected “purposiveness” of behaviour of our primitive chemical plants. A part of the explanation of the growing diversity in the chemical content of the pools would be easy to find: the pools did not all start out alike. Geological and metrological accidents led to differences in the dissolved minerals, in the continuing supply of volcanic gasses, in the concentration of the original atmospherically derived organic materials, in the extent and temperature of local hot spots, and the like. These differences would, by normal operation of the physically based laws of chemistry, affect the relative probabilities of different possible reactions and thereby, with the passage of time, contribute individuality to the chemical character of the pools The development of this degree of understanding would bring us to a critical point in our imaginary investigation. If we were not careful, we would be apt to assume that we had found the complete explanation for the growing diversity in the chemical composition of the pools, and move on to some other aspect of this study. This would be a mistake, for it would cause us to miss an important discovery. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

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If we have just continued our observations for another few centuries, we would sooner or later have stumbled across examples of sudden and dramatic changes in the chemical activity of the pools that could not be accounted for satisfactorily by detectable differences in the reacting ingredients. From time to time a pool would seem suddenly to develop a mind of its own; for it would take off on a new course of chemical activity featured by the rapid generation of complex products that it had previously manufactured in insignificant amounts, if at all. We shall find the explanation of this phenomenon more difficult than the earlier determination of the individuality-contributing effects of the starting conditions of the pools and more rewarding in terms of its contribution to our ultimate understanding of processes important to life. Learning should be suffused with excitement, engagement, passion, challenge, creativity and joy. We worry about what our students will be tomorrow, yet we forget that they are somebody today. Teach them to do the right thing. Morality is living by the rules, but not all rules are compatible. Following one’s passionate heart to one’s true love is the right thing. Another right thing is fidelity. Teaching one that jealously, pain, and despair are wrong. Which of these two right things is more right than the other? Rules are too plentiful, too various. They contradict each other. It is impossible to obey all the rules all the time. Were I to try, I could locate my most outrageous conduct within a set of rules so adroitly chosen as to permit anything. Nevertheless, even so, I want to be decent about this. Is that a cop-out? Is “decency” but the refuge of the coward who quails at the hard choice of right and wrong? I want to be fair to others, but fair also to myself. Fairness is equality in the distribution of goods—as when a mother divides a cake in equal portions for her several children. However, what is equality is not possible? What is a clear gain for the one is a clear and unavoidable loss to the other? #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

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It is raining. The light is gray. The raindrops streaking the window create an intimate whispering invitation. We are pretty clear about theft, murder, the beating of children, the torture of animals. It is in the quagmire of pleasures of the flesh, in the love and the caring that may or may not spring up around it, the promises we make the betrayals that follow those promises, the evasions we practice, the lies we tell—here, here is the agony of conscience, the confusion, the hunger for a god to tell us what is right and what is wrong. However, may the answer is right before us. Drop all this sophistry. You know what is right. Do it. The answer stares you in the face: obey the rules. The obvious rules, the simple, in-you-face rules. Have we not always known that we cannot have everything? Accept the boundaries, live within their limits and restrictions, and the problem of morality will have been solved. However, even the obvious must be examined. Is it sound? If this solution should come to be generally adopted, what consequences would follow? The person who is serious and conscientious about rule-observing is the perfectly moral human. Upright. Open. Nothing to hide. You know what one stands for, good as one’s word, one can count on this individual. One gets to work on time, never calls in sick, is prudent with one’s assets, exact in the contractual obligations, never shades figures on one’s tax returns. If this individual took a few discreet liberties here and there, no one would know, but this individual would know. One respects the rules, endows them with authority. No one has to keep an eye on this living soul. A careful and prudent individual, temperate, always looking more toward the rules one must be careful to obey than toward the ever-changing World with its shifting dangers and opportunities. One never flirts with an attractive individual, mindful that the slightest step in that direction might lead to adultery. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

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What sort of World would it be if everybody were like that? Would it be an improvement on the World we have? Might it be Heaven? Certainly it would be different. We would have no more Newsoms, Bidens, Clintons for sure nor Kennedys, nor Roosevelts. It might be that no one I really love would be there. It would be a static society—or rather, one striving to be static, but slipping progressively out of touch with the changes taking place, unstoppably, around it and within it. And as that discrepancy increased, the efforts of the group to save itself, and its rules, by arresting change would become more rigid, more desperate, more punitive. A Grand Inquisitor would preside over the Tribunal, sentence miscreants to the pyre. Does not all creativity originate in boundary violation, in breaking through to realms outside the old limits? The stupid and the cautious tend to obey the rules: the stupid because they fail to recognize how easily the rules may be subverted with impunity, the cautious because they fear the group’s ability to punish. The intelligent and the bold tend to violate the rules: seeing the loopholes, the endless opportunities for evasion and concealment, and perceiving, further, how far the change—resistant rules have lagged behind a changing social reality, how benighted therefore some of these rules have come to be still asserting, as they do, a horse-and-buggy morality in an age of superhighways, they take liberties—so easily they may not even notice. Snap, crackle, and pop they did not, for Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) designed his cornflakes to sooth and numb all taste buds, from tongue to toe. The successful physician, a Seventh-Day Adventist greatly influenced by Sylvester Graham, had such a strong aversion to pleasures of the flesh that he spent the nine decades of his life without ever indulging in it. “The reproductive act,” Kellogg declared, “is the most exhausting of all vital acts. Its effect upon the undeveloped person is to retard growth, weaken the constitution and dwarf the intellect.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

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Dr. Kellogg never risked this. Even during his honeymoon, he and his new wife spent a chaste but bonding six weeks revising his books, Plain Facts about Sexual Life and The Proper Diet of Man. Afterward, Dr. Kellogg never faltered. If he felt any temptation, he must have staved it off with one of the many pleasures of the flesh-muting tools he urged on others: a spiceless, wholesome diet, routine exercise, hard work, daily bathing, and religion. In his own long life and marriage, Dr. Kellogg practiced what he preached. After one pretty young woman jilted him, he unexpectedly proposed to and married Ella Eaton, a king and intellectual nurse-in-training at his sanitarium. The honeymoon produced only clean copies of this manuscripts, and soon afterward, the chase, childless Kelloggs announced they planned to open their home to needy children. Forty-two children later, the Kellogg family was also a societal experiment: Could Kellogg love, and moral instruction salvage, even disadvantaged, abused youngsters from slums? Sadly, the answer seemed to be no. Most of the successful junior Kelloggs cam from good family backgrounds, while most tragically hopeless cases slouched forward into equally dissolute adulthood. Ella and John, their virginal foster and adoptive parents, lived together in their mansion, publicly respectfully of each other, privately affectionate, perpetually celibate. Much besides forty-two little people bound them together: their committed Christianity; their obsession with proper vegetarian eating and food preparation; their profound interest in child-rearing. After two decades of marriage, however, Ella fell ill and effectively withdrew into her own rooms, dying over twenty years later without ever having emerged again into the Kellogg World. Nothing suggests her virginity tormented her any more than his did John. What is certain, however, is that the Kelloggs constructed a unique marital relationship based on mutual respect, shared ideals and goals, and an unshakable will to avoid pleasures of the flesh, and they died as celibate as they had been born. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

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There is, however, one answered question, namely, what is the function of the formulated laws for moral action? They appear abundantly in sacred texts that consecrate them and provide them with an almost unconditional validity. We must now ask: what is their significance within the structure developed up to this point? The answer lies in the word “wisdom.” They represent the wisdom of the past about humans, their relations to others and to oneself, one’s predicament in temporal existence, and the telos or inner aim of one’s being. Wisdom, in the later centuries of the ancient World, became (like logos) a divine power, mediating between God and the World and between God and humans. It was (again like logos) a principle of the divine self-manifestation in nature and history. According to the book of Job, God made the World while looking at “Wisdom” which was beside Him. In history it has inspired humans and showed them the right way; it has had revelatory power and it became embodied in Jesus as the Christ. Wisdom, in this sense, is the source of the tables of laws in many religions and cultures. From the point of view of humans, revelations, mediated by wisdom, are the result of both accumulated experiences and revelatory visions. As such, they are tremendous weight, but do not possess unconditional validity. They guide the conscious in concrete situations, but none of them, taken as law, has absolute validity. Even the Ten Commandments express not only living souls’ essential nature but also the wisdom and the limitations of an early feudal culture. Certainly there is risk in deviating from the wisdom embodied in a concrete tradition. However, there is also risk in accepting a tradition without questioning it. The former is an external and an internal risk, the latter only an internal risk. The former brings isolation and attack, the latter safety and praise. However, accepting or trespassing traditional morals is justified only if done with self-scrutiny, often in the pain of a spilt conscience, and with the courage to decide even when the risk of error is involved. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

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Most human beings follow the guidance of the moral tradition when they obey the moral imperative. Everyone needs such guidance for one’s daily life and its innumerable large and small ethical questions. A considerable amount of moral habit is necessary in order to fulfill the demands of an average existence. Therefore, the tables of laws, which are commandments of the divine-human wisdom of all generations, are gifts of grace, although they can become destructive when elevated to absolute validity and substituted for agape and its power to listen to the voice of the “now.” You hear economists saying the that the economy is doing well, and for many it is. The political attitude toward poverty is no longer part of their fighting economy theory. As labour economists, they do not have solidarity with the poor. When poverty used to be discussed by socialists—these same people younger—they theory was that in the capitalist system labour as a whole must be at the bottom and must become poorer, because the failing return on investment and its pressure on wages, because of the concentration of ownership and control and the increase of inequality, and the periodic crises and unemployment. Therefore the fight against poverty was solidary; it was the fight to improve the whole system in order to improve the position of labour. However, now the rate of interest does not fall; they system cushions its crises; there is high employment (with significant exceptions) or insurance. There is certainly a concentration of monopolistic control, but either inequality is less (that is debatable) or, certainly, workers on a fairly high standard do not much bother who has millions. Thus, nostalgic solidarity with poverty turns into philanthropy—and even into exclusion, on issues where the less affluent are unassimilable into the abundant system. One of the speakers at this conference where poverty was the theme, a labour leader, was asked whether the new income pyramid did not resemble a middle-aged gentleman. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

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I did not once hear the word “proletariat,” and that made sense. For the word had been used, bitterly and nobly, in a different theory: “producers of offspring,” paid by the iron law of wages just enough to reproduce labour. Our present poor are more like the ancient Roman proletariat, producers of offspring kept on the dole for political reasons. It was clear, too, why the word “do-gooder” had fallen into mild disrepute. It used to refer, like “muckraking,” to quixotic attempts to reform the system; not it is diminishing suffering, accepting the system. (Muckraking, in turn, has become the protest of Angry Young Men.) For those excluded from the high standard and its organization, it is becoming harder to maintain any American standard at all. It is characteristic of systems geared to high pay that is hard to work for low pay. There are fewer such jobs; those there are subject to grueling exploitation without benefit of union. Low pay generally means much harder work under worse conditions. Prices are, of course, geared to the high standard; and the use of any commodity tends to be increasingly tied up with the use of many other commodities and services that cost money. For instance, it is very grim to be poor and run a jalopy. The insurance costs three times as much as the car. The old car, which is safe at 50 miles per house, is effectually barred from parkways made for cars at 65 miles per hour. The prince of gasoline pays for the parkways. The price of repairs is geared to the new cars. It costs money to have any job at all, but transportation and lunches, presentable clothes and laundry, are priced for good wages. Unless one is capable of a different, incentive or community culture altogether, a poor person can afford little recreation. The popular culture is high priced and one gets the dregs of it. One’s poverty tend to degenerate into unintelligence. One cannot afford presentable shoes for the kids to go to school; they are ashamed and will not go. Thus, poverty becomes misery, and the poor belong to society less and less. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

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Rose Ashby walks to the dry cleaner’s to pick up her old but finest dinner dress. Although shaken at the cost of having it cleaned, Rose tells the sympathetic girl behind the counter, “Do not worry. It does not matter. I will not be needing the money any more.” Walking through the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida, she still wishes it had been Miami. The west costs of the fountain-of-youth peninsulas is not as warm as the east. If only Chet had left more insurance money, Rose could have afforded Miami. In St. Petersburg, Rose failed to unearth de Leon’s promised fount. Last week, she told the doctor she felt lonely and depressed. He said she should perk up. She had everything to live for. What does he know? Has he lost a husband like Chet and his left breast to cancer to cancer all in one year? Has he suffered arthritis all his life? Were his ovaries so bad he had to undergo a hysterectomy? Did he have to suffer through menopause just to end up alone without family or friends? Did he have to live in a dungeon? Is his furniture worn, his carpet threadbare? What does he know? Might his every day be the last one for him? As Rose turns into the walk to her white public housing cinderblock apartment building, fat Mrs. Green asks if she is coming to the community center that evening. Who needs it? The social worker did say Rose should come. Since Rose was in such good healthy, she could help those not so well as she. Help them do what? Finger-paint like children? Make baskets like insane people? Sew? Who can see to sew? Besides, who would appreciate it? Who would thank her? Who could she tell about her troubles? Who cares? When she told the doctor she could not sleep, he gave her the prescription but said that all elderly people have trouble sleeping. What does he know? Does he have a middle-aged daughter who can only think about her latest divorce, or grandchildren who only acknowledge her birthday check by the endorsement on the back? Are all his friends dead and gone? Is all the money from his dead husband’s insurance used up? What does he know? Who could sleep in this dungeon? Who could deal with the noise from the street gang that moved in? Who has to live in fear about be assaulted, robbed, living on the streets, or becoming sick from the deplorable conditions? #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

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Back in her apartment, Rose washes and sets her hair. It is good she had to do it herself. Look at this hair. So thin, so sparse, so frowsy. What would hair dressers think? Then make-up. Base. Rouge. Lipstick. Bright red. Perfume? No! No cheap perfume for Rose today. Remember the bottles of Joy Chet would but for her? He always wanted to have the best. He would boast that she had everything, and that she never had to work a day in her life for it. “She doesn’t have to lift her little finger,” Chet would say, puffing on his cigar. Where is the joy now? Dead and gone. With Chet. Rose manages a wry laugh at the play on words. Slipping into her dinner dress, she looks into the dresser mirror. “It’s good you can’t see this face now, Chet. How old and ugly it looks.” Taking some lavender notepaper from the drawer, she stands at the dresser to write. Why didn’t anyone warn her the growing old was like this? It is so unfair. But they don’t care. People don’t care about anyone except themselves. Leaving the note on the dresser, she suddenly feels excited. Breathing hard now, she rushed to the sink—who could call a sink in the counter in the living room a kitchen?—and gets a glass of water. Trying to relax, Rose arranges the folds in her skirt as she settles down on the chaise. Carefully sipping the water as she takes all the capsules so as to not smear her lipstick, Rose quietly begins to sob. After a lifetime of tears, these will be her last. Her note on the dresser is short, written to no one and to everyone. You don’t know what it is like to have to grow old and die. In the New World society, the elderly are more likely to commit suicide than people in any other age group. About 19 of every 100,000 persons over the age of 65 in the United States of American commit suicide. Elderly persons commit over 19 percent of all suicides in the United States of America, yet they account for only 12 percent of the total population. Many factors contribute to this high suicide rate. As people grow older, all too often they become ill, lose close friends and relatives, lose control over their lives, and lose status in our society. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

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Such experiences may result in feelings of hopelessness, loneliness, depression, or inevitability among aged persons and so increase the likelihood that they will attempt suicide. In one study, 44 percent of elderly people who committed suicide gave some indication that their act was prompted by the fear of being placed in a nursing home. Also, the suicide rate of elderly people who have recently lost a spouse is relatively high. The risk is greatest during the first years of bereavement, but it remains high in later years as well. Elderly persons are typically more determined than younger person in their decision to die and they give fewer warnings of their intent, so their success rate is much higher. Apparently one of every four elderly persons who attempts suicide succeeds. Given the resolve of aged persons and their physical decline, some people argue that older persons who want to die, are clear in their thinking, should be allowed to carry out their wishes. However, clinical depression appears to play an important role in as many as 60 percent of suicides by the elderly, suggesting that more elderly persons who are suicidal should be receiving treatment for their depressive disorders. The suicide rate among the elderly in the United States of America is lower in some ethic groups. Although Native Americans have the highest overall suicide rate, for example, the rate among elderly Native Americans is relatively low. The aged are held in high esteem by Native Americans and looked to for the wisdom and experience they have acquired over the years, and this may help account for their low suicide rate. Such high regard is in sharp contrast to the loss of status often experienced by elderly European Americans. Similarly, the suicide rate is only one-third as high among elderly African Americas as among elderly European Americans. One reason for this low suicide rate may be the pressures of assailing African Americans: “only the strongest survive.” Those who reach an advanced age have overcome great adversity and often feel proud of what they have accomplished. Because reaching the golden years is not in itself a form of success for capitalistic Americans, their attitude toward aging is more negative. Another possible explanation is that mature African Americans have successfully overcome the rage that prompts many suicides in younger African Americans. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

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Our political institutions also reflect an out-of-date organization of knowledge. Every government has ministries or departments devoted to discrete fields such as finance, foreign affairs, defense, agriculture, commerce, post office, or transportation. The United States of America’s Congress and other legislative bodies have committees similarly set aside to deal with problems in these fields. What no Third Wave government—even the most centralized and authoritarian—can solve is the inter-weave problem: how to integrate the activities of all these units so they can produce orderly, wholistic programs instead of a mishmash of contradictory and self-canceling effects. If there is one thing we should have learned in the past few decades, it is that all social and political problems are interwoven—that energy, for example, affects economics, which in turn affects health, which in turn affects education, work, family life, and a thousand other things. The attempt to deal with neatly defined problems in isolation from another—itself a product of the industrial mentality—creates only confusion and disaster. Yet the organizational mentality—creates only confusion and disaster. Yet the organizational structure of government mirrors precisely this Third Wave approach to reality. This anachronistic structure leads to interminable jurisdictional power struggles, to the externalization of costs (each agency attempting to solve its own problems at the expense of another), and to the generation adverse side effects. This is why each attempt by government to cure a problem leads to a rash of new problems, often worse than the original one. Governments typically attempt to solve this inter-weave problem through further centralization—by naming a “czar” to cut through the red tape. One makes big changes, blind to their destructive side effects—or one piles on so much additional red tape oneself that one is soon dethroned. For centralization of power no longer works. Another desperation measure is the creation of innumerable interdepartmental committees to coordinate and review decisions. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

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The result, however, is the construction of yet another set of baffles and filters through which decisions have to pass—and a further complexification of the bureaucratic labyrinth. Our existing governments and political structures are obsolete because they view the Old World through the Third Wave lenses. In turn, this aggravates another problem. It is an inexorable fact, which no politician can controvert by other facts but only by windy oratory and glib promises, that the causes of international tension friction and war will never be removed except by removing the egotisms, the greeds, the wraths, and other negatives from humans’ nature. Until then, we shall get rid of one old cause only to find a new one springing up in its train. Until they inwardly recognize and publicly realize the overriding importance of thought and feeling in these matters, their remedies will be illusory, their hopes denied, and their forebodings fulfilled by the course of events. Those who are led by religious enthusiasts to expect a miraculous conversion of humankind to goodwill peace and wisdom overnight, expect the impossible and are preparing themselves for bitter disappointment. Human character grows gradually; it does not improve by magical transformation. It is better to be realistic, to face the unpalatable truth, than to surrender ourselves to wishful thinking and be deceived thereby. For emotion and passion are still the real rulers of humankind, say what you will. How society has always had its problems and even more so in our times. However, the larger the number of problems, the larger number of agencies seeking to solve them grows. Why do we have to solve every problem with which the World is confronted? Why can we not leave the alone, indifferent, and attended solely to our own problems? Why must we meddle in affairs we ill understand? The answer is that we fail to see that the World is itself the great problem for which there is no solution. There can be no perfect solution to the World’s troubles because there can be no permanent one. All changes, all is transient. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

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There would be more peace in countries and between nations, in families and between neighbours, if people stopped meddling in other people’s affairs or interfering in each other’s lives or fanatically forcing their doctrinaire ideas and beliefs where these are repugnant. Love is the one remedy for all ills. We must be lovers and at once the impossible becomes possible. Our history for these 1,000 years has not been the history of kindness but of selfishness. Love would put a new face on this weary old World, in which we dwell as enemies too long. Love will accomplish that which force could never achieve. Once or twice in history, kindness has been tried in illustrious instances, with signal success. Love is victorious in attack, and invulnerable in defense; Heaven arms with love those it would not see destroyed. Censorious minds have doubtless much to pick on which is wrong or rotten in our society, but until they have something better to replace it with, some really worthwhile alternative, of what use is the destruction and liquidation of that which has been built up? The spiritual progress of human beings’ winds upward by devious routes, by slow wanderings, and by periodic lapses. However, its ultimate character as progress remains assured. Slowly, out of all these wartime reflections and peacetime crises, these dangers, agonies, and calamities, the World is becoming aware that it must find for its day-to-day activities a strong support, a better faith, and a truer ideology. Many leaders such as Churchill, and even the Pope, have talked of a new World to be built. Their aims are excellent but it will not suffice to change things externally alone; people must be educated aright, which means they must be educated in truth. The time to sit in seclusion or to enjoy one’s inner peace all alone will then have gone. Service and Action will be the keynote. The justification of the higher philosophy is what it can do ultimately, not merely what it can think. It alone has a sane view because it alone knows the need of a sound foundation in correct thinking plus an active effort afterwards, erected on such a foundation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

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How hard this ultimate teaching is as a way of life until one becomes habituated to it! For one has to feel that all the World is but a dream, even horrid wars, and yet one will have to know it as actual and act as though it were real. For ultimately it is real. Just as all the events, people, and objects of a dream are after all nothing but mind, in essence, because they are ideas and Mind is their reality, so in this World we have to understand that that which is regarded Mind, unified, all around us is the real. It is because ignorant people concentrate only on their material beliefs, taking body and environment as matter, and regarding everything as individual and separate, that they can never get at this higher realization. If one remembers that all golden rings, watches, tie pins, and so on, are in essence only one substance—gold—so one may remember that all bodies, things, and events are in essence also one substance—Mind. The actualized Christians are the people who holds firmly to this double “vision” or rather understanding and has made it one’s own by unremitting effort. So much progress that humans hope for from a science-based, politically guided civilization turns out to be a chimera. There is no good that science gave them without its costly price, no promise held out by political shifts without its revelation of the evil in humans. Real peace, true progress, genuine prosperity can come only by a different road. Those utopians who look for a quick abatement of human selfishness—and a consequent quick abatement of all the ghastly evils, sins, and comes which come out of it—look in vain. However, what cannot come quickly on a mass scale can, and will, come from scattered individuals. First the killing instinct will have to go, then the fighting instinct will have to follow. To eliminate the frictions in the World it would be necessary to eliminate those between human beings. Those who do not know that human evolution moves through double rhythms of ascension and declension, talk cheerfully of an increasing spiritual revival moving triumphantly to the complete change of our species. However, the fact is that what we aww are vestiges of medieval faith rather than a rising spirituality. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

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Even if the World crashed in a nightmare of hate, evil, and ruin all around us, those who gave their allegiance to Goodness and Wisdom were not wrong not their efforts a total failure. The nations can use nuclear energy to explode bombs or they can use it to power engines: they must choose between these two alternatives. If they try to evade the choice and to have both, they will end my losing both in the annihilation of nuclear war. As of now, we grapple with truth, lies, markets, and money. Today’s wealth revolution will unlock countless opportunities and new life trajectories, not only for creative business entrepreneurs but for social, cultural, and educational entrepreneurs as well. It will open fresh possibilities for slashing poverty both at home and around the globe. However, it will accompany this invitation to a glowing future with a warning: Risks are not merely multiplying but escalating. The future is not for the fainthearted. Today emails and blogs bombard us, they are life for so many people and businesses. EBay marks marketers of us all. Corporate and government megascandals burst into the headlines. Drugs are belatedly pronounced too dangerous and yanked off the market. Robots go to Mars and land with exquisite precision. Meanwhile, criminal street gangs from Los Angeles roam across Central America and build a quasi-army. To escape—or at least forget—what appears like chaos, millions turn to television, where “reality TV” fakes reality. Thousands form “flash mobs” and gather to have pillow fights, popcorn, and movie nights. Elsewhere, players of online games pay thousands of dollars in real money for nonexistent, virtual swords that their virtual selves can use to win virtual castles or maidens. Irreality spreads. More important, institutions that once lent coherence, order and stability to society—schools, hospitals, families, courts, regulatory agencies, trade unions—flail about in crisis. And it is against this background that America’s trade deficit soars to unprecedented levels. Its national budget staggers like it is coming around from general anesthesia. The World’s finance ministers wonder out loud if they should risk triggering a global depression by recalling the billions they lent to Washington. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

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Meanwhile, China, we are told-again and again—is certain to become the next World Superpower, dethroning the United States of America and tearing apart the rules-based international system that America and its allies have built since the end of World War II. The United States of America faces myriad conventional and unconventional threats from organizations from abroad. Yet, China wants to achieve the World’s next superpower by primarily going after economic, industrial, and technological targets that will offer competitive advantage to Chinese economic and technological sectors. Where it is these blueprints may have been borrowed from America’s enameled steel, stainless steel, or anodized aluminum flat files. In order to surpass the United States of America, China needs to continue its economic growth and technologically outmatch the United States of America and the result of the World. Already China under current president Xi Jinping is a global superpower. With the World’s second-largest economy, a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council, a modernized armed force, and an ambitious space program, China has the potential to become number one. One of the things needed in this World to generate capital is people. China has 1.42 billion, that is compared to the 333 million Americans. That is important because while China has all these people, their GDP is approximately $15 trillion (USA), and the United States of America has a GDP of 21 trillion. This is important because as more Chinese grow out of poverty and start working, this will increase their GDP. However, it is also interesting to note the America has a much smaller population and still a higher GDP. China has an army of 4,015,000 personnel, and America has an America of 2,233,050. To stay number one, America will need to produce more college graduate with high paying jobs to build up GDP and also bulk up its army. In this case, visually, numbers do matter. Nonetheless, the combination of economic high-wire acts and institutional failures leaves individuals back home face-to-face with potentially devastating personal problems. They question if they will ever receive the pensions for which they have worked, or whether they can afford the rocketing costs of gasoline and health care. They agonize about appalling schools. They worry about whether crime, drugs, and an anything-goes morality will destroy civil life. How, everyone wants to know, will this seeming chaos affect out wallets? Will we even have a wallet? #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Desire Deceives—We Only Know the Other as Reshaped by Our Desire!

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It is never too late to be what you might have been. To be a leader means willingness to risk—and a willingness to love. To this point our picture is essentially that of the gradual formation of amino acids and other organic structural units by the action of electric discharge, heat, ultraviolet radiation, and high-energy radioactive particles on the gaseous ingredients of the atmosphere. These new substances, being heavier than the atmospheric gases, gradually rained down into the seas beneath. With the passage of time, the accumulation of this organic material steadily increased until, after a billion years or so, the seas that covered most of the surface of the Earth became what someone has vividly described as a “hot dilute soup.” The next step in the natural formation of protein material had to be the linking together of amino acid molecules into chains. We have seen that the backbone of each amino acid molecule has a structure that permits such linking, but we have also learned that, in the laboratory at least, it takes more than just stirring together a mixture of amino acids to cause chains to form. Specifically, energy has to be supplied to force the successive links of the chain together before they will lock in a stable configuration. In the artificial synthesis of protein, the necessary energy was supplied chemically, by the temporary attachment of energy-rich substances to the ends of the amino acid backbones. It turns out that there are other ways of doing the trick. For example, if a suitable mixture of amino acids is made hot enough, some of its molecules will have enough energy of motion to cause them to hook together. To be sure, this simple process does not easily occur in water, and probably would have been effective only on dried-out beach sediments. However, Calvin has recently described multiple-step chemical reactions involving a number of the molecular components of the “hot dilute soup,” that take place readily in water and include among their products linked chains of amino acid—that is protein molecules. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

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Similar reaction sequences have also been shown capable of assembling the available ingredients to form other relatively complex organic molecules, including nucleic acids. It is attractive to think of ponds or lakes, rather than the open pools surely were formed from time of time by local seismic raising or lowering of the land. Evaporation of most of the entrapped water would greatly increase the concentration of the amino acids and other organic constituents in the pool, thereby greatly accelerating their interaction form more complex substances. Further concentration probably resulted from the know affinity or organic molecules for certain clays and sands, which must have dotted the bottoms and shores of the primeval pools and constituted local gathering points for the active chemicals. If in addition a volcanically produced hot spot happened to be nearby, the resulting combination of high temperature and high concentration would constitute an efficient “factory” for the fabrication of proteinlike material as well as other relatively complex organic substances. In a qualitative description such as this there is a danger of making everything seem too easy. The processes we have postulated to explain the origin of organic matter seemed, until just the last few years, most improbable. In required such developments as Miller’s exciting synthesis of amino acids to raise what had previously been unsubstantial speculation to the states of a respectable scientific hypothesis. Although it has only been hinted at in this treatment, the problem of quantitative sufficiency has also been a difficult one for the theory cope with. Calculations of the probable concentrations of amino acids and other organic components attained in the vast quantity of close approach of two or more of the component molecules with just the right thermal energy to cause linking, have always led to rates of generation of organic compounds that would be completely negligible in terms of ordinary time scales. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

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To be sure, factors of thousands in the speed of the reaction can be evoked by such assumptions as those concerning inland pools and local volcanic heating. Nevertheless, in the final analysis the only thing that makes the hypothesis. Although it has only been hinted at in this treatment, the problem of quantitative sufficiency has also been a difficult one for the theory to cope with. Calculations of the probably concentrations of amino acids and other organic components attained in the vast quantity of ocean water covering the Earth, and of the resulting probability of close approach of two or more of the component molecules with just the right thermal energy to cause linking, have always led to rates of generation of organic compounds that would be completely negligible in terms of ordinary time scales. To be sure, factors of thousands in the speed of the reaction can be evoked by such assumptions as those concerning inland pools and local volcanic heating. Nevertheless, in the final analysis the only thing that makes the hypothesis quantitatively tenable is the tremendous period of time that was available for increasing the thickness of the hot dilute soup and sustaining the chemical interactions of the ingredients. In this connection there at first appeared to be a troublesome problem. Even though organic constituents continually rained out of the primeval sky for a billion years or more, did their concentration in the surface waters continue to increase during all this time? If put into the ocean today, we know that such organic materials would disappear rapidly. Fortunately, we also know the reasons for their limited lifetimes, and these reasons were not valid in the preanimate era. Specifically, any constituent of organic matter disappears rapidly today for one of two reasons: it is either eaten by bacteria or it is destroyed by oxidation. Dr. Charles Darwin, whose preoccupation with evolutionary phenomena logically compelled him to speculate on the origin of life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

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Dr. Darwin said: “It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etcetera, present that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.” Defenseless though the components of organic material are against their animate enemies and the destructive effects of the free oxygen produced by living plants, in the preanimate period there appears no reason to question their ability to survive indefinitely, as seems required by the hypotheses we are considering. We may observe incidentally how fortunate it is that evolutionary processes ultimately resulted in different means of production of the materials essential to living organism. Otherwise, it seems certain that the development of higher life forms would ultimately have been markedly limited by the decreasing availability of the basic ingredients of life arising out of the destructive properties of the new organism themselves. However, we are getting ahead of our story. The important point is that, with the help of some laboratory results and various hopefully reasonable assumptions, we have developed a fairly strong case of the existence in the seas, lakes, and tidal pools of the preanimate Earth of significant concentrations of proteinlike chains of amino acids and of other typically organic materials such as carbohydrates, fats, oils, and nucleic acids. This is not yet “life” as we understand it, but at least in constitutes a group of promising ingredients for use in the further development of our theories. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

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If one wants their offspring to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders. In our economy of abundance it is still subject to discussion whether or not there is as much poverty as there was in the Thirties when “one-third of a nation was ill houses, ill clothed, ill fed.” The official poverty rate in 2020 was 11.4 percent, up 1.0 percentage point from 2019. This is the first increase in poverty after five consecutive annual declines. In 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019. (However, it is hard to determine a criterion of poverty. Exempli Gratia, an individual in the rich country of Westchester, New York, might have an income of $41,000, which is consider very low for an individual, yet have to pay so much rent for substandard housing that it cannot make both ends meet. In New York City novice individuals are fleeced four times as much for a quarter of the space that experienced citizens manage to find in the same neighbourhood.) Nevertheless, all students would agree on two propositions: The composition of the poor has changed immensely; it now consists of all races and cultures, including migrant farm labour. And the economic relations of the poor to the system has importantly changed: simply, the earlier African America, Irish, Jewish, Italians, Hispanics, poured into an expanding economy that needed people; the new com into an expanding economy that does not need people. There is another difference: The relation of the other classes to the poor has changed. For instance, many readers are no doubt surprised that there are so many poor and, reading about it, feel that it is a mere lag, a matter of mopping up in our general productive advance. Everything looks pretty streamlined. In income pyramid has changed. In shape. It used to be that the most were the poor at the bottom and then, evenly, fewer and few at each level up to a few at the top. However, the meaning of the economy of abundance is that there are now very many, perhaps even a bulge, at the lower-middle-income level. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

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These are the people with semiprofessional and service jobs, the occupational category that has grown the most, and who get status salaries; the skilled and semiskilled in semimonoploy factory jobs, strongly unionized; the families in which, in our artificially maintained nearly full employment, the man has two jobs or the woman also has a job; and families in newly industrialized areas in the South and Middle West. However, conversely, the poorly paying unskilled jobs have diminished. It is here that simple automation (exempli gratia self-checkout lanes in the supermarket, ATM machines, Internet Transactions, and sweeping the factory floor) is allowed full development. Many categories are not unionized. Sometimes even the minimum wage does not apply. Migratory farm labour is not covered by social insurance. By the connivance of union and management, marginalized populations are often rejected for apprenticeship. These less affluent groups, behindhand to begin with, get less schooling. That is, the economy of abundance, the bulge in the pyramid, means also that those at the bottom tend to fall out of “society” altogether. Consider it. There is a higher standard of living, more to conform to in order to be “decent”; it is more expensive to be decently poor. Yet there is a tighter organization above that is harder to belong to, so that the standard is increasingly unattainable for the underprivileged. So far as economic and vocational causes, poverty and job uselessness, are factors—and they are mighty important factors when they add up to being “out” of society—this is a sufficient explanation for juvenile delinquency. One need go no further. For in such hopeless condition, any grounds, of family hostility, unusual childhood frustration, or a gang on the street, will tip the balance. The question is whether or not this structure is organic in our present system. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

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(Let me say at this point, however, that many of the humble jobs of the poor are precisely not useless, morally. Farm labour, janitoring, messenger, serving and dish washing—these jobs resist remarkably well the imputation of uselessness made against the productive society as a whole. In the potency-ideology of teenage delinquents, of course, such jobs are contemptible and emasculating. However, we shall see that they are important for the poverty-mystique of the more thoughtful of the Generation Alpha.) “Dear Mom, Dad, and everyone else, I’m sorry for what I’ve done, but I loved you all and I always will, for eternity. Please, please, do not blame it on yourselves. It was all my fault and not yours or anyone else’s. If I didn’t do this now, I would have done it later anyway. We all die some day, I just died sooner. Love, John.” The suicide of John, age 17, was not an unusual occurrence. Suicidal actions become much more common after the age of 14 than at any earlier age. According to official records, over 2,000 teenagers, or 11 of every 100,00, commit suicide in the United Stares of American each year, although some clinicians believe that actual rate to be up to three times higher than this. In addition, as many as 500,000 teenagers may make attempts. Because fatal illnesses are uncommon among the young, suicide has become the third leading cause of death in this age group, after accidents and homicides. Furthermore, as many as half of all teenagers have thought about killing themselves. Although young European Americas are more prone to suicide than young African Americans, the rates of the two groups are becoming closer. The European American rate was 157 percent greater than the African American rates in 1980; today it is only 42 percent greater. This trend may reflect increasingly similar pressures on young African Americans and European Americans may also be linked to economic inflation and the demand for skilled labour, the many anxieties of inner-city life and the rate felt by many young African Americas over racial inequities in our society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

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About half of teenage suicides, like those of people in other age groups, have been tied to clinical depression, low self-esteem, and feelings of hopelessness, but many teenagers who try to kill themselves also appear to struggle with anger and impulsiveness. Many suicidal teens appear to have serious alcohol or drug problems. In addition, a number may have deficiencies in their ability to sort out and solve problems. Moreover, teenagers who consider or attempt suicide are often under great stress. They may experience long-term pressures such as poor (or missing) relations with their parents, family conflict, inadequate peer relationships, and social isolation. Alternatively, their actions also may be triggered by more immediate stress, such as a parent’s unemployment or medical illness, financial setbacks for the family, or problems with a boyfriend or girlfriend. The angst, confusion, conflict, and impulsivity that typically characterize adolescence provide fertile ground for the growth of suicidal thoughts and attempts. Stress at school seems to be a particularly common problem for teenagers who attempt suicide. Some have trouble keeping up at school, while others may be high achievers who feel pressured to be perfect and to stay at the top of the class. Some theorists believe that the period of adolescence itself produces a stressful climate in which suicidal actions are more likely. Adolescence is a period of rapid growth, and it is often marked by conflicts, depressed feelings, tensions, and difficulties at home and school. Adolescents tend to react to events more sensitively, angrily, dramatically, and impulsively than individuals in other age groups; thus the likelihood of suicidal acts during times of stress is increased. Finally, the suggestibility of adolescents and their eagerness to imitate others, including others who attempt suicide, may set the stage for suicidal action. One study found 93 percent of adolescent suicide attempts had known someone who attempted suicide. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

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Far more teenagers attempt suicide than actually kill themselves—the ratio may be as high as 200 to 1. The unusually large number of unsuccessful suicides may mean that teenagers are less certain than other persons who make such attempts while some do indeed wish to die, many may simply want to make others understand how desperate they are, get help, or teach others a lesson. Up to half of teenage attempters make new suicide attempt in the future, and as many as 14 percent eventually die by suicide. In countries around the World, the suicide rate for adolescents is not only high but increasing. Overall, it has more than doubled in the past two decades, as has the rate for young adults. Several theories, most pointing to societal changes, have been proposed to explain the dramatic rises in these two age groups. First, as the number and proportion of teenagers and young adults in the general population keep rising, the competition of teenagers and young adults and non-citizens in the general population keeps rising, the competition for jobs, college positions, and academic and athletic honours intensifies for them, leading increasingly to shattered dreams, and ambitions. Other explanations point to weakening ties in the family (which may produce feelings of alienation and rejection in many of today’s young people) and to the increased availability of alcohol and other drugs and the pressure to use them among teenagers and young adults. The mass media coverage of suicide attempts by teenagers and young adults may also contribute to the rise in the suicide rate among the young. The detailed descriptions of teenage suicide that the media and the arts have offered in recent years may serve as models for young people who are contemplating suicide. Within days of the highly publicized suicides of four adolescents in one New Jersey town in 1987, dozens of teenagers across the United States of America took similar actions (at least 12 of them fatal)—two in the same garage just one week later. Similarly, a 1986 study found that the rate of adolescent suicide rose about 7 percent in New York City during the week following a television film on suicides, in contrast to a 0.5 percent increase in adult suicide rate during the same week. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

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Therefore, the task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. On this basis we may judge asceticism in the light of the principle of agape. First, nothing created is bad in itself. Matter is not an antidivine principle from which the “soul” has to be liberated. The desire for union with material reality through the senses is an expression of love as libido. And in libido, elements of eros, philia, and agape are present, as libido is present in them. As in all other instances, the problem is how much agape is effective in the libido drives of love—in the desire for food, drink, pleasures of the flesh, and aesthetic enjoyment. If the libido quality overpowers the agape element, and with it also the eros and philia elements, resistance in the name of agape is necessary and, under some conditions, partial or total asceticism with respect to things that are in themselves good. This “disciplinary” asceticism is quite different from the “ontological” asceticism which avoids things because of the material element in them. The former is affirmed by agape, the latter rejected by it. This distinction applies also to the ecstatic element of religion which has a definite psychosomatic dimension in unity with its spiritual dimension. The union of these two factors characterizes every genuine ecstasy, including every serious prayer that reaches to the divine Presence. The libido element in love prevents agape from becoming a rational calculation of how to give the best possible help to others, as the agape element in love prevents libido from running wild and destroying the centered person, and with it the power of eros and philia. Love is one. Its different qualities belong to each other, although they may become isolated and antagonistic toward each other. Decisive in all situations is agape, because it is united with justice and transcends the finite limits of human love. Therefore, in any conflict of the qualities of love, agape is the determining element. Only on this basis can love be called the ultimate source of moral demands. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

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If love is understood in this way a second answer to the question of religion and morality is provided. The first was the unconditional character of the moral imperative. The second is the transcendent character of the ultimate source of moral demands. If love is understood in this way a second answer to the question of religion and morality is provided. The first was the unconditional character of the ultimate source of moral demands—love under the dominance of agape. This again demonstrates that morality has a religious quality even when independent of any system of ethics that belongs to a religion in the narrower sense of the word. In calling love the source of moral norms we have answered the first question of this report, namely, that of the relativity of ethics. For love is both absolute and relative by its very nature. An unchanging principle, it nevertheless always changes in its concrete application. It “listens” to the particular situation. Abstract justice cannot do this; but justice taken into love and becoming “creative justice” or agape can do so. Agape acts in relation to come to the concrete demands of the situation—its conditions, its possible consequences, the inner status of the people involved, their hidden motives, their limiting complexes, and their unconscious desires and anxieties. Love perceives all these—and more deeply the stronger the agape element is. (In line with this thought we might interject that the discovery of the psychology of the unconscious was a work not only of creative eros, but also of creative justice or agape, in spite of the antireligious bias of many representatives of the psychoanalytic movement.) Christian theology has dealt with the problem of the concrete moral decision in terms of the doctrine of the divine Spirit. The “Spiritual Presence,” the presence of the divine Ground of Being toward and in the human spirit, opens living soul’s eyes and ears to the moral demand implicit in the concrete situation. Tables of laws can never wholly apply to the unique situation. This is true of the Tend Commandments as well as of the demands of the Sermon on the Mount and the moral prescriptions in the Epistles of Paul. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

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“The letter kills” not only because it judges one who cannot fulfill the law, but because it suppresses the creative potentialities of the unique moment which never was before and never will come again. This Spirit, on the contrary, opens the mind to these potentialities and determines the decision of love in a particular situation. In this way the problem of the absolute and the relative character of the moral demands is solved in principle. Love, as the ultimate principle of morality, is always the same. Love entering the unique situation, in the power of the Spirit, is always different. Therefore love liberates us from the bondage to absolute ethical traditions, to conventional morals, and to authorities that claim to know the right decision perhaps without having listened to the demand of the unique moment. This Spirit is the Spirit of newness. It breaks the prison of any absolute moral laws, even when vested with the authority of a sacred tradition. Love can reject as well as utilize every moral tradition, and it always scrutinizes the validity of a moral convention. However, love itself cannot question itself and it cannot be questioned by anything else. The problem is the religious source of the moral demands has so far been answered, concerning the ultimate principle of ethical norms. The first statement is the idea of justice, the affirmation of every person as a person. The second problem described love, taking justice into itself, as the ultimate principle of moral demands. And the third points out the dependence of moral demands on the concrete situation in its uniqueness. Desire deceives. We never know the real other out there, know only that other as reshaped by our desire. We take our fantasy, go looking for a suitable place to lodge it, reshaping reality with longing, stumbling through our years, seeking out stand-ins with whom we can act out again and again the old script, hoping this time for a happy ending, believing all the while that we are into something new. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

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And in the rain of conflicts to come, we remind ourselves that, our papier-mâché  angel will turn into a witch or a drab. Yet this passion for a falsified other may be the only thing in life really worthwhile. Without it one lives in a World of dailiness, of hearth love, the ordinary love of husband and wife, of parent and child, of friends. Such love may be constant, caring, loyal, may protect against loneliness and despair, provide the only security possible in a World of hazard, all these good things, and it may be, if we were wise, we would settle for it, renouncing that fever in the blood. However, it does not transcend, does not lift us up and out, does not take us to the other side. The assumption that it always desirable to see the World as it is may be in error. That undistorted and hence unexalted life may not be worth living. Desire is endless and unappeasable, is most intense where most forbidden, and is never far from despair. Sylvester Graham, S.B. Woodward, and William Alcott were among the founders of the America’s Male Purity Movement, dating from 1830. The chaos, formlessness, and surging changes in this new America horrified these men. Paternal control over sons was eroding and with it, the attendant lessons in discipline, manhood, and morality. Apprenticeships, the traditional job training system, were disappearing. The Male Purity Movement could not force all American males into premarital celibacy. It did, however, influence many—how many we shall never know—and was the only concerted chastity campaign ever to focus exclusively on bachelors. However, a parallel development directed to women preached purity in the context of piety, submissiveness, and domesticity, with motherhood the only possible object of pleasures of the flesh—postmarital, of course. Pure women deserved the pure males the reformers were attempting to create. The Male Purity Movement’s propagandists preached temperance, vegetarianism, moral reform, and chastity before marriage. Alcohol and rich spiced foods overstimulated and led to eroticism, and eroticism, often self-administered, corrupted, caused mental illness, disease, and the decay of the entire society. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

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Fear of disease and insanity were part of the reason for the male celibacy. Also the recommended bland diet—the diet that cured pleasures of the flesh—unseasoned vegetables and wholesome, taste-free bread and biscuits, Graham crackers, made of Graham’s new flour, and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s breakfast cereal—cornflakes, then advertised as a healthsome assistant to subduing eroticism, now (more accurately) touted as a healthsome assistance to sound nutritional balance and good, plain, time-honoured taste. It was also recommended that men should spend fifteen years in celibate Christian courtship, preparatory to marriage. When he finally wed his frigid, Very Good wife. The American Male Purity Movement rolled through the decades, converting some bachelors, many more parents, a host of other reformers, and briefly, physicians. These young men, however, were still encouraged to be celibate after marriage. Cold morning shows, coarse toweling, restricted meat and spieces, and frequent defecation were also highly recommended. And at age forty-five or thereabouts, pleasures of the flesh as to be completely terminated. The Male Purity Movement, and the related Moral Purity Movement, which also included women, cut an ideological swath in the fabric of American society that resonates to this day. It is fervour and authoritarian tone were captivating. The prestige of many of its crusaders and its temporary endorsement by much of the medical profession lent it great credibility. Its Christian base and its rigorous formula for a pure life appealed to those distressed by the turbulence of a changing America. A century and a half later, echoes of its urgent message resound in the agenda of the Moral Majority, the Promise Keepers, and True Love waits. If choosing the “best” leader were all we had to worry about, our problem could be solved within the framework of the existing political system. In fact, however, the problem cuts far deeper. In a nutshell, leaders—even the “best”—are crippled because the institutions they must work through are obsolete. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

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Our political and governmental structures, to begin with, were designated at a time when the nation-state was still coming into its own. Each government could make more or less independent decisions. Today, as we have seen, this is no longer possible, though we retain the myth of sovereignty. Inflation has become so transnational a disease that no one can prevent the contagion from crossing the border. The Communist industrial countries, even though partially severed from the World economy and rigidly controlled from within, are dependent upon external sources of oil, food, technology, credit, and other necessities. In 2021, America was forced to hike many consumer prices. California nearly doubled its price on fuel and by boosting electricity, for some consumers, with new peak time rates 51 percent. Each decision in one country forces problems or calls for responses from the next. For instance, when France built a nuclear reprocessing plant at Cap de la Hauge (which is closer to London than the British Windscale reactor) at a place where radioactive dust or gas, if released, would be wafted toward Britain by the prevailing winds. Mexican oil spills imperil the Texas coastline 500 miles away. And if Saudi Arabia of Libya raises or lowers petroleum production quotas, it has immediate or long-range effects on the ecology of many nations. In this tightly wired web national leaders lose much of their effectiveness no matter what rhetoric they employ of sabers they rattle. Their decisions typically trigger costly, unwanted, frequently dangerous repercussions at both the global and the local level. The scale of government and the distribution of decision-making authority are hopelessly wrong for today’s World. This, however, is only one of the reasons why existing political structures are obsolete. In devoting time to spiritual reform, we go to the root of all other reforms. If humans get rid of their spiritual ignorance it is inevitable that they will more quickly get rid of undesirable conditions in every other department of their life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

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Nowadays we must especially guard ourselves against the one-sided unbalanced doctrines, the selfish degrading ethos, and the false materialistic ideas which have so widely permeated the political, cultural, commercial, and religious terrain of our time. No Marxian magic and no financial wizardry can turn a planet people by humans still dominated by hates, greeds, selfishness, and lusts into a physical utopia. Ultimately the experience of all history, both individual and national, teaches the lesson that physical well-being alone is not enough. It contributes toward the true happiness of humans on Earth but does not complete it. The welfare of the body is not an end in itself but only a means to a higher end. Hence philosophy, in its consideration of the methods to be used to achieve such an end, says that external re-arrangement of social forms will not of itself bring about fully satisfactory results. A re-arrangement from within is equally if not much more necessary. Only those who refuse the lessons of humankind’s historic past can suppose that peace, which it has never had for more than short periods, will suddenly bloom all over the Earth and remain here continuously, in defiance of the violent and destructive instincts which still lurk in humankind. The opportunities to wage war can be brought under international control by external means, and within our time they will be so brought when humankind is driven by necessity to take such a measure for the sake of the race’s own survival. However, the psychological causes that urge humans to wage war—these remnants of the terrestrial being lift in humans—can only be dealt with by internal means. This drawing-together of the different peoples out of their earlier isolation, which modern civilization has brought about, has not only increased their knowledge of each other but also increased their effect upon the lives and fortunes of one another. Out of this has grown the complexity of contemporary political, economic, gender, and racial problems. What one nation does is liable to affect not only its neighbours but also far-away nations to the point of actual war. Therefore, there is much greater need of learning for what purpose all the human race has been placed on this Earth than there was in earlier and more isolated times. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

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Not any military, political, or economic preparation—whether defensive or aggressive—has any hope for humankind’s true protection, if it does not include learning and obeying these higher laws. There are healing, restorative, guiding, and protective forces amid us even today, trying to reach the human race and to penetrate the dense, dark conditions surrounding it. If they are recognized and received in time, it will be saved from a frightfully destructive event. However, if human blindness and inertia prevent this from happening, the penalty will have to be paid. In the heart’s deepest place, where the burden of ego is dropped and the mystery of soul is penetrated, a human finds the consciousness there not different in any way from what all other humans may find. The mutuality of the human race is thus revealed as existing only on a plane where its humanness is transcended. This is why all attempts to express it in political and economic terms, no less than the theosophic attempts to form a universal brotherhood, being premature, must be also artificial. This is why they failed. None of the Powers, great or small, has been able to resolve the World crisis. It drags on through the years, getting aggravated with each year. This is because all the Powers try to resolve it against the wrong background, using ideas and methods which may have formerly been right but now are obsolete and inapplicable. This is the Nuclear Age. It requires a totally new approach. If God is in His Heaven and all is well with the World, are we in error to attempt reforms where they are obviously needed or to right wrongs where they are heavily oppressive? No—this is no error, for the attempts itself will then be introduced by the divine presence. Humans who have lost the sense of life’s spiritual significance, and who do not even have any insistent questions about it, will not respond to such events in the correct ways. Hitherto religion has provided the ordinary human with the truth in a form one was capable of comprehending. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

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However, owning to the wider spread and quickened evolution which one has undergone in recent centuries, one has become capable of comprehending more deeply that which was formerly kept apart from popular religion and reserved for mysticism, the next higher form. Consequently it is no longer enough to limit one to merely religious strict and rigid doctrines and practices; these must now be intermixed with mystical doctrines and practices also. It is a fact that war and crisis have multiplied by many times the number of mystical seekers. However, the new group is still, relative to the total population, extremely small, insignificant and uninfluential. Yet the benefits of mysticism could be of untold help to countless others. The temporary forgetfulness from current turmoils and personal burdens which mental quietism offers its votaries should prove attractive to quite a number of persons in these times. For the need of personal, firsthand experience of the soul is greater today than ever before. Therefore the importance of this work is unquestionable. So many are discussing the new economic World which they hope, except, or demand to emerge during the postwar period, and so few the new spiritual World without which it can only be a failure. The truth is that both are needed, that one without the other will be an imperfect incomplete thing. Because we live in an era of flux, we need a better-exercised intelligence and intuition to negotiate it aright. The real war today is within the human mind. The real choice is between allegiances being made there. As individuals give themselves up to, or cleanse themselves from, the base emotions, they carry on this inner war. The interminable quarrels over ownership of countries will always produce recurring wars. So long as Nature’s proprietorship is ignored and unacknowledged, so long will humans and nations stake out their selfish claims to perpetual possession. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18  

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This home was designed to impress. From the foyer, the great room stretches into an impressive kitchen and dining room.  This entertainer’s dream.

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#CresleighHomes

It Takes More than Strong Leadership to Make the Trains Run on Time!

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Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. What is worth doing is worth doing well. Therefore, the task to which you dedicate yourself can never become a drudgery. The unexpected success of S.L Millers experiment of a mixture of water vapor, ammonia, methane, and hydrogen past an electric discharge to simulate the ultraviolet radiation of the sun, which at the end of the experiment created unmistakable traces of “organic” compounds, including several of the amino acids, neatly inspired others to undertake similar investigations. It was soon learned that Miller’s results could be duplicated and extended. Some of the most important results were obtained by the University of California chemist Melvin Calvin. (Some of Calvin’s work actually preceded Miller’s discovery, but in his earlier work ammonia was not present so that nothing as complex and significant as amino acids had been observed.) Calin employed high-energy electrons, rather than ultraviolet radiation, as his source of disruptive energy. Using the facilities of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, he was able to simulate the kind of electron bombardment that might have resulted in primordial times from the natural disintegration of the radioactive elements. When a mixture of water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen was subjected to the high-energy electrons and then analyzed for new ingredients, a veritable storehouse of complex molecules was discovered. In addition to amino acids of several kinds, there were sugars, fatty acids, hydroxy acids, urea, and even several of the bases that, as we shall learn later, play in the nucleic acid molecules a component role similar to that played by the side chains of the amino acids in protein molecules. In short, Calvin’s experiment yielded an impressive number of the different kinds of molecular units employed in nature in the construction not only of proteins but also of carbohydrates, fates, oils, and nucleic acids—the essential materials of living organisms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

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The results of Calvin and Miller have been repeated and extended by other experimenters. It has been shown that a methane-ammonia-water mixture, heated to high temperatures such as would have been occasionally produced by meteoritic impact in the primordial atmosphere, produced by meteorite impact in the primordial atmosphere, produces at least 14 of the 20 amino acids that occur in living organisms. And ultraviolet irradiation at cool temperatures of a mixture of water and hydrogen cyanide—a compound that is frequently formed in experiments such as those of Miller and Calvin—has been found to result in two of the key nucleic acid bases. Similar treatment of mixtures of water and formaldehyde—another common product of the experiments—has produced the two sugars that are found in the nucleic acid. In short, it has by now been demonstrated that almost any kind of input to a suitable atmosphere of energy—whether from heart, ultraviolet, electric discharge, or radioactivity—will synthesize the building blocks of life’s molecules. Of course, it should not be imagined that the only new ingredients produced by the irradiation or bombardment of a “primeval atmosphere” are those which are essential to the construction of organic molecules. In Calvin’s work, for example, there were in addition a number of other molecular products, not all of which were completely analyzed. However, the important point is that, when the simple molecules of water, ammonia, methane, and hydrogen believed to have comprised the major part of the primeval atmosphere are torn asunder by electric discharge, heat, radiation, or radioactive bombardment, an appreciable fraction of the resulting fragments automatically recombine into just the kinds of molecules that have turned out to be the basic structural units of all living matter. In experiments such as these described, the variety of organic building blocks produced was, of course, limited by the starting ingredients used. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

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In a real primeval atmosphere, there would be traces of sulfur, phosphorous, sodium, potassium, and other elements that would presumably permit the formation of amino acids and other organic molecules with side chains including these materials. Although such experiments convincingly establish the point that we need in order to get on with our task of reactivating the doctrine of spontaneous generation, it is hard to avoid a digression at this point to consider a troublesome question. Why do things work out this way? Why should amino acids, for example, just happen to have been among the prominent products formed when the primeval atmosphere was disrupted by the naturally existing forces of the heat, lightening, ultraviolet radiation, and radioactive bombardment? There is an answer to this question. In physico/chemical terms, there are various stable configurations of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms. Their mutual electric forces of attraction and repulsion are that, if such atoms of the four species are brought near one another and jostled about by the effects of external sources of energy, they will tend to stick together in one or another of these stable three-dimensional arrangements. Depending upon the accidental details of atomic juxtaposition and jostling, the result may be one or another amino acid, a sugar, a nucleic acid base, or an inorganic molecule. Such an explanation may convince us of the prosaic inevitability of the early formation of amino acids, but it is not likely thereby to suppress our tendency to feel that there is still something peculiar going on here. Granted that amnio acids had to be formed out of the inevitable workings of the laws of physics on the atmospheric ingredients of the preanimate World, how did it happen that they were just the structural units needed for the clues that, a billion or so years later, contributed to the appearance of the remarkable new phenomenon of life? This question, too, has a nonvitalistic answer. It epitomized in the assertion that modern organisms are based on amino-acids-containing substances because they constitute a class of long-chain, complex molecular material that happened to be available in the primordial Earth, not because they were uniquely required for the creation of life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

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As we move along into aspects of our treatment in which the principles of evolution and natural selection come into play in the development of the progenitors of living organisms, we shall encounter no reason to believe that the specific kind of chemistry that could support life. If we only imagine that the only form of life possible is that which we know, which is so strongly dependent on just the kinds of products that they looked for and found in their experiments, then the results obtained by Calvin and Miller seem mysterious. If instead we imagine that there are various possible molecular components on which life might be based, that among them are those found in the experiments and presumably therefore generated in the atmosphere of our preanimate Earth, and that the natural processes of evolution and selection (yet to be treated) did the rest, the mystery vanishes. Evolution is a gradual change to the DNA of s species over many generations. It can occur by natural selection, when certain traits created by genetic mutations help an organism survive or reproduce. Such mutations are thus more likely to be passed on to the next generation, so they increase in frequency in a population. Gradually, these mutations and their associated traits become more common among the whole group. By looking at global studies of our DNA, we can see evidence that natural selection has recently made changes and continues to do so. Though modern healthcare frees us from many causes of death, in countries without access to good healthcare, populations are continuing to evolve. Survivours of infectious diseases outbreaks drive natural selection by giving their genetic resistance to offspring. Our DNA shows evidence for recent selection for resistance of killer diseases like Lassa fever and malaria. Selection in response to malaria is still ongoing in regions where the diseases remain common. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

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Humans are also adapting to their environment. Mutations allowing humans to live at high altitudes have become more common in populations in Tibet, Ethiopia, and the Andes. The spread of genetic mutations in Tibet is possibly the fastest evolutionary change in humans, occurring over the last 3,000 years. This rapid surge in frequency of a mutated gene that increases blood oxygen content gives locals a survival advantage in higher altitudes, resulting in more surviving children. Diet is another source of adaptations. Evidence from Inuit DNA shows a recent adaptation that allows them to thrive on their fat-rich diet of Arctic mammals. Studies also show that natural selection favouring a mutation allow adults to produce lactase—the enzyme that breaks down milk sugars—is why some groups of people can digest milk after weaning. Over 80 percent of north-west Europeans can, but in parts of East Asia, where milk is much less commonly drunk, an inability to digest lactose is the norm. Like high altitude adaptation, selection to digest milk had evolved more than once in humans and may be the strongest kind of recent selection. We may well be adapting to unhealthy diets too. One study of family genetic changes in the United States of America during the 20th century found selection for reduced blood pressure and cholesterol levels, both of which can be lethally raised by modern diets. Yet, despite these changes, natural selection only affects about 8 percent of our genome. According to the neutral evolution theory, mutations in the rest of the genome may freely change frequency in populations by chance. If natural selection is weakened, mutations it would normally purge are not removed as efficiently, which could increase their frequency and so increase the rate of evolution. However, neutral evolution cannot explain why some genes are evolving much faster than others. We measure the speed of gene evolution by comparing human DNA with that of other species, which also allows us to determine which genes are fast-evolving in humans alone. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

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One fast-evolving gene is human accelerated region 1 (HAR1), which is needed during brain development. A random section of human DNA is on average more than 98 percent identical to the chimp comparator, but HAR1 is so fast evolving that it is only around 85 percent similar. Though scientist can see these changes are happening—and how quickly—we still do not fully understand why fast evolution happens to some genes but not to others. Originally thought to be the result of natural selection exclusively, we now know this is not always true. Realizing evolution does not only happen by natural selection makes it clear the process is not likely to ever stop. Freeing our genomes from the pressures of natural selection only opens them up to other evolutionary processes—making it even harder to predict what future humans will be like. However, it is quite possible that with modern medicine’s protections, there will be more genetic problems in store for future generations. Historically, male sexuality has been perceived as both a moral issues and a physical phenomenon. The moral plane involves passion and lust, seduction and conquest, lack of restraint and weakness. It is interesting, however, that Hippocrates told women is was best to be unchaste and had a different message for men, who he advised to abstain from pleasures of the flesh to retain their seed, which energized their bodies. Pleasures of the flesh, though salutary for women, was detrimental to men because it brained away their lifeforce. He was cited as warning a young man who was over active in pleasures of the flesh who had actually died, raving mad, after a simple stomach ailment escalated to fatal illness, so drastically had he weakened his body by recklessly depleting his stores of seed. The practical significance of this was not entirely clear, because what was beneficial for women might be detrimental for men. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

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Celibacy was, after all, simply another tool, like diet, exercise, message, and bathing, to improve health in a fanatically health-conscious people. By the early second century, creeping asceticism was reflected in medical writings. Galen, the great second-century Greek doctor who supplanted Hippocrates as the medical genius, reached conclusions that clashed with previous medical wisdom. Galen’s personal preference was virginity for both men and women, but as a doctor, he worried about the disorder celibacy could cause. Specifically, a glut of surplus seed, like putrefying garbage, could cause health problems such as slothfulness and listlessness. His prescription? Pleasures of the flesh. However, he warned that pleasures of the flesh was tiring because the seed consisted of pneuma or vital spirit, and orgasms warmed the blood, a debilitating process. Young men who overindulged in pleasures of the flesh, for example, dried out their bodies and require humidification. Galen believed in moderation. However, through Adam’s semen, the entire human race had inherited a nature irrevocably marred by sin. The mechanism for this tragic collective flaw? “The nature of the semen from which we are to be propagated, Adam’s semen was shackled by the bond of death, and so every human born through semen is contaminated by sin. Only Christ, conceived without semen, is devoid of sin. In Augustine’s mind, semen was inherently evil, a virulent poison that has infected the World since the time of the Fall. When one looks at it through the lenses of moral and social issues—celibacy and its opposite were seen purely as prescriptions for health, little different from a course of exercise of diet. Some thinkers interpreted this vital force as magnetism, electricity, galvanism, animal heart, nervous energy, or never force; other preferred simply the vital force. What all systems had in common was the belief that vital energy transmitted life itself and that energy from pleasures of the flesh as the great conductor. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

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Swiss doctor Samuel A. Tissot thought celibacy was a good idea because loss of once ounce of this vital force would weaken more than [the loss of] of forty ounces of bloody. Of course this was also because this vital force, when it is preserved in the chaste body was reabsorbed, enriching the blood and revitalizing the brain. Celibacy, therefore, was presented not merely as a moral choice but a physiological necessity. Chastity was in vogue as part of the respectable gentleman’s gear, with John Locke and William Pitt, who held up as models for lifetime celibates. Dr. William Acton, a British proselytizer for the ideal of respectable chastity, recommended daily baths, a hard bed, a balanced diet without alcohol, intellectual stimulation, religious study, and rigorous physical exercise. The latter was incorporated enthusiastically into school curricula and idealized as Muscular Christianity. Celibacy was considered the accumulation of capital. Incontinence, on the other hand, was bad and provoked too early marriages and poverty. Based on these premises, it followed that celibacy—until appropriately late marriage, after enough wealth has been amassed to buy a decent house—should be an integral part of England’s new industrial society. After all, were not continence dealing with pleasures of the flesh and industry linked as values in a single system? The same vaunted thrift that had build England’s industrial empire could, applied to an individual’s limited supply of seed, stabilize society and produce fewer but superior citizens. The Male Purity Movement, as it was known, everywhere rolled over the decades successfully, until it was finally spent. There is, however, a limit to the formulation of the moral principle of justice thus far. The acknowledgement of somebody as a person remains an external act that can be performed with legal detachment or cool objectivity. It can achieve justice without creating a relationship. Under many conditions this is the only way of actualizing justice, especially in encounters of social groups. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

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However, mere objectivity never occurs between human beings. Accompanying “pure” detachment is always an element of involvement. In the encounter of person with person within a community of persons, “community” also expresses involvement. In the encounter of person with person within a community of person, community also expressed involvement because it implies mutual participation, and, by participation, union. And the desire for union of the separated (which is ultimately re-union) is love. All communions are embodiments of love, the urge for participation in the other one. If the acknowledgment of the other person as person is not detached but involved. In this way, loved becomes the ultimate moral principle, including justice and transcending it at the same time. However, at this point it is necessary to combat several misinterpretations of the principle of love. First, it must be emphasized that is love takes justice into itself, justice is not diminished but enhanced. It has become creative justice in the sense of the Old and New Testament concepts of the Yedaquah and Dikaiosyne of God that both judges and saves. The frequent cry of the Jewish people who has suffered immeasurable injustice through two millennia of church history—“We do not want love, we want justice”—is based on a misunderstanding of the biblical idea of love. Love, in the sese of agape, contains justice in itself as its unconditional element and as its weapon against its own sentimentalization. It is regrettable that Christianity has often concealed its unwillingness to do justice, or to fight for it, by setting off love against injustice, and performing works of love in the sense of “charity” instead of battling for the removal of social injustice. One of the reasons for this misunderstanding of love it the identification of love with emotion. Love, like every human experience, of course includes an emotional element, and this can in the case of love prove to be overwhelmingly strong. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

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However, this element is not the whole of love. Above all, love as agape is far removed from pity, although it can have elements of pity within a particular situation. Nietzsche’s attack on the Christian idea of love is caused by this confusion. However, it should serve to warn the Christian church to demonstrate in teaching, preaching, and liturgy the unconditional demand for justice in the very nature of agape. (If the word “love” in the sense of agape could be avoided for a long time, and the word agape introduced into modern language, I believe it would be salutary.) Agape is a quality of love, that quality which expresses the self-transcendence of the religious element in love. If love is the ultimate norm of all moral demands, its agape quality points to the transcendent source of the content of the moral imperative. For agape transcends the finite possibilities of humans. Paul indicates this is his great hymn to love (I Corinthians 13) when he describes agape as the highest work of the divine Spirit, and as an element of the eternal life, even beyond faith and hope. Agape as the self-transcending element of love is not separated from the other elements that usually are described as epithymia—the libido quality of love, philia—the friendship quality of love, and eros—the mystical quality of love. In all of them what we have called “the urge toward the union of the separated” is effective, and all of them stand under the judgment of agape. For love is one, even if one of tis qualities predominates. None of the qualities is every completely absent. There is, for example, the compassion element of philia and eros in agape, and there is the agape quality in genuine compassion (a fact important for the dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism). It is this agape element that prevents participation in the other one from becoming mere identification with one, as compassion prevents agape from becoming a detached act of mere obedience to the “law of love.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

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And there is eros in agape, and agape in eros, a fact that permitted Christianity to receive into itself the eros-created classical culture, both rational and mystical. It is the agape element in eros that prevents culture from becoming a nonserious, merely transitory entertainment, just as eros prevents agape from becoming a moralistic turning away from the creative potentialities in nature and humans toward an exclusive commitment to a God who can only be feared or obeyed, but not loved. For without eros toward the ultimate good there is no love toward God. Even the libidinous quality of love is always present in the highest forms of eros, philia, and agape. Humans are multidimensional unity and not a composite of parts. Therefore, all elements of a living soul being participate in every moral decision and action. When, in the evolution of human life, consciousness so expands that the individual sees oneself as separate from the group, unique, possessed of an inner life oriented by fixed memories, living out a personal history that moves toward its own termination, one becomes aware that the drive for pleasures of the flesh which impels one so powerfully will not safeguard that uniqueness. Pleasures of the flesh is being used, and used up, and soon discarded, by a life force that cares nothing for the individual. All those monuments and spires, the swooning sonnets, like flaking paint, the crashing chords, are the residue of protest against such waste. Uniqueness and morality are our condition, impel us to create legacies meant to last forever. The creative impulses, writes Otto Rank, is anti-pleasures of the flesh in its yearning for immortality. Whereas Dr. Freud had traced the repressions of pleasures of the flesh to social constraint, Mrs. Rank sees it as driven by an individual dread of death no less inherent in the individual than the impulse of pleasures of the flesh. Hers is an offering of self that hold nothing back. Nothing in reserve, she gives it all. No barter, no exception of return, no maneuvering for advantage. Just upfront conversation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

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Who could resist such a gift? The fact that it is free both renders it more enchanting and breaks your heart, moves you to an unfamiliar generosity, you want to protect this vulnerable being who cannot arrange for her own security. However, what is offered as love, I warn myself, is in fact a camouflaged raid, and if the gift is accepted she will begin to exact in exchange what then is due and payable, the tribute owed the victorious weak by the vanquished strong; and whatever the outcome of those unhappy negotiations, love, it will transpire, will have played no part at all. A beautiful woman is always in danger of becoming a witch. Because beauty evokes desire, and desire enslaves; and when the slave eventually rebels, the angel who evoked the desire and, as one then sees it, cast the spell becomes a witch. “The recurring comforts us,” she says, “the singular is tragic, must not be missed. This is singular. Once, only once, never again. I love you. I trust you. I have never, until now, trusted any being I have become a different person. The wildness is gone. It was like a storm. All is calm now. All my life I have moved from person to person, denying possession to any. However, you have tamed me. No one could have predicted it. I would not have thought it possible. With you I would stay forever.” The master teacher that lurks within each of us is likelier to burst forth within the intellectual atmosphere that collegiality can create. Absolutely, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly enough. It asks for what we cannot give, but it is in this direction we must go. It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have some space to bang around in, that is not always somebody’s property; to have better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better friendships without fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a voice. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

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These are not outlandish demands. Certainly they cannot be satisfied directly in our present system; they are baffling. That is why the problem is baffling, and the final recourse is to a curfew, to ordinances against carrying knives (imagine that, people feel that unsafe), to threatening the parents, to reformatories with newfangled names, and having 696,644 full-time law enforcement officers employed in the United States of America. The Number of full-time officers reached a peak in 2008 with 708,569 officers, and hit a low in 2012 with 626,942 officers. Sources of information interviews indicate that elementary school children learn about suicide most often from television and discussions with other children, and rarely discuss suicide with adults. Where we turn to—one survey of 396 high school students indicated that teenagers are unlikely to initiate contact with a counselor during a suicidal crisis, but over half would probably tell a friend. Teenage Anomie, in a study across several midwestern states, half of the 300 homeless and runaway teenagers said that they had thought of suicide, and over one-quarter had attempted suicide in the previous year. The likelihood of committing suicide generally increases with age, although people of all ages may try to kill themselves. Recently clinicians have paid particular attention to self-destructive behaviour in three age groups: children, partly because suicide at their young age contradicts society’s perception that childhood is an enjoyable period; adolescents, because of the steady and highly publicized rise in their suicide rate; and the elderly, because suicide is more prevalent in this age group than any other. Although the features and theories of suicide we discuss apply to all age groups, each of these groups faces unique problems that may play key roles in the suicidal acts of its members. Tommy [age 7] and his younger brother were playing together, and an altercation arose that was settled by the mother, who then left the room. The mother recalled nothing to distinguish this incident from innumerable similar ones. Several minutes after she left, she considered Tommy strangely and quiet and returned to find him crimson-faced and struggling for air, having knotted a jumping rope around his neck and jerked it tight. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

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Although suicide is infrequent among children, it has been increasing over the past several decades. “Dear Mom and Dad, I love you. Please tell my teacher that I cannot take it anymore. I quit. Please don’t take me to school anymore. Please help me. I will run away so don’t stop me. I will kill myself. So don’t look for me because I will be dead. I love you. I will always love you. Remember me. Help me. Love Justin [age 10].” Approximately 500 children under 14 years of age in the United States of America now commit suicide each year—around 0.9 per 100,000 in this age group, a rate nearly 800 percent higher than that of 1950. Boys outnumber girls by as much as 5 to 1. In addition, it has been estimated that one of every 100 children tries to harm him- or herself, and many thousands of children are hospitalized each year for deliberately self-destructive acts, such as stabbing, cutting, burning, overdosing, or jumping from high places. One study of suicide attempts by children revealed that the majority had taken an overdose of drugs at home, half were living with only one parent, and a quarter had attempted suicide before. Recent studies further suggest that the use of guns is increasing among children who attempt suicide. Researchers have found that suicide attempts by the very young are commonly preceded by such behavioural patterns as running away from home, accident proneness, acting out, temper tantrums, self-depreciation, social withdrawal and loneliness, extreme sensitivity to criticism, low tolerance of frustration, dark fantasies and daydreams, marked personality change, and overwhelming interest in death and suicide. Studies have further linked child suicides to the recent or anticipated loss of a loved one, family stress and parent unemployment, abuse by parents, and a clinical level of depression. Most people find it hard to believe that children fully comprehend the meaning of a suicidal act. They argue that because a child’s thinking is so limited, children who attempt suicide fall into Shneidman’s category of “death ignorers,” like Billy who sought to join his mother in Heaven. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

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Many child suicides, however, appear to be based on a clear understanding of death and on a clear wish to die. In addition, suicidal thinking among even normal children is apparently more common than most people once believed. Clinical interviews with schoolchildren have revealed that between 6 and 33 percent have thought about suicide. Changing suicide rates—the suicide rates of elderly people has been generally declining for over half a century, while that of young adults is increasing. Still, older people continue to be at higher risk for suicide. “O Lord, correct, instruct, and chastise me, but with judgment and in just measure—not in Your anger, lest You diminish me and bring me to nothing. Put out Your wrath upon the nations that do not know or recognize You and upon the peoples that do not call upon Your name. For they have devoured Jacob, yes, devoured him and consumed him and made his habitation a desolate waste,” Jeremiah 10.24-25. The Messiah Complex is the illusion that we can somehow save ourselves by changing the man (or woman) on top. Watching Second Wave politician stumble and flail drunkenly at the problem arising from the emergence of the Fourth Wave, millions of people, spurred on by the press, have arrived at a single, simply, easy-to-understand explanation of our woes: the “failure of leadership.” If only a messiah would appear on the political horizon and pit things back together again! This craving for a masterful, macho leader is voiced today by even the most well-meaning of people as their familiar World crumbles, as their environment grows more unpredictable and their hunger for order, structure, and predictability increases. Thus, a formidable cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for someone or something to take command. In the United States of America, President Joe Biden is violently condemned for “lack of leadership.” However, in the Communist industrial nations, where leadership is anything but timid, the pressure from still “stronger leadership” is intensifying. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

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Modern Russia glorifies Stalin’s ability to draw the necessary political conclusions. To this day, little pictures of Stalin sprout on windshields, in homes, hotels, and kiosks. Stalin on the windshield today is an upsurge from below…a protest, however paradoxical, against the present disintegration and lack of leadership. As dangerous decade opens, today’s demand for “leadership” strikes at a moment when long-forgotten dark forces are stirring anew in our midst. Because the Republican Party had been viewed as racist in the past, many egalitarians were happy to see the country to become more Democratic. However, now, America is stuck in a dangerous cycle of Democratic overdrive that is ripping the country apart. As a result, after more than three decades in hibernation, small but influential right-wing groups are again seeking the intellectual limelight, expounding theories on race, biology and political elitism discredited by the fascism of the Democracy majority. Aryan racial supremacy used to control several journalistic outlets. Some believe that the races are born unequal. Across the globe in Japan, my wife and I not long ago spent 45 minutes in a massive traffic pile-up watching a procession of trucks crawl by, bearing uniformed and helmeted political toughs, chanting and flinging their fists skyward to protest some government policy. Our Japanese friends tell us these proto-storm troopers are linked to the mafia-like yakuza hangs and are financed by powerful political figures eager to see a return to prewar authoritarianism. Each of these phenomena in turn has its “left” counterpart-terrorist gangs who mouth the slogans of socialist democracy but are prepared to impose their own brand of totalitarian leadership on society with Kalashnikovs and plastic bombs. In the United Sates of American, among other unsettling signs. There is a surge of demand for “stronger leadership” coincides precisely with the recrudescence of highly authoritarian groups who hope to profit from the breakdown of representative government. The tinder and the spark are coming perilously close to one another. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

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This intensifying cry for leadership is based on three misconceptions, the first of which is the myth of authoritarian efficiency. If nothing else, few ideas are more widely held than the conation that the train must run on time. Today so many institutions are breaking down and unpredictability is so rife that millions of people would willingly trade some freedom (someone else’s, preferably) to make their economic, social, and political trains run on time. Yet stronger leadership—and even totalitarianism—has little to do with efficiency. There is not much evidence to suggest that counties with assuredly stronger and more authoritarian than that United States of America, France, or Sweden are run more efficiently. Apart from the military, the secret police, and a few other functions vital to the perpetuation of these tyrannical countries are run much better, but they are more loyal to their leaders, more serious and more willing to accept authority. When a society is crippled by waste, irresponsibility, inertia, and corruption—in short, by lassie fare inefficiency, it will fail. Sloppy ships use scientists very poorly. Much of the breakthrough technology and inventions of great significance never get into production because of the prevailing inefficiency and regulation. It takes more than strong leadership, as we shall see, to make the trains run on time. Different civilizations require vastly different leadership qualities. And what is strong in one may be inept and disastrously weak in another. During the First Wave, peasant-based civilization, leadership typically derived from birth, not achievement. A monarch needed certain limited practical skills—the ability to lead men in combat, the shrewdness to play off his barons against one another, the cleverness to consummate an advantageous marriage. Literacy and broad powers of abstract thought were not among the basic requirements. Moreover, the leader was typically free to exercise sweeping personal authority in the most capricious, even whimsical fashion, unchecked by constitution, legislature, or public opinion. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

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If approval was needed, it was only from a small coterie of nobles, lords, and ministers. The leader able to mobilize this support was “strong.” The Second Wave leader, by contrast, dealt in impersonal and increasingly abstract power. One had many more decisions to make on a far wider variety of matters, from manipulating the media to managing the marco-economy. One’s decisions had to be implemented through a chain of organizations and agencies whose complex relationships to one another he understood and orchestrated. One had to be literate and capable of abstract reasoning. Instead of a handful of barons, one has to play off a complex array of elites and sub-elites. Moreover, one’s authority—even if one were a totalitarian dictator—was at least nominally constrained by constitution, legal precedent, party political requirements, and the force of mass opinion. Given these contrasts, the “strongest” First Wave leader plunged into a Second Wave political framework would have appeared even more weak, confused, erratic, and inept then the “weakest” Second Wave leader. Similarly today, as we race into a new stage of civilization—the strong leaders of the Fourth Wave Capitalistic society, like President Trump, were illegally ousted for a confused President, who is unwilling to help the American people advance. However, people are still searching for seemingly decisive, jut-jawed, sharply opinionated leaders—whether Trumps, Lincolns, Reagans, Chiracs, or Thatchers—is in exercise in nostalgia, a search for father- or mother-figure based on obsolete assumptions. For the “weakness” of today’s leaders is less a reflection of personal qualities than it is a consequence of the breakdown of the institutions on which their power depends. In fact, their seeming “weakness” is the exact result of their increased “power.” Thus, as the Fourth Wave continues to transform society, raising it to a much higher level of diversity and complexity, all leaders become dependent on increasing numbers of people for help in making and implementing decisions. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

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The more powerful the tools at a leader’s command—supersonic fighters, nuclear weapons, computers, telecommunications—the more, not less, dependent the leader becomes. This is an unbreakable relationship because it reflects the rising complexity on which power today necessarily rests. This is why the American President can sit next to the nuclear push button, which give one the power to pulverize the planet, and still feel as helpless as though there were “nobody at the other end” of one’s telephone line. Power and powerlessness are opposite sides of the same semiconductor chip. The emerging civilization of the Fourth Wave demands, for these reasons, a wholly new type of leadership. The requisite qualities of the Fourth Wave leaders are not yet entirely clear. We may well find that strength lies not in a leader’s assertiveness but precisely in one’s ability to listen to others; not in bulldozer force but in imagination; not in megalomania but in a recognition of the limited nature of leadership in the New World. The leaders of tomorrow may well have to deal with a far more decentralized and participator society—one even more diverse than today’s. They can never again be all things to all people. Indeed, it is unlikely that one human being will ever embody all the traits required. Leadership may well prove to be more temporary, collegial, and consensual. As the World shrinks, the problems are so general, so basic and so interdependent that they cannot be solved, as once problems were, by one human or one Government’s initiative. In short, we are moving painfully toward a new kind of leader not because someone thinks this a good thing but because the nature of the problems makes it necessary. Yesterday’s strong human may turn out to be tomorrow’s 98-pound weakling. Whether or not this proves to be the case, there is one final, even more damming flaw in the argument that some political messiah is needed to save us from disaster. For this nation presupposed that our basic problem is personnel. And it is not. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

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Even if we had saints, geniuses, and heroes in charge, we would still be facing the terminal crisis of representative government—the political technology of the Third Wave era. The descent into materialism will be intellectually checked by science reversing its own nineteenth-century conclusions; the lapse into immorality by the vivid demonstration of its tragic results in recent national and individual history; the fall into irreligion by the uprise of a more personal and more mystical faith. The first social goal which philosophy sets before its votary is the dropping of class race and creed prejudices—not, be it remembered, of their actualities. Although racial differences must be taken into account, cultural variations must be recognized and the contrasts of living standards must be noted; although the oneness of humankind is a metaphysical and not a practical uniformity, all this is no excuse for racial prejudices and hatreds or for unfair partialities and discriminations. In the case of the colour bar, this has been particularly cruel in the past and will be dangerous in the future. One must be too wise, too tolerant, and too decent to be caught up by the fanatic nationalisms, the unashamed savageries, the battling brutalities, the social hostilities, the racial animosities and religious intolerances of unenlightened humans. Whoever breathes the rarefied atmosphere of truth can only regard with sorrow those who insist on breathing the murky fogs of overweening race, nationality, sect, or colour discriminations. Whoever practices the philosophic discipline is walking the path to the consciousness of being a World citizen. One cannot help but be a confirmed internationalist. This is a logical and practical result of one’s knowledge and attitude. One sees clearly that we are all children of the same supreme Father, all rooted in the same infinite Mind, all brought together on this planet to carry out the same noble tasks of self-regeneration and self-realization. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

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Consequently one is friendly to humans of all nationalities, all races, all countries. They are not disliked, suspected, nor hated, ignored, neglected, nor ill-treated because in the flesh they happen to be foreigners. One sees that the truth is there are no Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Germans, but only human beings harbouring stuffy mental complexes that they are English, French, or Germany. Nevertheless, the human who has liberated oneself from this fleshly materialism need not cease thinking of oneself as a citizen of one’s particular country. However, one will alongside of that think of oneself as a citizen of the World. Their high pitched baying as if in prayer’s unison, remote, undistracted, given over utterly to belief, the skein of geese voyages south, hierarchic arrow of its convergence toward the point of grace swinging and rippling, ribbon tail of a kite, loftily over lakes where they have not elected to rest, over humans who suppose Earth is human’s, over golden Earth preparing itself for night and winter. We humans are smaller than they, and crawl unnoticed, about and about the smoky map. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who creates the light of the fire. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who didst make a distinction between America and the heathen, between the seventh day and the six working days. Praised be Thou, O Lord, who makest a distinction between holy and profane. May He who sets the holy and profane apart, blot out our sins before His sight, and make our numbers as the sand again, and as the stars of night. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast sanctified us by Thy precepts, and hast enjoined upon us the kindling of the Hanukkah and Kwanza and Christmas light. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who art this season wroughtest miracles for our fathers in the old days. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast kept us in life, and hast preserved us, and enabled us to reach this season. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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Cresleigh Homes

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Seriously, could you dream of a more dreamy laundry room? It’s beyond our wildest dreams! (yes, yes we hear it too…but it’s seriously that awesome!)

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Laundry is fun when you’ve got all the space you need; not to mention that chic floor in the Mills Station Residence 2 model.

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The very thought of you, and I forget to do, the little ordinary things that everyone ought to do. I’m living in a kind of day dream. I’m happy as a King in my Cresleigh Homes. To me that is everything. The mere idea of you, the longing to be near you.

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The very though of my love, my Cresleigh Home. There mere idea of you, the long here for you. I see your architecture in every flower, your windows in stars above. It is just the thought of you, the very though of you, my Cresleigh Homes.

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There is a summer place, where it may rain or storm, yet I’m safe and for within my Cresleigh Home, your arms reach out to me and my heart is free from all care.

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For it knows there are no gloomy skies. I am blessed with the secret of a forever home. I used to daze at the doorstep and picture me there. Chances are my Cresleigh Home is my Valentine! https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/

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#CresleighHomes
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Anti-Bacterial, Bottled Water–Does it Really Matter, for Life is a Germ and a Germ is Life?

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Be brave enough to live creatively. Excellence resides in quality, not in quantity. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it. In a curious way, all that we have learned to this point about the structure and properties of the complex molecules of life has not yet invalidated the original vitalistic dogma that organic matter can be created only by living organisms. To be sure, chemists can now manufacture organic material, but are not chemists alive? There is a serious point here: the susceptibility to a purely physical interpretation of structure and properties of an existing complex organic molecule is by no means proof that the many thousands of atoms it contains could ever have been arranged in just that form through the unaided operation of natural law in an inanimate World. If the first American astronauts to set foot on the moon were to find there a message in Russian scratched on its surface, their ability to hypothesize a series of meteoritic impacts capable of producing just the observed configuration of scratched would hardly be likely to convince them that it really happened that way. And in our case, are we really to believe that the blind workings of the ordinary laws of physics, without the intervention of some nonphysical, vitalistic guiding principle, can account for the architecture of the precisely specified, fantastically complicated protein and nucleic acid molecules? What we are about to do is to reopen one of the most impassion controversies in the history of science—the question of spontaneous generation. To be sure, we do not quite stir up this major philosophic issue just by suggesting that natural processes may have been capable of building organic molecules out of inorganic material. For no one contents that a molecule of protein, for example, is of itself alive. However, obviously we are not going to stop there. If we can establish a reasonable and purely physical hypothesis for the origin of the complex molecules of living matter, we are going to try to push our arguments along to account for the ultimate and completely automatic organization of these molecules into living forms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

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At that point, if we reach it, we shall clearly be coming into conflict with the position held by practically all scientists for a hundred years, a position that was eloquently stated by Louis Pasteur during a public-demonstration lecture at the Sorbonne on April 7, 1864: “And, therefore, gentlemen, I could point to that liquid and say to you, I have taken my drop of water from the immensity of creation, and I have taken it full of the elements appropriated to the development of inferior beings. And I wait, I watch, I question it!—begging it to recommence for me the beautiful spectacle of the first creation. However, it is dumb, dumb…for Life is a germ and a germ is Life. Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the moral blow of this simple experiment. We are about to take the first steps along a path of scientific exploration, that after approximately century and sixty years later, is proving Dr. Pasteur to have been wrong. The question we must treat is: “Before life existed on Earth, how could protein molecules have been formed?” Since the rules of the game we are playing require that we have recourse only to the ordinary laws of physical science for our hypotheses, we must obviously start by inquiring into the physical conditions of the primordial Earth at the time of interest. Considerable progress has been made in astrophysics and paleogeology in recent years. Certain speculations are now believed to be pretty safe with respect to the conditions existing on Earth several billion years ago, before the development of plants and animals. For example, we can be sure there was little if any free oxygen in the atmosphere of the preanimate Earth. This is because oxygen reacts so readily with the minerals that compose the major bulk of the Earth, and is so scarce with respect to those minerals, that it would all be taken up by chemical combination in a few thousand years if there were no continuing supply of free oxygen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

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 Today the source of supply is plant life, which releases oxygen into the atmosphere at such a rate as to maintain a 20 percent relative concentration of this element in the air, despite its tendency to combine with materials of the Earth’s crust. Before the existence of vegetation, however, there was no way that free oxygen could be maintained in the Earth’s atmosphere. Hydrogen, on the other hand, must have been relatively abundant in the primordial atmosphere. This element is known to comprise more than 90 percent of the mass of the Universe. To be sure, the light weight of the hydrogen molecule renders this gas unusually susceptible to escape from the Earth’s gravitational field, so it is likely that there was a gradual depletion of this element after the original formation of the Earth some five billion years ago. Nevertheless, calculations suggest that appreciable quantities of hydrogen still remained in the atmosphere, three or four billion years ago, when the events we are about to consider took place. Other important constituents of the primeval atmosphere must have been gaseous compounds of hydrogen and other relatively abundant elements, such as nitrogen and carbon. These gasses would include methane, CH4, and ammonia, NH3. Water vapor must also have been present, the result of evaporation of water from the Earth’s surface. The arguments for this kind of atmospheric composition are not entirely speculative. These gases are known to be prominent in the atmospheres of the other planets of our solar system. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, as well as some of their satellites, contain methane in their atmospheres. Ammonia is present on Jupiter and Saturn. Hydrogen is found on all. In the preanimate era, as now, a major part of the Earth’s surface was covered by oceans. The average temperature was higher than it is now, thereby facilitating chemical reactions, but not high enough in this period of interest to boil and vaporize the ocean waters. (This limitation would still have permitted ocean temperatures much higher than what we now consider to be the boiling point of water if, as seems likely, the atmospheric pressure was many times greater than it is today.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

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There was more volcanic action than we have today, and this produced local hot spots with their attendant enhanced chemical activity. Turbulence in the air produced by the volcanic eruptions resulted in extensive electric discharges that disrupted the atmospheric gases and aided the recombination of the resulting molecular fragments into new and sometimes more complex forms. The radioactivity in the Earth’s crust was also many times greater than it is now. The consequent bombardment of chemical compounds by high-energy nuclear particles resulted in a higher rate of decomposition and recombination of atomic and molecular fragments than we would observe today. Ultraviolet radiation from the sun beat upon the surface of the Earth with an intensity that today would destroy most modern forms of life because of the extensive chemical activity that it was capable of introducing. This was not because the sun emitted more ultraviolet radiation in those days: rather it was because of the absence of the shielding ozone layer, about twenty miles up, that today absorbs the most energetic of the rays before they can produce their lethal effects on the living things that inhabit the surface of the Earth. This shielding layer of ozone—a special molecular form of free oxygen—was absent in primeval times because it, like the more customary form of free oxygen, can be maintained in the atmosphere only by the action of countless billions of living plants. These, then, were the essential conditions: and Earth largely covered by warm water; and atmosphere largely composed of water vapor, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen; and a substantial rate of chemical activity in the Earth’s surface and atmosphere resulting from intensive bombardment by radioactive particles, extensive lightning discharge, brilliant ultraviolet illumination, and local regions of high temperature. Was there anything in this set of conditions that was conducive to the formation or organic molecules? #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

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At first glance, the situation does not look promising. While the conditions were favorable for the breaking dozen of the simple inorganic molecules in the seas and atmosphere into smaller fragments, it is hard to see how this would result in recombination of the fragments into the complex structures of characteristic of the kinds of matter we have called organic. On the other hand, our understanding of the chemical effects of the laws of physics in situations of this nature is not detailed enough to permit us to predict, with confidence, just what would be the results of exposing the specified ingredients to the postulated environment. An experiment might seem indicated. Why not prepare a mixture of the gases believed to have constituted the primeval atmosphere, subject it to one or more of the kinds of energy believed to have been important at the time in question, and see what happens? An obvious experiment? Yes, but if, as seems likely, the result of such an attempt should be negative in the sense of not producing detectable quantities of organiclike molecules, what would it mean? After all, nature had several billion years to perform its experiment; what would be the significance of a failure to obtain positive results in a laboratory experiment lasting only the few weeks or months that would be practicable for this kind of exercise. Discouraging though the prospects appeared, the attempt had to be made. Interestingly enough, it was not made until 1952. In that year S.L. Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, circulated a mixture of water vapor, ammonia, methane, and hydrogen past an electric discharge (to simulate the ultraviolet radiation of the sun). He continued this process for only one week. Nevertheless, when he analyzed his mixture at the end of the experiment, he found unmistakable traced of “organic” compounds, including several of the amino acids! The unexpected success of Miller’s relatively simple experiment naturally inspired others to undertake similar investigations. It was soon learned that Miller’s results could be duplicated and extended. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

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Therefore, teachers are the important link to the future of the World of knowledge and self-esteem for humanity. Let us continue to strengthen the chain that brings us together in a worthwhile and noble cause. Many religious leaders believe in celibacy or abstinence. They want people to remain chaste until they are married to prevent exposing them to dangerous elements, and these Christian leaders urge all men capable of marriage to marry. Therefore, unrestrained licentiousness is not countenanced. God really loves those who turn unto Him and loveth those who have a care for cleanness. Attraction between the genders is seen to some as divinely given and natural, an absolutely universal divine wish, and love is a mimicry of the creative act of God. The Catholic church is very strict and disallows unnatural and “natural” birth control methods other than abstinence because they are unmitigated sins. The Church even refuses the marriage sacrament to men who cannot ejaculate. Included in category are also Eunuchs, they may not marry. For the same reason, nonconsummation because of impotence constitutes grounds to annul a marriage. The nature of semen has long been of obsessive interest to philosophers, medical humans, social reformers, religious thinkers, and athletic trainers throughout the World. It is a key concept in two of the World’s largest religions, Christianity and Hinduism. As we have seen, Hinduism emphasizes the crucial importance of conserving the seed and the mouth also is not a proper receptacle for the seed. It is linked to the spiritual and moral development and with physical health. The properties and essence of semen have also underscored medical thought, from Hippocrates in fourth century B.C. on through William Acton in the nineteenth. For more than two millennia, athletes, too, have fretted as they struggled to honor their coaches’ strictures against preperformance pleasures of the flesh activity, for few able-bodied young men have dared rick defeat by rashly expending their vital energy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

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There is so much importance for men to conserve their vital energy—a uniquely male form of celibacy—for several perspectives: medicine from ancient to recent times; the nineteenth-century Moral Purity movements in the United States of America and Canada; Indian wrestlers caught up in anticolonialist, nationalist fervor; and the famous brahmacharya experiments of the great Mahatma Gandhi, who tested the state of his indifference involving pleasures of the flesh through intimate and intensely emotional relationships with a series of devoted women. Protestant biblicism attempted to derive ethical demands directly from the Christian Bible, Calvinism particularly from the Old Testament. Another cause was the general Protestant distrust of reason, an implication of the doctrine of living souls’ depravity in all parts of one’s nature, in mind as well as in body, in reason as well as in instincts. (The leading term “total depravity” does not mean complete depravity, but estrangement from one’s true being in all parts of one’s actual being.) Finally, the Protestant principle denies that there can be any human institution, including a church with its doctrines and ethical demands, above the dynamics of history. A system of unchangeable laws of concrete morality contradicts the creative powers in life and spirit, and it contradicts the transforming work of the divine Spirit within and outside the church. Protestantism can accept the element of relativity in ethics and can develop with its help a dynamic doctrine of the natural moral law. This, however, cannot be done without an answer to the question: is there a religious source of the moral demands? If so, how is it related to the formal answer given before, that the moral imperative demands that mortals become actually what one is essentially, a person within a community of persons? What does this mean concretely? What norms of moral action are implied in this demand? It will be necessary to answer these questions in sequence, and to build, step by step, a structure of moral action that embodies both the absolute and the relative, the static and the dynamic, the religious and the secular elements of ethical thought and more experience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

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First, let us examine the phrase “within a community of persons.” Contemporary ethical theory has strongly emphasized the person-to-person encounter as the experiential root of morality. The decisive reason for this is the basic difference between the encounter of a person with another person and one’s encounter with nonpersonal realities. In the second case, human’s encounter with nature outside of one, for example, there is no limit in dealing with it. Humans can make it into an object, dissect it, analyze it, or construct something new, a technical product, out of its parts or elements. Humans can subject nature, progressively and almost limitlessly in all directions, to one’s knowledge and one’s action. The only limit is the individual’s own finitude. However, no one can actually establish this limit. Before it is reached nothing can resist the living soul’s cognitive and technical attack on nonpersonal reality. Nothing can resist mortal’s will to transform it into an object and to use it for one’s purpose. There is, however, a limit here and now in the ego-thou encounter. The limit is the other person. This seems a simple and obvious statement. However, when we ask: where do we encounter a person? It is not so simple. In every living soul we encounter a person. If we define living beings as human, if they are, according to their psychophysical structure, potential persons, then the answer is helpful. This definition would include all degrees of the actualization of human potentiality, from the newborn child to the mature, wise individual. However, it does not determine which groups withing the psychophysical species, human race, have the personal potential. Throughout human history this has been (and still is in some respects) undecided. Slaves, women, enemies, and special races were considered as objects with limited or unacknowledged humanity. And often children, the sick, and the seniors, the mentally abnormal and criminals were treated as mere objects, even thought they belong to a group whose personal potential was acknowledged, because they had not yet actualized or no longer were able to actualize their personal potential. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

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This uncertainty with respect to beings who can be encountered as persons show that the attempted to escape the relativities of history in the moral realm by formalizing the first principle cannot be successful. In the very moment the principle must be applied, traditions, conventions, and authorities, on the one hand, and criticism, decisions, and personal risk, on the other, determined the ethical demands. Nevertheless, there are indications that living beings’ essential nature makes itself heard in the midst of these uncertainties. Christianity, although it did not liberate slaves, gave them the status of potential persons by conceiving them as equal in their relation to God. And the Stoics, who achieved more than Christianity for political emancipation, did so in the name of the universal logos in which every human being participates. Both movements, and even earlier legislators who limited the arbitrary mistreatment of slaves, must have been aware of the fact that one who turns a human being (in the psychophysical sense) into a mere object suffers distortion of one’s own personal center. The same, of course, is true of the human who treats a woman as a mere object, or of a parent who deals with one’s child as though it were a thing, or of a tyrant who attempts to transform one’s subjects into tools for one’s purposes. They all become depersonalized themselves. Popular enlightenment in regard to these relationships had enlarged the circle of those considered potential persons. The circle in principle includes all human beings, although in reality it never does, even where the all-inclusive principle has been accepted, as, for example, in the racial conflict. This discussion has led us to the deepest roots of what is usually called justice. All the implications of the idea of justice, especially the various forms of equality and liberty, are applications of the imperative to acknowledge every potential person as a person. Here, too, is the point at which every legal system of justice depends on some interpretation, consciously or unconsciously, of the moral idea of justice. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

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The art of being wise is to know what to overlook. I am full of desire. Never straight up balanced, but always learning, I fall in love easily, a small push will do it. And when it happens I always feel I am possess by—am in possession of—something unique and precious, something tht alone can lift me up our of the flat World of dailiness into the higher realm for which life must be destined. Then I want desperately for it to last forever. And when it crumbles, as always it does, I find tht I had been in possession only of something ordinary. And I never learn. I am, I think, unwilling to learn—because I cannot help but believe that what leads me on, however disastrously, is nevertheless what is best in me, most worth hanging on to. The alternative, it seems, is a cynicism so trenchant and bitter as to make life impossible. I understand my ailment but cannot seem to change it. Maybe I do not really want to recover. Maybe that is the secret and sinister nature of this disease, that one does not want to get well. Many people seem to believe that participating in pleasures of the flesh is their primary experience. Everything else give way. It is primary because only thereby can the species extend itself in time. Not that the species, qua species, wants to live forever. The species does not want anything. Other people, with the planet becoming overpopulated, with resources growing scarce, and the culture in American changes so much that abstinence and celibacy are way to extend their life into the future. They have a more capitalistic view, instead of the more tribal mentality. They want to work, stay single, gain wealth, and honor their family name, or build a castle, design a cool car or computer, as a way to stay relevant. Chris Bangle has gone down in history for his changes he made to the 7 Series BMW. They were so futuristic that this body is still being used 20 years later, with a few changes about every 7 years. Doing great things with products and machines or with words is another way to make sure your genetic line is never forgotten. It is like the CEO who retires at the right time, before the ship sinks. This also allows others to reproduce without their heirs being pushed off of the face of the planet. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

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Thus a winnowing of genes over vast reaches of time has sculptured us, like wind shaping sandstone, into creatures of machines of desire. We desire intensely. In a crunch, family, friends, career, honour, even life itself may be swept away. My plight, my curse, my demon, a savage yearning for something I am never going to get. Something to redeem me. From what? From vanity, insignificance, transience. From dung and death. And establishing a family and having children does that for many people. Most of the time I can arrange not to know, but it is always there, lurking, my own beast in the jungle; and sometimes it springs, lays waste my spirit, leaving only shards and rubble of meaning. When life has meaning, desire is held to its proper place—“proper” being the shape and scope and authority allowed to it by the interlocking structure of values that constitutes the meaning of life. When life is without meaning, desire is a supernova out of control. To express desire is to empower the other and disadvantaged one’s self. Catastrophic if unilateral, exalting when married people do it together. However, why would they, even together, choose surrender? Choose weakness over strength? They seem to want to get weaker and weaker, want their legs to give way with love, want to swoon together, fall into each other, totally disappear in each other. They want to die as individuals in the fusion, to be reborn on the other side, a love death followed by magical rebirth. Over and over. And if it is never actually achieved, desire ensures that we keep on trying. However, no matter the pain, one must never seek to be without desire. To desire nothing is to be dead. The glory of life—and there is no other—lies in the desiring of something so much that one will do one’s utmost to achieve it, spending the self, going all the way, holding nothing back. Our society has evolved a social plan, a city plan, an economy and a physical plant, of which this delinquent youth is an organic part. The problem is not to get them to belong to society, for they belong a priori by being the next generation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

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The burden of proof and performance is quite the other way: for the system of society to accommodate itself to all its constituent members. However, can it be denied that by and large the official practice is to write these boys off as useless and unwanted and to try to cajole or baffle them into harmlessness? Suppose we look at it the other way. Like any other constitutional group, they exert an annoying pressure, but they are inarticulate. In some dumb way they are surely right, but what the devil do they want? Has much effort been made to ask them and help them find words? We can guess that they want two broad classes of things: changes in the insulting and depriving circumstances that have made them ornery, spiteful, vengeful, conceited, ignorant, and callous—unable to grow; and objective opportunities in which to grow. Let us go back to President Trump. On the same occasion mentioned above, he issued to the press the following formal statement: “The problem of juvenile delinquency has no easy remedy. There is no quick or overnight solution. It is compounded of neglect by parents, broken homes, poor living condition, unhealthy background, lack of medical care, no role models, economic deprivation, mental disturbance, and lack of religious training. It is imperative that we care for these beautiful, beautiful people. We have to get them off the streets and into safe, secure, cleaning housing. Make sure they have food to eat, clothes to wear, and adequate educational opportunities so they become God loving, gainfully employed, tax paying, patriotic Americans. We want them to proud of this beautiful country.” This is not a bad list of background conditions; it satisfied every popular and scientific theory of etiology. It seems President Trump has some plan to improve the institution of modern marriage, especially among folk for whom it is hardly an institution. The less affluent are excluded from many organizations, communities and unions. They often earn less than the minimum wage, they are unschooled; naturally there is economical deprivation, inhumane living conditions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

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If it is irrelevant to the basic community functions of vocation and war, and wrong on gender, how is their religion relevant? There is no community and not even a community plane; naturally there is unhealthy background. What great concerted effort was being led by former President Trump to remedy these conditions, not overnight, but in the next five, ten, or twenty years? Indeed, his official policy started with tax cuts to stimulate development and increase spending. For instance, when corporations get tax cuts, and tax incentives, they build nice apartments in upscale community with 20 percent of the units designated for those with low-income. This prevent an area from being segregated and down trodden. It also exposes the affluent to people they may want to help obtain education and higher paying jobs, so they can escape the blackhole of poverty. If everyone in the community is disenfranchised, it does no one any good. President Trump also worked to decrease delinquency. Under his leadership, 90 percent of students graduated from high school, and there was an increase and African American and Latino graduated rate, they were staring to become parallel to European American students. He planned to tear down the slums, defund public housing because they disrupted community life. Instead, people would receive a credit card type payment that could only be used to subsidize their rent or mortgage, and all homeowners and property owners would receive government assistance that allowed them to accept federal housing voucher credit cards. President Trump, so heartbroken about the letter he received from residents in Malibu, California about development devastating the community and wildlife life and pushing millionaires out of their homes, which now only billionaires could afford, he planned to disallow building on certain vacant land to protect wildlife, reduce the number of multi-housing units, making decent family life possible. (Suppose you were fifteen years old and returned home at 11 P.M., to a room with Mom and Pop in one bed and two little brothers in your bed and a baby yowling, and people outside loitering and threatening you; you might well stay out till four in the morning.) #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

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Also, when their incomes increase, families are ousted from public housing, thus eliminating and penalizing the better models; and on the other hand, other families are not expelled for gang activity, threats, drinking in public areas, noise, harassing other tenants, vandalism, and pungent foul odors as well as fecal matter in front of their units. And the original income and racially segregation cell blocks are themselves bound to increase tension, like any segregation. The Federal Housing Credit Card Voucher system, would allow for the projects to be torn down, and the less affluent to be dispersed throughout the city and country, would gentrify High Risk Neighbourhoods (HRN), and reduce crime, noise, pollution, while decreasing traffic accidents. All of this would have been official policy, but it takes more than four years to Make American Great Again! His plan would also, temporary stabilize families in federally owned buildings either undergoing demolition or construction, by not making families have to pay rent in limbo. They would be treated like human beings in the private sector, not like patients in a mental institution. President Trump toured one of the governments project-based housing cell blocks, and said “It is worst than a prison. Only the cells are larger, and they are chaotic. No law, no order. Just a concrete jungle.” For years biological researchers relied largely on family pedigree studies to support their position that biological researchers relied largely on family pedigree studies to support their position that biological factors contribute to suicidal behaviour. They have repeatedly found higher rates of suicide among the parents and close relatives of suicidal people than among those of nonsuicidal people. Indeed, one study found that over 33 percent of teenage subjects who committed suicide had a relative who attempted suicide. Such findings may suggest that genetic, and so biological factors are at work. Studies of twins also have supported this view of suicide. Researchers who studied twins born in Denmark between 1870 and 1920, for example, located 19 identical pairs and 58 fraternal pairs in which at least one twin had committed suicide. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

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In four of the identical pairs the other twin also committed suicide (21 percent), while none of the other twins among the fraternal pairs had done so. As with all family pedigree and twin research, there are non-biological interpretations for these findings as well. Psychodynamic clinicians might argue that children whose close relatives commit suicide are prone to depression and suicide because they have lost a loved one at a critical stage of development. Behavioural theorists might emphasize the modeling role played by parents or close relatives who attempt suicide. In the past two decades, laboratory research has offered more direct support for a biological view of suicide. The activity level of the neurotransmitter serotonin has often been found to be low in people who commit suicide. An early hint of this relationship came from a study by the psychiatric researcher Marie Asberg and her colleagues. They studied 68 depressed patients and found that 20 of the patients had particularly low levels of serotonin activity. It turned out that 40 percent of the low-serotonin people attempted suicide, compared with 15 percent of the higher-serotonin subjects. The researchers interpreted this to mean that low serotonin activity may be “a predictor of suicidal acts.” Therefore, at annual medical examines, it may also be good for health care providers to use a blood test to measure the level of serotonin in the blood. Because later studies found that suicide attempters with low serotonin activity are 10 times more likely to make a repeat attempt and succeed than are suicide attempters with higher serotonin activity. Studies that examine the autopsied brains of suicide victims point in the same direction. Some of these studies measure serotonin activity by determining the number of imipramine receptor sites in the brain. Recall that imipramine is an antidepressant drug that binds to certain neuron receptors throughout the brain. It is believed the degree of imipramine binding reflects the usual activity level of serotonin; the less imipramine binding, the less serotonin activity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

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Fewer imipramine binding sites have been found in the brains of persons who died by suicide than in the autopsied brains of nonsuicides—in fact, approximately half as many binding sites has been the usual finding. At first glance, these and related studies may appear to tell us only that depressed people often attempt suicide. After all, depression is itself related to low serotonin activity. On the other hand, there is evidence of low serotonin activity even among suicidal subjects who have no history of depression. That is, low serotonin activity seems also to have a role in suicide separate from depression. How, then, might low serotonin activity increase the likelihood of suicidal behaviour? One possibility is that it contributes to aggressive behaviour. It has been found, for example, that serotonin activity is lower in aggressive men than in nonaggressive men and that serotonin activity is often low in those who commit such aggressive acts s arson and murder. Moreover, other studies have found that depressed patients with lower serotonin activity try to commit suicide more often, use more lethal methos, and score high in hostility on various personality inventories than do depressed patients with relatively higher serotonin activity. Such findings suggest that low serotonin activity helps produce aggressive feelings and perhaps impulsive behaviour. In people who are clinically depressed, low serotonin activity may produce aggressive tendencies that cause them to be particularly vulnerable to suicidal thinking and action. Even in the absence of a depressive disorder, however, people with low serotonin activity may develop such aggressive feelings that they, too, are dangerous to themselves or to others. Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. The real art of communication is not only to say the right thing in the right place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting movement. The dangers implicit in this power vacuum can be gauged by glancing briefly backward at the mid-1970’s. Then, as energy and raw material flows faltered in the wake of the OPEC embargo, as inflation and unemployment spurted, as the dollar plunged and Africa, Asia, and South America began to demand a new economic deal, signs of political pathology flared in one after another of the Second Wave nations. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

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In Britain, celebrated as the home of tolerance and civility, retired generals began to recruit private armies to impose order, and a resurgent fascist movement, the National Front, fielded candidates in some 90 parliamentary constituencies. Fascists and left-winger came close to fighting a mased battle in the London streets. In Italy the fascists of the left, the Red Brigades, escalated their reign of kneecapping, kidnapping, and assassination. In Poland, the government’s attempt to hike food prices to keep up with inflation brought the country to the edge of revolt. In West Germany, wracked by terrorist murders, a jittery establishment rushed through a series of McCarthyite laws to suppress dissent. It is true that these signs of political instability receded as the industrial economies partially (and temporarily) recovered in the late 1970’s. Britain’s private armies never came into play. The Red Brigades, after killing Also Moro, appeared for a time to pull back for regrouping. A new regime took over smoothly in Japan. The Polish government made an uneasy peace with its rebels. In the United States of America, Jimmy Carter, who won office by running against “the system” (and then embraced it), managed to hang on by his fingernails despite a disastrous decline in popularity. Nevertheless, these evidences of instability must make us wonder whether existing Second Wave political systems in each of the industrial nations can survive the next round of crises. For the crises on the 1980’s and 1990’s are likely to be even more severe, disruptive, and dangerous than those just past. Few informed observers believe the worst is over, and ominous scenarios abound. If turning off the oil spigots for a few weeks in Iran could cause violence and chaos on gas lines in the United States of America, what is likely to happen, not only in the U.S.A., when the present rulers of Saudi Arabia are kicked off the throne? It is likely that this tiny clique of ruling families, who control 25 percent of the World’s oil reserves, can cling to power indefinitely, while intermittent warfare rages between North and South Yemen nearby, and their own country is destabilized by floods of petrodollars, immigrant workers, and radical Palestinians? #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

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Just how wisely will the shell-shocked (and future-shocked) politicians in Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, or Tel Aviv respond to a coup d’état, a religious upheaval, or a revolutionary uprising in America—let alone to the sabotage of the oil pipelines, poisoned water, and voter fraud? Apparently, they do not care. Only Tomi Lahren and FOX News are talking about the tyranny. If, a former Governor of California, Jerry Brown, predicted when leave office that “the future is fully of darkness, massive debt, and crisis,” after he had just let an entire town burn down, mismanaged the forest, allowed a homless crisis to happen in the “World’s 5th largest economy,” and let a dam break, thereby killing a lot of people, wild life, and causing devastating property damage, how would these same overworked, nervously twitching Fourth Wave political leaders, East and West respond? Again, they did not seem to care. They elected his protégé Gavin Newsom. It is scarcely reassuring to look at a map and note that California, barely able to maintain domestic law and order, pontificates about setting trends for the rest of the World and being richer than a lot of other states and even countries. What happens, asks another chilling scenario, when Mexico begins in earnest to exploit its oil—and faces a sudden, overpowering influx of petro-pesos? Will its ruling oligarchy have the desire, much less the technical skills to use the bulk of that new wealth to “take back California,” and use the combined resources to feed its long neglected, malnourished, and long-suffering peasantry? Perhaps Gavin Newsom should spend less time putting all that grease and his hair, and Joe Biden should step down, or stop acting like he is deranged and lost his mind? My friend’s father who actually has Alzheimer’s seems much more coherent and aware than Joe Biden does. If a war were to break out, how would Washington respond? And how would the huge populations of Chicanos in the highly coveted suburbs and less affluent areas of America react? Can we expect even semi-intelligent decisions about crises of such magnitude, given today’s disarray in California’s leadership, Congress and the White House? #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

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Economically, will governments already incapable of managing marco-economic forced be able to cope with even wilder swings in the international money system, or with its complete breakdown? With currencies hardly under control, the Voodoo economics still unexorcised, the Eurocurrency bubble still expanding unchecked, and consumer, corporate, and government credit ballooning, without help to get through this pandemic, can anyone look forward to economic stability in the years ahead? Will Americans be priced out of America and have to start moving to developing countries? Given skyrocketing inflation, full employment, a credit crash, or some other economic and natural catastrophe looming, we may yet see private police and armies in action. As we seem to be advancing, we also seem to be reverting to the Wild, Wild, West. There will be militias patrolling our streets, and a high demand for individuals who know how to build houses and are willing to bargain, an increased demand for auto science engineers, and also cars without the big engines, all the computers, and power windows. Some consumers will want to have new cars, but ones that are simply so the less affluent can afford them. Many people want to move away from buying used cars because they hear about how expensive they are to maintain and how frequently they have to go in the shop. With everything being so expensive these days, a used car could cause some to lose their homes or rental units. Not everyone is rich, but that is the way California is ran, but when you look at the streets, there are homeless tent cities popping up in community that never had a homeless crisis. Finally, what happens when, among the myriad religious cults now flowering, some spring up to organize for political purpose? As the major organized religions splinter under the de-massifying impact of the Fourth Wave, armies of self-ordained priests, ministers, preachers, nuns, and teacher are likely to appear—some with disciplined, perhaps even paramilitary, political followings. With the President and Governors and Mayors lose their status, control and power the way award’s shows have? #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

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In the United States of America, it is not hard to imagine some new political party running Father Jimmy Swagger or Joel Osteen or Joseph Smith or Russell M. Nelson on crude “law-and-order,” “anti-porn,” “abstinence,” “celibacy,” “liquor and drug prohibition,” program with a strong authoritarian streak. Or some as yet unknown Anti Jane Byrant or Milton Allimadi or Jozsef Szajer demanding imprisonment for gays or “gay-symps.” Such examples provide only a faint, glimmering intimation of the religio-politics that may well lie ahead, even in the most secular of societies. One can imagine all sorts of cult-based political movements headed Lucien Greaves, Alex Jones, David Duke, Creflo Dollar, Gregory Dollar or Jesse Duplantis. I am not saying these scenarios will necessarily materialize. They could all turn out to be farfetched. However, if these do not, we must assume that other dramatic crises will erupt, even more dangerous than the riots of the 2020s. And we must face that our present crop of Fourth Waver leaders is grotesquely unprepared to cope with them. In fact, because our Fourth Wave political structures are even more deteriorated today than they were in the 1990’s, we must assume that governments may be less competent, less imaginative, and less farsighted in dealing with the crises of the 2000’s and 2020’s than they were in the decade just past. And this tells us that we must re-examine, from the roots up, one of our most deeply held and dangerous political illusions. Stop ignoring politics and religion. If you must, find groups on social media to communicate with, even under an unofficial name to keep your privacy. Stay aware. Organize. The human situation which has emerged from the cataclysm and anguish of war and crisis, still shows insufficient spiritual awakening. And yet this awakening—and this alone—is the only instrument of our salvation that is worth looking for because it is the only one which is not doomed to be destroyed. All other instruments may be effective in ordinary times, but we are living in exceptional times. Today they can offer only the illusion of success or happiness with the actuality of failure of misery. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

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However, so few people are fortunate enough to have the time, leisure, energy, and opportunity for spiritual culture, that the awakening from social lethargy is often the first sign of any awakening at all. The social awakening may nowadays be a troubled upheaval rather than a smooth progress. However, human egoism and passion being what they are at the present evolutionary stage, this is inevitable. However, the awakening must be understood as the first part of a deeper awakening from spiritual slumber which is yet to come. We must see in all this social renovation a necessary preliminary and unavoidable preparation for the subsequent spiritual one. When the political, scientific, and economic reorganization of the World which is going on before our eyes culminates, when more settled conditions begin to prevail again, humans will realize that materialism has brought them its best and worst. And realizing, they will tun to discovery of their inner needs. Therefore we may expect no general spiritual awakening in our own lifetime whilist this external new era is being established, but after that such awakening will surely come because it is evolutionarily due. Thus there is room for both an optimistic and a pessimistic outlook; neither along is quite true. If we look only at the next few years, there is gloom all around; but if we look through them to some decades father ahead, there is light. Those who believe in a sudden religo-mystical revival to change humankind almost overnight, are far from philosophy. However, still they are only being foolish. Those however who not only believe this, but also believe that it is they or their particular religious organization that will help to bring bout the revival, are also being self-conceited. Just as the Germans were presented with the choice between revolution and democratic evolution as well as the chance of escaping a misery so much worse than anyone can imagine, so humanity today has both choice and chance. The real decision is between obedience to a spiritual leading or denial of it. With all too many people, both among the vanquished and the victors everything within themselves remains as before the war. If anything, they are even spiritually emptier than before, because the negative feelings of bitterness, resentment, selfishness, suspicion, or violence have now taken hold of their hearts. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

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If we look the situation of contemporary humanity fully in the face, putting aside suggestion and propaganda, we shall have to confess that its salvation will never be brought about by the little mystical groups and large religious sects. The “Kingdom of God on Earth, is not a political concept but a personal one. Its realization will never be found outside but only inside the individual mind and heart. It is neither spring nor summer: it is Always with towhees, finches, chickadees, California quail, wood doves, with wrens, sparrows, cockatiels, juncos, cedar waxing, flickers, with Oakland A’s, San Francisco Giants, Dallas Cowboys, all in my yard, of a perpetual Sunday, all morning! All morning. Happy is every one that reveres the Lord, that walks in His ways. When you eat of the labour of your hands, you shall be happy, and it shall be well with you. Your wife within your house shall be as a faithful vine, your children like olive plants, around your table. Behold, surely thus shall the human be blessed that revers the Lord. The Lord bless you out of America: and may you see the good of America all the days of your life; and see your children’s children. People upon America. The Sabbath is welcomed with light and departs with the glowing light of the Havdalah candle. When the shadows deepen and the stars appear in the Heavens, we take reluctant leave of our cherished guest. We kindle the Havdalah candle, chant the Hamavdil prayer, and inhale fragrant species, thus sending the Sabbath forth with a burst of light on wings of song, praying that her blessed influence linger on until we greet her again on the next Sabbath eve. Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for God, the Lord, is my strength and song, and He is become my salvation. Therefore with joy shall you draw water out of the wells of salvation. Salvation belongeth unto the Lord; Thy blessing be upon Thy people. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. The Lord’s people had light and joy, gladness and honor. So be it with us. I will lift the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the vine. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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Cresleigh Homes

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Cooking is more fun with a gourmet kitchen! Residents of  Cresleigh Homes get to feel like contestants of Top Chef with a spacious state-of-the-art kitchen like this one.

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When you just give love, and never get love, you’d better let love depart. I know it’s so, and yet I know I can’t get you out of my heart.

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You made me leave my happy home. You took my love, and I am glad you have not gone, since I fell for you.

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As far as I can see, My Cresleigh Home is Heaven. And speaking just for me, it is ours to share. The glow of love has grown.

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Now I see the light, and I never get the blues since I fell for my Cresleigh Home. I fell the glow of your unspoken love, I’m aware of the treasure that I own, and I say to myself it’s wonderful, wonderful, oh, so wonderful, my love.

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That’s the dream, right?! Come join us.

#CresleighHomes

These Jolly Devices Put Money Back to Work!

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We live in constant tension between the urgent and the important. One of the characteristics of effective leaders is that they continually find joy in their jobs. One must understand that and strive for balance in one’s life. Th long string of amino acids of which each molecule is composed twists and turns upon itself so as to produce a three-dimensional tangle. The tangle is not random of accidental, however. The specific twists and convolutions of the backbone (the backbone of the protein molecule consist, of course, of the sequence of segments composed of the backbones of the linked amino acid molecules) of one molecule are just like those of the same protein. The electric forces produced by the side chains that protrude from the main backbone result in detailed attractions and repulsions that cause the array to fold and twist upon itself in a definite, characteristic way. Thus, while the protein molecule is a tangled ball of string, the tangle is designed, not haphazard. The chemical properties of the resulting molecule upon which vital processes of living organisms depend are largely determined by the detailed three-dimensional configuration of electric fields produced by the specific pattern of twisting and folding of the linear array. (Two structural principles go a long way toward accounting for the specific conformations assumed by protein molecules. To begin with, the long-chain molecule has a strong tendency to form a helix—always of the same diameter and pitch—which permits the electric charges on the amino acid segments on adjacent turns of the helix to fit together. However, the side-chain construction of two of the twenty kinds of amino acid—proline and hydroxyproline—is not conductive to such bonding. Therefore, at point where these amino acid components occur in the protein molecule, the helix must make a sharp bend. The resulting succession of straight helical segments separated by sharp bends leads to the kind of tangle envisioned in the preceding discussion.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

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Many wonder whether protein materials, like simpler organic substances, could be accommodated in a nonvitalistic philosophy based on an assumption of continuity and essential similarity between inorganic and organic matter. The most convincing answer to the question would be a demonstration that the proteins, like urea, can be fabricated in the laboratory out of in organic materials. We now how have the background needed for intelligent consideration of this important question: Can proteins by synthesized? Because the answer to the question is to be something less than a categorical yes, we should start by paying a bit of attention to the difficulties that confront the chemist in working with these giant molecules. Although we have written glibly about the composition and molecular structure of the various amino acids, the number and arrangements of amino acids in a given protein molecule, the patters of twists and folds of the linear array, and the like, each of our assertions could be made only because of literally hundreds of human-years of laboratory effort by brilliant and dedicated chemist. And it has been easier for them to arrive at general properties of proteins than to determine the detailed structure of specific protein molecules. Many of you, like myself, may be wondering what protein synthesis is so important? Well, DNA’s main purpose is to make proteins within the cell. These proteins, which include enzymes that do specific jobs, control the activities of the cell. Different cells have different activities. By controlling protein synthesis within each cell, the genes that make up DNA control the life of the entire organism. Although the outcome of protein synthesis can be involved and quite complex, its purpose is rather straightforward. The purpose of protein synthesis is simply to create a polypeptide—a protein made out of a chain of amino acids. In a hair follicle cell, a protein called keratin is made. Lot of it. Many ribosomes can be working on a single strand of mRNA at once. Protein synthesis is not a slow process, either. A protein chain 400 amino acids long can be assembled in 20 seconds! #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

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The keratin made by the hair follicle cells makes long fibers. The cells, growing just under the scalp, eventually die, leaving the keratin behind. This keratin, combined with the keratin left by many other cells, emerge from your scalp as hair. Despite ultracentrifuges, electron microscopes, X-ray spectrometers, artificially radioactive tracer material, paper chromatography, and all the other modern devices and techniques that assist the chemist today, the sheer complexity of the giant molecules of living organisms renders almost impossible the task of analysis, let alone synthesis, it was only in 1958 that F. Sanger, of England, was awarded a Nobel Prize for working out the first complete sequence of amino acids in a protein. It is significant that the protein he chose to work on was insulin, whose molecule contains only 51 amino acid components. By companions, the hemoglobin molecule, which is of average size for proteins, contains more than 600 amino acids! In the mid-1960s, therefore, when we are just becoming able to analyze the detail composition of some of the simpler proteins, it is too early to report great success in their synthesis. However, important progress has been made. Amino acids have been synthesized from inorganic ingredients. And amino acid molecules have been hooked together to form chains or arrays. This, by the way, is not quite as easy to accomplish as might be suggested by the earlier reference to the strong tendency of the backbones of these molecules to hook together. Perhaps an analogy can be drawn with a zipper. The opposing section of the zipper are designed to fit together tightly, but energy has to be supplied by the slide to fit together tightly, but energy has to be supplied by the slide fastener to bend the two sections a bit and force them into the correct spatial relationship before the closed, stable configuration can be achieved. So it is with amino acids. The energy whereby the front end of one backbone is forced into the proper relationship with the back end of the next is usually supplied chemically by temporarily hooking on to one end of each amino acid an energy-rich molecule. This molecule (or the pieces into which it may have been broken during the reaction) drops away from the structure after it has provided the motive power for linking the two amino acids together. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

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Early techniques where by the chemist laboriously linked one new amino acid at a time to a slowly growing chain have been supplemented by more recent methods where by chains of hundreds of or even a thousand amino acids can be formed rapidly in the test tube. These synthetic chains are comparable in size with moderate-sized natural protein molecules, and they prove, under test, to have many proteinlike properties. Nevertheless, it cannot quite be claimed they are the same as naturally formed protein. For, owning to limitations of the techniques of synthesis, they are usually made up of only one or two of the 20 different kinds of amino acids. Apart from a few simple proteins, such as fibroin in silk, nature appears not to employ such a monotonous architectural design for its giant molecules. Thus, the protein synthesis machinery uses 22 natural amino acids as building blocks that faithfully decode the genetic information. Such fidelity is controlled at multiple steps ad can be compromised in the nature and in the laboratory to rewrite protein synthesis with natural and synthetic amino acids. Expanding the genetic code with synthetic amino acids through rewiring protein synthesis has broad applications in synthetic biology and chemical biology. Biochemical, structural, and genetic studies of the translational quality control mechanisms are not only crucial to understand the physiological role of translational fidelity and evolution of the genetic code, but also enable us to better design biological parts to expand the proteomes of synthetic organisms. An atom of an element is composed of nothing more than the fundamental particles of the nuclear physicist, held together by the nuclear and electric forces described by laws of physics. A small molecule consists of nothing more than a few such atoms, held together by the forces arising from the sharing of their extranuclear electric charge. The physical and chemical properties of a small molecule are also completely determined by the specific distribution of electric charge in and around the molecule. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

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A large molecule consists of nothing more than an aggregation of smaller molecules, which fit together the way they do only because of the mutual forces of attraction and repulsion deriving from their arrangements of electric charge. When a large molecule twists, turns, and tangles the liner array of which it is basically composed into a complex three-dimensional form, it does so under the precise control of the same forces of attraction and repulsion that arise out of the detailed distribution of electric charge along the backbone and side chains of its array. The resulting chemical and physical properties of the large molecule, be it protein or nucleic acid, are also no more and no less than the resultant of the effects of the detailed three-dimensional distribution of electric charge trapped and held within its tangled web. Fantastically complicated through a large protein or nucleic acid molecule may be, the problem its structure and properties pose to human understanding is one of degree, not of quality. A simple molecule of water, with its 1 oxygen and 2 hydrogen atoms, brings into play exactly the same and as many basic natural laws as a molecule of the protein excelsin, which contains approximately 40,000 atoms! Thus, more than a century after the synthesis of urea by Dr. Wohler, the demonstration that he commenced has finally been completed: there is no need for invoking any special vital principle to account for the structure and properties of any of the chemical compound for living organisms, or it can influence the mechanisms whereby in nature, as distinct from in the laboratory, the complicated molecules essential to life are in fact produced. We shall defer consideration of the evidence for or against the operation of vitalistic principles at higher levels of organization of matter. Considering them human genome contains approximately 30,000 genes, scientists from a broad range of disciplines are working to reveal the structure and function of the proteins encoded by these genes. Their findings could lead to the solution of a multitude of problems in biology and medicine. In addition to structure-function analyses of extant proteins, protein chemists are working to create new proteins with desirable properties, either by de novo design or by altering natural frameworks. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

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To be a leader means willingness to risk—and a willingness to love. Has the leader given you something from the heart? It is never too late to be what you might have been. You can build your reputation on what you are going to do. There are countless ways of attaining greatness, but any road to reaching one’s maximum potential must be build on a bedrock of respect for the individual, a commitment to excellence, and a rejection of mediocrity. More aware of what challenge means, the New York Youth Board has had a policy more calculated to succeed. Its principle is provisionally to accept as given the code of than gang and the kids’ potency-proving values and prejudices; and then, as an immediate aim, to try to distract their overt behaviour into less annoying and dangerous channels. This immediate aim is already valuable, for it diminishes suffering. For instance, if a youth’s addiction is changed from heroin to alcohol, so long as heroin is illegal and alcohol is legal; the youth is less in danger and the store that he would rob to pay for the criminally overpriced narcotic is out of danger, so there is less suffering. Then there is the further hope that, accepted by the wise and permissive adult, the adolescents will gradually come to accept themselves and the spiral of proving will be arrested. Further, that the friendship of the trusted adult will evoke a love (transference) that can then be turned elsewhere. I take it that this is the Youth Worker philosophy. In many cases it should succeed. I am skeptical that it can widely succeed. For here again the young people are not taken seriously as existing, as having real aims in the same World as oneself. To the Youth Board, in their own real World (such as it is), the code is not acceptable, and then teenage vaunts and prejudices cannot lead to growth in any World. To pretend otherwise is playing games and continuing to exclude them from one’s own meant World. How then can the boys be trusting and feel they are understood? Not being morons, they know they cannot be understood in their own terms, which are empty to themselves. They know there is another World beyond, as square and sheepish as they might please to rationalize it, but which is formidable and enviable. (Actually, apart from the code itself and the sphere of their delinquencies, the kids are model of conventionality in their tastes, opinion, and ignorance.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

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And though they have a childish need for sympathic attention and are proud of having compelled it—“We are so bad, they give us a youth worker”—they are too old not to demand being taken seriously. There is a valuable nondirective approach which makes no judgments or interpretations and gives no advice, but which simply draws the patient out and hold up a mirror; and this is no doubt also part of the philosophy of the Youth Board. However, then, it must be therapy, it must hold up the mirror and risk the explosion of shame and grief or the impulsive defenses against them, violent retaliation or flight. In Youth work this is very impractical. It is different thing to go along with the patient, or worse to seem to go along with him, and provide only the reassurance of attention. Only if the worker can hold out some real objective opportunity, something more than “interpersonal relations,” and make the boy finally see it. Then the philosophy of the Youth Board can succeed. (In New York there has been an experiment of simply urging the kids to go to college—a far-off goal—showing that it is economically possible for them, and promising that the school will follow up. This alone had resulted in rapid academic advances, in I.Q., and less truancy.) My hunch is that the occasional spectacular success occurs not because of the “accepting” method, but because the youth worker does not really belong to the World of the Youth Board either, and his acceptance is bona fide. For whatever motive, he confronts the young people as real. He may be a covert accomplice with the same inner dilemma as his gang, and can pass on a more practical Worldly wisdom. He many be emotionally involved with some of them, so they are in fact important. He may be so deeply compassionate or so inspired a teacher that he creates new interests and values altogether, not the meant World of the Youth Board which is, after all, just what has proved unsatisfactory to begin with. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

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According to a comparison of America and Japanese medical students, Americans tend to regard suicide as an expression of anger or aggression, whereas the Japanese view it as a way to escape pain or as a method of leaving the World on your own terms, instead of being known as a failure. This difference reflects the cultures’ religious and philosophical understandings of the life and death. The Shinto and Buddhist traditions stress eternal change and the transience of life. In the Buddhist view, life is sorrowful, and death is a way of freeing oneself from illusion and suffering. Furthermore, the highest aim of many Japanese is complete detachment from Earthly concerns, total self-negation. Within this framework, death can be seen as beneficial, as an expression of sincerity (makoto) or an appropriate reaction to shame. However, in Japan suicide is not welcomed anymore as a means of solving problems, and it has become a national issue as well as a personal problem. In 2020, approximately 21,100 people committed suicide in Japan. However, it became a national issue before that when Matsuri Takahashi, age 24, a promising graduate of Japan’s top University, Dentus, leapt to her death in December 2015; leaving being a trail of grievances over relentless days. She clocked more than 105 hours of overtime in October, before becoming depressed. Her death, deemed by the government to be “karoshi,” which can be translated to death by overwork. Japan has been forced to confront its work culture after labour inspectors ruled that the death of a 31-year-old journalist had been caused by overwork. Miwa Sado, who worked at the broadcaster’s headquarters in Tokyo, logged 159 hours of overtime and only two days off in the month leading up to her death from heart failure in July 2013. More than 2,000 Japanese killed themselves due to work-related stress in the year to March 2016. According to the government, dozens of other victims died from heart attacks, strokes, and other conditions brought on by spending too much time at work. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

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  These deaths have increased pressure on Japanese authorities to address the large number of deaths attributed to the punishingly long hours expected of many employees. The government wants to cap monthly overtime at 100 hours and introduce penalties for companies that allow their employees to exceed the limit—measures that critics say still put workers at risk. While the deaths are a major issue, I am not sure that government regulation is the answer. Some people really need more money than they earn and the overtime may be helping them to pay their mortgage, rent, medical insurance or care for their elderly parents. If they are not allowed to clock this overtime at their job, they may have to take on a new job, or might turn to criminal activity to earn extra money. The Japanese are also very humble and taught that because life is so expensive and they are so smart, their achieve in the career field denotes their value in life. Many people are looking for rich husbands, with a good job, nice apartment, and fancy car, retirement benefits, and investment accounts. So if a man does not have those kind of things, he may never find a wife. Also, a lot of women do not want to marry and do not want to be dependent on a man and want to prove they are equal; therefore, she may work long hours to demonstrate her value. It is impossible to be simultaneously blasted by a revolution in energy, a revolution in technology, a revolution in family life, a revolution role in dealing with pleasures of the flesh, and a Worldwide revolution in communications without also facing—sooner or later—a potentially explosive political revolution. All the political parties of the industrial World, all our congresses, parliaments, and supreme soviets, our presidencies, and prime ministerships, our courts and our regulatory agencies, and our layer upon geological layer of government bureaucracy—in short, all the tools we use to make and enforce collective decisions—are obsolete and about to be transformed. A Fourth Wave civilization cannot operate with a Second Wave political structure. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

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Just as the revolutionaries who created the industrial age could not govern with the leftover apparatus of feudalism, so today we are faced once more with the need to invent new political tools. This is the political message of the Fourth Wave. Today, although its gravity is not yet recognized, we are witnessing a profound crisis not of this or that government but of representative democracy itself, in all its forms. In one country after another, the political technology of the Third Wave is sputtering, groaning, and malfunctioning dangerously. In the United States of America, we find an almost total paralysis of political decision-making in connection with the life-and-death questions facing society. Fully six years after the OPEC embargo, despite its sledgehammer impact on the economy, despite its threat to independence and even military security, despite interminable congressional study, despite repeated reorganizations of the bureaucracy, despite passionate presidential pleas, the U.S.A. political machinery still spins helplessly on its axis, unable to produce anything remotely resembling a coherent energy policy. This policy vacuum is not unique. The United Starts of America also has no comprehensive (or comprehensible) urban policy, environmental policy, family policy, technology policy. If we listen to critics abroad, it does not even have a discernible foreign policy. Even if they did exist, the American political system would not have the capacity to integrate and prioritize such policies. This vacuum reflects so advanced a breakdown in decision-making that President Carter, in a wholly unprecedented speech, was forced to condemn the “paralysis, stagnation, and drift” of one’s own government. This collapse of decision-making is, however, not the monopoly of one party or one president. It has been deepening since the early 1960’s, and reflects underlying structural problems that no president—Republican or Democrat—can overcome within the framework of the present system. These political problems have destabilizing effects on the other main social institutions such as the family, the school, and the corporation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

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Dozens of laws with immediate impact on family life cancel and contradict one another, worsening the family crisis. The educational system was flooded with construction funds at precisely the moment when school-age population begam to plummet, thus provoking an orgy of useless school building, followed by a cutoff of funds when they are most desperately needed for other purposes. Corporations, meanwhile, are compelled to operate in a political environment so volatile that they literally cannot tell from one day to the next what government expects of them. First, Congress demanded the General Motors and the other auto manufacturers installed catalytic (what some people call Cadillac) converters on all new cars in the interests of a cleaner environment. Then, after GM spent $300 million on converters and signed a $500-million ten-year contract for the precious metals needed for their manufacture, the government announced that cars with catalytic converters emitted 35 times more sulphuric acid than cars without them.  At the time, Chrysler’s vice president, Alan Loofbourrow, said the were “The dumbest thing that ever happened to the automobile.” The controversy was about the catalytic converter, Detroit’s major technological change for it 1975 cares. The converter, in a stainless-steel case hooked up between the engine and the muffler, and was thought would probably never be seen by the car buyer, and if it were to break down, one would never know it. However, if it worked, two major auto emissions—carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons—would be reduced sharply. The converter was designed to cleanse the exhaust after combustion, so the engines, which had been turned in past years to reduce emissions, could be reset to improve gasoline mileage. Yet, if the converters did not work, the clean air drive would be crippled, and new pollutant, sulphuric acid, would slip into the atmosphere. The converter, in effect, was a small chemical processing plant, using platinum and palladium as catalysts to change the hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide fumes into harmless carbon dioxide and water on their way to the tailpipe. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

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When the converters were brought up to speed, they cut fumes by 25 to 33 percent of the standard. It was also required that these systems last 50,000 miles because they do deteriorate. Also, lead in gasoline was found to destroy the effectiveness of the catalysts, so nonleaded fuel was ordered on the market by the Government.  This was all part of the Clean Air Act, which passed in 1963. Because Catalytic Converters are so expensive, for example on a V8 or V10 BMW, which has two catalytic converters, replacement can be in excess of $4,000.00. These parts are often the target of thieves because the part contains valuable precious metals. Catalytic Converters typically happen on cars with more ground clearance, since it is easier to access the part. Regardless of the type of vehicle you have, there are some steps you can take to help prevent theft: If a secure garage is unavailable, park in well-lighted areas close to the building entrances. Weld the catalytic converter to the vehicle frame, which can make it harder to remove. Consider buying an aftermarket part similar to a metal cage that can be installed to over the converter. Install a car alarm with a vibration alter sensor. Engrave your vehicle identification number (VIN) to the converter, which can help make selling the part harder and help alter you if your converter is ever stolen. At the same time, a runaway regulatory machine generates an increasingly impenetrable mesh of roles—45,000 pages of complex new regulations a year. Twenty-seven different government agencies monitor some 5,600 federal regulations that pertain to the manufacture of steel along. (Thousands of additional rules apply to the mining, marketing, and transport operations of the steel industry.) A leading pharmaceutical firm, Eli Lilly, spends more time filling out government forms than doing heart-disease and cancer research. A single report from Exxon, the oil company, to the Federal Energy Agency runs 445,000 pages—the equivalent of a thousand volumes! #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

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This mandarin complexity weighs the economy down, while the jerky, on-again-off-again responses of government decision-makers add to the prevailing sense of anarchy. The political system, erratically zigzagging from day to day, greatly complicates the struggle of our basic social institutions for survival. Now is this decisional breakdown a purely American phenomenon. Government in France, Germany, Japan, and Britain—not to mention Italy—exhibit similar symptoms, as do those in the Communist industrial nations. And in Japan, a prime minister declares: “We increasingly hear about the Worldwide crisis of democracy. Its problem-solving capability, or the so-called governability of democracy, is being challenged. In Japan, too, parliamentary democracy is on trial.” The political decision-making machinery in all those countries is increasingly strained, overworked, overloaded, drowned in irrelevant data, and faced with unfamiliar perils. What we are seeing, therefore, are government policy makers unable to make high priority decisions (or making them very badly) while they chase frenziedly about making thousands of lesser, often trivial, ones. Even when important decisions are extruded they usually come too late, and seldom accomplish what they are designed to do. “We have solved every problem with legislation,” says one hard-pressed British lawmaker. “We have passed seven acts against inflation. We have eliminated injustice numerous times. We have solved the ecology problem. Every problem has been solved countless times by legislation. However, the problems remain. Legislation does not work. An American TV announcer, reaching into the past for an analogy, puts it differently: “Right now I feel the nation is a stagecoach with the horses running headlong, and a guy trying to pull in the reins, and they are not responding.” This is why so many people—including those in high office—feels so powerless. A leading American senator privately tells me of his deep frustration and the feeling that he cannot accomplish anything useful. He questions the ruin of his family life, the frantic pace of his existence, the long hours, hectic travel, endless conferences, and perpetual pressure. He asks, “It is worthy it?” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

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A British M.P. poses the same question, adding that “the House of Commons is a museum piece—a relic!” A top White House official complains to me that even the President, supposedly the most powerful man in the World, feels impotent. “The President feels as though he is shouting into the telephone—with nobody at the other end.” This deepening breakdown of the ability to make timely and competent decisions changes the deepest power relationships in society. Under normal, nonrevolutionary circumstances, the elites in any society use the political system to reinforce their rule and further their ends. Their power is defined by the ability to make certain things happen, or to present certain things from happening. This presupposes, however, their ability to predict and control events—it assumes that when they yank on their reins, the horses will stop. Today the elites can no longer predict the outcomes of their own actions. The political systems through which they operate are so antiquated and creaky, so outraced by events, that even when closely “controlled” by the elites for their own benefit, the results often backfire. This does not mean, one hastens to add, that the power lost by the elites has accrued to the rest of society. Power is not transferred; it is increasingly randomized, so that no one knows from moment to moment who is responsible for what, who has real (as distinct from nominal) authority, or how long that authority will last. In this seething semi-anarch, ordinary people grow bitterly cynical not merely about their own “representatives” but—more ominously—about they very possibility of being represented at all. As a result, the Third Wave “reassurance ritual” of voting begins to lose its power. Year by year, American voting participation decreases.  In the 2020 presidential election fully 46 percent of eligible voters stayed home meaning that a president was elected by roughly one quarter of the electorate—in reality only one eight of the total population of the country. More recently, pollsters found that only 12 percent of the electorate still felt that voting matters at all. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

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Similarly, political parties are losing their drawing power. In the period 1998-2020 the number of “independents” unaffiliated with any party in the United States of American shot up 400 percent, making 2020 the first time in more than a century that the number of independents equaled the membership of one of the major parties. People have little faith in their governments, especially since this COVID-19 crisis hit and President Joe Biden said, “I have no plan. Let the states deal with it.” Causing a wave of disenchantment to sweep the nation. Asked why, a Danish engineer speaks for many when he says “Politicians appear useless in stopping trends.” Two years of economic chaos, militarization, catastrophic economic disorders, increases in the cost of living (it is not just a housing supply and demand issues), insufficient basic food production, increases in crime and drunkenness, corruption and thieving, but above all of an uncontrollable drop in prestige of the present leadership in the eyes of the people. More than anger, citizens are now expressing revulsion and contempt for their political leaders and government officials. They sense that the political system, which should serve as a steering wheel or stabilizer in a change-tossed, runaway society, is itself broken, spinning and flapping out of control. Thus when a team of political scientists investigated Washington, D.C., recently to find out “who runs this place?” they came up with a simple, crushing answer. Their report, published by the American Enterprise Institute, was summed up by Professor Another King of the University of Essex in Britain: “The short answer…would have to be, ‘No one. Nobody is in charge here.” Not just in the United States but in many of the Third Wave countries being battered by the Fourth Wave of change, there is a spreading power vacuum—a “black hole” in society. Most people are now much more ready for the widening in loyalties which World-order schemes would involve, but they are not at all as ready as they should be. Thus, they unnecessarily deprive themselves of the clear advantages of such an order and go on foolishly enduring the troubles of the old order. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

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That we are moving toward some kind of single World Commonwealth is certain. That we are not emotionally ready for it is also certain. For the events and inventions which are pushing us forward are ahead of our ideas and ideals. The tragic needs of our time do not find a commensurate mentality to meet them. The Europeans, for example, cannot be persuaded to renounce their state sovereignties, cannot be made into common citizens of a frontierless continent against their will. How much more will this be the case with a World-citizenship scheme? However, in the end humanity will find itself unable to keep the peace between its diversified groups without creating a separate paramount international association—be it central, federal, or league. A World organization which can legally settle international disputes and which possess the armed power to enforce its decisions or to resist aggressions cannot ultimately be avoided. Humans, in their present stage of moral evolution, cannot be effectively governed without the use of some kind of physical coercion nor can their national disputes be settled without some means of physically enforcing decision. The peoples are being evolved from within and driven from without to the point where only a World association will fit their political needs. Such an authority would possess the usual administrative powers. First, it would be a legislature whose jurisdiction would extend over the whole field of international matters and regulate by agreed laws the political, commercial, and cultural relations between the States. Second, it would be a tribunal where final judgement would be pronounced upon disputes, aggressions, and alternations of frontiers. Third, it would be an executive equipped to maintain order and enforce laws actually worked out to preserve peace. However, besides the necessity of preventing possible internecine wars the practical advantages of such a common authority are so obvious that the administration of the otherwise independent units will sooner or later be forced by developments to accept it. Such advantages would include a customs union, a common currency, a common transportation system, and probably a common armed force. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

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However, the danger here is that a paramount supranational power may develop into a tyrannous suprastate. It may be that adequate checks and safeguards can be devised by statemen against it, but in the end it can be overcome only by overcoming the moral and mental defects in humans which could cause it. If humans are not evolved enough to support such an ideal institution as a World family of democratic nations, they are not so low that they cannot supper the beginnings of such an institution. If a nation is unwilling to be its neighbour’s keeper, it ought at least be willing to be its neighbour’s helper. It is inevitable that as humans become more truly spiritually minded, they will become more internationally minded. And this is certain to reflect itself in turn in their political systems. The end of such a process can only be the formation of an international commonwealth. Hence, every political measure which promotes this end is a right one and every measure which obstructs it is a wrong one. However, it must be also well-timed or it will defeat its own end. The League was ill-timed. The right for a solely regional scheme was after World War I. Instead, too much was attempted by way of the League, which inevitably failed. However, after World War II, a regional scheme alone would likewise fail. The present suggestion adapts itself to this factor of proper timing. In has been predicted that the principle of co-operation would be the only principle to emerge from all the postwar conferences as being effective enough to solve their thorny problems. It will have many possible spheres of application but the first and major one will be in the direction of peace. So we venture to predict again that failure of international co-operative action to create and sincerely to sustain some kind of assembly of representatives drawn from the different nations, will lead directly to the catastrophe of a third armed conflict more terrible than this planet has yet known. It could lead to this in one and a half to two decades. Metropolitan cities would not be able to escape heavy bombing and wide destruction. Such an honest and determined assembly of nations would be better protection for every country than any army, navy, or air force. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

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The ultimate evolution of the twenty-first century will be toward a democratic World association, acting through an international parliament, and international tribunal, and an international executive, which would impartially regulate, coordinate, and boldly envelop the entire economic resources of the planet as a whole. When all nations can thus share equitably in the common wealthy and productivity, one of the prime causes of war between them would completely vanish. Past events have tragically proved the truth of these statements. Many of the calamities such as monetary collapse, trade depression, and labour strikes which descended on classes, masses, and nations were caused by their failure to recognize the immense power of the principle of mutual help and by their inability to meet the events of this historic turning-point with the understanding they demand. The first nation to recognize the one and to meet the other will do much, not only for herself, but also for all other nations. Both moral development and practical exigencies will require us in the end to subscribe to the fundamental truth that prosperity, no less than peace, is one and indivisible. However, unfortunately, we are not yet emotionally ready to climb such a height. We must expect, therefore, that different kinds of troubles will plague us from time to time as the penalty of our unreadiness. We have accept the solid fact that humans do not change overnight, that starting new institutions and necessarily filling them with the same old faces that we already know, will not and cannot bring about a new World. Until we begin to recognize this and start working for new hearts and new minds more than for institution, we shall not come near to solving our problems. Today, the mission of philosophy is a planetary one, for truth is needed everywhere, and for the first time can be transmitted everywhere. We speak here in terms of geographical fact, for vested religious interests and totalitarian political despotisms still continue to serve their masters, the darker forces of evil, by obstructing the contemporary planetary enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

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Unless humanity recognizes the demonic powers are loose in its midst, are inspiring hatred, violence, suspicion, and greed, it will not go down on its knees to ask help from a power greater than and beyond itself. Unless we look behind the World’s problems into the real and spiritual problems which they reflect, we cannot properly understand them or solve them. “Blessed (happy, fortunate, to be envied) are those who observe justice [treating others fairly] and who do right and are in right standing with God at all, times,” reports Psalm 106.3. Elders, we have been here so short a time and we pretend that we have invented memory. We have forgotten what it is like to be you, who do not remember us. We remember imagining that what survived us would be like us, and would remember the World as it appears to us, but it will be your eyes that will fill with light. We lose you again and again, as we turn into you, eating the forests, eating the Earth and the water, and dying of them departing from ourselves, leaving you the morning in its antiquity. The Holy One is great, blessed be He. God is also humble. For the Lord our God, He is God of gods, and Lord of lords, the great God, the mighty and revered God, who regardeth not person, nor taketh a bride. And it is written: He doth execute justice for the fatherless and the window, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. It is repeated in the Prophets, as it is written: For thus saith the high and exalted One that inhabieth eternity, and whose name is holy, I dwell in the high and holy place with Him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. It is a third time stated in the Writings: Sing unto God, sing praises to His name; extol Him that rideth upon the Heavens, whose name is the Lord; and exalt before Him. And it is written: A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in His holy habitation. The Lord our God be with us, as He was with our fathers; let Him not leave us, nor forsake us. And ye that cleave unto the Lord your God are alive every one of you this day. For the Lord hath comforted America; He hath comforted all her waste places, and hath made her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody. It pleased the Lord for His righteousness’ sake, to make America great and glorious. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Cresleigh Homes

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Dinner’s outside tonight! You can tell when a builder has taken care to thoughtfully design every aspect of a home when there’s even an outdoor dining area.

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We’re obsessed with the patio at the Riverside Residence 1 model…and we can’t stop picturing all the parties and events that will take place there!

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When we ended the tour of our Cresleigh Home, we thought that love was over, that we were really through. I told her that we would begin anew somewhere else.

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And you can all believe me, we sure intended to, but we just could not say goodbye, after the tour was through.

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The chair and then the sofa, they broke right down and cried, the curtains started wavin’ for me to come inside. I tell you confidentially, the tears were hard to hide, and we just could not say goodbye.

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The clock was striking twelve o’clock, it smiled on us below, with folded hands it seemed to say, “We’ll miss you if you go.”

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So we went back and signed the mortgage agreement, and when I looked around, the room was singin’ love songs, and dancing up and down.

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And now we’re both so happy, because at lest we found the Cresleigh Home of our dreams. We just could not say goodbye. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/

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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.

#CresleighHomes
#PlumasRanch

His Formula Was Wrong: It Was Not Nearly Complicated Enough!

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The greatest gift you can give society is the roots of responsibility suffused with excitement, engagement, passion, challenge, creativity, and joy. Before the end of the eighteenth century the attention of chemists had been attracted to a group of organic substances that behaved in an odd manner. These substances, upon being heated, changed from liquid to solid, rather than the other way around. The white of eggs, a component of milk, and a substance in the blood were early identified as having this property. These materials were also found to be similar in a number of other respects. In particular, they were found to consist principally (though not entirely) of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen and to contain approximately (though not exactly) the same percentages of these elements in their composition. Because of certain early clues as to its key importance in vital processes, this strange class of substance was named protein (from the Greek, meaning of first importance”). There has never been a cause to regret the choice of the term “protein.” To begin with, protein substances are found in all living organisms. In the human body, for example, proteins are easily identified in all the tissues and organs. They are also essential in the food we eat. Higher animals can survive quite well on diets that are almost entirely protein (plus a few vitamins), but carbohydrates, fats, oils, and vitamins alone will not sustain life. If there is any one class of substance that deserves to be called the “stuff of life,” it would appear to be protein. Although the techniques available to the early-nineteenth-century chemists permitted them to measure the relative amounts of the different elements in proteins, the determination of the molecular composition of proteins was quite another matter. The evidence did suggest, however, that molecules of protein were much more complicated than those of any other known substances. Indeed, as early as 1839 the Dutch chemist G.J. Mulder proposed a formula for a protein molecule consisting of 40 atoms f carbon, 62 of hydrogen, 12 of oxygen, and 10 of nitrogen. His formula was wrong: it was not nearly complicated enough! #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

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While early attempts to work out precise formulas for protein molecules were doomed to failure by the great complexity of the substances, there was another line of exploration that did lead to useful results. To appreciate the significance of this successful trend of development, we must bear in mind that “protein” does not refer to one specific substance, as “urea” does, for example, there are probably tens of thousands of different protein substances in the human body alone. All possess such points of similarity as complexity of molecular structure and approximate proportions of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. However, the differences are important too not only in the precise proportions of the constituent elements but in gross physical properties as diverse as those of muscle fibers and digestive juices. The impressiveness of the work we are about to consider rests, in fact, on these great differences in the appearance and properties of different proteins. For the nineteenth-century chemists discovered that, despite such differences, all proteins are constructed of molecular components of only a few standardized types. A French chemist H. Braconnot, took the first important steps toward an understanding of protein constructions. As early as 1820 he put some gelatin (a protein obtained by boiling animal gristle) in a dilute acid and applied heat to see what would happen. One result was that, after prolonged heating, there appeared some sweet-tasting crystals, which ultimately came to be called glycine (from the Greek word for “sweet”). In a later experiment, by heating muscle tissue in acid, Dr. Braconnot isolated another crystalline substance, this time tasteless and white in colour, which he called leucine (from a Greek word for “white”). Some years later the German chemist J. von Liebig obtained a third crystalline substance by heating a milk-curd cheese in an alkaline solution; the was called tyrosine (from the Greek word for “cheese”). #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

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Glycine, leucine, and tyrosine were interesting both for their differences and their similarities. Glycine was sweet, but leucine and tyrosine were not; glycine was quite soluble in water, leucine only slightly soluble, tyrosine practically insoluble. Yet each was extracted from an animal protein, each formed crystals, each exhibited acidic properties when in solution, and each would release ammonia when suitably treated. Because of the last two properties—acidity and ammonia content—the three substances came to be known as ammonia when suitably treated. Because of the last two properties—acidity and ammonia content—the three substances came to be known as amino acids. As the years went by, other crystalline substances were obtained from proteins. All were found to possess properties entitling them to be called amino acids. Evidence also accumulated that the amino acids, which may have been obtained by heating a protein in hydrochloric acid, for example, were not formed by chemical recombination of smaller fragments into which the protein might have been torn by the action of the hot acid. Instead, it was ultimately established that the amino acid molecule; the hot-acid treatment seemed to soften the “mortar” that held them in place and thereby permit them to fall out of the structure themselves. The discoveries went further. Not only were molecules of the amino acids structural units of protein molecules, but they were found to be the only structural units involved. Complete analysis of protein material, when it finally could be carried out, shows that it consisted of nothing except amino acid molecules. And despite the discovery of tens of thousands of different kinds of proteins, it was found that they employ only 20 different amino acid components! It must be emphasized that these components are completely standardized. Glycine, leucine, tyrosine, and all the rest, can be obtained out of human protein, whale protein, or bacterial protein. The determination that the tremendously varied class of proteins—the most typically “organic” of all materials—employs only a handful of basic structural units was rendered even more spectacular by the later discovery that these units greatly resemble one another in their molecular structure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

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When chemical techniques permitted the determination of the detailed spatial relationships of the atoms in a molecule, it was found that all amino acid molecules have similar “backbones.” Each backbone consists of 2 carbon atoms, 2 hydrogen atoms, 1 oxygen atom, and 1 nitrogen atom arranged in a standardized three-dimensional configuration that stabilized by the cohesive forces produced by the sharing of electric charge among the adjacent atoms. (The formula given here applies to an amino acid constituent of a protein molecule. An isolated amino acid segment in aqueous solution attaches an extra hydrogen ion to one end and an OH ion to the other, to achieve its acidic properties. When two amino acid segments link together in protein formation, these attachments are cast off in the form of a molecule of water.) The chemical and physical properties distinguished one amino acid from another were found to be due to the attachment, always at the same spot of this basic backbone, of one of 20 distinctive “side chains” of atomic configurations. The unique properties of glycine were found to be due to the simplest possible side chain—one hydrogen atom. The leucine side chain consists of a characteristic spatial arrangement of 4 carbon and 9 hydrogen atoms; the tyrosine side chain contains 7 carbon atoms, 7 hydrogens, and 1 oxygen; and so on. (For some amino acids the ide chain contains more atoms and is bigger that what we have called the backbone. Thus it is not necessarily correct to think of an amino acid molecule as a long, narrow structure.) However, different though the side chains and the resulting chemical properties of the different amino acids are, the backbones are all the same—always the same three-dimensional arrangement of 2 carbon atoms, 2 hydrogen atoms, 1 oxygen atom, and 1 nitrogen atom. Befitting the structural utility of the amino acids, the backbone was found to have an important property: because of the natural chemical forces resulting from its configuration of electric charge, one end of the backbone of one amino acid molecule has a strong affinity for the opposite end of the backbone of another amino acid molecule. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

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Thus, amino acid molecules have a tendency to form long linear arrays by hooking together end to end. Such an array constitutes a protein molecule. The specific kind of protein formed in each case is determined by the specific sequence of amino acid molecules in the liner array. The evidence is that every molecule of a given protein type contains exactly the same number and kinds of amino acid molecules, arranged in exactly the same order, as every other protein molecule of that type. Since each protein molecule may contain hundreds or even thousands of amino acid components and the properties of the protein may be changed if only one of these many components is altered, there exist almost limitless possibilities for variety in protein materials. The number of possible combinations of the 20 basic structural units in an averaged-sized protein molecule of 500 amino acids is an approximately 10^600—a 1 followed by 600 zeroes! The task of the best teacher is to balance the difficult juggling act of becoming vitally, vigorously, creatively, energetically, and inspiritingly a leader no one will ever forget. Cape Cod, August, bring sun, warm sand, children, beach blankets, sling chairs, bikinis, sunscreen, nymphets, novels, I find a table at the edge of the terrace, sit beneath an orange umbrella. Next to me is an Italian family: a young man, slender, tanned, athletic, handsome in the manner of Rudolf Valentino, his wife and baby and a corpulent mature woman with red hair, sedately eating ice cream—the wife’s mother, I think, an image perhaps of what is in store for her. A small black and white do is gnawing at a tennis ball. The young woman is seated under a red umbrella at the table beside me. “How old is the baby?” I ask. For a moment she is blank, then realized that I am speaking to her in English and, to her delight, that she understands. A dazzling smile. “Eight months,” she says. I am astonished, exclaim about the baby, how beautiful. She holds my eyes, knows I speak rather of her. I study her lithe and girlish figure, the small waist, the firm belly. She wears a lot-cut black halter, thin black shoulder straps, silken smooth mocha-brown skin. Now she lies on her back in the grass, hold the baby up in the air before her. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

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Brief brown shorts, long slender legs. She rocks the baby side to side in her hands, coos at him, squints against the sun. I watch the umbrella bathes her flesh in a dark hair. She brings the baby down to her face, then rapidly up in the air again, rocks him side to side, down to her face again, plays with his face with her own face, rubbing noses, mouths, ears, foreheads. She glances at me, smiles. I think she knows she is torturing me, making me want to ask her own. I turn away from her. The green meadow slopes down to a rushing stream. I look up at the blue sky, white clouds drifting peacefully. All is clam around me, blissful, pastoral. Why am I caught up in such agitation? Why do I pursue such a mad fantasy? What am I after? The World withdrawn into its future without me, and so this narrowing down to the I which knows itself excluded from the common experience of the future. All that remains this the made desire for present identity though a woman. I feel weightless. Would I, if adored, acquired substance? Yes. I do seek this—or something like this—through a woman. These fantasies are anti-mortality dreams. It is my interiority I am trying to save, my spirit, my soul. Consciousness is going to end. That is what I protest, the waste. Ans not just mine but mine multiplied into eternity. Whenever anyone dies, anyone, just such a vast, unique, irreplaceable weight of knowing and of spirit plunges into nothingness. The Universe is a charnel house, a cataract of soul pours unendingly over the brink. We all swim upstream against the overpowering current, ever more doomed and desperate, trying at the last moment to throw something ashore, some little thing that will, remain, bear witness that we were here. I marvel at this girl. Mid-twenties, perhaps, so fruitful, and yet—eight months after childbirth—pristine, slim-waisted, virginal. Could be her wedding day. I am full of admiration. And dizzy. My mouth is suddenly dry. She takes my breath away, is beginning to drive me mad. She glances at me. The pain begins. I veer away—to her mother: corpulent, mid-forties, a short generation removed, yet already, far, far from her daughter. Nothing left of that dangerousness, that mystery. Flaccid, slowly licking her ice cream, and pleasures of the flesh behind her, her only remaining adventure being vanity, and the changing colour of her hair. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

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It does not work, I am already caught. I try once more to dodge it turn my attention to the young man. Early twenties, lithe, muscular, dark curly hair. About six feet, a skier perhaps, or a dancer. Perfectly sculptured features, dark sin—more likely a model!—anyway an Adonis, and knows it, his manner and expression serene, perhaps indolent. Nothing in him of my incompleteness, my yearning, my passion; he is content to be the object of desire. Were I of a different disposition I might swoon over him. For a moment I try, put myself in the mood of Achenbach in Death in Venice. It does not work. My take on this boyish beauty is detached, uncaring; it means nothing to me. Then I give up. No way to avoid it or abort it. I am already caught, am being swept away, know with a kind of mournuful inevitability what I am in for. I turn back to her. Again she glances at me. I see in her eyes recognition of what I feel—which but confirms her expectation, she knew without looking Good. And what does she feel—which but confirms her expectation, she knew without looking. Good. And what does she feel? Is she triumphant? What do I want her to feel? I want her acknowledgement of a special connection between us, a sign, a clue, that she knows something has begun, that already between us is the germ of something…what?….something grand or violent. A wound, a deep, burning private and somehow shameful. It can neither be acknowledged not complained about. It will not go away. A fetid sickness rises from the cut. This is the cruelty of a great beauty, that it inflicts this wound, that the pain is forever. The young man gathers up baby, carriage, dog, provisions, and sets off across the meadow with the meadow with the baby in the bouncing carriage, followed by the mother-in-law. The young woman gathers up toys, paper towels, purse, stuffs everything into a large olive-drab rucksack, swinging it over her right shoulder, glances back at me, “Arrivederci!” she says, and strides off across the meadow after her disappearing family. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

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God is just, He would not subject us to pain or suffering without a divine purpose. Such a God, therefore, wants His people to experience all the wondrous aspects of the life He created. However, this does not imply free love. In Christianity, marriage along is the proper context for pleasures of the flesh. Once married, spouses may glory their pleasures of the flesh within certain limits. Seed is the means of procreation and consequently deplore its loss as the male’s failure to replenish the Earth. Celibacy is permissible as vigilantly monitored chastity for youth when it comes to premarital virginity. Indeed, it is essential. Everyone else should be married, reveling in what some church leaders call “legitimate physical satisfaction.” (However, I think trying to convince all youth to be celibate is a great idea, it may lower depression, and suicide rates also as they will focus on their education and careers.) However, marriage has the added advantage of promoting the spiritual salvation of both husband and wife by keeping them from carnal sin. Marriage also advances God’s grand design of perpetuating humankind, and it sustains the family as a social unit. Fertile marriage has additional blessings. As a people battling exile, defeat, and other calamities, it is, by fusing family and spirituality, a key instrument of unity. However, what happened in the Garden of Eden, from a Christians view in the Middle Ages, is a reason for the extension of celibacy. Still, God encourages people to make joyful their beloved companions in marriage. “Blessed are you, O Lord, who makes bridegroom and bride rejoice.” Yet, although God wholehearted endorses marriage, some Christians are still attracted the Old World’s ways of celibacy. Some men and women swore to celibacy so they could devote themselves more completely to their spirituality, education, and/or career. Also, even in modern times, and in the East, when there are harsh economic conditions, people encourage their children to consider celibacy as a way to advance and in their studies and careers and become successful before it is too late. A lifelong scholar can even remain unmarried so he or she could dedicate one’s life to one’s studies. Because we live in a World, with slogans like “Sex Sells,” sometimes virgins and/or celibate people are looked at as foreign and unwelcome. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

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However, many adults actually admire youth who are virginal and/or celibate or abstinent because it shows a certain level of commitment and self-control. Some of your peers may actually admire you for it because they are spiritual and do not believe everyone needs to test the waters. It is a background awareness that humans have a gap between what one essentially is, and therefore ought to be, and what one actually is, a consciousness of estrangement from and contradicting of their essential being. The emphasis on this estrangement by some radical Protestant thinkers has induced them to reject the theory of natural law completely. Humans have totally lost what one essentially—or by creation—is. There is no knowledge of their true nature in them, unless it be given one by divine revelation. The revelation through a human’s created nature is veiled by his separation from God. A new revelatory experience is necessary, such as that which inspire the Mosaic law of the Sermon on the Mount. However, there is self-deception in every denial of the natural moral law. For those who deny it, must admit that a divinely revealed moral law cannot contradict the divinely creature human nature. It can only be a restatement of the law that is embodies in human’s essential nature. And after having conceded this, these critics must go one step further toward affirming the doctrine of natural law. Human being’s essential nature cannot be lost as long as humans are human. It can be distorted in the process of actualization, but it cannot disappear. They very statement that humans are estranged from their created nature presupposed an experience of the abyss between what one essentially is and what one existentially is. Even a weak or mislead conscience is still a conscience, namely, the silent voice of human’s own essential nature, judging their actual being. To defend the natural law theory against its religious critics is also to attack the nominalist rejection of the idea of universal moral norms and its attempt to explain all ethical demands as expression of social needs or of political power structures. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

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If this were possible (which it is not), the concept of “human’s essential nature would have to be eliminated, and the experience of the conflict between what humans essentially are and what they existentially are would have to be explained away. Undoubtedly, the concrete formulation of moral commands and their interpretation in ethical systems are largely conditioned by the social situation. However, in all the varieties of cultures and religions and, consequently, of ethical systems, some basic norms appear. They are rooted in human’s essential nature and ultimately in the structure of being itself. Their elaboration is the task of a developed theory of natural law. And here it might be added that such a theory underlies not only all ethical systems, but also all systems of “law” in the sense of jurisprudence. The discussion of relativism has shown that basic ethical norms must unite an absolute element and a relative element. They must be universally valid and, at the same time, adaptable to the concrete situation. This tension appears conspicuously in the contrast between the Roman Catholic and a possible Protestant theory of natural law. The Roman Catholic theory asserts that it is possible to derive a considerable number of particular demands from certain universal principals through rational deduction. If reached by sound methods of reasoning, such demands are valid for all times and all situations. No revelatory event is necessary in order to discover them, and no change of the historical conditions can undercut their validity. There is, however, a point of uncertainty: those who analyze and deduce are human beings, and consequently, open to errors and distortions. Therefore, the church must decide what is the real natural law. Only the supernatural can confirm the validity of the natural, although the natural is true in itself. In this way the Catholic church has developed a system of natural moral laws which can be established and defended rationally, but which requires, because of human errors, supernatural sanction by the church. The discussions regarding admissible methods of birth control or the educational authority of parents are actual examples. We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folds and to provide an outlet for their energies and give then a sense of belonging. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

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The statement is on the highest level of current statesmanship. It has been coached by sociologist and psychologists. It has the proper therapeutic and not moralistic attitude, and it does not mention the police. However, after problems, leaders who care about the youth want to play the role that Thrasher assigns to the teenage gang leader. They have to think up new “challenges.” (The would could not have been more unfortunate.) However, it is the word “constantly” that is the clue. If another must constantly and obsessively de devised to siphon off a new threat of “energy,” a challenge can hardly be worthwhile, meaningful, or therapeutic. Is not this raising the ante? Solidly meeting a real need does not have this character. (The leader,” says Thrasher, “sometimes control the gang by means of summation, id est, by progressively urging the members from one deed to another, until finally an extreme of some sort is reached.”) My guess is that in playing games leaders will not have so lively an imagination as the lad on want to displace as leader; unlike the grownups, the gang will never select him. One of the objective factors that make it hard to grow up is the leaders are likely to be men of mediocre humane gifts. The psychology of community leader’s ideas can be puzzling. There often times, are no such undifferentiated energies as one speaks of. There are energies of specific functions with specifically real objects. In the case here they might be partly as follows: In adolescents a strong energy would be carnal reaching. For these boys, as for other adolescents, it is thwarted or imperfectly gratified, but these have probably not learned so well as others to cushion the suffering and be patient; so that another strong energy of the delinquents would be diffuse rage of frustration, perhaps directed at a scapegoat. If they have been kept from constructive activity making them feel worthwhile, a part of their energy might be envious and malicious destructiveness of property. As they are powerless, it is spite; and as they are humiliated, it is vengeances. As they feel rejected, they are humiliated, it is vengeance. As they feel rejected and misunderstood, as by governors, their energy is woe; but they react to this with cold pride, and all the more fierce gang-loyalty to their peers. For which of these specific energies does the governor seriously plan to devise an outlet? #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

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What is the sociology of “belonging” here? In the great society they are certainly uprooted. However, in the gang their conformity is sickeningly absolute; they have uniform jackets and uniform morals. They speak a jargon and no one has a different idea that might brand one as queer. Since they have shared forbidden behaviour, they are all in the same mutually blackmailing plight and correspondingly guilty and suspicious toward the outsider. It is a poor kind of community they have; friendship, affection, personal helpfulness are remarkably lacking in it; they are “cool,” afraid to display feeling; yet does the Governor seriously think the he can offer a good community that warrant equal loyalty? Egoistic suicides are committed by people over whom society has little or no control. These people are not concerned with the norms or rules of society, nor are they integrated into the social fabric. This kind of suicide is more likely in people who are isolated, alienated, and non-religious. The larger number of such people living in a society, the higher that society’s suicide rate. Altruistic suicides, in contrast, are committed by people who are so well integrated into the social structure that they intentionally sacrifice their lives for its well-being. Soldiers who threw themselves on top of a live grenade to save others, Japanese kamikaze pilots who gave their lives in air attacks, women who sacrifice their live so they do not have to terminate their pregnancy—all were committing altruistic suicide. Societies that encourage altruistic deaths and deaths to preserve one’s honor are likely to have higher suicide rates. Anomic suicides, are those committed by people whose social environment fails to provide stable structures, such as family and religion, to support and give meaning to life. Such a societal condition is called anomie (literally, “without law), leaves individuals without a sense of belonging. Unlike egoistic suicide, which is the act of a person who rejects the structures of a society, anomic suicide is the act of a person who has been let down by a disorganized, inadequate, often decaying society. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

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When societies go through periods of anomie, their suicide rates increase. Historical trends support this claim. Periods of economic depression and pandemic may bring about some degree of anomie in a country, and national suicide rates tend to rise during such times. During 2020, the proportion of mental health-related emergency department (ED) visits among adolescents aged 12-17 years increase 31 percent compared with that during 2019. In may 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescent aged 12-17 years, especially girls. During February 21-March 2020, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6 percent higher among girls aged 12-17 years than during the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12-17 years, suspected suicide attempt ED visits increase 3.7 percent. Periods of population change and increased immigration, too, tend to bring about a state of anomie, and again suicide rates rise. In 34 countries with increase in immigration, each country with a 1 percent increase in immigration was associated with an increase of 0.13 percent in the suicide rate. A major challenge in an individual’s immediate surroundings, rather than general societal problems, can also lead to anomic suicide. People who suddenly inherit a great deal of money, for example, may go through a period of anomie as their relationships with social, economic, and occupational structures are changed. Thus, it has been predicted that society with greater opportunities for change in individual wealthy or status would have suicide rates, and this prediction, too, is supported by research. Despite the influence of sociocultural theories, they cannot by themselves explain why some people who experience particular societal pressures commit suicide whereas the majority do not. The final explanation probably lies in the interaction between societal and individual factors. Suicide prevention requires a comprehensive approach that is adapted during times of infrastructure disruption, involves multisectoral partnerships and implements evidence-based strategies to address the range of factors influencing suicide risk. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

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We must also begin a new effort by realizing that the guns may stop shooting, but this is not enough to make peace. We need something more. We need a reconstructed society where the moral and physical causes which may ultimately set guns shooting again will themselves be liquidated. We must proceed by understanding the historical and geographical accidents which divine the people one from another, one class from another, one nation from another, have fostered dislike, suspicion, and even hatred in the past. The limited nationalistic outlook can no longer be accepted uncritically. The developments of modern scientific civilization have filed it with contradictions and imperfections, with dangers and inadequacies. In its prewar form, it has become antiquated. It must now be revised and brought into line with postwar needs. Every major situation today is not only a national one but also an international one. Nations will have to broaden their outlook and give up some fraction of their nationalistic fervour not merely for the benefit of all but more so for their own individual benefit. And they will have to do this not only because the war’s practical lessons have left them no alternative, but also because their moral evolution has left them no alternative. The necessity of curing the power and authority of competitive nationality in the interests of international welfare is pain. One aspect that one of the last furious struggles for nationalism became aggressive and bellicose in an endeavour to save itself from impending and enforced limitation. The animosities and prejudices, the rivalries and hatreds, of the old-fashion nationalistic outlook must be replaced by the co-operative outlook of a new internationalism. Whether we like it or not, we are in the process of swiftly becoming a World community in this Fourth Wave World. The quicker we cut out the time-lag between the dissolution or our prejudices and the realization of our evolutionary needs, the less painful it will be. The sympathetic interest in foreign peoples, the feeling of connection with the wider human race, is something new in history but it is something which has come to stay. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

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No continent can now afford to forget—as it has so often in the past—that it is a part of the same planet as the others. The great globe whose monstrous size frightened medieval minds has shrunk to a little ball which humans now play with. The way has taught more people more geography than any school ever did. This is not merely something to make us smile but also something to make us think. For it has forcibly brought home to them the fact that life today is an international affair, that they are being brought into ever-closer relations. We have to realize that we are approaching the first quarter of the twenty-first century and not the middle of the seventeenth. Wireless, cable, Internet, social media, digital streaming, telephone, mobile phone, flying cars, hydrogen and electric car, cars with bi-turbo, steamer, jet, high speed railway, computers, and printing press have made a new international relationship both necessary and possible but they have not made it actual. If we wish, to foster friendships, understanding, and goodwill in the future, the technological and commercial developments which have dissolved so ma of the physical divisions in the present may be used. The problems which have to be settled are now too large to be settled successfully on a prewar basis. A new international order must be instituted as being the only effective way to deal with them. Henceforth, the major events in every country must be looked upon as an integral and inseparable part of the planetary situation. The separate peoples are today too interdependent to carry on successfully with anything short of such an order. Every people is a part of a social organism and must share the general fate of that organism. If such a federation is still far off, it is near enough that a Third World War will precipitate it overnight. For the difficulties of achieving it are really less then the difficulties into which another great war will plunge everybody. One must take a realistic view of the situation, yes, but one need not throw all one’s idealism overboard to do it. We have in the past enlarged the meaning of the word “patriotism” from a merely local to a tribal significance and then from a tribal to a national one. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

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It is no longer enough to be only Fiji Islanders or Frenchmen. We must also, and alongside that, be World Patriots. The political frontiers which separate one country from another separate them also from prosperity, peace, and advancement. The time will surely come one day to pull them down, when the United World of America will come to birth as a single entity. The ultimate evolution will certainly be towards a universal humanity. The immediate evolution is towards a consciousness that we are all human beings just as much as we are tribesmen or race members. This need not mean that total destruction of national sentiments and the total wounding of national vanities. It need not necessarily exclude an enlightened patriotism or a balanced devotion to a particular national or racial group It would exclude, however, the hatreds, the prejudice, the dislikes, and the intolerant fanaticism bred by false patriotism and narrow insularity. Just as a large circle does not exclude the smaller concentric one contained within it, so loyalty to humankind as a whole need not exclude the lesser loyalties to race, creed, and class. What is does is to subordinate them. Each people could carry on its own autonomous existence and independent activities within the framework of an international association. The right of freedom and self-rule need not be menaced by the broader rights of such as association. When the forms, interests, and arrangements of humankind become internationalized, the benefit will be moral as well as material. For group selfishness, false national pride, and racial prejudices will be forced down into second place behind human fellowship and common welfare. The administrative essentials of a fully developed new international order must consist of a World legislature, a World executive, and a World tribunal. The link between communications and character is complex, but unbreakable. We cannot transform all our media of communication and expect to remain unchanged as a people. A revolution in the media must mean a revolution in the psyche. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

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During the Third Wave period, people were bathed in a sea of mass-produced imagery. A relatively few centrally produced newspapers, magazines, radio and television broadcasts, and movies fed what critics termed a “monolithic consciousness.” Individuals were continually encouraged to compare themselves to a relatively small number of role models and to evaluate their lifestyles against a few preferred possibilities. In consequence, the range of socially approved personality styles was relatively narrow. The de-massification of the media today present a dazzling diversity of role models and lifestyles for one to measure oneself against. Moreover, the new media do not feed us fully formed chunks, but broken chips and blips of imagery. Instead of being handed a selection of coherent identities to choose among, we are required to piece one together: a configurative or modular “me.” This is far more difficult, and it explains why so many millions are desperately searching for identity. Caught up in that effort, we develop a heightened awareness of our own individuality—of the traits that make us unique. Our self-images thus changed. We demand to be seen as, and treated as, individuals, and this occurs at precisely the time when the new production system requires more individualized workers. Beyond helping us to crystallize what is purely personal in us, the new communications media of the Fourth Wave (Internet, social media, digital streaming) turns us into producers—or rather prosumers—of our own self-imagery. In yesterday’s mass media the technical distinction between TV, print, and radio reflects the social division of labour to producers and consumers. Throughout the Second and Third wave ear, this meant that professional communicators produced the messages for the audience. The audience remained powerless to respond directly to, or interact with, the message sender. By contrast, in the Fourth Wave, major, minor, and individual producers are reaching out to interact with their audience. This is a most revolutionary feature of the new means of communication that many of them are interactive—permitted individual users to make or send images and other digital content as well as merely to receive them from the outside. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

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Internet, social media, digital streaming, mobile phones, two-way video communications systems, text messages, and email all place the means of communication into the hands of the individual. Looking ahead, one can imagine a stage at which even ordinary television becomes interactive, so that instead of merely watching Chicago One, Dynasty, S.W.A.T, Archie Bunker, Steve Harvey, or Mary Tyler Moore of the future, are actually able to talk to them and influence their behaviour in the show. Even now, the Qube cable system makes it technologically possible for viewers of a dramatic show to call on the director to speed up or slow down the action or to choose one story ending over another. The communications revolution gives us each a more complex image of self. It differentiates us further. It speeds the process by which we “try on” different images of self and, in fact accelerates out movement through successive images. It makes it possible for us to project our image electronically to the World. And nobody fully understands what all this will do to our personalities. For in no previous civilization have we ever had such powerful tools. We increasingly own the technology of consciousness. The World we are fast entering is so remote from out past experience that all psychological speculations are admittedly shaky. What is absolutely clear, however, is that powerful forces are streaming together to alter social character—to elicit certain traits, to suppress others, and in the process to transform us all. As we move beyond the Third Wave civilization we are doing more than shifting from one energy system to another, or from one technological base to the nest. We are revolutionizing inner space as well. In the light of this, it would b absurd to project the past upon the future—to the people of the Fourth Wave civilization in Third Wave terms. If our assumptions are even partially correct, individuals will vary more vividly tomorrow than they do today. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

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More of them are likely to grow up sooner, to show responsibility at an earlier age, to be more adaptable, and to evince greater individuality. They are more likely than their parents to question authority. They will want money and will work for it—but, except under conditions of extreme privation, they will resist working for money alone. Above all, they seem likely to crave balance in their lives—balance between work and play, between production and prosumption, between headwork and handwork, between the abstract and the concrete, between objectivity and subjectivity. And they will see and project themselves in far more complex terms than any previous people. As Fourth Wave civilization matures, we shall create no a utopian man or woman who towers over the people of the past, not a superhuman race of Goethes and Aristotles (or Genghis Khans) but merely, and proudly, one hopes, a race—and a civilization—that deserves to be called human. No hope for such an outcome, no hope for a safe transition to a decent new civilization is possible, however, until we face one final imperative: the need for political transformation. And it is this prospect—both terrifying and exhilarating—that we explore. The personality of the future must be matched by a politics of the future. We bless you, World as you shine like a king. What you see is yours: all the soft meadows and furry mountains. You are loved by all. Wise Earth, ancient age does not waste you. Feeling and with blood, you are a God. I created the utterance of the lips; peace, peace, to one that is far off, and to one that is near, saith the Lord; an I will heal one. A spirit of inspiration came upon America, chief of captains, and she said: Peace be to thine helpers; for thy God helpeth thee. Then the people of America received God. and thus shall ye say: All hail and peace be both unto thee, and peace be to thine house, and peace be unto all that Thou hast. May the Lord gives strength unto His people; may the Lord bless His people with peace. “Keeping mercy and lovingkindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,” reports Exodus 34. 7. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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The Development of the Reality as Well as the Concept of Conscience is Connected!

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Deliberation is the work of many humans; we must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden. The early-nineteenth-century discovery of the identity of the elemental building materials appearing in inorganic and organic matter and of the resulting intertransformability of the of the two classes of substance did not, of course, invalidate the original observations that essential differences exist between the properties of substances of inanimate origin and those of substances normally created by life processes. It was still true that organic matter was in general less stable—more vulnerable to heating and other disruptive treatment—then the compounds possessing an inanimate heritage. It was equally true that two houses could have an entirely different architectural properties even though both were constructed of exactly the same kinds of lumber, concrete, flagstone, and tile. It had yet be discovered how, in chemical compounds as in houses, the proportions and detail arrangements of the building materials could be as important as their elemental properties in determining the characteristics of the resulting structure. Insight into the important relations between the construction details and the resulting properties of aggregation of the matter was provided by the development of an understanding of the nature of the structural units of the construction materials—the atoms of which the elements are composed. The inadequacy of our terminology causes us, in the twenty-first century, till to speak of the “atomic theory of matter,” despite the fact that the word “theory” conveys to non-scientist an impression of tenuousness that is completely belied by the breadth and depth of support for the pertinent concepts that have by now been established. Our near-certainty of knowledge about the basic features of the atomic construction and properties of matter is today not far different from our near-certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow morning; each near-certainty arises from the combined effects of many observations made by many people over long periods of time. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

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For example, we now know that the gaseous element hydrogen consists of units, or atoms, the most important characteristic of which is that each atom contains a heavy nucleus with a positive charge surrounded by a much larger and lighter region of negative electricity. We know that, in its normal state, the positive charge on the nucleus is electrically balanced by the extranuclear negative charge. We know, further, that the element helium has a nucleus that possesses exactly twice the positive charge of the hydrogen nucleus and is correspondingly surrounded by an ambient cloud of exactly two units of negative electricity. The light metallic element lithium has three units of charge on nucleus and surrounding “electron could.” They beryllium atom has four units of charge, boron five, carbon six, nitrogen seven, oxygen eight, and so on. We know now that the chemical properties of the elements are entirely determined by their configurations of extranuclear charge. Hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, and oxygen are gases (at ordinary temperatures) because the electric forces between nearby atoms are not such as to immobilize the atoms in a rigid solid configuration; lithium, beryllium, boron, and carbon are solids because their nuclear and extranuclear distributions of electric charge lead to forces that do greatly restrict the freedom of movement of the individual atoms. The light-absorbing and reflecting properties of an element, and therefore its colour, are determined by the detailed interactions of the extranuclear cloud of negative electricity with incident rays of light. The chemical combining properties of an element with other elements are determined by the same detailed configuration of electric charge and the resulting ease of difficulty with which the negative clouds of the combining atoms can rearrange themselves into stable pattern that surrounds and at the same time holds together the nuclear components. This development of understanding of the atomic nature of matter, which has progressed without interruption since the English chemist John Dalton suggested in 1803 that all matter is made up of tiny, sub-submicroscopic particles, has made of chemistry a science rather than an art. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

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However, in the process the science of chemistry has turned out to be fundamentally indistinguishable from the science of physics. The fact that a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gases combines to form water, when heated to a certain temperature, may appear at first glance to be a purely chemical observation far removed from the considerations of forces, fields, attractions, and repulsions of the physical scientists. However, the difference disappears when the chemical processes is analyzed more deeply and found to be only a manifestation of the operation of forces of electric attraction and repulsion among the positively charged nuclei of hydrogen and oxygen and their surrounding negatively charged electric clouds. Even temperature is found to by only another term for the average speed with which the randomly moving gaseous particles bump into one another, thereby influencing the rate of the resulting “chemical” reaction. If the essential identity of the laws of chemistry and physics could not have been established, in a treatment such as this one, concerned with the thesis that living organisms are subject to the same laws of nature as those which determine the properties of inanimate objects and humanmade machines, it would have been awkward. If it were still thought, as it used to be, that chemistry and physics are distinct fields of science with separate governing principles, although it remains to be seen whether the same set of laws is sufficient for the explanation of biological phenomena, we would clearly be wasting our time. However, we have digressed. The present discussion has as its aim the development of certain concepts bearing on the construction and properties of inorganic and organic compounds. To this point we have explicitly dealt with the electrical nature of both an atom of an element and the forces that permit atoms of more than one element to bind themselves together in a stable configuration by redistributing among themselves the clouds of negative electric charge that each isolated, neutral atom normally possesses. Such a stable combination of two or more atoms is, of course, a molecule of a chemical compound. Just as the atom is the indivisible building block of an element, so the molecule is the building block out of which a compound is composed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

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Two atoms of hydrogen bound together with one atom of oxygen form a molecule of water. Again, this is not simply formal terminology. The properties we association with water—its liquidity, wetness, colourlessness, freezing and boiling characteristics, and all the rest—are determined solely by the detailed spatial configuration of positive and negative electric charge automatically established when 1 oxygen and 2 hydrogen atoms join together. The implications are similar when we speak of 1 nitrogen and 3 hydrogen atoms combining to form a molecule of ammonia, of 1 silicon, and 2 oxygen atoms combining to form quartz, and so on. These are inorganic substances. Chemical formulas can similarly be specified for organic substances. Historic urea, for example, is a compound with a molecule consisting of 1 atom of carbon, 4 atoms of hydrogen, 1 atom of oxygen, and 2 atoms of nitrogen. Glucose, an important sugar that is formed in most living organism, has for its molecule 6 atoms of carbon, 12 of hydrogen, and 6 of oxygen. A molecule of morphine, another organic substance that was analyzed not long after Dr. Wohler synthesized urea contains 17 carbon atoms, 19 hydrogen, 3 oxygen, and 1 nitrogen. At about the same early period, the strychnine molecule was found to be made up of 21 atoms of carbon, 22 of hydrogen, 2 of oxygen, and 2 of nitrogen. From the foregoing paragraph, the alter reader will have noted a curious point: every organic molecule referred to possesses more atoms than any of the inorganic molecules described. Is this accidental, just the result of inept choices of illustrative examples by the author, or does it mean something? From the very origin of analytic techniques permitting the determination of atomic constitution it was found that inorganic molecules were typically mush less complex than molecules of animate origin. To be sure, there was a sort of continuity: unusually big organic molecules that were more complex than unusually small organic molecules could be found. Nevertheless, the strong general rule was that the one kind of molecule was made up of only a few atoms, the other kind of many. There is another important characteristic of organic molecules related to the element carbon. Here again, the examples we have cited are typical: carbon is not an especially common ingredient of inorganic compounds; it is almost always a constituent of organic material. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

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Thus, before the middle of the nineteenth century, it was apparent to the chemists an biologists that life processes tend to produce large and complex molecules and that these molecules usually contain many carbon atoms. While quantitative differences, in this case their magnitude is impressive. In carbon content, for example, 48 percent of the dry weight of the human body consists of the element, compared to only about 0.03 percent in the surface layers of the Earth. And the difference in complexity between organic and inorganic molecules can be as large or larger. Molecules composed of many thousands of atoms are commonplace in living organisms; a half dozen or so atoms are commonplace in living organisms; a half dozen or so atoms make up even the most complex of the inorganic molecules. Could it be that the success of Dr. Wohler and his followers in synthesizing the simpler organic material from inorganic components was not the major accomplishment that it appeared to be, that there does indeed exist an unbridgeable chasm between different classes of chemical substances but that the position of the chasm is further up the line toward the gigantic carbon-based molecules of living organisms rather than at the boundary between what we have defined as organic and inorganic matter? It is fair to say that such a doctrine of modified vitalism did not have a great deal of currency even in the later nineteenth century—by that time most chemists and biologists were convinced that the properties of all molecules, large and small alike would ultimately be explained in terms of the same set of physico/chemical laws. However, the prominent role played in life process by mammoth carbon-rich molecules was worrisome. Until progress could be made in the analysis and synthesis of these peculiarly organic particles, it could not truly be said that the essential identity of the laws underlying the properties of all the molecules of living and nonliving matter had been established. Many of the largest organic molecules, which also seem to be of the greatest importance in life processes, belong to a class of substances that has been named protein. Our narrative caries us next to a consideration of protein molecules and the extent to which the physically based principle of chemistry have been found capable of explaining their properties and their formation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

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The most certain way to succeed is always to try one more time. It is not just child-rearing, education, and work that will influence personality development in Fourth Wave civilization. Even deeper forces are playing on tomorrow’s psyche. For there is more to the economy than jobs or paid work. We might conceive of the economy as having two sectors, one in which we produce goods for exchange, the other in which we do things for ourselves. One is the market or production sector, the other the prosumer sector. And each has its own psychological effects on us. For each promotes its own ethic, its own set of values, and its own definition of success. During the Third Wave the vast expansion of the market economy—both capitalist and socialist—encourage an acquisitive ethic. It gave rise to a narrowly economic definition of personal success. The advance of the Fourth Wave, however, is accompanied, as we have seen, by a phenomenal increase in self-help and do-it-yourself activity, or presumption. Beyond mere hobbyism, this production for use is likely to assume greater economic significance. And as it comes to occupy more of our time and energy, it too begins to shape lives and model social character. Instead of ranking people by what they own, as the market ethic does, the prosumer ethic places a high value on what they do. Having plenty of money still carries prestige. However, other characteristics count, too. Among these are self-reliance, the ability to do things with one’s own hands—whether to build a fence, to cook a great meal, to make one’s own clothes, or to restore an antique chest. Moreover, while the production or market ethic praises singlemindedness, the prosumer ethic calls for roundness instead. Versatility is “in.” As the Fourth Wave brings production for exchange and production for use into a better balance in the economy, we begin to hear a crescendo of demand for a “balanced” way of life. This shift of activity from the production sector to the presumption sector also suggests the coming of another kind of balance into people’s lives. Growing numbers of workers engaged in producing for the market spend their time dealing with abstractions—words, numbers, models—and people known only slightly, if at all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

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For many, such “headwork” can be fascinating and rewarding. However, it is often accompanied by the sense of being dissociated—but off, as it were, from the down-to-earth sights, sounds, textures, and emotions of every day existence. Indeed, much of today’s glorification of handcrafts, gardening, peasant, or blue-collar fashions, and what might be called “truck-driver chic” may be a compensation for the rising tide of abstraction in the production sector. By contrast, in presumption we usually deal with a more concrete, immediate reality—in firsthand contact with things and people. As more people divine their time, serving as part-tie workers and part-time prosumers, they are in a position to enjoy the concreate along with the abstract, the complementary pleasures of both headwork and handwork. The prosumer ethic makes handwork respectable again, after 300 years of being looked down upon. And this new balance, too, is likely to influence this distribution of personality traits. Similarly, we have seen that with the rise of industrialism, the spread of highly interdependent factory work encouraged humans to become objective, while staying home and working at low-interdependency tasks promoted subjectivity among women. Today more women are drawn into jobs producing for the marketplace, they too are increasingly objective. They are encouraged to “think like a president of a company.” Conversely, as more men stay home, undertaking a greater share of the housework, their need for “objectivity” is lessened. They are “subjectivized.” Tomorrow, as many Fourth Wave people divine their lives between working part-time in big, interdependent companies of organizations and working part-time in big, interdependent companies or organizations and working part-time for self and family in small autonomous, prosuming units—we may well strike a new balance between objectivity and subjectivity in both genders. Instead of finding “male” attitude and “female” attitude, neither of them well-balanced, the system may reward people who are healthily able to see the World though both perspectives. Objective subjectivists—and vice versa. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

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In short, with the rising importance of prosumption to the overall economy, we touch off another racing current of psychological change. The Combined impact of the basic changes in production and prosumption added to the deep changes in child-rearing and educations, promises to remake our social character at least as dramatically as the Third Wave did 350 years ago. A new social character is cropping up in our very midst. In fact, even if every one of these insights were to prove mistaken, if everyone of the shifts we are beginning to see were to reverse itself, there is still one final, giant reason to expect an eruption in the psycho-sphere. That reason is summed up in the two words “communications revolution.” Human conflict has reached its most violent expression in the war [WWII staggering planetary dimensions and unheard-of scientific destructiveness. However, it helped to quicken the dawn of a say when the soldier’s sword and the airman’s bomb will be found only in such places as the “Chamber of Horrors” at Madam Tussaud’s Museum in London. Such extreme violence was an evolutionary necessity to convince one that one must cease to tolerate war, that one must find a more refined—that is, more mental—method of carrying on one’s struggles, that one must come into the consciousness of the World citizenship, and that one must create international institutions commensurate with such a border consciousness. Such thoughts have begin to circulate within one’s consciousness, but they will circulate forcibly only whilst the horrors of the last was are still easily remembered. It would be wiser and prudent to realize that a long night must precede this full dawn. A fresh generation or two will not feel the force of this remembrance, and then passions which breed war may overcome it and prove stronger than whatever mechanical organization to preserve itself society may have brought into being for itself-protection. This is so because sustained thought is creative and returns to us, in part, in the events which meet us as we travel through life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

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Nevertheless, we have indeed started to move onward and upward to that degree of ethical maturity which shall surely come when we shall have controlled these passions sufficiently to fight our quarrels around a conference table and not on a battlefield and which shall transform history from a record of national warfare into a record of international welfare. Morality constrains individuals to serve the interests of power for the collective, in the way cells serve the interests of power for the individual. The man may be dangerous, but he expects the parts of his body to be law-abiding If one of his cells decides to follow its own lights, the man will correctly see this s a danger to the whole, will call it a “wild” cell, a cancer and if he can, he will destroy it. It has always been in the interest of power to conceal that morality as its handmaiden; we are trained by power to be blind to this subservice. The official version is as follows: Morality is independent of power. It may be overcome by power but never invalidated by power. The paradigm of morality is a human with a principle saying no to a human with a gun. It is always possible to say not to evil. That refusal is authorized by conscience, the voice of God within us. We know that some things must not be done. Every human is responsible, is accountable to one’s fellow humans and to God. We are justified, by these lights, in ignoring people who say no. It is a lie: To be moral is to be subject to restraint; to be sovereign is to do as one sees fit. The United States of America does not want its ministers and generals to say no; once the course of action has been set, it expects them to follow through. We expect our lieutenants to do what their captains tell them to do. And we have any number of trained and loyal officers ready to perform as ordered when ordered to launch the missiles, which can harm millions. Is it really a paradox that the first practical step in forging an armour for such self-protection against war must necessarily be a moral and not a physical one? #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

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There must be deep unflinching sincerity behind the will for peace. We yearn for a war-proof World; but when we come to consider the practical means of protecting human kind from further wars, we shall discover that insofar as they are not counterweighted with ethical principles and psychological understanding also, they may become as dangerous to us through creating a false sense of safety as the Old League of Nations become for a similar reason. One of the half-conscious tasks which destine in the war’s hands was to show the World’s face to itself. In the result it unmarked a gargoyle before an affrighted audience. For instance, when the League of Nations was denounced as a humbug, we tuned our ears away. Yet, this individual was not wrong as he was not quite right. For those who know what really went on behind its public conferences and pleasant speeches, know also that too much unscrupulous intrigue, political greed, and ethical insincerity were covered by its fine verbal façade of idealism and morality. Not that the basic conception of a League of Nations was a bad one; one the contrary, it was magnificent! However, it was one thing to invent machinery to check the outbreak of war and quite another to find the mental outlook large enough to work such machinery. For the new institution itself did not change their old outlook. Geneva witnessed both the birth of a great idea and death of a grand hope. The League perished because it put heads together but not hearts. It was to be expected that a machine of the character of the League of Nations would work badly at first, but it was not expected that it would ignominiously fail to work at all. Only a few anticipated this failure. They were the few who comprehended that the mental reality behind a thing is more formidable and important than its material appearances, that the inevitable karma of so much past aggression, exploitation, cruelty, and selfishness could not be easily circumvented without a real change of heart. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

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Th League of Nations was only an idea. It never came to life because it was never given the chance to do so. And it was never given the change because each of its members thought of its own country first and the League second, because each brought its nationalistic interest right into the League chambers and kept them there as the foremost purpose of its presence, because none had the consciousness of really being what all pretended to be—a untied commonwealth. We, however, have the splendid chance to make it some kind of arrangement which will honestly carry out its takes of preventing aggressive war and not merely talk about doing so, which will comprehend that the duty of stronger nations is to protect the weaker ones and not to exploit them, must paradoxically be one of the products of this terrible times. A supermajority is Germany contributed to this stabilization by promoting their country and their products, which allows their economy to overcome a depression and become one of the greatest nations in the World. Undoubtedly, the question of the ethical content—the question of what one must do—has already and persistently arisen in the minds of many readers. This question was lot left totally unanswered; but the answer—that we must become what we essentially are, persons—is so formal that it does not offer any concrete advice. Yet such advice is necessary for the life of humans. So also are principles, which at the same time abstract and concrete, so that support for moral decisions can be derived from them. Are there such principles of moral action? If so, how can they be related to the ever changing conditions of existence? Is not ethical relativism the only possible answer, even in view of the unconditional character of the moral imperative? The first problem is to consider the beneficial aspects and the limitations of ethical relativism. For relativism is the predominant ethical theory and, in many respects, also a widespread moral practice. The facts that support this theory are obvious. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

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The pronounced difference between primitive and modern ethics and between Western and Eastern, feudal and bourgeois, liberal-humanist and neo-collectivist morality, and the difference in ethical attitudes to the same event in the same locality by diverse social strata, diverse religious groups, and diverse generations strongly support ethical relativism. For certain time anthologist dealing with primitive cultures were the champions of ethical relativism. Ever since the eighteenth century, anthropological research has shown a particular interest in the ethics of primitive humans. Their morality was supposed to demonstrate the conditioning of our own ethical ideas, whether feudal or bourgeois, Christian or humanist. Particular laws pertaining, for example, to killing, stealing, and lying, and so forth, in one culture were compared with corresponding but different (and sometimes contradicting) laws in another culture, and the conclusion was drawn that there is no common ground in ethical thought among separated cultures. Ethics, according to this view, is culturally conditioned, and therefore ethics of different cultures are as different as the cultures themselves. In both cultural anthropology and popular understanding, such concepts are still widespread despite the fact that a sharp reaction has arisen against the primitive character of this method. We have learned (partly thought the insight that a living reality is a structural unity, a Gestalt, and not a mechanical composite) that cultures are wholes, and that we cannot compare parts of them with parts of others, but must understand the significance of the particulars in the light of the whole. Then we may discover that the contrast of ethical demands in separated cultures is not a contradiction, but a different expression of a common fundamental principle. Ignorance of this insight has produced much naïve relativism in popular thought and unfortunately also among scholars when they unintentionally become philosophers. The method of structural analysis is a warning against a primitive use of the “primitives” in the argument for ethical relativism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

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A beneficial and constructive criticism of the relativistic theories is embodied in the doctrine of the natural moral law. It is a very old, famous, and still rather vital theory that humans by nature (in Christianity by creation) have an awareness of the universally valid moral norms. To every human this awareness is potentially given, even though actually distorted by culture, education, and one’s existential estrangement from one’s true being. This classical theory of natural law has only laws of nature in the ordinary sense of the word. Natural law in our context is the law of moral reason or, as Kant calls it, “practical reason.” For Sotic thought it has a common source with the physical laws in the divine logos, who is creatively present both in the laws of nature and in the natural moral laws of the human mind. Christianity accepted the Sotic doctrine, and most systems of religious thought have developed similar concepts. It is a general and unavoidable human problem, present in the quest for truth as well as in the demand for justice. You are singing, little dove, on the branches of the silk-cotton tree. And there also is the cuckoo, and many other little birds. All rejoicing, the songbirds of our God, our Lord. And our goodness has her little birds, the turtledove the redbird, the black and yellow songbirds, and the hummingbird. These are the birds of the beautiful goddess, our Lady. If there is such happiness among the creatures, why do our hearts not also rejoice? At daybreak all is jubilant. Let only joy, only songs enter our thoughts. Depression can make some people stronger individual somehow. They learn how to handle that kind of thing. People have to develop skills and abilities that they otherwise would not. And sensitivities too. It will make some people more compassion. Because it is like of it, they know what is it like to go through something that that and are more curious about other people and what they are going through. They are also more intent in trying to make some meaning out of the whole thing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

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Many people in the World today are frequently harassed by others simply because they look different, and it makes some who all look alike want to target this people and make life hard on them. Also, when people’s way of life is stifled, and they see themselves as being depressed, to down play it, they are socially engineered to say that they are just sad. And several people do not want to go on medication and try to wait for the situation to end, but many times it does not. Look, you cannot change the people around you and maybe you do not want weekly or daily appointments to talk about your problems. Keeping a journal in a locked box might be helpful so others cannot read your intimate thoughts. A lot of doctors think that a low dose of Prozac is sufficient to cure a small dose of sadness and anxiety. It may work for a while, but if the situation is ongoing, and you are having trouble sleeping, it may be a good idea to talk to your primary care physician. I have found that Desyrel (generic form is Trazodone) is very helpful. However, you may need to take a few weeks off from school or work to let your body adapt to the medication. And do not operate any heavy machinery, nor cook, or do anything that requires you attention, including going on dates or watching child. It is best taken at bed time, and allow yourself to rest. Even when you feel you are alert, have someone accompany you to make sure you are safe to drive. When you sleep, it allows your brain to recharge, rest and heal. You also get to forget about what is going on around you. (However, talk to your doctor first and never take anyone else’s medication!) Overall, sometimes it is best to get out of toxic situations by moving or transferring schools. It is often said, “You cannot runaway from your problems,” but you certain may need to get out of a toxic environment that is abusive and detrimental to your health. If you are having problems with your neighbours, friends, or at school, it is a good idea to talk to your parents or spouse to see how they can accommodate you, of if you can move in with a relative. Things change when you re around people who love and care about you. The probability of suicide is determined by how attached a person is to such social groups as the family, religious institutions, and community. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

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The more thoroughly a person belongs, the lower the risk of suicide. Conversely people who have poor relationship with their society are at greater risk of killing themselves. Remember, even the government is warning people, it may not be you with the problem, you could be fine, it may be the group you need to get away from and there are resources to help you. O House of America, come and let us walk in the light of the Lord. And the stability of thy times shall be abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge, and reverence for the Lord which is His treasure. And David had prospered in all his ways, and the Lord was with Him. He hath delivered my life in peace so that none came nigh me, for there were many that strove with me. And the people said unto Saul: Shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great deliverance in America? Far from it, as the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to ground, for with God’s help hath he wrought this day. So the people rescued Jonathan that he died not. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto America, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall vanish. Thou didst turn for me my mourning into dancing; Thou didst loose my sackcloth, griding me with gladness. The Lord thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but the Lord thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because the Lord thy God loved thee. Then shall the maiden rejoice in the dance, young men (and women) and their elders shall together make merry; for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them and make them rejoice after their sorrow. “And [God Who provides seed for the sower and bread for eating will also provide and multiply your [resources for] sowing and increase the fruits of your righteousness [which manifests itself in active goodness, kindness, and charity]. Thus you will be enriched in all things and in every way, so that you can be generous, and [your generosity as it is] administered by us will bring forth thanksgiving to God. For the service that the ministering of this fund renders does not only fully supply what is lacking to the saints (God’s people), but it also overflows in many [cries of] thanksgiving of God.” reports 11 Corinthians 9. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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WINDSOR HOMES

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