The real community of humans, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers of all humans to the extent they desire to know. The face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the World was mad in the past; humans always though they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all. Many students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated. The best they can do is point out all the opinions and cultures there are and have been. What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others? Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more of less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others, the warlike, in others industrious. As a nation, we began with the model of the rational and industrious human, who was honest, respected the laws, and dedicated to the family. Above all one was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodies it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal.” A powerful attachment to the letter and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each humans’ reason, was the goal of the education of democratic humans. This called for something very different from the kinds of attachment required for traditional communities where myth and passion as well as severe discipline, authority, and the extended family produced an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism, unlike the reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty—not so much to the country but to the form of government and its rational principles—required in the United State of America. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

There is no enemy other than the human who is not opened to everything. However, when there are no shared goals or visions of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible? Hobbes and Locke, and the American Founders following them, intended to palliate extreme beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, which lead to civil strife. The members of sects had to obey the laws and be loyal to the United States of America’s Constitution; if they did so, other had to leave them alone, however distasteful their beliefs might be. The insatiable appetite for freedom to live as one pleases thrives on this aspect of modern democratic thought. In the end it begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all. The effective way to defang the oppressors is to persuade them they are ignorant of the good. History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice. We should not be ethnocentric, a term drawn from anthropology, which tells us more about the meaning of openness. We should not think our way is better than others. Then intention is not so much to teach the students about other times and places as to make them away of the fact that their preferences are only that—accidents of their time and place. Their beliefs do not entitle them as individuals, or collectively as a nation, to think they are superior to anyone else. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one. The dominant majority gave the country a dominant culture with its traditions, its literature, its tastes, its special claim to know and supervise the language, and its Protestant religions. The reactionaries did not like the suppression of class privilege and religious establishment. For a variety of reasons, they simply did not accept equality. Critics knew full well that the Constitution’s heart was a moral commitment to equality and hence condemned segregation. The Constitution was not just a set of rules of government but implied a moral order that was to be enforced throughout the entire country. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The Americans who were demanding civil rights, were the true Americans because they understood that equality belongs to them as human beings by natural and political right. It was a demand for American identity. However, with history, nothing has taken place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas. None of this means much, partly because little attention has been paid to what is required in order truly to convey the spirit of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone, partly because the students see no relevance in any of it to the lives they are going to lead or to their prevailing passion. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise humans in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life—except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. Gone is the real historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hour from each busy day in which “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.” Some critics of the United States of America’s Constitution, which provided rights for all citizens, truly believed that some people were inferior to them, and they thought that Jim Crow was necessary, as it was part of their unique way of life. Different strokes for different folks. Like said before, the only way to defang them is not with hate, but to show them the beauty of equality. The point is to persuade students to recognize that there are other ways of thinking and that Western ways are not always better. It is again not the content that counts but the lesson to be drawn. Such requirements are part of the effort to establish a World community and train its members—the person devoid of prejudice. However, if the students were really to learn something of the minds of any of these non-Western cultures—which they do not—they would find that each and every one of these cultures is ethnocentric. All of them think their way is the best way, and all others are inferior. Western phenomenon, and in its origin is obviously connected with the search for new and better ways, or at least for validation of the hope that our own culture really is the better way, a validation for which there is no felt need in other cultures. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

The reason for the non-Wester closedness, or ethnocentrism, is clear. Humans must love and be loyal to their families and their peoples in order to preserve them. Only if they think their own things are good can they rest content with them. A father must prefer his child to other children, a citizen his country to others. That is why there are myths—to justify these attachments. And a man needs a place and opinions by which to orient oneself. This is strongly asserted by those who talk about the importance of roots. The problems of getting along with outsiders is secondary to, and sometimes in conflict with, having an inside, a people, a culture, a way of life. A very great narrowness is not incompatible with the health of an individual or a people, whereas with great openness it is hard to avoid decomposition. When people take on the good from another culture, this may be considered a dangerous business because it tends to weaken wholehearted attachment to their own, hence to weaken their peoples as well as to expose themselves to the anger of the family, friends, and countrymen. Loyalty versus quest for the good introduced an unresolvable tension into life. However, the awareness of the good as such and the desire to possess it are priceless humanizing acquisitions. Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys both one’s own and the good. True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness. A proper historical attitude would lead one to doubt the truth of historicism (the view that all thought is essentially related to and cannot transcend its own time) and treat it as peculiarity of contemporary history. Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether humans are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation. Prejudices, strong prejudices, are visions about the way things are. They are divinations of the order of the whole of things, and hence the road to a knowledge of that whole is by way of erroneous opinions about it. Error is indeed our enemy, it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. The mind that has no prejudices at outset is empty. It can only have been constituted by a method that is unaware of how difficult it is to recognize that a prejudice is a prejudice. Without getting misty-eyed about it, I think we can fairly say that universities have a sacred responsibility to define for their society what is worthwhile knowledge. These definitions are most clearly visible in university catalogues, where you will find lists of courses, subjects, and “fields” of study. Taken together, they amount to a certified statement of what the university thinks a serious student ought to think about. In what is omitted from a catalogue, you may also learn what a serious student need not think about. However, these are bad times for scrupulous efforts at gatekeeping, and, happily, many universities are now busily engaged in rewriting their catalogues. Some tend to think that living in California; Florida, and other warm climates tends to shrivel the brain and makes people dumber than those living in colder climates, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Iowa. There was a study by two doctoral students at Texas Technical University who found that the ten states with the highest average SAT scores all had cold winters. Indeed, every state with an average of 540 or higher on both the verbal and quantitative parts of the SAT had an average higher temperature in January of less than 42 degrees Fahrenheit. At the other end, five of the ten states with the lowest SAT scores were warm-weather states. Moreover, temperature has a significant relationship to SAT scores even when the researchers took into account such factors as per-pupil expenditures on schooling. So there! Now, there is also an important reason to keep authority figures on the right side of the law. Not only will it accord them more respect, but also more compliance. In the face of what they construe to be legitimate authority, most people will do what they are told. Or, to put it in another way, the social context in which people find themselves will be a controlling factor in how they behave. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Many people who consider themselves scientists, are not. Dr. Freud’s work is exemplary—indeed, monumental—but scarcely anyone believes today that Dr. Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Webber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing was weaving narratives about human behavior. Their work is a form of storytelling, not unlike conventional imaginative literature although different from it in several important ways. The work of these people is called storytelling because this suggest that an author has given a unique interpretation to a set of human events, that one has supported one’s interpretation with examples in various forms, and that one’s interpretation cannot be proved or disproved but draws its appeal from the power of its language, the depth of its explanations, the relevance of its examples, and the credibility of its theme. And all of this has an identifiable moral purpose. The words “true” and “false” do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no postulates in which they are embedded. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researchers. Quite like a piece of fiction. There is more hypocrisy in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in some of our philosophies. What we know about ourselves—can be more terrifying than what we do not know. Most of us generate piles of junk—unconvincing stores without credible documentation, sound logic, or persuasive argument. Books are, in many cases, written by men and women who are concerned not to improve scholarship but to improve social life. Thus, the purpose of doing this kind of work is essentially didactic and moralistic. The purpose of social research is to rediscover the truths of social life; to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people; and finally, to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity. Specifically, the purpose of media ecology is to tell stores about the consequences of technology; to tell how media environments create contexts that may change the way we think or organize our social life, or make us better or worse, or smarter or dumber, or freer or more enslaved. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Sometimes the stories media ecologists have to tell are rather more important than those of other academic storytellers—because the power of communication technology to give shape to people’s lives is not a matter that comes easily to the forefront of people’s consciousness, though we life in an age when our lives—whether we like it or not—have been submitted to the demanding sovereignty of new media. And so we are obligated, in the interest of humane survival, to tell tales about what sort of paradise may be gained, and what sort lost. We will not have been the first to tell such tales. However, unless our stories ring true, we may be the last. Now the TV tends to be a beast, too, as so many people know. The TV news media is usually there to frame certain stories they way they feel will be more entertaining, and they will also suppress or ignore others when they are involved in the corruption or paid to cover it up. To fight corruption, people need to learn the legal system, its tactics, and their means of manipulating media. To learn these, individuals have to restructure their mind and conceptions. And so to stand against the enemy, many engage of the process of self-destroying what remained of their own culture. When news television crews learn of a struggle they want to profit from, reporters are flown out from Hollywood and other areas to shoot images following the networks news guidelines for “good television” and “balanced reporting.” When it comes to the people, they often juxtapose with the people, others in suits and ties, who are responsible government officials concerned about jobs, and a lot of savage-looking types in funny clothes, speaking jive about their land, which does not seem credible because they way the people are dress and the emotions of their language. People are most likely to believe a professional in a suit, than someone who is wearing regular clothes and has been a victim of crime.  After 40 million viewers see a Caucasian, modishly dressed TV newsman explain the crosscurrents in the struggle, and plaintively ask whether something of an earlier culture could not be permitted to remain, he finishes his report by saying, “From Sacramento, California, this is John Doe reporting.” This is followed by a commercial for the need to build affordable housing, how it creates jobs, and how green energy will be used to power the buildings during this energy crisis. The next is a story talking about gas prices and the need to suspend the gas tax. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Surely this story and the advertisements did not help the people concerned about their land. It was certain that they did not come through as well as the businessmen, the government officials and the reporter’s objective, practical analysis. They were attempting to convey something subtle, complex, foreign and ancient through a medium which did not seem able to handle any of that and which is better suited to objective data, conflict and fast, packaged information. When a struggle is revealed, usually the people become fixed into the model of artifact. The medium cannot be stretched to encompass their message. On the other hand, what if one had four minutes, or even one minute, to convey the essence of a product? A BMW? A stereo set? A toy? Could one accomplish that efficiently? One certainly could. It is obvious that a product is a lot easier to get across on television than a several acres of land or a cultural mind-set. Understanding cultural ways enough to care about them requires understanding a variety of dimensions of nuance and philosophy. You do not need any of that to understand a product, you do not have problems of subtlety, detail, time and space, historical context or organic form. Products are inherently communicable on television because of their static quality, sharp, clear, highly visible lines, and because they carry no informational meaning beyond what they themselves are. They contain no life at all and are therefore no capable of dimension. Nothing works better as telecommunication that images of products. Might television itself have no higher purpose? Most Americas, whether on the political left, center, or right, will argue that technology is neutral, that any technology is merely a benign instrument, a tool, and depending upon the hands into which it falls, it may be used one way or another. There is nothing that prevents a technology from being used well or badly; nothing intrinsic in the technology itself or the circumstances of its emergence which can predetermine its use, its control or its effects upon individual human lives of the social and political forms around us. The argument goes that television is merely a window or a conduit through which any perception, any argument or reality may pass. It therefore has the potential to be enlightening to people who watch it and is potentially useful to democratic process. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You have to accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers’ behavior becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. Once technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbolic relationships among technologies themselves. If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people’s thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behavior in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction. In all of these instances, the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the World, the way it will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends. And so it is with television. Far from being “neutral,” television itself predetermines who shall use it, how they use it, what effects it will have on individual lives, and, if it continues to be widely used, what sorts of political forms will inevitably emerge. Television is not reformable. If our society is to return to something like sane and democratic functioning, it must be gotten rid of totally. This is not about the television itself. It is about a process, already long underway, which has successfully redirected and confined human experience and therefore knowledge and perceived reality. We have all been moved into such a narrow and deprived channel of experience that a dangerous instrument like television can come along and seem useful, interesting, sane and worthwhile at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control. Television has been used and expanded by the present powers-that-be, and that was inevitable, and it should have been predictable at the outset. The technology permits of no other controllers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

One also has to worry about the effects of television upon individual human bodies and minds, the effects which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium. Furthermore, television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all humans understanding within a rigid channel. And as mentioned before, these aspects of television are reformable. What is revealed, however, is that there is ideology in the technology itself. To speak of television as “neutral” and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as social media. The medium is the message. Many do not recognize the transformative power of new communication technologies. They need to come with a warning about the threat the power poses—and the risk of being oblivious to that threat. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with on and through which the American way of life was formed and is changing. When people start debating (as they always do) whether the medium’s effects are good or bad, it is the content they wrestle over. Skeptics, with equally good reason, condemn the crassness of the content, viewing it as signaling a “dumb down” of culture. One side’s abundant Eden is the other’s vast wasteland. The Internet is the latest medium to spur this debate. In the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the World, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we us it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts. Rather, they alter patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Our focus on a medium’s content can blind us to these deep effects. We are too busy being dazzled or distributed by the programming to notice what is going on inside our heads. In the end, we come to pretend that the technology itself does not matter. It is how we use it that matters, we tell ourselves. The technology is just a tool, inert until we pick it up and inert again once we set it aside. We are too prone to make technological instruments, like guns, scapegoats for the sin of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value. However, it is also our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that count, which is the numb stance of the technological idiot. People have been replacing God with false idols and that is the problem. So many people say they believe in God, but so few read the Bible or pray daily. They are too busying watching TV and using the Internet to. Many people are essentially being sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine because is it calmly, coldly, discounting their memory circuits that control their brains. Many people can feel it, too. They have an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with their brains, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. Their minds are not going—so far as they can tell—but it is changing. They do not think the way they used to think, and it can be felt most strongly when they are reading. Several people are no longer able to immerse themselves into a book or a lengthy article. Their minds used to get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and they spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. For many, that is rarely the case anymore. Now their concentration starts to drift after a page or two. They get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. They feel like they are always dragging their wayward brains back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. The Net has become the all-purpose medium, the conduit for most information that flows through one’s eyes and ears and into their mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich and easily searched store of data are many, and they have widely described and duly applauded. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

While the Inter is an astonishing boom to humanity, gathering up and concentrating information and idea that were once scattered so broadly around that World that anyone could profit from them, now all this information is at your fingertips. When one is writing a report for school and using mostly book sources, some of the information may be outdated, and now what they can do it go online, find a reputable site and supplement the new information. It is better than gathering all your information from the silicon memory system. The more people use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some worry they will become chronic scatterbrains. Because of the Internet, some people have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a long article on the web or in print. Even electronic Web pages that are more than three or four paragraphs is too much for some to absorb. They just skim it. There are people that think the Internet is the most creative thing that was invented. One could hardly meet anyone who says it has not been helpful. Many individuals like to go online because they love the ability to review and scan tons of information on the web. It is believed that reading lots of short, linked snippets online is a more efficient way to expand one’s mind than reading a 250-page book. These technopagans also believe in superiority of the Internet and think others have not been able to recognize it yet because they are measuring it against our old linear thought process. In many ways, the Internet is making people less patient readers, but could possible be making them smarter. They have more connections to documents, artifacts, and people, which means more external influences on their thinking and thus on their writing. Regardless, more people know they have sacrificed something important, but they will not go back to the way things used to be. For some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even a little silly—like driving your own car when you can just schedule a ride share service. This generation thinks thing sitting down and reading a book from cover to cover does not make sense. It is not a good use of their time, as they can get the information they need faster through the Internet. These skilled Internet hunters think books are superfluous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

The digital immersion has even affected the way people absorb information. They do not necessarily read from left to right and from top to bottom. They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest. The Net has become essential to their work, school, or social lives, and often to all three. Some log on only a few times a day—to check their e-mail, follow a story in the news, research a topic of interest, or do some shopping. And there are, of course, many people who do not use the Internet at all, either because they cannot afford to or because they do not want to. What is clear, though, is that for society as a whole the Net has become, in just the thirty years since software programmer Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web, the communication and information medium of choice. The score of its use is unprecedented, even by the standards of the mass media of the twenty-first century. We seem to have arrived, at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different types of thinking. What we are trading away for the riches of the Internet is our old linear thought process. Calm, focused, undistracted, the liner mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole our information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better. When people go online, they feel their brains light up, and feel like they are getting smarter. The feelings are intoxicating—so much so that they can distract people from the Net’s deeper cognitive consequences. Many people miss the days of the old box TV with rabbit ears sitting on the floor, and the bulky avocado telephone fixed to the wall in the kitchen with its rotary dial and long, coiled cord. And the den filled with books on the bookshelves—lot of books—with their many-colored spines, each bearing a title and the name of a writer. There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait, years, decades, our centuries even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time, the books whisper. We are not going anywhere. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

The computer, however, is more than just a simple tool that does what one tells it to do. It is a machine that, in subtle but unmistakable ways, exerts an influence over you. The more one uses it, the more it alters the way one works. Reading lone feels new and liberating because for many kids who did not like reading books because of the lack of pictures, not have hyperlinks and search engines which deliver an endless supply of words to their screen, alongside pictures, sounds, and videos. People have started letting their newspaper and magazine subscriptions lapse. Who needed them? By the time the print editions arrived, dew-dampened or otherwise, the felt like that have already seen all the stories. The Internet is exerting a much stronger and broader influence over any one than their old stand-alone personal computer ever could. Their way their very brains work is changing. And this when most start worrying about their inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes. It is not just a symptom of middle-age mind rot. One’s brain is not just drifting. It is hungry. It is demanding to be fed the way the Internet feeds it—and the more it is fed, the hungrier it becomes. Should I check another e-mail, clink another link, look at another web page. Cause I am falling on the floor. I am climbing up the walls and everytime I get a grip, I seem to lose myself just a little more. Cause I am here and it eats me up, but I love the way it feels. I really should not stay online, but I cannot give up. The more it hurts, the more I need it more. It is like an addiction. I want to be connected. Just as Microsoft Word had turned me into a flesh-and-blood word processor, the Internet, one may sense, is turning one into something like a high-speed data-processing machine. Maybe that is a good thing because today more than every we are governed, all over the World, by the students of economics professors. Presidents and politicians, treasury secretaries or ministers of finance and chancellors of the exchequer, central bankers, investment bankers and senior officials of the World’s biggest and more powerful corporations have all dutifully sat in their classrooms listening to them, pouring over their key ideas. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The same goes for brokers, financial advisers and newspaper and television pundits who take these ideas to the public. Unfortunately, many ideas remembered from college days belong in the “obsoledge attic,” or better yet, in the cemetery of ideas. The media is sometimes behind big bloopers. In February of 2004 U.S. president George W. Bush stiff-armed his own Council of Economic Advisers, refusing to publicly back its forecast that the economy would provide 2.6 million new jobs that year. But as The Washington Post reported, That forecast, derided as wildly optimistic, was one of the more modest predictions the administration has made about the economy over the past three years. Two years ago, the administration forecast that there would be 3.4 million more jobs in 2003 than there were in 2000. And it predicted a budget deficit for discal 2004 of $14 billion. The economy ended up losing 1.7 million jobs over that period, and the budget deficit [for 2004]…is on course to be $521 billion. No doubt, some of this is political exaggeration. Any statistic can be tortured into submission. Nor are the torturers jut Republicans. The discrepancies between the forecast and subsequent results began to widen under the previous Democratic administration. It was clear that, even allowing for political fact manipulation, something was seriously amiss. In the words of a Republican White House press spokesman, “The old theories…proved themselves wildly wrong…Nobody saw this happening—not on Wall Street, not Vegas, not Poor Richard, not Nostradamus.” Economists have failed to anticipate more than job numbers and deficits. They have contributed to some of the most publicized, embarrassing financial debacles in recent decades. In the last two months of 2022, inflation has averaged 0.85 percent. If these hikes continue over the next three months, the headline inflation rate would approach 9 percent by spring. If they persist for a year, it would surpass 10 percent—the first time the United States of America would have a double-digit inflation since the early 1980s. President Biden’s entire economic team has consistently played down inflation’s threat all year. They lied about helping the American people through the pandemic and ignored the warnings from former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers that the American Rescue Plans massive size would reduce inflation. Then said initial upticks in prices were simply statistical glitches caused by the dramatic price drops during the pandemic’s initial phase and would fade away once that glitch dropped out of the calculations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

When that did not happen, they started blaming supply chain woes for the problem, even though that cannot possible explain things such as the fast and steady rise in housing costs. When consumers are fast losing purchasing power during two-digit inflation, consumers’ goods industries suffer symptoms of contraction and recession, especially unemployment of capital labor. Two-digit inflation only comes to an end with the advent of three-digit inflation which signals the approaching demise of the paper currency. In the final convulsion of inflation fever, millions of men and women will be in a panic rush to exchange their rapidly depreciating money for real goods. When there are mistakes made during a financial crisis by macroeconomists of the International Monetary Fund—errors can trigger ethnic clashes. Experts also occasionally miss anticipating major changes like the industrial slowdown in 1995, as we have seen with the 2020 pandemic. Along with the hyperinflation of the late 1980s, which we are also starting to see happening now and more so in late 2022-2023. The Fed does not know if it wants to raise interest prices because that will hurt human capital and businesses, while this war is going on and gas prices are skyrocketing, as well as consumer goods and services, and home prices. So we turn to our crucial problem: What to do that is self-justifying when the great social World is pretty unavailable? The essential Hipster problem is: to heighten experience, and get out of one’s usual self. To heighten experience is a common principle of Hipster and Delinquent, but the difference are marked. Among the Hipsters, the craving for excitement and self-transcendence is darkly colored with violence and death wish, and they therefore dread flipping, which they interpret as weakness, castration, and death. Among the younger delinquents, we shall see, it is fatalism, the wish is to get caught and be brought back into society. However, for some others, it is a religious hope that something new will happen, a revival. Not everyone gets self-destructive. The risks of delinquency, criminality, and injury rouse some in a normal apprehension, and they express a human amazement at the brutality and cruelty of some with whom they keep company. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

In taking drugs for the new experience, many largely steer clear of being hooked by an addiction. On the other hand, if the aim is to get out of the World, one can hardly play it safe. So if they push their stimulants, sleeplessness, and rhythmic and hallucinatory exercises to the point of having temporary psychotic fugues, or flipping, it is not surprising. For some people, going to the municipal psychiatric hospital is an expected and regular occurrence. The young actualized Christians seek enlightenment, and the city hospital succors them when they break down. Let us now go back to the jargon. The supreme words are “crazy,” “far out,” “gone,” ‘high,” “gas,” “sent.” These mean not in this World but somewhere, not rational but something. “Flip” is generally used with enthusiastic self-deprecation. When the crazy or far-out moment can be maintained for long enough to be considered a something and somewhere, it is “groovy,” that is, one is like somebody else’s phonograph record. One is “with it” or falls in.” The “it” or the understanding “where” is not, of course, definite, for the pure being has no genus and differentia. “Swinging with it” is the condition of passing from here and now to the heightened experience of “it.” Contrariwise, it is bad and painful to be “nowhere,” to “fall out” (take an overdose), or to be “drug” (dragging). The way of being-in-the-World, that is, is to be either cool and mask-faced, experiencing little; or to be sent far out, experiencing something. However, since the cool behavior of these usually gentle middle-class boy looks like adolescent embarrassment and awkwardness rather growth in experience would not be a more profitable enterprise and ultimately get them much further out. A possibility that has interestingly dropped from popular culture as the exploitation of shared athletic or wildly physical agitation, which belonged grandly to the old jazz-for-dancing and revival meetings. This is certainly an important truth that jive is energetic, in words like “go” and “dig.” (To the jazz-for-listening one is not supposed to respond overtly by more than a quietly tapped toe. It can be hypnotic and speak to the listener like a crustal ball or a foundation or a hearth fire. As it is remarkably thin gruel (no doubt I am tone deaf). For the performer, of course, it provides the deepening absorption of any simple improvised variations, plus the solidarity of the group.) #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

I can think of two reasons why the overtly shared crazy physical rhythms are spurned. First is that this motion is in fact too much in the extremities of the body rather than in the solar plexus, it is too superficial an excitement and more fit for teenagers. The difference is between the lostness in juvenile jitterbugging and the “central” experience of an Eastern Dance or Mary Wigman. Some young men have taken to the Eastern dance, but most who love popular culture do not practice physiological yoga either, just as their Zen is without breathing-exercises or correction of posture. So perhaps another reason for their dropping the old physical jazz and revival is just the opposite, that the display of energy would upset their coolness, it would be embarrassing and make them feel too young. I would wonder if this is not the simple explanation of their disdain social dancing as “dry” pleasures of the flesh; for certainly one of the reasonable uses of social dancing is body contact and sometimes foreplay involving pleasures of the flesh. However, these boys are embarrassed to get excited, to betray feeling, in public, though they are more than willing to get into their birthday suits and exhibit themselves, or to beat a drum wildly in public as an exhibition for others, but not as contact with them. Celibacy necessitated by castration—the excision of the private parts—sends shudders through our modern sensibilities. Yet for more than four thousand years, millions of males have endured this mutilation. The Persians were perhaps its first authors. As an eighteenth-century scholar noted, “The Latin word spade, which comprehended several sorts of eunuchs, was taken from a village of Persia called Spada, where…the first execution of this nature was made…The first eunuch mentioned in the holy scriptures was Patiphor…who brought Joseph from the Midianites…and it is observed…that Nebuchadnezzar caused all the Jewish people, and other prisoners of war, to be gelt or cut.” Throughout the centuries, a large percentage of eunuchs have been youngsters from families whose poverty precipitated the decision to castrate the child. In these cases, parents expected to advance their son’s career in areas closed to all but eunuchs: certain types of domestic service in aristocratic homes or royal courts, or as castrati opera singers. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Other boys were neutered after their enslavement by enemies victorious in wars: Nebuchadnezzar’s policy of castrating male prisoners of war that he might have none to attend him in his private service but eunuchs is a case in point. Sometimes older males voluntarily sought out the surgery, almost always as a means of earning a living as an entertainer or court functionary. Occasionally, men gelded themselves in full adulthood for religious reasons—the Church Father Origen; the obscure Valesii, a heretical Christian scet of the third century about whom little is known; and the nineteenth-century Russian Skopts are examples of these self-determined celibates. Much closer to home and closer in time is California’s Heaven’s Gate celibate computer cult, the members of which committed mass suicide in 1997 and whose leader, Marshall Applewhite, had turned to castration as a desperate measure to obliterate his uncertain sexuality. Hundreds of thousands of people have also been subjected to castration as punishment for imagined or real crimes ranging from “self-love” to nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh. The mentally or physically disabled have been neutered to prevent them from reproducing. African-American men have been brutally desexed by lynch mobs, which some say are starting to pop up again in a different form, terrified of their sexuality. We shudder at castration for a host of reasons. It assaults the private core of human existence. It has almost always been a butchery, performed inexpertly by unqualified quacks and costing the lives of a majority of its victims. Its consequences are lifelong, visible, and far-reaching, affecting appearance, stance, and above all, psychological development and adjustment. We know now how important, perhaps crucial, the male organ is to psychosexual development. However, some men are now choosing to castrate themselves and keep their manly appears, which creating another gender’s private part in its place. Lessons harshly learned from routine circumcisions gone wrong have hardly taught us that gender is not an amorphous variable physicians can successfully alter simply by radical surgery. When we read about eunuchs, whether in medieval China or the Ottoman empire, or as victims of Nazi eugenics, our growing knowledge of the effects of castration colors our perceptions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The issues surrounding castration are complex and as fascinating as they are disturbing. Eunuchs who have left written records reported that they reflected deeply and incessantly on their mutilation. Though a dearth of such documents prevents a thorough study of eunuchs’ reactions, all anecdotal evidence suggests that most of them brooded bitterly about the physical effects of castration and about the contempt and ostracism that mainstream society directed at them, including the mightiest military commanders of the Byzantine empire. However, eunuchs often simultaneously understood and valued another dimension of their condition, seeing it as a means—their only means—of gaining access to certain positions. They or their parents neutralized poverty by trading their sexuality for opportunity, often nit not always realized. Afterwards, eunuchs had lifetimes of confronting the other, less desirable consequences of the procedure. In particular, they had to deal with incessant humiliation and enforced celibacy, though much evidence exists that they experienced longings for intimate passions their ravaged bodies could not satisfy. And these were the luckier men who could at least rationalize about their situation. Others, victims of brute force alone, had not even that consolation. “Search me [thoroughly], O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there is any wicked or hurtful way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting,” Psalm 139.23-24. A light exists in Spring, not present in the Year at any other period when March is scarcely here. A color stands abroad on Solitary Fields that Science cannot overtake but human nature feels. When you pass through waters, God will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you; when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon you. I shall strengthen you, yea, I shall help you, yea, I shall uphold you with the power of righteousness. Behold, all they that contend with you shall be ashamed and confounded; they say that strive with you shall be as naught and shall perish. In righteousness shall you be established; you shall not fear. You who have been forsaken, shunned and hated, now will I make you an eternal pride, a joy to all ages. Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. Every weapon that is formed against you shall fail, and every tongue that shall rise against you, shall disprove. This is the inheritance of the Lord’s servants, and their salvation from Me, saith the Lord. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Custom light fixtures in the bedroom are one of our favorite parts of living at Meadows Residence One at #PlumasRanch.

Other highlights include the walk-in shower and large soaking tub in the owner’s suite. Who knew you could get luxury like this in a single story home?! We did. 😉

Cresleigh Homes make the most enchanting homes you’ll ever find.

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