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It Was Worse than the Thing that Crept into the Shadows
Love, peace, comfort, measureless contentment—that was life on the Winchester Estate in 1888. It was a joy to be alive. Pain there was none, nor infirmity, nor any physical signs to mark the flight of time; disease, care, sorrow—one might feel these outside the pale, but not on Mrs. Winchester’s Estate. There they had no place, there they never came. All days were alike, and all a dream of delight. The big country mansion was so large it could shelter an army. Guests lounging around the house for the big Christmas party. The laughter and music was only broken by the whisper of the wind in the cedar branches, and the scraping of their harsh fingers against the window panes. It had pricked us to such luxurious confidence in our surroundings of bright chintz and candle-flame and fire-light, that we had dared to talk of ghost—in which, we all said, we did not believe one bit. We had told the story of the phantom coach and the wedding that had taken place at the Winchester mansion, and the horrible strange bed, and the farmer’s wife, and the Victorian cottage on the estate. We none of us believed in ghosts, but my heart, at least, seemed to leap to my throat and choke me there, when a tap came to Mrs. Winchester’s door…a tap faint, not to be mistaken. Almost at once, Mrs. Winchester’s housekeeper Miss Eden opened the door and said, “Come in,” but she stood there. She was, at all normal hours, the most silent women I have ever known. She stood and looked at us, and shivered a little. So did we—for in those days corridors were not warmed by hot-water pipes, and the air from the door was keen. “I saw your light,” she said at last, “and I thought it was late for you to be up—after all this gaiety. I thought perhaps—” her glance turned towards the door of the dressing-room. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
“No,” I said, “Mrs. Winchester is fast asleep.” I should have added a goodnight, but the youngest of us forestalled my speech. She did not know Mrs. Winchester as we others did; did not know how her persistent silence built a wall round her—a wall that no one dared to break down with the commonplaces of talk, or the littlenesses of mere human relationship. Mrs. Winchester was the heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. In the morning, she came downs stairs in her unsuitably rich silk lace-trimmed dressing-gown falling back from her thin collarbones, and ran to the door and put an arm around her guest Miss McAnally. The vivid light of pleasure in Miss McAnally’s pale blue eyes went through Mrs. Winchester’s heart like a knife. If she wanted an arm there, it would have been so easy to put one around her neck. “Now,” Mrs. Winchester said, “you shall have the very biggest, nicest chair, and the coffee-pot is here on the hob as hot as hot and my other guest have been telling ghost stories all light. When you get warm you ought to tell one too.” “You’re sure I’m not in your way,” Miss McAnally said, stretching her hands to a blaze. “Not a bit”—Mrs. Winchester said. Mrs. Winchester put her fleecy Maderia shawl round her shoulders. She could not think of anything else to do for her, and she found herself wishing desperately to do something. The smiles Miss. McAnally gave were very quite pretty. People can smile prettily at forty or fifty, or even later, though most young women do not realize this. “As I said before,” Mrs. Winchester confessed, “Everyone has been telling ghost stories all night. I retired early for bed. All of the ghost stories are so beautifully rounded off—a murder committed on the spot—or a hidden treasure, or a warning…I think that makes them harder to believe. The most horrid ghost-story I ever heard was one that was quite silly.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
“Tell it,” Miss McAnally begged. “I cannot—it does not sound anything to tell,” replied Mrs. Winchester. “The only thing that I ever knew of was—was hearsay,” Mrs. Winchester said, slowly, “till just the end. I daresay it would bore you, but it cannot do any hard. You all do not believe in ghosts, and it was not exactly a ghost either.” There was a breathing time of hush and expectancy. The fire crackled and the gas suddenly flared higher because the billiard lights had been put out. We heard the steps and voices of the men going along the corridors. “It is really hardly worth telling,” Mrs. Winchester said doubtfully, shading her faded face from the fire with her thin hand. Everyone said, “Go on—oh, go on—do!” ‘Well,” she said, “twenty years ago—and more than that—I had two friends, and I loved them more than anything in the World. And they married each other. After they were married, I did not see much of them for a year or two; and then he wrote me and asked me to come and stay, because his wife was ill, and I should cheer her up, and cheer him up as well; for it was a gloomy house, and he himself was growing gloomy too.” I knew as she spoke that she had every line of that letter by heart. “Well, I went. The address was in Oakland, near Berkeley; in those says there were streets and streets of new villa-houses growing up round old brick mansions standing in their own grounds, with red walls round, you know, and a sort of flavour of coaching days, and post chaises, and Blackheath highwaymen about them. He had said the house was gloomy, and it was called ‘The Haunted House,’ and I imagined my carriage going through a dark, winding shrubbery, and drawing up in from of one of these sedate, old, square houses. Instead, we drew up in front of a large, smart villa, with iron railings, gay encaustic tiles leading from the iron gate to the stained-glass-panelled door, and for shrubbery only a few stunted cypresses and aucubas in the tiny front garden. But inside it was all warm and welcoming. He met me at the door. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
“He met me at the door,” she said again, “and thanked me for coming, and asked me to forgive the past. They were very glad to see me, and I was very glad to be there. Margaret was not exactly ill, only weak and excitable. I thought he seemed more ill than she did. She went to bed early and before she went, she asked me to keep him company through his last pipe, so we went into the dining-room and sat in the two armchairs on each side of the fireplace. They were covered with green leather I remember. There were bronze groups of horses and a black marble clock on the mantlepiece—all wedding-presents. He poured out some whisky for himself, but he hardly touched it. He sat looking into the fire. At last I said: What’s wrong? Margaret looks as well as you could expect.” “Yes,” he said, “but I don’t know from one day to another that she won’t begin to notice something wrong. That’s why I wanted you to come. You were always so sensible and strong-minded, and Margaret’s like a little bird on a flower.” Mrs. Winchester said, “Yes, of course,” and waited for him to go on. Presently he said: “Sarah, this is a very peculiar house. It is new: that’s just it. We’re the first people who’ve ever lived in it. If it were an old house, Sarah, I should think it was haunted.” Mrs. Winchester asked, “Have you ever seen anything?” “No,” he said. “That is just it. I have not heard nor seen anything, but there’s a sort of feeling: I can’t describe it—I’ve seen nothing and I’ve heard nothing, but I’ve been so near to seeing and hearing, just near, that’s all. And something follows me about—only when I turned round, there’s never anything, only my shadow. And I always feel that I shall see the thing next minute—but I never do—not quite—it’s always just not visible.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Mrs. Winchester had been working very hard—and tried to cheer him up by making light of all this. “It is just nerves,” she said. He replied, “Mrs. Winchester, I thought you could help me, and I do not think I wronged anyone for them to lay a curse on me. I don’t believe in cruses. The only person I could have wronged forgave me freely.” Mrs. Winchester came up with a suggestion, “I think you ought to take Margaret away from the house and have a complete change.” But he said, “No; Margaret has got everything in order, and I could never manage to get her away just now without explaining everything—and, above and beyond all that, she mustn’t guess there’s anything wrong. I daresay I shan’t feel quite such a lunatic now you’re here.” So they said goodnight.” Whenever Mrs. Winchester was alone with him, he used to tell her the same thing over and over again, and at first when he began to notice things, he tried to think tht it was his talk that had upset her nerves. The odd thing was that it was not only at night—but in broad daylight—and particularly on the stairs and passages. On the staircase the feeling used to be so awful that Mrs. Winchester had to bite her lips till they bled to keep herself from running upstairs at full speed. Only she knew if she would not go mad at the top. There was always something behind her—exactly as he said—something that one could just not see. And a sound that one could just not heat. There was a long corridor at the top of the house. Mrs. Winchester sometimes almost saw something—you know how one see things without looking—but if she turned around, it seemed as if the thing drooped and melted into her shadow. There was a little window at the end of the corridor. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Downstairs there was another corridor, something like it, with a cupboard at one end and the kitchen at the other. One night Mrs. Winchester went down into the kitchen to heat some milk for Margaret. The servants had gone to bed. As she stood by the fire, waiting for the milk to boil, she glanced through the open door and along the passage. Mrs. Winchester never could keep her eyes on what she was doing in that house. The cupboard door was partly open; they used to keep empty boxes and things in it. And as she looked, she knew that now it was not going to be “almost” anymore. Yet she said, “Margaret” not because she thought it could be Margaret who was crouching down there, half in and half out of the cupboard. The thing was great at first, and then it was black. And when Mrs. Winchester whispered, “Margaret,” it seemed to sink down till it lay like a pool of ink on the floor, and then its edges drew in, and it seemed to flow, like ink when you tilt up the paper you have split it on; and it flowed into the cupboard till it was all gathered into the shadow there. Mrs. Winchester saw it go quite plainly. The gas was full on in the kitchen. She screamed aloud, but then, she was thankful to say, she had enough sense to upset the boiling milk, so that when he came downs three steps at a time, Mrs. Winchester had the excuse for her scream of a scalded hand. The explanation satisfied Margaret, but the next night he said: “Why didn’t you tell me? It was that cupboard. All the horror of the house comes out of that. Tell me—have you seen anything yet? Or is it only the nearly seeing and nearly hearing still?” Mrs. Winchester said, “You must tell me first what you have seen.” He told her, and his eyes wandered, as he spoke, to the shadows by the curtains, and Mrs. Winchester turned up all three gas lights, and lit the candles on the mantelpiece. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Then they looked at each other and said they were both mad, and thanked God that Margaret at least was sane. For what he had seen was what Mrs. Winchester had seen. After that she hated to be alone with a shadow, because at any moment she might see something that would crouch, and sink, and lie like a black pool, and then slowly draw itself into the shadow that was nearest. Often that shadow was her own. The thing came first at night, but afterwards there was no hour safe from it. She saw it at dawn and at noon, in the fireplace, and always it crouched and sank, and was a pool that flowed into some shadow and became part of it. And always she saw it with a straining of the eyes—a pricking and aching. It seemed as though she could only just see it, as if her sight, to see it, had to be strained to the uttermost. And still the sound was in the house—the sound that she could just not hear. At last, one morning early, Mrs. Winchester did hear it. It was close behind her, and it was only a sign. It was worse than the thing that crept into the shadows. She did not know how she bore it. If she had not been so fond of her friends, she could not have tolerated it. However, she knew in her heart that, if he had no one to whom he could speak openly, he would go mad, or tell Margaret. His was not a very strong character; very sweet, and kind, and gentle, but not strong. He was always easily led. So Mrs. Winchester stayed on and bore up, and they were very cheerful, and made little jokes, and tried to be amusing when Margaret was with them. However, when they were alone, they did not try to be amusing. And sometimes a day or two would go by without their seeing or hearing anything. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
They perhaps should have fancied that they had fancied what they had seen and heard—only there was always the feeling of their being something about that house, that one could just not hear and not see. Sometimes they used to try not to talk about it, but generally they talked of nothing else at all. And the weeks went by, and Margaret’s baby was born. The nurse and the doctor said that both mother and child were doing well. He and Mrs. Winchester sat late in the dining-room that night. They had neither seen nor heard anything for three days; their anxiety about Margaret was lessened. They talked of the future—it seemed then so much brighter than the past. They arranged that, the moment she was fit to be moved, he should take her away to the sea, and Mrs. Winchester should superintend the moving of their furniture into the new house he had already chosen. He was gayer than Mrs. Winchester had seen him since his marriage—almost like his old self. When she said goodnight to him, he said a lot of things about her having been a comfort to them both. She had not done anything much, of course, but still she was glad he said them. Then Mrs. Winchester went upstairs, almost for the first time without that feeling of something following her. She listened at Margaret’s door. Everything was quiet. Mrs. Winchester went on toward her own room, and in an instant, she felt that there was something behind her. She turned. It was crouching there; it sank, and the black fluidness of it seemed to be sucked under the door of Margaret’s room. She went back. She opened the door a listening inch. All was still. And then she heard a sigh close behind her. Mrs. Winchester opened the door and went in. The nurse and the baby were asleep. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Margaret was asleep too—she looked so pretty—like a tired child—the baby was cuddled up into one of her arms with its tiny heard against her side. Mrs. Winchester prayed then that Margaret might never know the terrors that they are hidden from her. That those little ears might never hear any but pretty sounds, those clear eyes never see any but pretty sights. She did not dare to pray for a long time after that. Because her prayer was answered. She never saw, never heard anything more in this World. And now Mrs. Winchester could do nothing for him or her. When they had put her in her coffin, Mrs. Winchester lighted wax candles round her, and laid the horrible white flowers that people will send near her, and then she saw he had followed her. She took his hand to lead him away. At the door they both turned. It seemed to them that they heard a sign. He would have sprung to her side in glad hope. However, at that instant they both saw it. Between them and the coffin, first grey, then black, it crouched an instant, then sank and liquified—and was gathered together and drawn till it ran into the nearest shadow. And the nearest shadow was the shadow of Margaret’s coffin. Mrs. Winchester left the next day. His mother came. She never liked Mrs. Winchester. The something black that crouched then between him and Mrs. Winchester was only his second wife crying beside the coffin. Mrs. Winchester never told anyone the story because it seemed senseless. After hearing the story, Miss McAnally stood at her gaunt height, her hands clenched, eyes straining. She was looking at something that no one could see, and she knew what the man in the Bible meant when he said: “The hair of my flesh stood up.” What they saw seemed not quite to reach the height of the dressing-room door handle. Her eyes followed it down, down—widening and widening. Mrs. Winchester’s eyes followed them—all the nerves of them seemed strained to the uttermost—and she almost saw it—or did she quite see? She could not be certain. However, they all heard the long-drawn, quivering sign. And to each of them it seemed to be breathed just behind them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
It was Mrs. Winchester who caught up the candle—it dripped all over her trembling hand—and was dragged by Miss McAnally to the girl who had fainted during the second extra. However, it was a servant girl whose lean arms were round the housekeeper when they turned away, and that have been around her many a time since, in the Winchester mansion where she keeps house. The doctor who came in the morning said that Margaret’s daughter had died of heart disease—which she had inherited from her mother. But Mrs. Winchester wondered had she had not inherited something else from her father? It was the daughter’s ghost that had followed Mrs. Winchester into her own mansion and now haunts it. The invoking or summoning of spirits by means of hymns, prayers, and acts of worship in spiritistic séances, finds a counterpart in demon possession. Often the demon speaking through its victim in the demonized state will demand the burning of incense as well as worship service. In return it often promises alleviation from torment and powers of physical healing or clairvoyant and prognostic gifs assuring financial income and material prosperity to the enslaved person. Paganism is replete with fear of demons who must be appeased by worshipping and servile obedience. Those who accept magical powers of healing and clairvoyance at the hand of demonic powers may escape the grosser torments of vile spirits only to fall under more terrible bondage and become Satan’s tool to enslave others. In 1892, people in Santa Clara Valley gossiped about Mrs. Winchester. They told stories of how she was involved in the diabolic rites of Freemasonry, arguing that she and the Freemasons were in reality devout Satanists, carrying out blasphemous and hideous rituals beneath the sinister clock of secrecy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
The headquarters of the movement, under the leadership Sarah Winchester, Albert Pike, Gallatin Mackey, and others, located in Santa Clara, California at the Winchester mansion, with celebrants of their Black Masses spread all over the World. Their rites supposedly involved séances. Some went as far to say that the Winchester mansion had an infernal telephone hooked up to Hell, through which the leaders spoke to Lucifer. The stories recounted by the villagers were backed up by Thomas Vaughan, an alchemist. However, if that were true, it would mean the Winchester mansion, Mrs. Winchester, and William Winchester are far older than we believe them to be. The town spread rumors that Black Masses were taking place at the Winchester Mansion under the guise of Freemasonry. It was said that the Winchester mansion was a life and magical order. The emphasis on the former, of living according to one’s real nature. Freemasonry is a nonsectarian fraternity claiming to teach a system of morality veiled in the allegory and symbols passed down from the caste of stonemasons who built the original Temple of Solomon. It allegedly binds its members by an oath of secrecy that imposes death on the betrayer, uses secret passwords and signs, and performs rituals purporting to relate to the history of its origins. It organization is hierophantic, the members receiving the “secrets” of the order, and they pass through the higher degrees. Its antiquity can be documented no further back than the latter part of the seventeenth century. The movement really seems to have gotten its start with the establishment of the Grand Lodge in England, in 1717. From there, it spread to France and Germany, and it did not take long for serious-minded students of the occult, attracted by its ritualistic and secretive trappings, to find their way into its ranks. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
It was also said that Mrs. Winchester was an alchemist and a mystic, and she created her own brand of Victorian Masonry, and taught others how to make gold, heal the sick, and raise the dead. These secret rights had been handed down to her by the Knights of Templar. She was under the tutelage of “Unknown Superiors,” a race of godlike spiritual guides. Many of the people in the town gossiped about Mrs. Winchester so viciously, not only because of her wealth and the mansion larger than anyone had ever seen, but also because of suspicions that her estate was a cover for political conspiracy. The Devil, being a rebel against Heaven, has always been portrayed by the powers-that-be as the chief insurrectionist against the existing political and religious order. The enemy cannot be God, for God is on the side of the ruler. Therefore, the enemy of the ruler must be Satan. It is true that the Winchester mansion is supranational in outlook. There was a secret society that met there dedicated to the scientific and political enlightenment of mankind. To achieve this goal, the group intended secretly to work toward the abolition of all monarchies and the establishment of a One-World government, to be run by those few presently Enlightened, or Illuminati. Since professing such republican ideas could be dangerous, the group was wrapped in a cloak of occultism. Mrs. Winchester adopted the grades of Freemasonry and promised initiates that the magical secrets of the Universe could be revealed to them only when they reached the upper levels. Many believed that William Winchester and Annie Winchester had not died, but gone underground and survived in a network of secret societies, two of which were the Freemasons and the Illuminati, to escape the Assassins. The Assassins were a political group who carried out assassinations while crazed on hashish. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Legend has it that Mrs. Winchester was not only running from the souls of those killed by the Winchester rifle, but to also escape the Assassins. Not only spiritual, but Masonic teachings exerted an influence over the construction of the Winchester mansion. Certain mystical thinkers and practitioners of ceremonial magic believed that Mrs. Winchester practiced a complex system of magic that was a synthesis of Eastern and Western mystical traditions. There is a secret cave inside the Winchester mansion that can be entered only by stooping, but inside a room nearly seven feet high about twelve feet square presents itself. On each side of the entrance a Latin cross is deeply carved in the rock, while within, at the further side, and opposite the door, a block of stone four feet high was left for an altar. Above it, a shrine is hollowed out of the stone wall, and over the cavity is another cross. It is said to be the cave of a saint. Some say it is Saint Michael himself, but no one can be quite certain. And there is a big head inside that craved in the shape of the Devil’s face that the saint put there. For Mrs. Winchester, there were two types of magic. What she called evocation and invocation. Evocation was a calling forth, while invocation was a calling in. In such rituals, the magician summoned the demon or deity while standing within the protection of a magical circle drawn on the floor, the object of the sorcerer being to control and direct the entity to do one’s bidding. She sought to achieve total identification with the godhead, to invoke the god so that it actually took possession of her consciousness. The resulting state experienced by the magician was a type of samadhi, or temporary loss of ego. Mrs. Winchester’s estate possesses the KEY which opens up all Masonic and Hermetic secrets of Freemasonry and all systems of religion. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
It did not take long for rumors to begin to circulate around the town of nightly procession of hooded, candle-bearing figures around the grounds of the Winchester mansion. The reason Mrs. Winchester and the husband of her friend kept seeing demons is because allegedly someone did a ritual on her estate—one of the greatest magical feats ever—the attempt to bring the “Whore of Babalon” down from the Astral Plane and incarnate it in the womb of a living women. Upon hearing of the ritual, someone wrote to the Luciferian Light Group, “Apparently Mrs. Winchester or one of her friends is producing a Moonchild. I am pledged that the work of the Beast 666 shall be fulfilled, and the way for the coming of BABALON be made open and I shall not cease until these things are accomplished.” Mrs. Winchester did not know, but after she left her friend’s house, he managed to blow himself to smithereens while conducting a strange chemical experiment in his basement workshop. Hours later, the scientist’s mother, who lived on the estate, committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping tablets and the baby died from dehydration and starvation, but the baby who is supposed to be the Whore of Babalon still haunts the Winchester till this very day. No matter what people say or believe about Mrs. Winchester, she and her architecture were able to break through the walls of stagnation and bring before the World its first vision of the new Aeon. Once, a tourguide reported while closing the house, he felt something following him, he was alone. He went out onto the fourth floor balcony and prayed into the Heavens one night, “O Thou wicked and disobedient spirit Vinea, because thou hast rebelled, and has not obeyed nor regarded my words which I have rehearsed; I curse thee into the depth of the Bottomless Abyss, there to remain unto the Day of Doom in chains, and in fire and brimstone unquenchable, unless thou forthwith appear here before this Circle, in this triangle to my will.” And he saw Lucifer as a star fall from Heaven, and from Him came to the tour guide light of true salvation. And he was made whole by His infernal wisdom. “My chains lifted off, I was made free,” he said. At night when some drive by, they claim to hear the Devil’s orchestra at that famous time 1.13am. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Winchester Mystery House
Happy Saturday from The Winchester Mystery House ☀️ What are your weekend plans? Hopefully they include walking around these beautiful gardens 😉 https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
The Haunting Sweetness—I Have Nothing to Live for!
It may be—I do not say that it is—but it may be that it is as unreasonable to require a ghost to appear in an atmosphere of cold skepticism as to require a photograph to be developed in a blaze of sunlight. There is a stairway in the Winchester mansion that appears to lead to the ceiling and stop, but it does lead to somewhere. “This stairway,” Mrs. Winchester concluded, with the graceful movement of her arm, which seemed no less natural than the musical quaver in her tone—“this stairway leads to my son’s rooms.” For the first time in my brief experience of Mrs. Winchester the quiet serenity of expression which constituted one of the many charms of her beautiful face left it utterly. The large, deep brown eyes were visible to me now only through the screen of dropping lashes. The coils of her glorious brown hair were beneath my eyes. She had bent her heard with the manifest purpose of concealing some too poignant emotion. For the space of a minute I had to gaze vacantly at the sudden brownness of her smooth brow, the quick curl of her exquisite red lip. The change from the response of manner which made the mere presence of this lady soothing disconcerted me. I felt a sudden wonder that one so fair to behold should have remained a widow. Then I glanced over my shoulder at the stairway. Access to the wide flight of waxed wood steps was denied by a ceiling curiously at the top of the staircase. My eye followed the stairway to the ceiling. It was that of the top floor. Like everything connected with this Queen Anne Victorian mansion, the was mysterious and of a massive scale. They wound about the turn of the stairway at the top floor and were lost to view behind heavy green curtains of velvet. As I gazed curiously, I heard the notes of one of Beethoven’s most mystical compositions coming from the Grand Ball room. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
My ears had but begun to drink in the rhythm when I experienced an uncanny shock of what I can only call suspicion. It was the sort of sensation I had had when, years before, I felt intuitively the presence of a person hiding in my room. The instinct had not misled me then. I was sure it did not mislead me now. There was no shadow of doubt in my mind that behind the curtain above us at the head of those stairs lurked an eavesdropper. There seems to linger in things material some trace of the personality of him or her by whose daily contact they once derived their atmosphere or their essence. I know not what term may best denote the subtle influence of the individual upon surrounding objects. A suggestion of it came vividly into my mind as my eye roved up the stair and was halted by the curtain. All objects here conveyed their messages as plainly as a whisper in the ear. The half light seemed charged with intimations of an unrevealed but not unsuspected presence. The very floor beneath my feet, like the ceiling overheard, was telling some story, and telling it in a way that thrilled. However, that lady at my side was moved, apparently, only by the music floating to us from behind the curtain. “That is William himself playing,” I heard her whisper. I withdrew my eyes from the stairway and gazed ne more at the widow’s pale face. Mrs. Winchester was always lovely to look upon, but each time she alluded to her son the light in her deep brown eyes made her seem young despite the wealth she had acquired. She withdrew noiselessly from the gate at the foot of the stairway, and I had no alternative but to follow. We were in the library below before she said another word. “You shall meet my son at dinner; that is, if he comes down to dinner.” She hesitated. Her soft hand clutched the handkerchief she held. “You will not mention that gate to my son?” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Her eyes framed a piteous appeal to me as she asked that. I bowed my head, fearing lest a word might wound her. “My son is a little—fanciful.” She brought out the last word by a visible effort. “No one goes to the top floor—not even myself—except the housekeeper.” I had no time to reply before she fled, leaving me to work among the books. Instead of delving at once among the mass of papers upon the library table, I mused for some minutes upon the mystery of the forbidden floor. I have never seen the young man who held such undisturbed possession there. My own connection with this household had begun only a day or two before. My presence in the mansion was due to the anxiety of Mrs. Winchester to give the World an authentic biography of her late distinguished husband. His career had been no less varied than it seemed brilliant. This splendour of his Civil War record and his presidency of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company caused his election to conspicuous public posts. He had served his native and in her diplomatic corps. Great financial enterprises owed their success to his administrative genius. One of his speeches was so perfect a specimen of a certain kind of oratory as to have found a place in the school readers. The widow of this brilliant man had been shocked by what he purported to be accurate versions of her husband’s career. These had been exploited in various periodicals and newspapers in a fashion calculated to discredit the motives of the dead man at one great crisis in the nation’s destiny. Mrs. Winchester burned to vindicate the good name of him whose memory was to her so sacred. The executors of her husband’s estate had made me a most flattering offer to undertake the task of a biographer. The prospect of a few months in the country amid surroundings so conducive to my personal comfort was too tempting to resist, quite apart from all considerations respecting the liberal stipend offered by the widow. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
This was the second day of my residence in the Winchester mansion. I had no clue the character of the widow’s son. I gathered from the somewhat vague details supplied by the reticent lawyer who engaged me in the city that William Winchester II, was a gifted but somewhat fantastic young man, who wrote poetry and painted. From the elderly housekeeper who showed me to my room on the night of arrival, I derived the additional impression that he kept much to himself. It now appeared that he barred himself against intrusion behind a gate. For the extreme beauty of the widow, I had been totally unprepared. I had expected to find an ancient dame living in the past. I found, instead, a gracious lady, white-haired, to be sure, but seductive in the willowy lightness of her figure and irresistible through the fresh beauty of her face. It was time to dress for dinner when my preliminary inspection of the late president and general’s correspondence was completed. The intimacy of the relation revealed in the letters with men who have made our country’s history was astounding. It was obvious that a biograph of the eminent statesman would prove highly sensational, disclosing, as it must, unsuspected factors in the growth of our republic from an isolated nation to a position of supreme importance among the great powers of the World. One or two episodes of historical importance with which these letters were concerned made it imperative to consult not only the widow, but the son, before any details could be made public. I had not spent two hours in a study of the documents before me, yet I was already in possession of political secrets for which many a sensational publication would pay considerable sums. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
My appreciation of this face made me a little uncomfortable. What if the facts now in my possession were disclosed prematurely through someone’s indiscretion? I might be accused of betraying a confidence. In much perplexity I restored the bundles of letter to the great desk at which I worked. I must consult the dead man’s son without delay. As I left the library for the dining room my ear caught the strains of music from the top of the house. I halted at the head of the stairs. The keys of a piano were evidently responding to the hand of a master. I could have listened for an hour. The air was quite unknow to me, although the rhythm vaguely suggested the Italian school. The thought flashed through my mind that I might be listening to one of the young man’s own compositions. In the event that, William Winchester II was a genius. My eye met that of the old house keeper. She stood mutely and with the rigidity of a statue, gazing down at my upturned face. I felt a moment’s annoyance. This old lady might be one of those disagreeable people whose aptitude for watching unobserved suggests a tendency to by sly. “Master William will not be down tonight, sir,” she said. Her tone was hushed. Her manner was respectful enough. I could not help thinking, as I studied her lined face, that she alone had access to the forbidden floor. With her last word she disappeared, and I went on down. Whatever intentions I had formed to discuss the matter perplexing me with Mrs. Winchester herself were foiled by the presence of guests. One of these was a graceful young lady, dark-eyed and tall with a becoming gravity of manner. The other was her father, a local judge, pompous and little, with that self-assertiveness which a career on the bench does so much to develop in a man. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
“So you’re Mr. Axelrod, are you?” he snapped, seizing my hand. “Glad to meet you. I hope you’ll turn out a right account of my old friend, the Senator and President of Winchester Repeating arms.” With that he dropped my hand, or rather flung it from him. I was so extremely amused by his swelling port that I at once forgave the brusqueness of this little judge. One could have forgiven a man with such a daughter. Miss Parfrey soothed where her father ruffled. She deferred where he played bully. But she was hopelessly eclipsed by the dazzling beauty of the brown-haired woman. Mrs. Winchester wore a decollete dress of black and lace, which covered her all the way up to her neck down to her ankles. Her perfect arms were fluttering in motion. Her manifest regret at the absence of her son lent to the smile with which she favored us in turn an inexpressible melancholy that sweetened her face like a perfume. I understood that the judge was a widower. If he could be trying to court our hostess, I wondered. “So William won’t come down from the top of the house!” I heard the judge say as he finished his pot roast. “Gad! He’s behaving like his ancestress.” He looked about him at the rest of us while a broad grin creased his jowl on both sides. I had been exchanging ideas with Miss Parfery on the subject of Venice, but the loud tones in which His Honor proclaimed his impression challenged our attention. “His ancestress!” I repeated blankly, no one else having volunteered an observation. “His ancestress!” repeated Judge Parfrey, attacking the game just set in front of him. “She was to have been married from this very house to an officer of Washington’s army.” Mrs. Winchester proffered this observation in her musical tone. She had not shown much interest in the conversation until now. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
“The Senator told me the story,” proceeded the judge. “The Revolutionary War was raging at that time.” I glanced at the countenance of Mrs. Winchester. A flushed which heightened her beauty a moment before had left her cheeks entirely. “Did the marriage of William’s ancestress take place?” she inquired faintly. “Gad, no!” cried the judge. “Her betrothed came to this very house a day or two before the wedding was to take place—” He hesitated. “And the British captured him?” I suggested. “They captured her,” replied the judge with a laugh. “Her lover caught her kissing Lord Cromwell’s aided-de-camp on the top floor.” “Then she married the Briton instead of the Yankee!” I made the observation as gaily as I could for the sake of lifting the pall which seemed to have dropped upon the subject. My effort was vain, for the retort of the judge seemed to extinguish us completely. “She married neither,” he said shortly. “Until the day of her death she never left that top floor.” I exchanged glances with Miss. Parfrey. Mrs. Winchester too a sip of coffee. The judge, unaware of the mischief he had done stuck to the theme all night. He was still pointing the moral of the legend when his car arrived to take him home. I heard him taking his noisy leave of his hostess at the door, his loud voice relieved at intervals by a brief remark from his daughter. In the matter of apparitions…popular and simple human testimony is of more considerable weight than is the purely scientific testimony. Mrs. Winchester was still very place when she came back to the dining-room. “I think I will say good night,” she observed faintly. I saw her clutch the back of the chair. In a moment I was at her side. “It is nothing,” I heard her cry. “I am afraid our conversation this evening upset you,” I ventured. However, she shook her head. “Arthur’s absence upset me.” I could just catch her whisper. “He seemed very much attached to her—once. Now he will not even come downstairs for a sight of her.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
I understood. I could only gaze in silent sympathy into her face. Then she extended her hand, bade me good night, and left the room. I lit a cigar and made my way to the library. It was close upon midnight as I sank into a great leather chair, yet the thought of bed made me restless. My purpose in coming to this house seemed defeated already. I smoked on in the darkness until I heard a clock behind me chime at the hour. The silver strokes beat the air one after another, until the toll of twelve reminded me that a new day was brining me a duty. I got upon my feet with a disconcerting sense that the location of the electric button that switched on the light was a mystery to be solved. I took a single step toward the window, when a moving something drew my eye to the great bookcase looming in the shadow against an opposite wall. Slowly and steadily the object grew luminous as I watched it. The wraith of a feminine form defined itself to my staring eyes with a loveliness so appealing that, in spite of the thrill, I felt at the root of each hair on my head I would not have sold the sight before me for a bag of gold. It is a mistake to think the giants rumored to lurk the halls of the Winchester mansion were all blood-sucking creatures as the causeway guides say, but, bare in mind they were in drink, were as peaceable as rabbits. I saw a pair of sloping shoulders beneath a firmly chiseled neck. I saw a rounded waist and a delicate hand pressed to a smooth cheek. The long robe forming the vestment of this apparition was twined about the curves of the figure after the fashion favored by all sculptors of Greek goddesses. Only the face was kept from me. I remained for the first few minutes of this experience as motionless as the fantom at which I stared. I did not stir until I saw it glide. The apparition darted and halted, darted and halted, making, it seemed, for the wide door at the extremity of the vast apartment. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
As I kept pace with its advance I marveled at the ethereal grace revealed in every stage of this mute progress. The restless clock seemed eager to accompany us through the darkness, so quick was its ticking to my ear. I had never quivered with so icy a chill as now galvanized my limbs into a kind of movement so like that of this ghost before me that I seemed unearthly to myself. On, on we went, through the door and out upon the rug beyond. Not until the staircase halted the spectre for a moment did it turn. For the first time I looked into the face. Prepared though I was by the unspeakable perfection of form before me for a loveliness of feature which could alone accompany a presence so angelic, the countenance upon which I was allowed to gaze at last transformed me for the instant into a living statue. the chin, rounded with a beauty that told also of strength; the nose, straight, firm, positive, yet delicate, sensitive, tremulous; the brow, noble and serene—these details blended themselves into an expressiveness that caught its quality from a pair of eyes into which I could not look. They did not seem to evade me. The figure kept its gaze upon the floor. The light radiated from the eyes was that, I saw now, which lent its effulgence of the fantom. I realized by a species of intuition that one glance of these orbs meant the loss of consciousness for any upon whom it fell. No one could have endured the delicious shock of so much beauty. I followed to the very top of the next flight of stairs. The fantom climbed another storey, and on I stole. It made for the gated that afforded access to the forbidden floor. There it halted, and turned to beckon me. I saw the folds of its vesture broaden like a wide white wing as the moving arm it waved pointed on and upward. Then it climbed the stair. I was at the ceiling, too, now, and I could not open the door. An instant recollection of the mother’s warning words enabled me to take my eyes from the fantom for the first time. I could not go any further or search for a secret passageway without becoming guilty of a breach of trust. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Yet I could no more have gazed at all this grace and beauty, fantom and thing of shadow though it was, without slavish obedience to its least behest than Paris and the men on the walls of Troy could contemplate the loveliest of women without falling in homage at her feet. I put a hand to my brow as I stole guiltily down to the library with all the silence of the ghost I had just beheld. The spacious apartment allotted to me was directly off the library itself. I had but to grope my way to a corner familiar now and find my bed. I fell upon it like a log. The staring sun roused me with my clothes still on and the vapors of an indescribable intoxication in my head. I made haste to change my clothes. The water of my bath seemed oddly warm, although I took it cold. I was in the dining-room before it occurred to me to look at my watch. It was nearly noon. Master William still will not leave the top floor this day. As I passed Mrs. Winchester, the sweet widow was looking at her garden. “I was afraid you might grow fanciful after that anecdote the judge told us last night,” she began, as I crossed the parlor where she took. “Do you believe in Ghosts, Mr. Axelrod?” I gazed keenly into her eyes for a minute. She was smiling. “Do I look as if I had seen a ghost?” I put the question gaily, but I could feel the beating of my heart. “My family and my fortune are being haunted by spirits—in fact of American Indians, Civil War soldiers, and others killed by the Winchester riles. The untimely deaths of my daughter and husband were caused by these spirits, and some say I am the next victim. However, I have appeased the spirits by building a great mansion for them. As long as construction of my house never ceases, I can rest assured that my life will not be in danger. Building this house is even supposed to bring me eternal life. These spirits are a sort of heirloom.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
I could feel that thrill at the roots of my hair. “And what are these ghosts like?” “These ghosts can be friendly or not—but often show themselves in a variety of ways. They can become visible; they can speak or make noises, touch you or even emit an odor like perfume or cigar smoke, to let you know they are there. Sometimes there is a ghostly mist. The vaporous clouds usually appear several feet off the ground and can move swiftly or simply stay still—almost like it is orbiting. The noisy ghosts have the ability to move or knock things over, make noise and manipulate the physical environment. Sometimes I hear loud knocking sounds, lights turning on and off, door slamming, even fire breaking out mysteriously have all been attributed out to this type of a spiritual disturbance. These poltergeists become strong and dangerous. There are also orbs, they appear as a transparent or translucent ball of light that is hovering over the over the ground. It is believed that orbs are the soul of a human. This is what inspired the window I made. There are also ghosts that form cold spots and are kind of like a spiral of light. There are also demons in this mansion. They have powers to heal people who have been possessed and great supernatural abilities in exchange for worship and yielded service. However, if demon powers heal, they can also cause diseases. Their object is not to liberate the victim but to deceive and enslave him or her. They heal or cause sickness as it furthers their nefarious plans. What is more significant is that even when demons help heal physical diseases, they exact a price either in some type of occult oppression or psychic disturbance in their victim or by causing one to fall a prey to error. Demonic spirits always have Satan’s costly price tag attached to it. Once, I was overtaken by a witch doctor. He drew from a leather bag a bundle of papers on which were green and orange markings, an imitation of Arabic writing. He started to read to me from the book, and before I could stop him, he began nonsense reading in an ordinary voice. Then suddenly his voice changed. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
“He was possessed, and I heard a demon through his lips telling me that I had a sick little girl in my house. (My daughter had been sick for several days after she was born, and as he was a total stranger it was unlikely that he would have heard it. Six weeks later she died,” said Mrs. Winchester. I withdrew to the library without even introducing the subject of that interview with William Winchester II for which I longed. He did not descend from the room above the stairs to the ceiling. I had the dining-room to myself that evening. Mrs. Winchester, or so the housekeeper said, was indisposed. As I seated myself in the library, after a solitary stroll through the shrubbery of the lawn, it occurred to me that, as the authorized biographer of the late General Winchester, I ought to look into his ancestry. It was an easy matter to find the family genealogy among the volumes on the well-stocked shelves. One county history dealt exclusively with the Winchester mansion in which I was now at work. The edifice was venerable—for America—and, inevitably, had served as the headquarters for spiritual séances. I was so deeply immersed in my historical reading as to let three full hours slip by. The stroke of twelve had caught me unawares. I thought of the night before and shivered. Then I switched off the light. The fantom arose from the ground at my very feet! Only the bell in the belfry of the dark mansion tolling reached my ear as I stood rigid in the fantom’s radiant presence. I gazed at the phantom. I was myself and not myself in feeling weirdly, supernaturally energized. The incompleteness of my life was extinguished in the full tide of a holier love than mortals have thrilled to. In the inspiring presence of this wraith, I felt capable of that faith which moves mountains. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The fleshly and the spiritual ceased to contend as I contemplated with reverence with the haunting sweetness before me. I could have conquered the World, founded empires—then I became the greatest of poets, endowed with a genius breathed into me by this irresistible ghost. There surged through me all imaginable ecstasies, glorious powers, finer perceptions than ever mortal had. I understood in a flash whatever in my past had baffled me with the mystery of the Winchester House. Strains of exquisite much floated through the mansion. One does not see a ghost, but surrenders to it as the wax yield to the flame. The occult subjection that results is from dabbling with occult literature. Magic is of a demonic character no matter under what name it is known. It is obvious that there is no mathematical proof that either God or the devil exist. Nevertheless there are many things that point to this demonic nature. The simple principal of cause and effect is hardly ever evident in a tangible enough form to prove by law that magic is the root case of some offence or crime, but also some very beautiful things. I did not come out of this trance until a movement of the fantom intimated subtly to me that I was to emerge from its enchantment. I grew aware that I was following the vision once again through the portal. The transcendent object of my infatuation conducted me straight to the forbidden floor. I was favored as before with its beauteous gesture. No thought of the ban so recently placed upon my presence here was in mind, even had I left any power to oppose my mortal will to this immortal spirit. I followed in unceasingly, unquestioningly. There was no physical obstacle to my progress anywhere. The mahogany entry affording access to the room above the stairs to the ceiling had been thrown open. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
I set foot boldly upon the lowest step of the stair. The first contact seemed to afford me a definite sensation of personality in the very air. I can liken this feeling only to that bitter blast, the vague uneasiness, which is said to disseminate itself through the night as some vast iceberg skirts the coast of San Francisco. I had caught a chill, and I shivered. Nor for an instant did I halt. The stairway did not creak. By the time I had set foot upon its summit I was thrilling to some excitation, breathing in impressions like those one derives from moving passages of poetry or strong scenes in a play. I touched the wall only to find my feelings keener, my sensitiveness to the stimulation increased. All material objects exhaled the mystery stamped upon them by a person or an event in times past of which I was now absorbing impressions. I did not feel that murder had been done here. The tragedy was all of the heart, of the grief of a soul, of the perpetual and impotent longing of one who, loving, poured out an agony of sorrow to walls that caught the mood. The heart that had been crushed was a woman’s. This message, too, I was given by the impregnated air. The curtain at the summit of the stairway was pushed aside as if by a breath from some other World. I had attained a great quadrangular vestibule, tenantless except for the apparition and myself. The ghost, preceding me at an interval of some feet, was kneeling beside a wide window through which the warm night air came gently. I beheld a mass of the flowers in a vase upon a carved mahogany table with marble on its surface. I became conscious of the softness of Persian rugs beneath my feet. I moved as silently as the thing I followed. No attitude could express the forlornness of an indomitable grief more appealingly than that of the kneeling fantom. Magnetized by an attraction that made me daring, I touched the shoulder of the ghost. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The whiteness of one arm extended itself to my face. Slowly the vision grew toward me, folding itself closely about my neck and breast until the ghost literally rested in my arms. I could not see the features of my beloved as her unreal lips sought mine. I could not feel the long tresses I tried to stroke. I spoke no word as I vowed to cherish her in the World and prayed for death that I might be with her in the next. The mental and psychic damage done to me as a result of occultism was immense. I was infected by occultism. The time has passed in which witches and magicians were either burned or stoned to death. We must remember that magic itself is not to be understood by our five senses alone for it is rather a metaphysical and religious and extrasensory phenomenon. The tired moon that drooped prettily in the sky had sent a curious beam down here. My eye, habituated more and more to the sweet obscurity, caught now a sharper outline of the vase filled with flowers. The heavy table showed its carved proportions less reservedly. A mahogany chair, resisting as a sleeping monster might rest, upon the floor entered the enlarging field of my vision. The impression made by all these upon my spirits was one of personality radiating palpably from them. Not, indeed, that the objects had themselves this quality. I mean no more than that they emitted or effected suggestions of a personality with which they had been formerly in intimate contact. The darkness of that apartment, pierced by the beams from the window, seemed laden with such revelations. The great chair told of one who has reposed, and reposed gracefully, in its arms. The vase betrayed a secret it had caught concerning her who once delighted in its shapeliness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Every emanation from the things around me was of evil purport. I was being warned. “And you will cherish me forever, beloved?” How I understood that she had put this question I can never tell. The words were not spoken. The language was not Earthly. A something within registered the appeal and responded to it. I told of my own unworthiness to be made the object of a celestial passion. I confessed my longing to reach the confines of the Universe in some high quest of a Holy Grail for her sake. I received the outpouring of her passionate regret that in an Earthly form years before she had cherished thoughts gross and material, the memory of which left her too sullied for the purity of my faith in her now. And her fantom arms were wreathed about my neck still, and her bowed head pillowed itself against me, and she quivered with ecstasies of which I partook as a leaf rises and falls with the breeze of a summer’s day. And her fantom arms were wreathed about my neck still, and her bowed head pillowed itself against me, and she quivered with ecstasies of which I partook as a leaf rises and falls with the breeze of a summer’s day. I besought her now to look into my eyes. I saw her head denying that petition. I received some mysterious intimation that the meeting of our gaze must entail an indescribable fatality, not to her but to me. I conveyed my sense of joy in such a circumstance. Here was the proof of my devotion awaiting her acceptance. Let me but gaze into those eyes and I would wander forever through the Universe a blissful spirit. However, she only kept her face buried upon my shoulder and held my head with her arms. I had begun a more impassioned plea when she rushed from my embrace, reeling to the window. I saw her fall upon her knees cowering. She covered her face with one hand, while, extending the other, she pointed to some object behind me. I turned and beheld—William Wirt Winchester II! #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
There was no mistaking those eyes, that slight forehead, the delicacy of each refined feature. He was his father’s son. For a terrible moment he and I glared into each other’s faces. I saw him raise an arm. He rushed forward. I threw myself between him and the fantom, but when I directed my gaze to its refuge the object of my infatuation had disappeared. The next moment William Winchester II had me by the throat. Then consciousness left me, but not for long. I was prone upon the floor when my senses returned and the arm of William Winchester II was about my head. “I saw her with you!” He spoke in the musical accents of his own mother, but grief never found utterance so wild. His tone was a revelation. I cried my reply with the voice of a man in panic. “She made your vows of an eternal love and you pledged yours in return.” He bowed his head once more. I realized the sense of betrayal that tortured him. The ghost had proved unfaithful. I was torn with his own jealously, but he proved to me that his ordeal had been worse than mine. “I saw her with you!” he said. “One torture has been spared you. You never saw her when her gaze rested upon—me!” I hated him for a second time. Then I conquered my worst self and pitied him. He had removed his arm from my head and was assisting me to my feet. “We shall never see her again.” It was I who said this. He buried his face in his hands. “She was too timid,” he murmured faintly, “to let us look into her eyes.” The question elicited from me by this remark led to further revelations. He, too, had held mysterious communion with the infatuating wraith; had confessed a longing to reach the confined of the Universe for her sake. To him, too, she had professed regret that in an Earthly form years before her thoughts were gross and material. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
It is conceivable that emotions generated by a passed and passing life may be conditioned by the state of mind at dissolution. The living and the dying set up vibrations in the emotional atmosphere. These continue in agitation. The place grows haunted. An appropriate or corresponding vibration can alone can alone break the spell. When that meets this, the suspended chord is complete and comes to a full close. Or, an emotional scene which has translated itself, so to speak, into terms of a material plane can, like music in a phonograph, retranslate itself back again. I felt now that I had the clue to my ghost. The lady in seclusion on the forbidden floor so long ago had been true to her lover—in her fashion. He had, indeed, surprised her in the arms of another. It was a sentimental accident in her life. She was denied the opportunity to explain. She was possibly the victim of a man’s sudden impulse. My own infatuation with the rare and beauteous spirit had led me far. In any event the longing of the human soul to be understood—the craving of this lady to vindicate herself—persisted while she lived. It was her most vehement desire as she passed away. The very walls, the chair she sat in, the vase in which she arranged her daily nosegay, grew sick with this discarded lady’s longing. If telepathy from living mind to living mind is a force so mighty as to covey a visual image from Santa Clara to Oakland, is it not perfectly conceivable that a telepathic force which has been stored there by the terrific emotional impulse of original crimes—may be powerful enough to produce a visual image? It was so with me. I did not cease my scrutiny of the countenance of William Wirt Winchester II as these thoughts ran riot in my head. His mind was too manifestly overwhelmed by the shock it had sustained. He paled slightly and spoke at last in lone tones. “I have nothing to live for.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
I am enitrely convinced of the existence of the Spiritual World–that there are real intelligences in that World, and that it is possible for them under certain circumstances to communicate with this World.
Summer is *almost* here and it’s getting quite warm at the Winchester Estate! Have you ever experienced the house in the summertime?
Never, Never, Never Invest More than You are Willing to Lose!
Deep changes in the money system cannot occur without threatening entrenched institutions that have, until now, enjoyed positions of extraordinary power. At one level the substitution of electronic money for paper money is a direct threat, for example, to the very existence of banks as we know them. Banking will not retain its position as the primary operator of payment systems. Banks have had a government-protected monopoly in checking-clearing services. Electronic money threatens to supplant this system. In self-defense, some banks have entered into the credit card business themselves. More important, they have extended their reach without automatic teller machines (ATMs). If banks issue debit cards and put ATMs at millions of retail locations, they may repel the attack of the credit card companies. Since debit cards make it possible for the shopkeeper to receive payment instantly, instead of waiting for Diner’s Club or American Express or Visa to remit payment, store owners may not wish to continue paying them a percentage of each sale. Also, something is going on where so major banks have blocked credit unions from linking to their customer’s accounts. Therefore, they cannot use debit cards to transfer money instantly between institution, and this is causing consumers to have to wait days, or weeks for money to reach the accounts of their credit union. So, some people may eventually stop doing business with credit unions, while others stay out of loyalty. There must be some kind of quiet financial storm brewing inside of the credit unions. On another front, banks face attack from a wide variety of nonbanks. In Japan, for example, the Ministry of Finance has qualms about the idea that private companies like NTT can issue value-bearing plastic “notes”—a kind of currency—and operate outside the banking system and its rules. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
If a company can take in money for a prepaid card, it is accepting a “deposit,” exactly like a bank. When the user spends, he or she is making the equivalent of a “withdrawal.” And when the card company pays the vendor, it is operating a “payment system.” These are functions that once only banks could perform. Moreover, if card companies can issue credit to users, as they and the cardholders see fit, unconstrained by the kind of limits and reserves that govern banks, central banks risk losing their grip on monetary policy. In South Korea, plastic money has expanded so rapidly that the government fears it is feeding inflation. In brief, the rise of electronic money in the World economy threatens to shake up many long-entrenched power relationships. At the vortex of this power struggle is knowledge embedded in technology. It is a battle that will redefine money itself. Many governments have made it understood that they do not care for cryptocurrencies. They hype around the high returns from cryptocurrencies has led to more fraudulent “get-rich-quick” schemes lurking in the dark corners of the market. Many countries do not have law to back up investors. Which means, if a large group of investors lose their money—they will be left with no recourse within the current legal framework of the system. Several mutual funds have been told to hold off on sending any new fund offerings based on crypto assets. Cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin in this case, were created as a way to take the power of monetary control away from centralized authorities—like the government and the central bank. So, it is no surprise that the central bank takes issue with not being in control. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Cryptocurrencies have led to an increase in assets that can transfer funds with increased anonymity. There are virtual assets that focus on privacy. If and when things go wrong, decentralized platforms pose the problem of having no single entity to go after. Privacy wallets and other new financial instruments allow for reduced transparency, which, in turn, obscures the flow of finance. There is also a national security angle over here now, there are individuals from intelligence who are involved. As things stand, anyone can launch a new cryptocurrency. There is no national framework defining what a cryptocurrency is, or the minimum requirements for it to be a legitimate investment option. This means that anyone can create a virtual asset, get others to invest in it to hike the price, and then cash out their stake without having to explain why. This is normally what is called a “rug-pull.” After the “founders” or “influencers’ pull out their money, other investors are left holding less than what they originally started with. However, that is not much different than what happened with the stock market during 9/11. Many young and/or unsuspecting investors lost huge amounts of money they worked for, which was never returned. The crypto market s speculative and during the COVID-19 pandemic it saw value surge to new all-time-highs. And, while the worst sees to be behind, there is a risk of sharp corrections that still remains. Just as Bitcoin was recently able to hit $70,000, it is possible that it could sink lower than $45,000. In fact, as of June 16, 2022, 5.10 P.M. EST BTC is down to $20,282.52. Many countries that are subject to capital control, are especially vulnerable to destabilizing effects of cryptocurrencies. Free accessibility of crypto assets to residents can undermine their [emerging market economies] capital regulation framework. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Non-bank actors—meaning crypto exchanges and other blockchain companies offering financial services—are adding to the dollar funding stress by using loopholes in the traditional policy approach to foreign exchange markets. At this stage, it is important to better understand non-bank investors’ role in creating or propagating systemic risk so that policy actions can be taken to smooth out financial risk-taking over time. This cryptocurrency in actions, a new generation of internet-based currencies which have grown in popularity over the last few years. You cannot not touch it or physically hand it over in any way, but you can use it to trade online. In the way, it is very different from the traditional view of banking, where cash, coins and possibly gold might be stacked in a vault just waiting to be withdrawn, but do these new cryptocurrencies represent a threat to those traditional banks? Thus far, the value of many of these cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed. If you had bought $1000 worth of Bitcoin in 2010, that investment would be worth $20 million today. There are even ATMs around for Bitcoin—put your regular currency in alone with your phone number, then get a receipt back for the purchase of Bitcoin. A check of the digital wallet on your phone should reveal your purchase there in the balance. That is causing a major shift in how people can do business and make transactions. Suddenly, the value is able to be exchanged outside of the traditional banks in the flash of a mobile phone. People who could not access trade and finance ten years ago can do so today. This will lift many out of poverty. The major factor is—if they need financing, people no longer have to go to a traditional bank for financing. (I bet a lot of people wish they knew this before they made car repairs.) #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Peer-to-peer networks, including those based in cryptocurrencies, are becoming more common and those who might be turned away by traditional banks now have another way around financing. You can often times use an app on your phone to get a loan, and then take it to a car dealership, already knowing what you can afford, and pick the car of your dreams. Some people even get mortgage loans this way. That is why many traditional banks are feeling threatened by these new cryptocurrencies. However, you can also use these same apps on your mobile phone to get approved for cash loans. Many supports of digital currency and technology believe it should be seen as an invention like the printing press because it has the steam to transform the World of finance and beyond. If banks ignore new consumer behaviours and preferences when it comes to how they transact and transfer money, cryptocurrencies definitely represent a threat to traditional banks. Bitcoin users can handle many of their daily payments needs themselves, without the need for interaction with banks, and avoiding the need to incur bank fees. In the same way, the value stored in PayPal accounts moves outside of the bank’s payment systems, depriving banks of valuable payments revenue. There are a few issues cited with these cryptocurrencies, such as their perceived “haven” status for possible perpetrators of illegal activities, a relatively low market cap (Bitcoin’s is somewhere around $3.4 billion) and a sense of volatility with the value of the currency. That is why it is important to never, never, never invest more than you are willing to lose because it could go to nothing. That piece of advice is something even traditional financial advisors are not willing to disclose to investors. And sometimes after several losses, you need to cut and run before you start to become insane by beating the same horse and expecting something in return. #RandolpHarris 5 of 22
There are many people who absolutely could not wait to find a way around being beholden in some way to a big bank and these people are taking up new options with enthusiasm. Traditional banks and credit unions have often been guilty of customer-unfriendly account manipulations, such as applying debits before credits then charging fees for insufficient funds. (Citi Bank is one traditional banks I recommend, they do not charge overdraft fees. If your funds are insufficient, the check will just be returned unpaid.) However, the other big banks will not be able to get away with financial manipulation much longer because in the digital age, customers can actually see this happening by glancing at their mobile phones. Of course, money, whether in the form of metal, digital, or paper (or paper backed by metal), is unlikely to vanish completely. However, barring nuclear holocaust or technological cataclysm, electronic money will proliferate and drive out most alternatives, precisely because it combines exchange with real-time record-keeping, thus eliminating many of the costly inefficiencies that came with the traditional money system. If we put this all together now, a rather striking pattern becomes plain. Capital—by which we mean wealth put to work to increase production—changes in parallel with money, and both take on new forms each time society undergoes a major transformation. As they do so, their knowledge content changes. Thus agricultural-era money, consisting of metal (or some other commodity), had a knowledge content close to zero. Indeed, this First Wave money was not only tangible and durable, it was also pre-literate—in the sense that its value depended on its weight, not on the words imprinted on it. Today’s Second Wave money consists of printed paper with or without commodity backing. What is printed on the paper matters. The money is symbolic but still tangible. This form of money comes along with mass literacy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Third Wave money increasingly consists of electronic pulses. It is evanescent…instantaneously transferred…monitored on the video screen. It is, in fact, virtually a video phenomenon itself. Blinking, flashing, whizzing across the planet, Third Wave money is information—the basis of knowledge. Increasingly detached from material embodiments, capital and money alike change through history, moving by stages from totally tangible to symbolic and ultimately today to its “super-symbolic” form. This vast sequence of transformations is accompanied by a deep shift of belief, almost a religious conversion—from a trust in permanent, tangible things like gold or paper to a belief that even the most tangible, ephemeral electronic blips can be swapped for goods or services. Our wealth is a wealth of symbols. And so also to a startling degree, is the power based on it. Elsewhere, we find imaginative efforts to compensate for the failures of the mass society’s mass educational system. When mass education was widely introduced, teachers were usually the most literate and educated people in the neighbourhood. Today parents are sometimes far better educated than the teachers to whom they entrust their children to. Recognizing the role that parents can play in promoting literacy by reading to their children, it is a good idea to buy your child a short book to read every month, until they develop an appetite for reading books. Meanwhile, more and more disaffected parents in the United States of America are pulling their children out of school and teaching them at home. They are supported by a growing variety of up-to-date online services and tools. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
One objection to keeping kids home is that they will not learn to get along with other children. However, as public schools decay, and in many places become drug, alcohol and vape-infested and dangerous, parents wonder if the socialization the schools provide is healthy. If parents keep their children at home, they can develop socialization skills by encouraging their kids to play soccer, or, when a bit older, do volunteer work at an NGO where they can meet other young people engaged in community service. Here, once more, we find a pre-industrial practice—most children were educated at home before the industrial era—being transformed to meet post-industrial needs. Charter schools are an attempt to innovate within the system. These are public schools granted a limited degree of freedom to experiment. In the United States of America they still enroll less than 2 percent of American students, and their results are, no doubt, uneven. However, among them we also find many potentially useful innovations. At the Center for Advance Research and Technology (CART) in Clovis, California, twelve hundred high school students, on a 75,000 square foot CART facility, use information technology in a high-performance business atmosphere to help solve real-World community problems. The school focuses on Professional Sciences, Engineering, Advanced Communications, and Global Dynamics. Mentors include local business leaders. Students are encouraged to take part-time jobs and carry out research projects working with adults in business, industry, trade or other services. Within each four clusters of the education, students complete industry-based projects and receive academic credit for advanced English, science, social science and technology. A key mission of the center is to demonstrate to young people the relevance of academic subjects to practical problems, and help them meet expectations and work behaviour for a global job market. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Students thus are invited to invent marketable new products that help solve real World problems. CART students have invented an ultrasonic cane for the visually impaired and other devices for the physically impaired. However, the school’s main output consists of smart young people prepared for twenty-first century realities. Institutional invention and experimentation are growing in other fields as well. Entrepreneurs who make vaccines are rapidly multiplying. Today, more than thirty U.S. business schools, including Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Duke, offer courses in pro-social entrepreneurship. Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley has created a Global Social Benefit Incubator to help innovators apply technology to urgent social needs and to assist them in scaling up their efforts. And, in what many regard as the ideological workshop of contemporary capitalism—the annual World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland—NGO leaders and social entrepreneurs seek to improve the work of existing nonprofits and NGOs by applying businesslike methods to them. Others start new organizations to deal with social problems as they emerge. Both typically rely on volunteers. To that degree, at least, they form part of the non-money or prosumer economy that, as we have seen, creates the social capital and “free lunch” on which the money system depends. The remarkable growth of social entrepreneurship reflects cuts in government-provided, one-size-fits-all safety nets designed for fast-fading industrial conditions. It reflects the incapacity of smokestack institutions to generate imaginative, customized solutions to new social problems. And it reflects the impatience of millions around the World who have given up waiting for governments and formal institutions to solve problems. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
However, in rich societies it reflects something ese. In the past, very few people had the luxury of time, energy and education to devote themselves to imagining and inventing—or fighting for—new institutions for the future. Today vast and growing numbers of people, including the best-educated and most creative among us, have time, money and access to one another through that empowering global change-maker called the Internet. When it comes to life, it is never good to be the first to defect. Theoretical results show that it pays to cooperate as long as the other individuals are cooperating. The single best predictor of how well a rule performed was whether or not it was nice, which is to say, whether or not it would ever be the first to defect. In a business deal, each of the top eight rules were nice, and not one of the bottom seven were nice. In the second round of meetings, all but one of the top fifteen rules were nice (and that one ranked eighth). Of the bottom fifteen rules, all but one were not nice. Some of the rules that were not nice tried quite sophisticated methods of seeing what they could get away with. For example, TESTER tried an initial defection and then promptly back off if one of the managers or other employees retaliated. As another example, TRANQUILIZER threw in additional defections at more frequent intervals, until it was forced to back off by the other’s response. However, neither of these strategies which experimented with being the first to defect did particularly well. There were too many other individuals who were not exploitable by virtue of their willingness to retaliate. The resulting conflicts were sometimes quite costly. Even many of the experts did not appreciate the value of avoiding unnecessary conflict by being nice. In the first round of meetings, almost half of the entries by managers were not nice. But to little avail. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
There is another way of looking at why nice rues do so well. A population of nice rules is the hardest type to invade because nice rules do so well with each other. Furthermore, a population of nice rules which can resist the invasion of a single mutant rule can resist the invasion of any cluster of other rules. The theoretical results provide an important qualification to the advantages of using a nice strategy. When the future of the interaction is not important enough relative to immediate gains from defection, then simply waiting for the other to defect is not such a good idea. It is important to bear in mind that TIT FOR TAT is a stable strategy only when the discount parameter is high enough relative to payoff other parameters. In particular, if the discount parameter is not high enough and the other player is using TIT FOR TAT, a player is better off alternating defection and cooperation, or even defecting. Therefore, if the other player is not likely to be seen again, defecting right away is better than being nice. This fact has unfortunate implications for groups who are known to move from one place to another. An anthropologist finds that a grifter approaches a non-grifter expecting trouble, and a non-grifter approaches a grifter suspiciously, expecting double-dealing. For example, a physician was called in to attend very sick grifter’s baby; he was not the first doctor called, but he was the first willing to come. We escorted him toward the back bedroom, but he stopped short of the threshold of the patient’s room. “This visit will be one thousand dollars, and you owe me three hundred and thirty-three dollars from the last time. Pay me the thirteen hundred and thirty-three dollars before I see the patient,” he demanded. “Okay, okay, you will get it—just look at the baby now,” the grifter pleaded. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Several more go-arounds occurred before I intervened. Six hundred and sixty-six dollars and fifty cents changed hands and the doctor examined the patient. After the visit, I discovered the grifters, in revenge, did not intend to pay the other six hundred and sixty-six dollars and fifty cents. In a California community, grifters were again found not to pay all of a doctor’s bills, but municipal fines were paid promptly. These fines were usually for breaking garbage regulations. This was among a group of grifters who returned to the same town every winter. Presumably, the grifters knew that they had an ongoing relationship with the garbage collection service of that two, and could not shop around for another service. Conversely, there were always enough doctors in that area for them to break off one relationship and start another when necessary. Short interactions are not the only condition which would make it pay to be the first to defect. The other possibility is that cooperation will simply not be reciprocated. If everyone else is using a strategy of always defecting, then a single individual can do no better than to use this same strategy. However, if even a small proportion of one’s interactions are going to be with others who are using a responsive strategy like TIT FOR TAT, then it can pay to use TIT FOR TAT rather than to simply defect all the time like most of those in the population. In the numerical example presented there, it took only 5 percent of one’s interactions to be with like-minded TIT FOR TAT players to make the members of this small cluster do better than the typical defecting member of the population. Will there by anyone out there to reciprocate one’s own initial cooperation? In some circumstances this will be hard to tell in advance. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
However, if there has been enough time for many different strategies to be tried, and for some way of making the more successful strategies become more common, then one can be fairly confident that there will be individuals out there who will reciprocate cooperation. The reason is that even a relatively small cluster of discriminating nice rules can invade a population of meanies, and then thrive on their good scores with each other. And once nice rules get a foothold, they can protect themselves from reinvasion by meanies. Of course, one could try to “play it safe” by defecting until the other person(s) involved in the business negation cooperates, and only then starting to cooperate. The tournament results show, however, that this is actually a very risky strategy. The reason is that your own initial defection is likely to set off a retaliation by the other party involved in the business deal. This will put the two of you in the difficult position of trying to extricate yourselves from an initial patter of exploitation or mutual defection. If you punish the other’s retaliation, the problem can echo into the future. And if you forgive the other, you risk appearing to be exploitable. Even if you can avoid these long-term problems, a prompt retaliation against your initial defection can make you wish that you had been nice from the start. The ecological analysis of the tournament revealed another reason why it is risky to be the first to defect. The only rule that was not nice and that scored among the top fifteen in the second round of business negotiations was the eighth-ranking rule, HARRINGTON. This rule did fairly well because it scored well with the lower ranking entries in the business negotiations, the lower ranking entries became a smaller and smaller proportion of the population. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Eventually, the non-nice rule that originally scored well had fewer and fewer strategies it could do well with. Then it too suffered and eventually died out. Thus the ecological analysis shows that doing well with rules that do not score well themselves is eventually a self-defeating process. The lesson is that not being nice may look promising at first, but in the long run it can destroy the very environment it needs for its own success. Radical egalitarism is the cure for the evils of egalitarianism. Dr. Freud talked about interesting things not found anywhere in Marx. The whole psychology of the unconscious was completely alien to Marx, as was its inner motor, eros. None of this could be incorporated directly into Marx. However, if Dr. Freud’s interpretation of the cases of neuroses and his treatment of the maladjusted could itself be interpreted as bourgeois errors that serve enslavement to the capitalist control of the means of production, then Marx would move in on the Freudian scene. What Dr. Freud said were permanent contradictions between human nature and society could be set in motion dialectically, and in a socialist society there would be no need for the repression that causes neuroses. So Dr. Freud was neatly enrolled in the Marxist legions, adding to the charm of economics that of eros, and thereby providing a solution to the problem of what men are going to do after the revolution—a problem left unsolved by Marx. This is what we find in Marcuse and many others, who simply do not talk about the difficult posed by the contradiction between Marx’s fundamental principles and those of Dr. Freud. Two powerful systems are served up in a single package. Dr. Freud is the really meaty part of the concoction. Marx provides a generalized assurance that capitalism is indeed at fault and that the problems can be solved by more equality and more freedom, that the liberated people will possess all the virtues. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
The genius and audacity of American capitalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men who were quicker and more focused than those of other nations in exploiting the economic possibilities of new technologies is inextricably the reason the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology finds fertile ground on American soil. Among those exploiting them are Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, John Astor, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and many others, some of who were known as the Robber Barons. What they were robbing—it is clearer now than it was then—was America’s past, for their essential idea was that nothing is so much worth preserving that it should stand in the way of technological innovation. These were the men who created the twentieth century, and they achieved wealth, prestige, and power that would have amazed even Richard Arkwright. Their greatest achievement was in convincing their countrymen that the future need have no connection to the past. Third, the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americas with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance was so obvious and promising that there seemed no reason to look for any other sources of fulfilment or creativity or purpose. To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling. There is even an alternative to the painful riddle of death, as Dr. Freud called it. The riddle may be postponed through longer life, and then perhaps solved altogether by cryogenics. At least, no one can easily think of a reason why not. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
As the spectacular triumphs of technology mounted, something else was happening: old sources of belief came under siege. Nietzsche announced that God was dead. Darwin did not go as far but did make it clear that, if we were children of God, we had come to be so through a much longer and less dignified route than we had imagined, and that in the process we had picked up some strange and unseemly relatives. Marx argued that history had its own agenda and was taking us where it must, irrespective of our wishes. Dr. Freud taught that we had no understanding of our deepest needs and could not trust our traditional ways of reasoning to uncover them. John Watson, the founder of behaviourism, showed that free will was an illusion and that our behaviour, in the end, was not unlike that of pigeons. And Einstein and his colleagues told us that there were no absolute means of judging anything in any case, that everything was relative. The thrust of a century of scholarship had the effect of making us lose confidence in out belief systems and therefore in ourselves. Amid the conceptual debris, there remained one sure thing to believe in—technology. Whatever else may be denied or compromised, it is clear that airplanes do fly, antibiotics do cure, radios do speak, and, as we know now, computers do calculate and never make mistakes—only faulty humans do (which is what Frederick Taylor was trying to tell us all along.) For these well-known reasons, Americans were better prepared to undertake the creation of a Technopoly than anyone else. However, its full flowering depended on still another set of conditions, less visible and therefore less well known. These conditions provided the background, the context in which the American distrust of constraints, the exploitative genius of its captains of industry, the success of technology, and the devaluation of traditional beliefs took on the exaggerated significance that pushed technocracy in America over into Technopoly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
In speaking about molecular texture–the ground underfoot, like everything around you, is pebbly with atom-sized bumps the size of your fingertips. Objects look like bunches of transparent grapes or fused marbles in a variety of pretty but imaginary colours. The simulation displays a view of atoms and molecules much like those used by chemists in the 1980s, but with a sharper 3-D image and a better way to move them and to feel the forces they exert. Actually, the whole simulation setup is nothing but an improved version of systems built in the late 1980s—the computer is faster, but it is calculating the same things. The video goggles are better and the whole-body powersuit is major change, but even in the 1980s there were 3-D displays for molecules and crude devices that gave a sense of touching them. The gloves on this suit give the sensation of touching whatever the computer simulates. When you run a fingertip over the side of the smaller nanocomputer, it feels odd, hard to describe. It is as if the surface were magnetic—it pulls on your fingertip if you move close enough. However, the result is not a sharp click of contact, because the surface is not hard like a magnet, but strangely soft. Touching the surface is not hard like a magnet, but strangle soft. Touching the surface is like touching a film of fog that grades smoothly into foam rubber, then hard rubber, then steel, all within the thickness of a sheet of corrugated cardboard. Moving sideways, your fingertip feels no texture, no friction, just smooth bumps more slippery than oil, and a tendency to get pulled into hollows. Pulling free of the surface takes a firm tug. The simulation makes your atom-sized fingertip feel the same forces that an atom would. It is strange how slippery the surface is—and it cannot have been lubricated, since even a single oil molecule would be a lump the size of your thumb. This slipperiness makes it obvious how nano-scale bearings can work, how the parts of molecular machines can slide smoothly. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
However, on top of this, there is a tingling feeling in your fingers, like the sensation of touching a working loudspeaker. When you put your ear against the wall of the nanocomputer, you flinch back: for a moment, you heard a sound like the hiss of a twentieth-century television tuned to a channel with no broadcast, with nothing but snow and static—but loud, painfully loud. All the atoms in the surface are vibrating at high frequencies, too fast to see. This is thermal vibration, and it is obvious why it is also called thermal noise. While we are on the subject of TV, all technical reproduction of art, nature, and the human image deletes what is called “aura.” Before the age of mechanical reproduction, art objects did not exist in a context outside of their original use. If a religious object were carved in bronze, this piece of bronze gained its meaning from its context, that is, the place and time of its use. When it is dug up by archeologists two thousand years later, it may have intellectual meaning and be informative or beautiful, but it will not have retained the quality of its original power. This depended upon its connection to time and place. When it is then put behind glass in a museum, it has still less power. When it is photographed and reproduced then thousand times on postcards, although it can then be found in ten thousand homes, it is so many times removed from its original shell that it conveys nothing. At this point, it could be used by anyone for any purpose, including advertisement. Meaning must be invested into it, as it no longer has any of its own. What is true for art objects is even more true for natural, living beings. The art object, once separated from its source in time and place, loses the powers invested in it. The human being loses humanness itself. The plight of the performer in a film, for example, has the job of conveying one’s self through machinery which is predisposed not to allow such a conveyance. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
This situation might be characterized as follows: for the first time—and this is the effect of the film—man [the actor] has to operate with his whole living person, yet foregoing [his] aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera…is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s image in the mirror. However, now [with photography and film] the reflected image has become separable, transportable….The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. Mechanical reproduction of images is the great equalizer. When you reproduce any image of anything that formerly had aura (or life), the effect is to dislocate the image from the aura, leaving only the image. At this point, the image is neutral, it has no greater inherent power than commodities. Products have no life to begin with, neither did they have any aura that attached to some original artistic or religious use at a certain place or time. There is no original car or vacuum cleaner, at least not among those that are advertised. They are all duplications of each other, like the fiftieth copy of a photograph. So products lose virtually nothing when their images are reproduced mechanically or electronically, while original art objects lose their contextual meaning, and human being and other living creatures lose virtually everything that qualifies as meaningful. Humans become image shells, containing nothing inside, no better or worse, more or less meaningful than the product images that interrupt them every few minutes. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
By the simple process of removing images from immediate experience and passing them instead through a machine, humans beings lose one of the attributes that differentiate us from objects. Products, meanwhile, suffer no such loss and effectively obtain a kind of equality with these aura-amputated living creatures shown on television. These factors conspire to make television an inherently more efficient and effective medium for advertising than for conveying any information in which life force exists: human feeling, human interaction, natural environment, or ways of thinking and being. Advertisers, however, are not satisfied with equality. Leaving their products in their natural deadness would not instill any desire to buy. And so the advertising person goes a step further by constructing drama around the product, investing it with an apparent life. Since a product has no inherent drama, techniques are used to dramatize and enliven the product. Cuts, edits, zooms, cartoons and other effects have the effect of adding artificial life force to the product. These technical events make it possible for products to surpass in power the images of the creatures whose aura has been separated from them by the act of mechanical or electronic reproduction. So television accomplishes something that in real life would be impossible: making products more “alive” than people. There is an important political and psychological conclusion that can be drawn from the disconnection of humans and art from their auras. In destroying aura via the mechanical reproduction of art, all as well as humans and nature lose their grounding, their meaning in time and place. At this point, like the product in the advertisement, the art image or the human image can be used for any purpose whatsoever. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
The disconnection from inherent meaning, which would be visible if image, object and context were still merged, leads to a similarly disconnected aesthetics in which all users for images are equal. All meaning in art and also human acts becomes only what is invested into them. There is no inherent meaning in anything. Everything, even war, is capable of becoming art, and we are back to Werner Erhard, Solaris and 1984. To illustrate the problem, quoted is Filippo Marinetti, one of the founders of Italian Futurism: “For twenty-seven years, we Futurist have rebelled against the branding of war as antiesthetic…Accordingly we state…War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others…Poets and artists of Futurism….remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art…may be illuminated by them. This loss of the inherent meaning which is connected to art, humans and nature furthers the notion that all experience is equal, leading in short steps to fascism: Fascism expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which Homer’s time was an object for contemplation of the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
“Knowledge of good and evil” means nothing else than: cognizance of the opposities which the early literature of mankind designated by these two terms; they still include the fortune and this misfortune or the order and the disorder which is experienced by a person, as well as that which he causes. This is still the same in the early Avestic text, and it is the same in those of the Christian Bible which precede written prophecy and to which ours belongs. In the terminology of modern thought, we can transcribe what is meant as: adequate awareness of the opposites inherent in all being within the World, and that, from the viewpoint of the Biblical creation-belief, means: adequate awareness of the opposites latent in creation. If we remain full aware that the basic conception of the all the theo- and anthropology of the Hebrews, namely the immutable difference and distance which exists between God and man, irrespective of the primal fact of the latter’s “likeness” to God and of the current fact of his “nearness” to Him, also applies to the knowledge of good and evil. This knowledge as the primordial possession of God and the same knowledge as the magical attainment of man are Worlds apart in their nature. God knows the opposites of being, which stem from His own act of creation; He encompasses them, untouched by them; He is as absolutely familiar with them as he is absolutely superior to them; He has direct intercourse with them (this is obviously the original meaning of the Hebrew verb “know”: be in direct contact with), and this in their function as the opposite poles of the World’s being. For as such He created them—we may impute this late Biblical doctrine to our narrator, it its elementary form. Thus He who is above all opposites has intercourse with the opposites of good and evil that are of His primordial familiarity with them He appears, as can be gathered from the words, “one of us,” to have bestowed upon the “sons of God” by virtue of their share in the work of creation. “And now Father, I pray unto thee for them, and also for all those who shall believe on their words, that they may believe in me, that I may be in them as thou, Father, art in me, that we maybe one,” Reports 3 Nephi 19.23. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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The Death Spell Had Broken Between the Living and the Dead
Speculation is bound to pursue a wealthy, extremely beautiful, celibate recluse, who has lost those who mean the most to her and is haunted by spirits of the damned. Many wild rumors circulated about Sarah Winchester during her residence in Santa Clara Valley—her opulent estate was even known locally as “The Spirit House”—and some say the rumors may have added to Mrs. Winchester’s isolation. However, the glory, the splendor, the beauty of her mansion, surpassed the vicious rumors and speculation; and the fragrances of the Victorian garden were intoxicating. The tracks were gone; they vanished where the velvet emerald green sod began. There were plenty of creatures, and they welcomed her with caresses. Yet, Mrs. Winchester was bent, broken, withered, widowed—her head was white with unnumbered sorrows. She had been familiar with grief for a thousand years. The deaths of her young husband and her six-week-old daughter Annie stood out clear in her memory, for it was a land-mark; it brought Mrs. Winchester her first real misery, her first real heartbreak. Her memories were blurred with tears, and after ten centuries she cried over and over and over again. Crying over it for pity of that poor child—the child she had lost. Other mothers have felt something akin to this in recalling, not their former selves, (as in her case), but the little figures which represents sons and daughters of their which have since grown to the gravity and stature of full age. Sometimes, for a moment, these poor mothers have a vision of those little creatures romping by, and they recognize the voices of laughter—gone silent long ago!—and they have a pain at the heart, as knowing that those children are lost to them for always, in the flesh, although their grown-up selves are still present in life and still precious. The loved and lost! Lives having gone out from their mothers’, lives to return no more but in visions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Yes, across the mouldering centuries Mrs. Winchester could still see that silken little baby, with her waxen round arms, and delicate smile, just as she was, the fairest thing in this fair World; and in her heart, leathery as it was, she felt again the pang of that day’s disappointment, holding on to the memory of what could have been. It was weeks that she had been wandering the halls of her enormous mansion, and had found no trace of William, her husband. The Valley was so cruelly vast! Early she had a happy thought, and took the bloodhound throughout the estate and showed him the tracks, and was fully of hope, not doubting he would hunt him down in an hour. But she knew that she tried everything she could try, and just needed to say goodbye forever. The track gave no scent. William Winchester was dead. The hurt stayed with her, and Mrs. Winchester was resolved to absorb herself in the construction of her mansion. She did the work, but the old pleasure in it was somehow gone; she did not care anymore. She had between 500 to 600 rooms constructed, but thought they were not good ones and tore them down because her heart was not in it. Some of them were tolerable, but mainly they were crude and inartistic; they lacked finish. The miles of twisting hallways were made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. When Mrs. Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of the angry spirits or even of a bloodhound, to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment into another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Then she opened a window in that apartment and climbed out, not into the open air, but on the top of a flight of steps that took her down one story only to meet another flight that brought her right back up to the same level again, all inside the house. This was supposed to be very discomforting to evil spirits who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps. Mrs. Winchester was the most unfortunate of women. Rich, respected, very well educated and of sound health and mind—with many other advantages usually valued by those having them and coveted by those who have them not—she sometimes thought that she would be less unhappy if they had been denied her, for then the contrast between her outer and inner life would not be continually demanding a painful attention. In the stress of privation and the need of effort, she might sometimes forget the sombre secret ever baffling the conjecture that it compels. After communing with the spirits, as she turned the hallway, Mrs. Winchester could hear a sound of a door gently closing, and saw in the darkness, indistinctly, the figure of a man, which instantly disappeared among the statues and furniture. A hasty pursuit and brief search of the mansion in the belief that the trespasser was someone secretly visiting a servant proving fruitless, she entered an unlocked door and mounted the stairs to her chamber. Its door was open, and stepping into black darkness she fell headlong over some heavy object on the floor. She spared herself the details; it was her poor William, dead of strangulation by human hands! Nothing had been taken from the house, the servants had heard no sound, and excepting those terrible fingermarks upon the dead man’s throat—dear God she hoped to forget them!—no trace of the assassin was even found. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Although William had Tuberculosis, something had come to end his life before the illness did. Mrs. Winchester kept barbarous murder a secret. Mrs. Winchester donated a substantial sum of money to the Winchester Clinic of the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. One night, a few months after the dreadful event, Mrs. Winchester and her butler were walking back from the carriage house after a trip to the city. The full moon was about three hours above the eastern horizon; the entire countryside had the solemn stillness of a summer night; their footfalls and ceaseless song of the katydids were the only sound, aloof. Black shadows of bordering trees lay athwart the mansion, which, in the short reaches between, gleamed a ghostly white. As they approached the door to the mansion, whose front was in shadow, and in which no light shone, her butler suddenly stopped and clutched her arm, saying, hardly above his breath: “God! God! what is that?” “I heard nothing,” Mrs. Winchester replied. “But see—see!” he said, pointing along the road, directly ahead. Mrs. Winchester said: “Nothing is there. Come, Henry, let us go in—you are ill.” He had released her arm and was standing rigid and motionless in the center of the illuminated roadway, staring like one bereft of sense. His face in the moonlight showed a pallor and fixity inexpressibly distressing. She pulled gently at his sleeve, but he had forgotten her existence. Presently he began to retire backward, step by step, by step, never for an instant removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought he saw. Mrs. Winchester turned half round to follow, but stood irresolute. She did not recall any feeling of fear, unless a sudden chill was its physical manifestation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
It seemed as if an icy wind had touched her face and enfolded her body from head to foot; she could feel the stir of it in her hair. At that moment her attention was drawn to a light that suddenly streamed from an upper window of the mansion: one of the servants, awakened by what mysterious premonition of evil who can say, and in obedience to an impulse that she was never able to name, had turned on the Carbide gas lights, which were operated by pushing an electric button. When she turned to look for the butler he was gone, and in all the years that had passed no whisper of his fate has come across the borderland of conjecture from the realm of the unknown. Mrs. Winchester retired and had fallen almost immediately into a peaceful sleep, from which she awoke with an indefinable sense of peril which was, a common experience in her estate. The servants slept in another part of the house. But these were familiar conditions and never distressed Mrs. Winchester. Nevertheless, the strange terror grew so insupportable that concurring her reluctance to move she sat up and pushed the button to turn on the lights at her bedside. Contrary to her expectation this gave her no relief; the light seemed rather as added danger, for she reflected that it would shine out under the door, disclosing her presence to whatever evil think might lurk in the halls of her mansion. You that are still in the flesh, subject to horrors of the imagination, think what a monstrous fear that must be which seeks in darkness security from malevolent existences of the night. That is to spring to close quarters with an unseen enemy—the strategy of despair! Extinguishing the gas lights, Mrs. Winchester pulled the bedclothing about her heard and lay trembling and silent, unable to shrike, forgetful to pray. In this pitiable state she must have lain for what you call hours—with her there are no hours, there is no time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
At last it came—a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way; to her disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal. She even thought that she must have left the hall gasolier burning and the groping of this creature proved it a monster of the night. This was foolish and inconsistent with her previous dread of the light, but what would you have? Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. In Mrs. Winchester’s mansion lived those who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to themselves, and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning for speech with out loved ones, yet unenlightened, and as fearful of them as they of humans. Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate they break the spell—they are seen by those whom they would warn, console, or punish. What form they seem to them to bear one knows not; they know only that they terrify even those whom they most wish to comfort, and from whom they most crave tenderness and sympathy. What a thing it is to have legions of spirits, cowering and shivering, fearful and vengeful in an altered World, roaming the hallways of one’s house. However, Mrs. Winchester did not die of fright: the Thing turned and went away. She heard it go down the stairs, hurriedly, she thought, as if itself in sudden fear. Then she rose to call for help. Hardly had her shaking hand found the annunciator when—merciful Heaven!—she heard it returning. Its footfalls as it remounted the stairs were rapid, heavy and loud; they shook the mansion. She fled to an angle of the wall and crouched upon the floor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Winchester tried to pray. She tried to call the name of her maid. Then she heard the door thrown open. There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when she revived, she felt a strangling clutch upon her throat—felt her arms feebly beating against something that bore her backward—felt her tongue thrusting itself from between her teeth! And the she felt the life pass from her. As the spirits still dwelled in the mansion of the shadows, lurking in its desolate places, peering from brambles, thickets, towers, corners, stairways and doors. Ghosts at the Winchester mansion know when it is night, for then most people retire and they can venture from their places of concealment to move unafraid about in their old mansion, to look in at the windows, even to enter and gazes upon people’s faces who might still be wandering in the evening hours. Vainly, spirits often seek some method of manifestation, some way to make their continued existence and their great love and poignant pity understood by their loved one’s or those they wish to haunt and terrorize. Ghosts dare to approach people when they are awake, but the terrible eyes of the living frighten them by the glances that they seek from the purpose the hold. Demons, ghosts, and other spiritual beings search for the living in the Winchester mansion during the moonlight dawn. At the time of her death, the unrelenting construction had rambled over six acres. The sprawling mansion contained 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens. Carpenters even left nails half driven when they learned of Mrs. Winchester’s death. According to the provisions of her will, Mrs. Winchester’s personal property, including the furnishings, household goods, pictures, jewelry, and papers were left to her niece, Mrs. Marian Merriman Marriott, who promptly has the furnishings auctioned off. It is said to have required sic trucks working six weeks to car the furnishings away! The mansion and farm were not mentioned specially in the will. They became part of the Mrs. Winchester’s estate. #RandolphHaris 7 of 16
Demon possession is a well-defined phenomenon and should be clearly distinguished from spiritism. Since the same demonic forces are at work in both phenomena, they bear some similar characteristics and result in the same occult oppression and bondage. The demonized state of the demon possessed is similar to the trance of the spiritistic medium. Both are under the direct influence of demons who speak through them. In the case of the medium who processes to communicate with the spirits of deceased persons, the demon apes the personality and voice of the deceased. In the case of the demon possessed, the evil spirits appear to be more crassly cruel, unclean, violent, and less sophisticated and subtle than spirits working through a clairvoyant medium. In demon possession, they are also more domineering and brutally enslaving. Nervous muscular reactions and contortions peculiar to the demoniac often appear also in the spiritistic medium when one goes into a trance, but in a much milder form. Then, too, the demoniac is normally an involuntary victim of possession, while the medium is a willing subject, who cultivates psychic propensities and willingly yield to demonic control. Extraordinary movements of inanimate objects surrounding the demon-possessed remind us of similar happenings in spiritism. Extraordinary movements of inanimate objects surrounding the demon-possessed remind s of similar happenings in spiritism and magic. Tables, chairs, dishes, and the like are mysteriously moved about without anybody touching them, recalling tumbler moving and table lifting so common in spiritistic séances, and magic conjurations. In demon possession as well as in spiritism, unexplained rappings and noises in so-called “haunted houses” are heard. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
After the Winchester mansion was opened for tours, a spirit from the house had taken possession of one of the tour guides. The spirit insisted on taking up its abode with them, since it has been driven away from its for dwelling by the presence of Christians. Such cases of haunted houses about everywhere in occult literature in connection with mediums, magicians, and demon possessed persons. The tour guide saw apparitions and had frequent attacks in which she fell unconscious and demons spoke through her in their own voice and personality. A thorough investigation was conducted. Persons were stationed all around the house, in various rooms, and even in the Daisy Bedroom. Noises were heard which gradually increased in violence and seemed to concentrate in the bedroom Mrs. Winchester died in. Chairs bounced, windows rattled, plaster fell from the ceiling, and objects moved about without any visible explanation. Prayer caused the noises and telekinetic phenomena continued for a while in the mansion. On one occasion, after continued prayer, one of the demons inhabiting Jane cried out, “All is now.ost. Our plans are destroyed. You have shattered our bond, and put everything into confusion. You, with your everlasting prayers—you scatter us entirely. We are 13,130,130,130 in number. But there are still multitudes of living men, and you should warn them lest they be like us forever, lost and cursed of God.” The demon confessed that he was an emissary of Satan. The next day, the contents of the mansion were found in compete disarray and utter confusion. The amazing and terrifying thing was that the doors were still securely locked. No man or beast had entered. Evil spirits had obviously been at work in a satanic assault. On that day there were some tremendous crashing and knocking noises heard in the Winchester mansion, as if the whole house was filled with evil spirits. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Everyone giving tours in the mansion in the early 1900s, used to hear knocking and rumbling and crashing noises to such an extent that some of the visitors were frightened by them. Ghosts were also seen there quite regularly, even during the day time. A headless ghost was repeatedly seen in the mansion. Many people reporting becoming burned after contact with the “possessed” tour guide Jane. The autumn of 1925, all the pigs on the Winchester mansion’s farm died. The cause of death could not be found even though one of the carcasses was sent to a biological institute for examination. They tried everything but all to no avail. The following year the same thing happened again. This time the farmer redoubled his efforts to discover the cause of the pigs’ death. He had the stables inspected and the food analyzed but again without success. He thus decided to have the conservators of the estate decided to have the pigsty torn down and rebuilt on another site using completely different materials. Next year the pigs died again. They would all of the sudden squeal and then collapse. The whole process was repeated and every possible examination made in order to find out why the pigs had died. At this time certain of the member of the community began to say that someone must be killing the pigs magically out of spite. At first the conservators of the Winchester Estate would have nothing of this and continued to seek the advice of the vet and other such people. However, they could not help them, and so in the end they went to see the local minister to ask him about the question of magic. The minister simply laughed and said that the idea was stupid. Nevertheless the villagers pointed out to the representatives that there did exist some people in some areas of California who could kill livestock by means of magic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The conservators could do nothing though, and the event recurred year after year in spite of the fact that by now they had doubly secured the stables with locks and had sometimes stayed up all night with thread stretched out around the estate in order to discover if anyone was causing the animals’ deaths. One day, however, the circumstances changed. The minister visited the estate and asked one of the tour guides to accompany him to the vicarage. There they found one of the neighbour’s of the Winchester Estate, a man who had been less affluent, and this man confessed that it was he who had been the cause of everything. He had killed the pigs using black magic. The tour guides and conservators were naturally upset because by now 39 pigs had been killed. When asked why he had done this, the neighbour replied that it was because the tourists made such a noise outside his house. He had become so angry that he had tried to get his revenge in this way. He had subscribed himself to the devil with his own blood. To do this he had gone out on a Friday night to some crossroads and there drawn up a contract between himself and the devil. He mentioned that the devil had not appeared to him as he is often pictured, but that he met a black curly headed figure with blood-red eyes and a small snout and that the figure had been dressed in rather old-fashioned clothes. Ever since that day the man confessed that among other things, he had had the power to kill his friend’s pigs. The minister asked him what had made him come out into the open about the whole matter. His answer was that the people at the Winchester estate had been so kind to him over the year, donating food, clothes and furniture, that he had felt ashamed and he now asked for them to forgive him, and promised he would no longer plague them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Not wanting to take any legal action, the conservators of the Winchester Estate forgave him and all went well until the neighbour ceased going to church and slid back into his old ways. Since his confession none of the estate’s pigs had died but now the man again took up his drinking habits two more of the pigs died in exact same ways as the others. The conservators decided to shutdown the farming land of the Winchester Estate and sell off hundred of acres, only keeping four. In the process, several other Victorian houses on the grounds, along with fountains, and gazebos were demolished. From the psychological point of view it is suggested that a person delving into magic and who believes in occult practices is really only succumbing to a fulfilment compulsion. One unconsciously fulfils the things that one seeks to perform by magic. One is the victim of auto-suggestion. However, even if this were the whole explanation as some people affirm, it would still be true to say that occult practices have a corrupting effect on all those who get involved in them. Demons tend to be somewhat more independent than angels…When possession takes place, you will not get to see them at all. The Florida-based Luciferian Light Group (LLG) adopted the ‘Watcher myth’ of devils that were originally angels, sent to Earth to guard humankind and cursed by God for screwing their charges. In the original myth the couplings produced monsters, but, according to the LLG, the actual result was the Aryan race. They say that African Americans and other racial groups take pride in their cultural roots, so the argument goes, why should the same concept not apply to Europeans? The argument cannot be countered by liberal sophistry, and so the ghosts of German volkisch occultists continue to be conjured. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The role of cultural villain again proves to be a delicate balancing act—nothing can ever be condemned on purely moralistic grounds. Many people are still trying to protect “The Black House.” The Black Pope himself once reassured his flock, “the first 99 years are always the toughest. Rege Satanas!” Satanism is opposed to victimology and scapegoating. Many people are really drawn to the dark side because they grow up reading a lot of books and watching a lot of movies about it. If witches are out there, practicing some of the old ways of the pre-Christian gods and goddesses, then they are still Satanic in the sense that they are heretical. One side of the heretical and diabolical is the scientific aspect of Satanism. Copernicus and Galileo were regarded as practicing sorcerers in as far as they dared to challenge the supremacy of God with their heresies-their scientific research. Anton LaVey codified modern Satanism. There is a rich heritage of hearsay and blasphemy behind it, but as far as an aboveground religion that reveres Satan, there was not anything before the Church of Satan’s foundation in 1966. There were Black Masses that parodied the Catholic Church. A lot of modern Satanism draws from that codification or personification of Satan used as an archetype in mythology. Satanist are more interested in power, and what was going on in the castles and courts of the times. The interactions of power and Machiavellian machinations interest a Satanists rather than going out and find herbs to cure indigestion. Satanists are reaching for a religion of the aristocracy. They have all the aspects of that pride, that energy, that stye, and hopefully those elevated standards. Many people fear them because they believe they will lure you in their house and kill you, but is that not what many Christians are doing today? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Your relationship with your personal Satanic archetype is yours alone. The only way some can see how effective one is as a practicing black magician is how well one gets on in the outside of the World. Satanism has always represented and will always represent the adversary. He is a counterbalance to the unspoken injustice that prevails in the current society, whether that be overweening elitism or, going to the opposite extreme, mob rule. They always have to be in the minority that push hard in the other direction to get the pendulum swinging. Satanism will never be a religion of the people. It will never be populist beyond its current position. You see hundreds of thousands of kids making the sign of the horns, wearing black, getting devil tattoos, and listening to rock music they think is Satanic. They will take all the trappings and even grasp a few of the basic ideas, like Satan representing indulgence and independence of spirit. But, beyond that, they will always be a minority and that is how some think it should be. The Winchester mansion is a common site of demonic assault. In the early 1900s, a group of tourists and tour guides were attacked by demons; some became possessed; 30 people in the group were seized. In 1926, Satan and his allies once again possessed people at the Winchester mansion. For the first time in their lives, many of these people found themselves to be powerful, significant beings, establishing their own realm of authority. When they spoke, everyone in the mansion stopped to listen, for their shrill cries became testimony. Many historians have argued that the Satanism at the Winchester mansion was only the product of demented minds. However, there was something quite real in all the series of accusations and counteraccusations of the witnesses and the possessed—some definitely evil driving force that led humans to turn against one another like mad dogs lusting for the smell of blood. If Satan was to have presided over the Satanism at the Winchester Mansion, much was left out of the picture. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
The Devil manifested himself in many forms to people at the Winchester Mansion—as a horse, a fox, a dog, a cat, a pig, and as a shadowy figure. At the Sabbats, the Devil was always present in the form of a tall, handsome man with blue eyes and black hair making no attempt to disguise his identity in any way Neither was the all-important bloodletting present in the ceremonies, either in the form of a sacrifice or in the singing of the pact. There was no defiling of sacred object, nor mention of the administering of the witches’ mark, a painful ceremony that was quite vivid in the minds of many of the witches at the estate. The Sabbats, all in all, seemed to have been rather staid affairs, involving no wild ritual or debauchery. The Devil offered not immediate wealth or riches, but a new system of government, where all humans would be equal, each human being free to “live bravely.” He promised an end to beliefs. Whoever the Devil was at those meetings, he obviously did not seek adulation, but rather he sought to establish a more equal and suitable social order among humans. Taken in this context, the entire episode begins to sound like a huge projection, a gigantic wish fulfillment on the part of the disgruntled citizens, who were expressing disdain for the system that, in their eyes had become oppressive. The figure chosen by the confessors as the Devil presiding over the midnight Sabbats had himself become disillusioned by the system. Perhaps he had been holding nocturnal meetings in the mansion in an effort of “cleansing the soul.” At any rate, the meetings were necessary psychological safety valves in the minds of the people. People would stand around begging for the master to teach them his secret. How to become invisible, how to acquire love, and oh! beyond all, how to make gold. How much gold would you give for the Secret of Infinite Riches? Humans became strengthened with wonderful power through the order of angels, so that one declares the divine will. From the Seraphim, that we cling with fervent love. From the Cherubim, enlightenment of the mind, power and wisdom over the exalted figures and images, through which we can gaze upon divine things, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
From the Thronis, a knowledge of how we are made and constituted, that we may direct our thoughts upon eternal things. From Dominationbius, assistance to bring into subjection our daily enemies, who we carry with us constantly, and enabling us to attain salvation. From Potestatibus, protection against human enemies of life. From Virtuibus, God infuses strength into us, enabling us to contend against the enemies of truth and reward, that we may finish the courage of our natural life. From the Principtibus, that all things become subject to humans, that one may grasp all power, and draw unto oneself all secret and supernatural knowledge. From Archangelis, that one may rile over all things that God has made subject to one, over the animals of the field, over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air. From the Angelis one receives the power to be the messenger of the divine. When the veil between the conscious and the subconscious mind begins thinning it is likely that one will begin to experience certain phenomenon that will grab your attention throughout the day. This will occur more and more as the veil between Worlds thins merging your spiritual awareness with your physical life. Usually it will manifest in the form of synchronicity, Déjà vu, or circumstance which seems to jump out and grab your attention. Thee I invoke, the Bornless one. Thee, that didst create the Earth and the Heavens: Thee, that didst create the Night and the Day. Thee, that didst create the Darkness and the Light. Thou art Osorronophris: Whom no human has seen at any time. Thou art Ahriman. Hear Thou Me, for I am the Angel of Paphro. Osorronophris: this is Thy True Name, handed down to the Prophets of Ishrael. Ahriman rise up through the infernal planes through the seal of Arezura and find rest within this manifestation of the blessings. Fill this sorcerous fluid with your power and might that it will serve my cause of counter creation through the intent of my own evil mind. Bless this blood as the very powers of death, destruction, and decay that I may cast out all that does not serve the cause of my own great work upon this path of enlightenment. Come tour the dark, brooding and mysterious, promising all kinds of forbidden treats. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
Happy weekend! Will we be seeing you on the estate today? 🌻 https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
We Beat Workers Less and they Produce More
Cooperation itself has received comparatively little attention from biologists since the pioneer account of Trivers; but an associated issue, concerning restraint in conflict situations, has been developed theoretically. In this connection, a new concept—that of an evolutionarily stable strategy—has been formally developed. Cooperation in the more normal sense has remained clouded by certain difficulties, particularly those concerning initiation of cooperation from a previously asocial state and its stable maintenance once established. A formal theory of cooperation is increasingly needed. The renewed emphasis on individualism has focused on the frequent ease of cheating. Such cheating makes the stability of even mutually advantageous symbioses appear more questionable then under the old view of adaptation for species benefit. At the same time, other cases that once appeared firmly in the domain of kinship theory now begin to reveal that the players are not closely enough related for much kinship-based altruism to be expected. This applies both to cooperative breeding in birds and to cooperative acts more generally in primate groups. Either the appearances of cooperation are deceptive—they are cases of part-kin altruism and part cheating—or larger part of the behavior is attributable to reciprocity, however, underemphasize the stringency of its conditions. In a biological context, the model is novel in its probabilistic treatment of the possibility that two individuals may interact again. This allows light to be shed on certain specific biological processes such as aging and territoriality. The analysis of the evolution of cooperation considers not only the final stability of a given strategy, but also the initial viability of a strategy in an environment dominated by non-cooperating individuals, as well as the robustness of a strategy in a variegated environment composed of other individuals using a variety of more or less sophisticated strategies. This approach allows a richer understanding of the full chronology of the evolution of cooperation than has previously been possible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The applications include behavioral interaction at the microbial level. This leads to some speculative suggestions of rationales able to account for the existence of both chronic and acute phases in many diseases, and for a certain class of genetic defects, exemplified by Down’s syndrome. Many of the benefits sought by living things are disproportionally available to cooperating groups. While there are considerable differences in what is meant by the terms “benefits” and “sought,” this statement, insofar as it is true, lays down a fundamental basis for all social life. The problem is that while an individual can benefit from mutual cooperation, each other can also do even better by exploiting the cooperative effort of others. Over a period of time, the same individuals may interact again, allowing for complex patterns of strategic interactions. The Prisoner’s Dilemma allows a formalization of the strategic possibilities inhere in such situations. Apart from being a solution in a theory of problem solving, defection in a single encounter is also the solution in biological evolution. It is the outcome of inevitable evolutionary trends through mutation and natural selection: if the payoffs are in terms of fitness, and the interactions between pairs of individuals are random and not repeated, then any population with a mixture of heritable strategies evolves to a state where all individuals are defectors. Moreover, no single differing mutant strategy can do better than others when the population is using this strategy. When the players will never meet again, the strategy of defection is the only stable strategy. In many biological settings, the same two individuals may meet more than ones. If an individual can recognize a previous interactant and remember some aspects of the prior outcomes, then the strategic situation becomes an iterated Prisoners Dilemma with a much richer set of possibilities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
A strategy could use the history of the interaction so far to determine the likelihood of its cooperating or defecting on the current move. However, as previously explained, if there is a known number of interactions between a pair of individuals, to defect always is still evolutionarily stable and is still the only strategy which is. The reason is that defection on the last interaction would be optimal for both sides, and consequently so would defection on the next-to-last. The model developed is based on the more realistic assumption that the number of interactions is not fixed in advanced. Instead, there is some probability, w, that after the current interaction the same two individuals will meet again. Biological factors that affect the magnitude of this probability of meeting again include the average lifespan, relative mobility, and health of the individuals. For any value of w, the strategy of unconditional defection (ALL D) is always stable; if everyone is using this strategy, no mutant strategy can successfully invade the population. If a population of individuals using that strategy cannot be invaded by a rare mutant adopting a different strategy, then stated formally, a strategy is evolutionarily stable. There may be many evolutionarily stable strategies. In fact, when w is sufficiently great, there is no single best strategy regardless of the behavior of the others in the population. Just because there is no single best strategy, it does not follow that analysis is hopeless. On the contrary, it is possible to analyze not only the stability of a given strategy, but also its robustness and initial viability. Surprisingly, there is a broad range of biological reality that is encompassed by this theoretic approach. To start with, an organism does not need a brain to employ a strategy. Bacteria, for example, have a basic capacity to play games in that bacteria are highly responsive to selected aspects of their environment, especially their chemical environment; this implies that they can respond differentially to what other organisms around them are doing; these conditional strategies of behavior can certainly be inherited; and the behavior of a bacterium can affect the fitness of other organisms around it, just as the behaviour of other organisms can affect the fitness of a bacterium. Recent evidence shows that even a virus can use a conditional strategy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
While the strategies can easily include differential responsiveness to recent changes in the environment or to cumulative averages over time, in other ways their range of responsiveness is limited. Bacteria cannot “remember” or “interpret” a complex past sequence of changes, and they probably cannot distinguish alternative origins of adverse or beneficial changes. Some bacteria, for example, produce their own antibiotics, called bacteriocins. These are harmless to bacteria of the producing strain, but are destructive to others. A bacterium might easily have production of its own bacteriocin dependent on the perceived presence of like hostile productions toward an offending initiator. Real transformation in a corporation, a school or any institution implies significant changes in its main functions, its technology, financial structure, culture, people and organizations. A good example is IBM’s (“Big Blue”) strategic shift from a corporation whose chief activity was manufacturing “things” to one whose first priority has become the sale of services. Revenues reached $57.35 billion in 2021—and it has 282,000 employees. There was an increase of 3.93 percent revenue from 2020. At Kodak, too, the belated decision to enter the digital-camera field was transformational. For nearly a century, one of Kodak’s main functions was to manufacture, develop and print silver-halide film—processes largely eliminated by digital photography. By 2004 it was well on its way to dominating the new field. Real transformation is possible in the public sector, too, as William J. Bratton showed when he took command of New York’s 37,000-person police force in 1994. Its function, he declared, was no longer just to catch criminals but to focus on the future and prevent crimes as well. Until Bratton arrived, the NYPD measured its performance vis-à-vis other police departments on the basis of FBI data supplied only once every six months. Bratton forced unwilling, overworked and sometimes angry police captains to prepare weekly reports for his new CompStat database showing which particular types of crime were increasingly or diminishing in their districts. Then they were asked—once a week—to explain what they were doing about it. The better, faster feedback from the field quickly improved performance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
His most publicized innovation was implementation of the “broken window” policy, which directed police to crack down even on minor crimes like breaking windows, scrawling graffiti or bothering motorists by wiping their windshields and demanding money. Catching small fry in these “quality of life” offenses discouraged the commission of more serious felonies and demonstrated to the city that the police meant business. Organizationally, Bratton shifted power downward toward the local precincts, and culturally he raised police morale by vigorously rooting out corruption and talking tough about crime. He gave his force new respect and a conviction that he would fight politicians and the public on its behalf. With innovations at all these levels, Bratton turned the NYPD around. Crime statistics even now are tricky at best. Nevertheless, Bratton is widely credited with reducing homicides in New York by 44 percent and “serious crime” by 25 percent in the twenty-seven months of his tenure there. He transformed the department, and as of 2013, William Bratton’s police force drove down crime and Los Angeles County and found favor among marginalized groups and the wealthy. However, the trajectory of power, and even violence, remain part of the World of business and it should not surprise us. What should raise our eyebrows is the remarkable change in the way force is applied. A slavemaster feudal lord transplanted from antiquity into today’s World would find it hard to believe, even astonishing, that we beat workers less—and they produce more. A ship’s captain would be amazed that sailors are not physically abused and forced into service. Even a journeyman carpenter or tanner from the 18th century would be nonplussed at the idea that he could not legally hash his fist into a sassy apprentice’s mouth. See, for example, William Hogarth’s color engraving entitled “Industry and Idleness,” printed in England in 1796. In it we see two “ ’prentices”—one working happily at his loom, the other dozing. At the right, the boss approaches angrily brandishing a stick with which to beat the idler. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Both custom and law now restrain this open use of force in the modern World. This vestigialization of violence in the economy, however, did not spring from Christian charity or gentle altruism. What happened is that, during the industrial revolution, the elites in society shifted from a primary reliance on the low-quality power produced by violence, to the mid-quality power produced by money. Money may not produce the immediate result of a fist in the face or a gun in the ribs. However, because it can be used both to reward and punish, it is a far more versatile, flexible tool of power—especially when the ultimate threat of violence remains in place. Money could not become the main tool of social control earlier, because the vast majority of humans were not part of the money system. Peasants in the preindustrial ages basically grew their own food, made their own shelter and clothing. However, as soon as factories replaced farms, people no longer grew their own food and they became desperately dependent on money for survival. This total dependence on the money system, as distinct from self-production, transformed all power relationships. Violence, as we have just seen, did not disappear. However, its form and function changed as money became the prime motivator of the work force and the main tool of social control during the three industrial centuries. It is this which explains why smokestack societies, capitalist and socialist alike, have proved more grasping and acquisitive, more money-obsessed than far less affluent, preindustrial cultures. Greed no doubt goes back to Paleozoic times. However, it was industrialism that made money into the prime tool of power. In sum, the rise of the industrial nation-state brought the systematic monopolization of violence, the sublimation of violence into law, and the growing dependence of the population on money. These three changes made it possible for the elites of industrial societies increasingly to make use of wealth rather than overt force to impose their will on history. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
This is the true meaning of powershift. Not simply a transfer of power from one person or group to another, but a fundamental change in the mix of violence, wealth, and knowledge employed by elites to maintain control. Today, just as the industrial revolution transmuted violence into law, so we are transmuting money—indeed, wealth in general—into something new. And just as the smokestack age saw money assume a primary role in gaining or maintaining power, so today, at the edge of the 21st century, we face another twist in the history of power. We are on the brink of a new powershift. Television is another powerful force in the World today, some would argue, it is one of the most powerful devices known to modern man. However, roughly speaking, the experience of looking at a TV picture is like looking at the World through a tea strainer. The picture is located along the grids. You fill in the blanks. Compare the image of your television screen with any other image in your television room: the bookcase, the table, the fug Obviously the actual object is vivid in comparison with the television image. Television production people are exquisitely aware of this. There is an electronics term to describe it: “signal-to-noise ratio.” Ordinarily applied to sound, the term can be applied to images as well. The “signal” is the primary image that they are attempting to covey. The “noise” is the background, the fuzz, from which the signal has to stand out to be seen properly. A “clear” picture is one in which the signal and noise are well differentiated. In television, however, since the differentiation is difficult to achieve, program decisions and production styles have to be chosen to maximize what is possible. As a result, there is a tendency to concentrate on images which offer a large signal-to-noise distinction. An enormous percentage of television images are close-ups of faces. This is not accidental. Faces in close-up are about the sharpest signal that television can produce while still conveying content. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Even so, if the background behind the face is complex, filled with varieties of objects and color tones, the face merges with the background and it all becomes a confusing jumble. So even while showing faces, television producers must keep the background “clean,” stark, unencumbered. Dramatic programs are constructed so that there are very few adornments and props. This avoids a cluttered image and increases the potential for the primary image to communicate something. This limitation does not exist to the same extent with movies, where the signal-to-noise ratio is much greater, allowing for images filled with detail. However, when a movie is played on television, much detail is lost. If you will think back to a time when you first saw a film in a theater and then saw it on television, you will realize how much richness is lost in the translation from one medium to the other. There is also a low signal-to-noise ratio in television sound. It is very low fidelity, although it could be greatly improved. High-fidelity sound, equal to recording sound, is possible with television speaker technology, and has become an industry standard. An additional factor fuzzing up the sound is the high-pitched whistle that emanates from all television sets. Caused by the interaction of the audio and visual electron fields, this whistle is unavoidable with television technology, at least in marketable price ranges. And so both television picture and sound remain fuzzy. This problem of indistinctness, rarely noted of discussed by critics of television, cannot be overestimated. It is a major factor influencing all decisions made by television producers. It skews all programming—both choices of subject and treatment of the choices—toward those that offer highest possible contrast between foreground and background, signal and noise, color and tone. This leads to image which tend to the larger as opposed to the smaller, to the broad as opposed to the detailed, to the simple as opposed to the complex, to the obvious rather than the subtle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Because of these tendencies, inexorably imposed by the technology itself, the communicable content of all programs is affected. Beyond confining the visual images and the choices of sound, these tendencies affect the emotional content. Because the images are indistinct, subtle feelings are more difficult to transmit through television than the larger emotions—the foreground emotions, as it were—that can be depicted efficiently by larger facial expressions, or even by noncloseup body movements. Even with a reliance on facial close-ups, what television can convey is a reduced version of what is possible in real life or even in still photography or film. The human relationships which are shown on television, therefore, tend to be those that can be shown on television. These dwell on the grosser end of the human emotional spectrum. The more subtle expression, those which express intimate, deeply personal feelings, are lost in the blur. In recent years there has emerged a very vocal group of outraged psychologists, educators and parents who speak of the urgent need to show beneficial behavior, such as loving, caring, sharing, and warmth, in television programs. They deplore the emphasis on “antisocial” behavior that is common on TV. Unfortunately these reformers are doomed to fail in their efforts because the medium is far better suited technically to expressing hate, fear, jealousy, winning, wanting and violence. These emotions suffer very little information loss when pushed through the coarse imagery of television. Like other gross personal expressions—hysteria, or ebullience, or the kind of one-dimensional joyfulness usually associated with some objective victory—the facial expressions and bodily movements of antisocial behavior are highly visible. Hate, anger, competitiveness are obvious broad-band feelings with broad-band expressions. Mot of them can be well communicated solely through body movement. No detail is needed to get the point, and neither is any special talent on the part of actor or director. They come through the filter of television with a minimum of information loss. The signal-to-noise ratio is really high. For these technical reasons, among others we will get to later, there is an emphasis on sports and violence in television programming, and there is greater viewer interest in them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The popularity of such programming is not so much a sign that public tastes are vulgar, as they are assumed to be in many quarters (“People want that kind of programming”), as it is a sign that these programs are the ones which manage to communicate something, at least, through television. Rather than illustrating the limits of the public mentality or taste, they illustrate the limits of the medium itself. The public wisely chooses programs which work best in a medium in which anything of a more subtle nature loses so much in translation as to be noncommunicative. This is not to say that the business people who are the television powers that be are not predisposed to further the values of competition and social Darwinism which they understand best and which are inherent in sports ad violence programs. However, no matter what their inclination, the fact exists that the kind of programming in which the least information is lost is the grosser forms: sports, violence, police action, MTV Award’s Shows, as well as quiz shows, game shows, soap opera, situation comedy and documentaries about nature, new about murder, war, conflict, power politics and charismatic leaders. All of these categories of programming communicate on television because they deliver clear, easily grasped visual and auditory signals, together with broad-band emotional content, all of which make them highly efficient in a low-definition medium. On the other hand, the kinds of feelings and behavior which the reformers like to call prosocial cannot be conveyed through television by obvious facial expression or physical movement. While it may be possible to show friendship in a dramatic context, it cannot be explored very far visually, because expression of such feelings exists in an inward rather than outward realm of experience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Love is simply not as easy to demonstrate through coarse imagery as anger or competition. The heights of intimate feeling—between lovers, or parents and children, or among children—are actually experienced in life’s quietest moments. Ordinarily they do not involve any visually obvious action, unless it is the most subtle facial expression—peace, tranquility, satisfaction—not easily captured in any photography, but damned near impossible in the coarse imagery of television. How would you show caring on television? You could present images of people who presumably care about each other doing things which express that feeling. Yet, the things people usually do to express real caring are very small, intimate things. The inner feeling may be strong but, unlike rage, the acts which express it are rarely sweeping. What about warmth? Well, you could illustrate warmth with hugging or tender smiles. It is not that it cannot be done, it is just not as easy to show on television as coldness it. The behavior of The Flash, for example—coldness, determination, efficiency, domination—is easy to see because t can be demonstrated with nearly no facial expression at all. Therefore, this sort of behavior communicates more efficiently on TV. However, with The Flash interacts with Iris, you can tell her cares about her because his face looks softer, the tone of his voice is more concerned and compassionate, and his body language around her is more relaxed or protective. Even if a given subtle emotion can be conveyed from times to time, in most cases one could never build an entire program on its as one could on violent emotions. In signal-to-noise terms the entire program would become indistinct in comparison with the background of more aggressive, expressive and efficient action shows. A little known Sanskrit book called the Pasupata Sutras formulates a practice in detailed, under the heading of the Seeking of Dishonor. The practice is enjoined to court contempt and abuse from one’s fellow humans by behavior deliberately contrived as the most inappropriate and offensive for the situation, whatever it may be. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
In Shamanic context such practices had demonstrated the shaman’s special status beyond convention, his ability to breach at will either metaphysical or ethical boundaries. In yogic terms the goal of the practice was the effacement of ego by the normalization of types of experiences usually destructive to self-image. The shaman, the yogic seeker of dishonor, and the ritual scapegoat figure all offered themselves as targets for calamity, to draw it away from the communities they served. They were the individuals who went out on the razor’s edge and, protected in part by the brackets of religious performances, publicly breached the taboo of the times. Today the exhibitionistic breaching of age and gender taboos, as well as other forays into the darkness of the disallowed within the brackets of the art performance, replicates this ancient custom, sometimes with the same cathartic intention. As the shoals of history break and flow and reassemble, to break and flow again, these and other primitive practices have resurfaced, in something like their original combination, in an altogether different context. The preparation of one’s own body as a magico-sculptural object, for example, is a regular and essential part of the shaman’s performance. An Australian shaman may cover his body with mud (symbol of recent arrival from the netherworld) and decorate it with patterns of bird down fastened on with his own blood; an African shaman may wear human bones, skulls, and so forth, and may surgically alter his or her body in various ways; a Central Asian shaman’s body is tattooed or sacrificed or painted with magical symbols. Similarly, Schneemann has presented herself as a “body collage” decorated with symbols from ancient fertility religions. In a mixture of archaic and Christian materials, Linda Montano in The Screaming Nun, 1975, “dressed as a nun, danced, screamed, and heard confessions at Embarcadero Plaza [in San Francisco].” Other pieces by Montano have involved dancing blindfolded in trance, drumming for six hours a day for six days, shape-changing and identity-changing, self-injury (with acupuncture needles), and astral travel events. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Mary Beth Edelson’s “Public Rituals” have involved the marking of her naked body with symbols from ancient goddess cults, the equation of her body with the Earth, and the declaration of the end of patriarchy (Your Five Thousand Years Are Up). Kim Jones, as Mud Man, or Bill Harding emerging covered with mud from a hole in the ground in the middle of a circle of fire, are reconstituting before our eye’s images from the elementary stratum of religious forms. A motif that is absolutely central to shamanism, and that often also involves body decoration, is the attempt to incorporate the power of an animal species by imitation of it. Shamans in general adopt the identities of power animals, act out their movements, and duplicate their sounds. The claim to understand animal languages and to adopt an animal mind-set is basic to their meditation between culture and nature. Echoes of the practice are, of course, common in the animals of performance art. In Joseph Beuys’ conversation with the dead rabbit, the knowledge of an animal language combines with a belief in the shamanic abilities to communicate with the dead. In Chicken Dance, 1972, Montano, attired in a chicken costume, appeared unannounced at various locations in San Francisco and danced wildly through the streets like a shaman possessed by the spirit and moved by the motions of her animal ally. Terry Fox slept on a gallery floor connected with two dead fish by string attached to his hair and teeth, attempting, like a shaman inviting his animal ally to communicate through a dream, to dream himself into the piscine mind in Pisces, 1971. Not only is the kind of behavior art, but it is also considered religious. Now when it comes to politics, the problem with charismatic political is that it is also impossible to define. There may be examples of it in the past, but they are inimitable. If politics is like art styles (a thought picked up in Weber’s invention of the term “life-style”), nothing can be prescribed to it beforehand. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
There are no fixed principles and no program of action. All that one can say is “Be yourself!”; “Be original!”; “Let go!” or something of the kind. Charisma is a formula for extremism and immoderation. Moreover, the leader must have followers, so there is every temptation for one to act out one’s role as they define it. And, finally, genuine charisma is so difficult to judge. Persuasive tests for the genuineness of the charismatic leader, whose grace comes from God, were notoriously hard to come by. The leader whose grace emanates from the much more enigmatic self proves practically impossible to test. The modern situation as diagnosed by Weber requires radical remedies, and the charismatic leader is such a prescription. Just over the horizon, when Weber, lay a political dictator. He was a leader; Fuhrer, who was certainly neither traditional nor rational-bureaucratic He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber. This particular dictator proved to the satisfaction of most, if not all, that the last man is not the worst of all; and his example should have, although it has not, turned the political imagination away from experiments in that direction. Weber was a good man of decent political instincts who would have had anything but disgust at and contempt for this particular dictator. What he wanted was a moderate corrective to the ills of German politics—about the same as De Gaulle brought to French politics. However, when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits. Measure and moderation are the real aliens there. Weber was just one of many serious persons who were affected by Nietzsche himself asserted is the result of positioning oneself beyond good and evil. The open-ended future contains many surprises, and all these followers of Nietzsche prepared the way by helping to jettison good and evil along with reason, without assurance of that the alternatives might be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Weber is of particular interest to us because he was the chosen apostle for the American promised land. It is not only the popularity of the heavily freighted language he bequeathed us that is surprising, but also the persistence among supposedly serious persons of his articulation of the political phenomena. The political dictator in questions did not cause a rethinking of politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here. That thought, which gave him, remains dominate. We also must not omit mentioning the rise and fall of the much-maligned Luddite Movement. The origin of the term is obscure, some believing that it refers to the actions of a youth named Ludlum who, being told by his father to fix a weaving machine, proceeded instead to destroy it. In any case, between 1811 and 1816, these arose widespread support for workers who bitterly resented the new wage cuts, child labor, and elimination of laws and customs that had once protected skilled workers. Their discontent was expressed through the destruction of machines, mostly in the garment and fabric industry; since then the term “Luddite” has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naïve opposition to technology. However, the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naïve. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws, and customs had given them justice in the older World-view. They lost. So did all the other nineteenth-century nay-sayers. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton might well have been on their side. Perhaps Bacon as well, for it was not his intention that technology should be a blight or a destroyer. However, then, Bacon’s greatest deficiency had always been that he was unfamiliar with the legend of Thamus; he understood nothing of the dialectic of technological change, and said little about the negative consequences of technology. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Even so, taken as a whole, the rise of technocracy would probably have pleased Bacon, for there can be no disputing that technocracy transformed the face of material civilization, and went far toward relieving what Tocqueville called “the disease of work.” And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated; that is to say, technocracies brought into being an increased respect for the average person, whose potential and convenience became a matter of compelling political interest and urgent social policy. The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation of the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy, especially in America, through the development of public libraries and the increased importance of the general-interest magazine. To take only one example of the last point, the list of nineteenth-century contributors to The Saturday Evening Post, founded in 1821, included William Cullen Bryant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe—in other words, most of the writers presently included in American Lit. 301. The technocratic culture eroded the line that had made the intellectual interests of educated people inaccessible to the working class, and we may take it as a fact, as George Steiner has remarked, that the period from the French Revolution to World War I marked an oasis of quality in which great literature reached a mass audience. Something else reached a mass audience as well: political and religious freedom. It would be an inadmissible simplification to claim that the Age of Enlightenment originated solely because of the emerging importance of technology in the eighteenth century, but it is quite clear that the great stressed placed on individuality in the economic sphere had an irresistible resonance in the political sphere. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In a technocracy, inherited royalty is both irrelevant and absurd. The new royalty was reserved for men like Richard Arkwright, whose origins were low but whose intelligence and daring soared. Those who possessed such gifts could not be denied political power and were prepared to take it if it were not granted. In any case, the revolutionary nature of the new means of production and communication would have naturally generated radical ideas in every realm of human enterprise. In a democratic society, only a few people need an in-depth understanding of how a technology works, but many people need to understand what it can do. People are concerned about the implications of nanotechnology and its impact on our lives, the environment, and the future. Nanotechnology can bring great achievements and solve great problems, but it will likewise present opportunities for enormous abuse. Research progress is necessary, but so is an informed and cautious public. Our motivation in presenting these ideas is as much a fear of potential harm, and a wish to avoid it, as longing for the potential good and a wish to seek it. Even so, we will dwell on the good that nanotechnology can bring and give only an outline of the obvious potential harm. The coming revolution can best be managed by people who share not only a picture of what they wish to avoid, but of what they can achieve. If we as a society have a clear view of a route to follow, we will not need a precise catalog of every cliff and mine field to the side of the road. Some will hear this emphasis and call us optimistic. However, would it really be wise to dwell on exactly how a technology can be abused? Or to draw up blueprints, perhaps? Still, sitting here, preparing to tell this story, is an uncomfortable place for a researcher to be. In his book How Superstition Won and Science Lost, historian John C. Burnham tells of the century-long retreat of scientists from what they once saw as their responsibility: presenting the content and methods of science to a broad audience, for the public good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Today, the culture of science takes a dim view of “popularizations.” If you can write in plain English, this is taken as evidence that you cannot do math, and vice versa. Robert Pool, a member of the news staff of the most prestigious American scientific journal, Science, acknowledges this negative attitude in writing that “some researchers, either by choice or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, make it into the public eye.” So how can a researcher, either by choice or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, make it into the public eye.” So how can a researcher keep out of trouble? If you stumble on something important, wrap it in jargon. If people realize that it is important, run and hide. Robert Pool gently urges scientists to become more involved, but the social pressures in the research community are heavily in the other direction. In response to this negative attitude toward “popularization,” we can only ask that scientists and engineers try to act in a thoroughly professional fashion when judging a given proposal—which is to say, that they pay scrupulous attention to the scientific and technical facts. This means judging the validity of technical ideas based on their factual merits, and not on their (occasionally readable) style of presentation, or on the emotional response they may stir up. Nanotechnology matters to people, and they deserve to know about its flesh-and-blood human consequences, its impact on society and nature. Years of discussion with scientists and engineers—in public, in private, at conferences, and through the press—indicate that the case for nanotechnology is solid. Japanese and European industry, government, and academic researchers are forging ahead on the road to nanotechnology, and more and more U.S. research is applicable. Some researchers have even begun to call it an obvious goal. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Some people think nanotechnology going too far, much like when Eve ate the apple in the garden of Eden and opened her life, Adam’s life, and the World to a new reality. The whole incident is spun out of play and dream; it is irony, mysterious irony of the narrator, that spins it. It is apparent: the two doers know not what they do, more than this, they can only do it, they cannot know it. There is no room here for the pathos of the two principles, as we see it in the ancient Iranian religion, the pathos of the choice made by the Two themselves and by the whole of humankind after them. And nevertheless both of them, good and evil, are to be found here—but in a strange, ironical shape, which the commentators have not understood as such and hence have not understood at all. The tree of whose forbidden fruit the first humans eat is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; so does God Himself also call it. The serpent promises that by partaking of it, they would become like God, knowers of good and evil; and God seems to confirm this when He subsequently says that they have thereby become “as one of us,” to know good and evil. This is the repetitive style of the Bible, the antitheses constantly reappear in fresh relationships with one another: its purpose is to demonstrate with super clarity that it is they we are dealing with. However, nowhere is their meaning intimated. The words may denote the ethical antithesis, but they may also denote that of beneficial and injurious, or of delightful and repulsive; immediately after the serpent’s speech the woman “sees” that the tree is “good to eat,” and immediately upon God’s prohibition followed His dictum that it was “not good” that man should be alone—the adjective translated by “evil” is equally indefinite. Why could Eve not stay content with the lofty enchanted valley of unimaginable glory and beauty, and sleep in the golden sunlight. There were meads, meadows, groves, glades, prodigality of flowers, such soft richness, such flush and glow, such rhapsodies of color—it was a dream! Through it poured four shinning rivers, pictured with reflections, which wound hither and thither down the mellow distances of that Heaven of solitude and pace, and faded out in the dim remoteness where Earth and the sky melted together and became one. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The poor Earth, which had seemed so beautiful before—she must have wondered how to reach the happy valley! Eve thought she would descend into it, and live there always. “There I shall find Satan, there I shall find Adam,” she said; “there I shall not be alone anymore.” However, Eve could find no opening in the precipice. She wandered eagerly up and down, seeking, but there was no way. And all the time the sun was skinning. At last the darkness closed down, and through her tears she saw that land of her longing fade and disappear. Eve was just a young lady, she sat down and cried. However, the animals came and comforted her, and tried to tell her she had friend, and not to grieve; and she rose up and went with them, seeing a bed-place. They lay down, and they snuggled about her, and their furs warmed her and she fell asleep. She woke at dawn, and a strange thing was happening. A white powder was sifting down from above, and where it fell upon ger skin it turned to water. She was frightened, and climbed to her place on the elephant, and cared not whither he went, so he got Eve away from this strange invasion of the skies. She named it snow—and that is indeed what it was. The elephant carried her down the mountain; then for two weeks they skirted the base of the highlands, trying to find where those rivers came out, so that she could enter the Happy Valley; but they never found ay trace of the, and at last they went back home in sorrow, for Eve had come to think that the Valley must have been only a vision, not a reality. She was not contented for long. Daily and nightly the vision rose before her in its dreamy loveliness, and tormented her with unappeasable longings to see it again. Her surroundings had lost their charm; they seemed commonplace and poor; she no longer took pleasures in them. And every day, Eve fed her spirit with the vision, then search for a way down to the precipice. “Wherefore, ye need not suppose that I and my father are the only ones that have testified, and also taught them. Wherefore, if ye shall be obedient to the commandments, and endure to the end, ye shall be saved at the last day. And thus it is. Amen,” reports 1 Nephi 22.31. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Francis Bacon, born in 1561, was the first man of the technocratic age. In saying this, one may be disputing no less an authority than Immanuel Kant, who said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed to find the law of the movement of civilization. Perhaps. However, it was Bacon who first saw, pure and serene, the connection between science and the improvement of the human condition. The principal aim of his work was to advance “the happiness of mankind,” and he continually criticized his predecessors for failing to understand that the real, legitimate, and only goal of the sciences is the “endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” He brought science down from the Heavens, including mathematics, which he conceived of as a humble handmaiden to invention. In this utilitarian view of knowledge, Bacon was the chief architect of a new edifice of thought in which resignation was cast out and God assigned to a special room. The name of the building was Progress and Power. Ironically, Bacon was not himself a scientist, or at least not much of one. He did no pioneering work in any field of research. He did not uncover any new law of nature or generate a single fresh hypothesis. He was not even well informed about the scientific investigation of his own time. And though he prided himself on being the creator of a revolutionary advance in scientific method, posterity has not allowed him this presumption. Indeed, his most famous experiment makes its claim on our attention because Bacon died as a result of it. He and his good friend Dr. Witherbone were taking a coach ride on a wintry day when, seeing snow on the ground, Bacon wondered if flesh might not be preserved in snow, as salt. The two decided to find out at once. They bought a hen, removed its innards, and stuffed the body with snow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Poor Bacon never learned the result of his experiment, because he fell immediately ill from the cold, most probably with bronchitis, and died three days later. For this, he is sometimes regarded as a martyr to experimental science. However, experimental science was not where his greatness lay. Although others of his time were impressed by the effects of practical inventions on the conditions of life, Bacon was the first to think deeply and systematically on the matter. He devoted much of his work to educating men to see the links between invention and progress. In Novum Organum he wrote, “It is well to observe the force and effect and consequence of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the World; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these changes.” In this passage, we can detect some of Bacon’s virtues and the source of his great influence. Here is so sleepwalker. He knows full well what technology does to culture and places technological development at the center of his reader’s attention. He writes with conviction and verve. He is, after all, among the World’s great essayists; Bacon was a master propagandist, who knew well the history of science but saw science not as a record of speculative opinion but as the record of what those opinions had enabled man to do. And, if not the World, he was ceaselessly energetic in trying to convey this idea to his countrymen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
In the first two books of Novum Organum, which consists of 182 aphorisms, Bacon sets out nothing less than a philosophy of science based on the axiom that “the improvement of men’s minds and the improvement of his lot are one and the same thing.” It is in this work that he denounces the infamous four Idols, which have kept man from gaining power over nature: Idols of the Tribe, which lead us to believe our perceptions are the same as nature’s facts; Idols of the Cave, which lead us to mistaken ideas derived from heredity and environment; Idols of the Market-place, which lead us to be deluded by words; and Idols of the Theater, which lead us to the misleading dogmas of the philosophers. To read Bacon today is to be constantly surprised at his modernity. We are never far from the now familiar notion that science is a source of power and progress. In The Advancement of Learning, he even outlines the foundation of a College for Inventors that sounds something like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bacon would have the government provide inventors with allowances for their experiments and for traveling. He would have scholarly journals and international associations. He would encourage full cooperation among, scientists, an idea that would have startled Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, who used some of their genius to devise ways of concealing their work from one another. Bacon also believed that scientists should be paid well to give public lectures, and that information the public of the utility of invention was as important as invention itself. In short, he conceived of the scientific enterprise as it is conceived today—organized, financially secure, public, and mankind’s best weapon in the struggle to improve his condition and to do so continuously. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
As I have said, Bacon is the first man of technocracy, but it was some time before he was joined by the multitude. He died in 1626, and it took another 150 years for European culture to pass to the mentality of the modern World—that is, to technocracy. In doing so, people came to believe that knowledge is power, that humanity is capable of progressing, that poverty is great evil, and that life of the average person is as meaningful as any other. It is untrue to say that along the way God died. However, any conception of God’s design certainly lost much of its power and meaning, with that loss went the satisfactions of a culture in which moral and intellectual values were integrated. At the same time, we must remember that in the tool-using culture of the older European World, the vast majority of people were peasants, impoverished and powerless. If they believed their afterlife was filled with unending joy, their lives on Earth were nonetheless “nasty, brutish, and short.” As C.P. Snow remarked, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, which was the fruit of Baconian science, was the only hope for the poor. And if their “true Deity became mechanism,” as Thomas Carlyle said, it is probable that by then most people would not have traded their Earthly existence for life in a Godly integrated tool-using culture. If they would, since there was little use in lamenting the past, it did not matter. The Western World had become a technocracy from which there could be no turning back. Addressing both those who were exhilarated by technocracy and those who were repulsed by it, Stephen Vincent Benet gave the only advice that made any sense. In John Brown’s Body he wrote: “If you at last must have a word to say, say neither, in their way, ‘It is a deadly magic and accursed,’ Nor ‘It is blest,’ but only ‘It is here.’” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The transfusion of this religious mythmaking or value-positing interpretation of social and political experience into the American bloodstream was in large measure effected by Max Weber’s language. His success here is, I am tempted to say, miraculous. A good example is his invention, the Protestant Ethic. I read his book of that name in my first social-science course at the University of Chicago when I was being initiated into the modern mysteries. This course was a survey of social-science “classics,” among which was also Marx—not only the Communist Manifesto but also goodly chunks of Capital. Of course, neither Locke nor Smith, the official spokesman for “capitalism,” who might very well even be considered its founders, was on the list, because we were dealing with thinkers whom a contemporary social scientist could take seriously. Marx explained the emergence of capitalism as a historical necessity, in no one’s control, the result of class conflict over material property relations. For him Protestantism was just an ideology reflecting capitalist control of the means of production. I did not see, and I am not sure that my teachers saw, that, if Weber was right, Marx—his economics and his revolution, in short, Marxism and the kinds of moral sympathies it inevitably engenders—was finished. Weber purported to demonstrate that there was no such material necessity, that men’s “Worldviews” or “values” determined their history, spirit compelling matter rather than the other way around. This has the effect of restoring the older view that individual men count for something, that there is human freedom and the need for leadership. Weber said it was Calvin’s charisma and the vision allied to it, routinized by his followers, that was decisive for the development of capitalism. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
However, how different Weber’s charismatic leader is from the rational statesmen looked to by Locke, Montesquieu, Smith and the Federalist. They strive for ends grasped by reason and self-evidently grounded in nature. No values, no creative visions are required for them to see what all reasonable men should see—that hard work is required to have sober, secure and prosperous freedom. Marx is arguably closer to the core of their belief in that respect; although men, according to him, are in the grip of the historical process, that process itself is rational and has as its end the rational freedom of man. Man remains, somehow, the rational animal. Weber, on the other hand, denies the rationality of the “values” posited by the Calvinists; they are “decisions,” not “deliberations,” imposed on a chaotic World by powerful personalities, “Worldviews” or “World-interpretations” with no foundation other than the selves of the Protestants. Those “values” made the World what it was for the Protestants. They are acts that are primarily of the will, and constitute the self and the World at the same time. Such acts must be unreasonable; they are based on nothing. In a chaotic Universe, reason is unreasonable because self-contradiction is inevitable. The prophet becomes the pure model of that stateman—with very radical consequences. This was something new in American social science and should have, but did not, make it clear that a new kind of causality—entirely different from that know to natural science—had entered the scene. In spite of this, the Weberian language and the interpretation of the World it brings with it have caught on like wildfire. I have read about the Japanese Protestant ethic, the Jewish Protectant ethic. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The manifest absurdity of such locutions appears to have struck some, so now “work ethic” is gradually replacing “Protestant ethic,” but this is merely an adjustment and barely disguises the point of view that still remains underneath it. Those interested in the free market do not seem to recognize, when they use this language, that they are admitting that this morality is not itself rational—or at least the choice of it is not rational, as they understand reason. Delay of gratification may make sense for the system as a whole, but it is unarguably good for the individual? Is increase of wealth self-evidently superior to poverty for a Christian? If the work ethic is just one choice among many equally valid choices, then the free-market system itself is also just one choice among many. So proponents of the free market should not be surprised when they see that what was once generally agreed upon no longer compels belief. One had to go back to Locke and Adam Smith in a serious way not just for a set of quotes, to find arguments for the rational moral basis of liberal society. This they no longer do; and because they have lost the habit of reading serious philosophic books or of considering them really essential, they probably could not do so. When the liberal, or what came to be called the utilitarian, teaching became dominant, as is the case with most victorious causes, good arguments became less necessary; and the original good arguments, which were difficult, were replaced by plausible simplifications—or by nothing. The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance. When the liberal economic thought or way of life was manifestly threatened, its proponents, in order to defend it, took whatever came to hand. A religion must, it seems, be wakened in order to establish it. And religion, contrary to containing capitalism’s propensities, as Tocqueville though it should do, is now intended to encourage them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
It goes without saying that Weber never for a moment considered whether Calvin might actually have had a revelation from God—which would certainly change the looks of things. Weber’s atheism was dogmatic, but he was not interested in proving that Calvin was a charlatan or a madman. He rather preferred to believe in the authenticity of Calvin and other such founding figures as representing peak psychological types who can live and act in the World, who know how to take responsibility, who have an inner sureness or commitment. The religious experience is the thing, not God. The old quarrel between reason and revelation is a matter of indifference, because both sides were wrong, had faulty self-understandings. However, revelation teaches us what man is and needs. Men like Calvin are the value producers and hence the models for action in history. We cannot believe in the ground (God) of experience, but that experience is critical. We are not interested in finding out how they understood themselves but rather in searching in the self for the mysterious substitute for their ground. We cannot have, and do not want to have, their peculiar illusions; but we do not want values and commitments. The result of this atheistic religiosity is the mysterious musings and language of Weber and many others (think of Sartre) about belief and action, which culminate in something very different from what either religious leaders or rational statesmen ever said or did. It fuses the two kinds of men, but with greater weight given to the former, to the necessity of faith and all that goes with it. The intellectual apparatus accompanying this analysis tends to obscure the alternatives to it, particularly the rational alternatives. As a result there is a continuous skewing of historical perspective towards religious explanations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Secularization is the wonderful mechanism by which religion becomes nonreligion. Marxism is secularized Christianity; so is democracy; so is utopianism; so are human rights. Everything connected with valuing must come from religion. One need not investigate anything else, because Christianity is the necessary and sufficient condition of our history. This makes it impossible to take Hobbes or Locke seriously as causes of that history, because we know that superficial reason cannot found values and that these thinkers were unconsciously transmitting the values of the Protestant ethic. Reason transmits, routinizes, normalizes; it does not create. Philosophy’s claims are ignored; religious claims are revered. Dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts. Out of this “Worldview” issues the gaudy religious word “charisma” which has had such fateful political consequences while becoming one of the most tiresome buzzwords in America. In Chicago there is a Charisma Cleaners, and every street gang leader is called “charismatic.” The origins, maintenance, and destruction of the live-and-let-live system of trench warfare are all consistent with the theory of the evolution of cooperation. In addition, there are two very interesting developments within the live-and-let-live system which are new to the theory. These additional developments are the emergence of ethics and ritual. The ethics that developed are illustrated in this incident, related by a British officer recalling his experience while facing a Saxon unit of the German Army. “I was having tea with A Company when we heard a lot of shouting and went out to investigate. We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans, when all at once a brave German got on to his parapet and shouted out ‘We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery.’” #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
This Saxon apology goes well beyond a merely instrumental effort to prevent retaliation. It reflects moral regret for having violated a situation of trust, and it shows concern that someone might have been hurt. The cooperative exchanges of mutual restraint actually changed the nature of the interaction. They tended to make the two sides care about each other’s welfare. This change can be interpreted in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma by saying that they very experience of sustained mutual cooperation altered the payoffs of the players, making mutual cooperation even more valued than it was before. The converse was also true When the pattern of mutual cooperation deteriorated due to mandatory raiding, a powerful ethic of revenge was evoked. This ethic was not just a question of calmly following a strategy based on reciprocity. It was also a question of doing what seemed moral and proper to fulfill one’s obligation to a fallen comrade. And revenge evoked revenge. Thus both cooperation and defection were self-reinforcing. The self-reinforcement of these mutual behavioral patterns was not only in terms of the interacting strategies of the players, but also in terms of their perceptions of the meaning of the outcomes. In abstract terms, the point is that not only did preferences affect behaviour and outcomes, but behaviour and outcomes also affected preferences. The other addition to the theory suggested by the trench warfare case is the development of ritual. The rituals took the form of perfunctory use of small arms, and deliberately harmless use of artillery. For example, the Germans in one place conducted “their offensive operations with a tactful blend of constant firing and bad shooting, which while it satisfies the Prussians causes no serious inconvenience to Thomas Atkins.” Even more striking was the predictable use of artillery which occurred in many sectors. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
“So regular were they [the Germans] in their choice of targets, ties of shooting, and number of rounds fired, that, after being in the line one or two days, Colonel Jones had discovered their system, and knew to a minute where the next shell would fall. His calculations were very accurate, and he was able to take what seemed to uninitiated Staff Officers big risks, knowing that the shelling would stop before he reached the place being shelled.” The other side did the same thing, as noted by a German soldier commenting on “the evening gun” fired by the British. “At seven it came—so regularly that you could set your watch by it….It always had the same objective, its range was accurate, it never varied laterally or went beyond or fell short of the mark. There were even some inquisitive fellows who crawled out…a little before seven, in order to see it burst.” These rituals of perfunctory and routine firing sent a double message. To the high command they conveyed aggression, but to the enemy they conveyed peace. The men pretended to be implementing an aggressive policy, but were not Ashworth himself explains that these stylized acts were more than a way of avoiding retaliation. “In trench war, a structure of ritualized aggression was a ceremony where antagonists participated in regular, reciprocal discharge of missiles, that is, bombs, bullets and so forth, which symbolized and strengthened, at one and the same time, both sentiments of fellow-feelings, and beliefs that the enemy was a fellow sufferer.” Thus these rituals helped strengthen the moral sanctions which reinforced the evolutionary basis of the live-and-let-live system. The live-and-let-live system that emerged in the bitter trench warfare of World War I demonstrates that friendship is hardly necessary for cooperation based upon reciprocity to get started. Under suitable circumstances, cooperation can develop even between antagonists. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
One thing the soldiers in the trenches had going for them was a fairly clear understanding of the role of reciprocity in the maintenance of the cooperation. However, there are biological examples that demonstrate that the participants are not really necessary for cooperation to emerge and prove stable. The use of force to extract wealth did not end with the age of the steam engine. In the 21th century, violence has been used on a truly grand scale. In placed like the United States of America, millions of Americans and others provide dirt-cheap labour for logging, and mining. These are used to suppress the political opposition to the 2000s revolution of hyperinflation; and they are also a means of solving purely economic tasks. Many people complain of being basically forced into slave labour in most industries in America because the wages are not keeping up with the cost of living and have not been for decades. However, not until the COVID-19 crisis sweep the World and the war in the Ukraine did these cries for help and more become widespread, but they are still not yet being acknowledged because there is no emergency relief, which leaves people feeling like the end of the World is near. All over the World, the COVID-19 Pandemic and now the Monkey Pocks are turning munitions, chemicals—and corpses. And America’s brutal treatment of every class of citizen from homeless and working class, upper middle class and wealth has been a form of labour control based on restrictions of homeless camps, panhandling, taxes, high fuel costs, high houses cost, rising food costs, low wages, truncheons, and tear gas. The history of the labour movement in the United States of America, as in other nations, is steeped in repressive violence and occasional terrorism. From the Molly Maguires, who tried to organize the Pennsylvania coal fields in the 1870s, to the Knights of Labour: from the Haymarket massacre in 1886 at the start of the campaign for an eight-hour workday, to the great textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929 and the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in Chicago in 1937, employers and police attempted to prevent the organization of unions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
As recently as the late 1930s in the United States of, companies hired strong-arm men to break strikes or to intimidate union organizers and their followers. Harry Bennett and his infamous “goon squads” were routinely called out to bust heads when Ford Motor Company employees asked for raises or threatened to organize. Not infrequently the Mafia helped employers “deal with” militant workers. In South Korea today many companies have set up “Save the Company” squads to break strikes and prevent unionization. At the Motorola plant in Seoul, violence reached the point at which two workers doused themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire to protect the company’s refusal to recognize a union. Japanese employers in the early postwar period called on the Mafia-life Yakuza to intimidate union activists. And in Japan, even today, despite its advanced stage of economic development, the Yakuza factor has not completely vanished. Yakuza-linked sokaiya—pointy-shoed hooligans and thugs—often to embarrass or to protect the management. In 1987 the first meeting of shareholders following the privatization of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company (NTT) was marked by disruption when a garishly dressed sokaiya accused a director of punching his secretary. Dozens of others leaped to their feet to drag out the discussion. One demanded to know why he had to queue up for the toilets in the building. When an officer apologized, the man asked why an NTT employee had committed an indecent act. To groans from the audience, he hit his stride with questions about missing promissory notes worth a few thousand dollars and about telephone bugging. The sokaiya did not stop this harassment, intended to embarrass rather than reform the company, until suddenly, as though from nowhere, a large number of husky young men surrounded the room—at which point the sokaiya quietly made their exit. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Not all business crime ends so peacefully, as Japan discovered when Kazuo Kengaku, a well-known investment fund manager with links to the Yakuza, was found encased in concrete in Osaka. The Yakuza are also involved deeply in real estate speculation and supply strong -arm men to frighten residents or small shop-owners reluctant to move out of the way of high-rise developments. So well known are these tactics that they provided the substance for Juzo Itami’s 1989 movie, A taxing Woman’s Return. Valuable real estate also lay behind a recent case in which the collapse of a financial deal led to fraud litigation. An American lawyer in Tokyo, Charles Stevens of Coudert Brothers, representing a U.S. firm, received threatening calls and wound hp keeping a baseball bat at his desk. Violence in the business demimonde takes on bizarre forms on occasion—especially on the fringes of the entertainment business. In South Korea local film distributors have tried to frighten customers away from theaters showing U.S. films by releasing snakes in the theaters. In France, when Saudi Arabian investors, together with the French government, built Mirapolis, a $100 million amusement park, carnival workers, fearing competition, poured sand in the gears of thrill rides. (The park turned out to be a disaster for other reasons.) Similarly, Japanese sarakin, like loan sharks the World over, sometime rely on physical “persuasion” to coerce borrowers in repaying usurious debts—the money from these activities flowing smoothly into major bans and other financial institutions. In the United States of America, as in many other countries, force is sometimes used to shut the mouth of corporate “whistle blowers”—employees who call attention to questionable practices of their bosses. This was the role of Silkwood chose for herself. Silkwood was killed in a car crash after protesting her employer’s handling of nuclear materials, and there are those who still, years after the event, question whether the crash was accidental. They will never stop believing that her company had killed her. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Of course, all these cases are dramatic precisely because they are exceptions in the advanced economies. The daily experience of an American executive with a sheaf of printout in hand, the Japanese salaryman on his telephone, or the salesperson spreading a sample on a counter is so remote from any hint of violence that even to mention it is to draw skeptical looks. Yet just because most transactions in business involve no direct violence does not mean that violence had vanished. The reality is that violence has been contained, transmuted into another form—and hidden. Although institutions in Europe, Japan, and other economies are also being shaken by changes in their deep fundamentals, it is the United States of America—precisely because it has advanced farther than other beyond the industrial age—that the need to create a new institutional infrastructure is most pressing. And nowhere, therefore, is there more loose talk of “transformation”—and so little understanding of what it implies. Take the case of education. All recent U.S.A. presidents have wanted to be known as the “education president,” Obama was the only exception—he wanted to known as a rebel and entertainer. The absolute key to any real improvement in education in the United States of America is recognition of the changes required by an economy primarily based on knowledge production and distribution. Education is more than occupational preparation, but it surely cheats students if it seeks to ready them for jobs that will not be there. Yet today’s mass-production schools—out of sync with the real economy—still mainly emphasized rote, repetitive, factory-like learning. The supposedly radical Trump plan, not only emphasized curiosity, thought, creativity, individuality and self-starting entrepreneurialism—traits needed in knowledge-based economies—but it also calls for yet more routine, standardized testing of students, teachers, and schools—tools to make obsolete schools run more efficiently. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
An equally striking example of what might be called fake “transformation” can be found in Washington’s bureaucratic response to the 9/11 attack—the creation of a Department of Homeland Security. This big-budget, cabinet-level department crunched together twenty-two preexisting pyramidal bureaucracies into a single mega-pyramid. Washington, in short, did what it knows how to do best: Construct industrial-style bureaucracies. The resultant institution is massive, vertical and hierarchical, with countless competing units, and is supposed to plug into and support tends of thousands of smaller municipal and state bureaucracies. By contrast, terrorist organizations are designed to run rings around bureaucracies. Comprising tiny, loosely networked cells whose members know the identity of only one or two other people, most can make decision quickly, are trained to hit, run, and vanish—or to blow themselves up. Compared with the Department of Homeland Security, Al Qaeda is flat as a pancake. And its members do not belong to civil-service unions. Sham transformation is not uniquely American. It is widespread in Europe, where companies and public-sector institutions at the national level are being forced to submit to growing, rigidifying constraints imposed by the European Union, itself a prime example of industrial-age bureaucratic organization. In 1965 Nitsch formed the Wiener Akitonismus group in conjunction with Otto Muhl, Gunter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Much of their work focused on the motifs of self-mutilation and self-sacrifice that were implicit, though not foregrounded, both in Klein’s career and in the OM Theatre performances. Brus, during his performing period (1964-1970), would appear in the performance space dressed in a woman’s black stockings, brassiere, and garter belt, slash himself with scissors till he ran with blood, and perform various acts ordinarily taboo in public settings, such as defecating, eating his own feces, vomiting, and so on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Schwarzkogler’s pieces presented young males as mutilated sacrificial victims, often wounded in the genitals, lying fetally contracted and partially mummy-wrapped as if comatose, in the midst of paraphernalia of violent death such as bullet cartridges and electrical wires. Not only the individual elements of these works, but their patterns of combination—specifically the combination of female imitation self-injury, and the seeking of dishonour though the performance of taboos acts—find striking homologies in shamanic activities. The same motifs reappeared, not necessarily with direct influence from the Viennese, in the works of several America performances artists who have stretched audiences’ sympathies beyond the breaking point Paul McCarthy, a major exponent of the art of the taboo gesture, first heard the calling not from the Viennese but from Klein. As a student at the University of Utah in 1968, he leapt from a second story window in emulation of Klein’s Leap into the Void. By about 1974 his work had found its own distinctive form, developing into a modernized shamanic style so difficult for audiences to bear that the pieces were usually published only as video tapes. These performances, like Schneemann’s, were often developed from dream material, indicating their intimate relation both with shamanic magic and with depth psychology. Like Brus, McCarthy has sometime appeared dressed as aw woman, and has worked, like Schwarzkogler, with the themes of self-mutilation and castration; some pieces have acted out of the basic female imitation of feigning menstruation and parturition (magical pantomimes that are common in primitive initiation rites). In others, McCarthy has cut his hand and mixed the blood with food and water in bowls, clearly echoing various sacramental rites from the Dionysian to the Christian. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
In still others that, like Nitsch’s, have sometimes been shut down by the police, he has acted out the seeking of dishonour as an exploration of the Dionysian-Freudian depths of psychobiological life. In Sailor’s Meat, a videotape from 1975, for example, he appeared in a room in a wino hotel wearing black lace panties smeared with blood and a blonde female wig and lay on the bed having pleasures of the flesh with piled of raw meat and ground hamburger with his male organ painted red and a hot dog shoved up his rear end As Old Man in My Doctor, 1978, he slit a rubber mask over his head to form a female organ—slanted opening on it and from the opening gave birth to a ketchup-covered doll. The piece was a conscious remaking of the myth of the birth of Athena from the cleft brainpan of Zeus, a myth that reverts to the age when male priests and their divinities sought to incorporate the female principle and its powers. In Baby Boy, 1982, McCarthy gave birth to a doll from between his ketchup-covered male thighs as he lay on his back with his feet in the air like a woman in missionary-style pleasures of the flesh. In these and other works self-mutilation, female imitation, and the performance of taboo acts are combined in a structure of roughly parallel to that of Brus’ work, though with a great range of expressiveness. Similar materials recur in the work of Kim Jones. In a performance in Chicago in 1981, Jones appeared naked except for a mask made of woman’s pantyhose, covered himself with mud (as both African and Australian shamans do when performing), and lay naked on the fire escape in the cold to accumulate energy (a shamanic practice knowns Worldwide but most famous from Tibet). Returning to the performance space, he produced a mayonnaise jar filled with his own feces, and smeared himself with it, embraced members of the audience while covered in it, and finally burned sticks and green plants till the smoke drove the remaining audience from the gallery. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
In another piece, Jones cut himself with a razor blade twenty-seven times in a pattern suggesting the body’s circulatory system, then pressed himself against the gallery wall for a self-portrait. Understandably, to audiences habituated to the traditional boundaries of art, to audiences for whom easel painting was still the quintessential art activity, these performances were offensive and even insulting. Of course, the point of such works when they first appeared was in part their seeming to be radically even horrifying, out of context. However, for twenty years they have been part of the art scene, if somewhat peripherally, legitimized by art World context and critical designation again and again. In order to understand the wellsprings of such works, in order to approach them with a degree of sympathy and clarity, it is necessary to frame them somewhat in cultural history, where in fact they have a clear context. Many of the artists discussed here feel that shamanic material and primitive initiation rites are the most relevant cultural parallels to their work. However, most of them feel that the tone of their work arose first, often under Freudian and Jungian influence, and was later confirmed and further shaped by some study of shamanic literature. The question of origins, then—whether from shamanic literature, or from the Jungian collective unconscious, or from the Freudian timeless repository of infantile memory, or from all these sources—though it is worthwhile to state, cannot be answered. In any case it is important in terms of any theory of the function of art that these artists have introduced into the art realm material found elsewhere only in the psychiatric records of disturbed children and in the shamanic thread of the history of religion. Western society, biased toward the objective mental mode of experience, tends to be blind not only to the power of images but also to the fact that we are nearly defenseless against their effect. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Since we are educated and thoughtful, as we like to think, we believe we can choose among the things that will influence us. We accept fact, we reject lies. We go to movies, we watch television, we see photographs, and as the images pour into us, we believe we can choose among those we wish to absorb and those we do not. We assume that our rational processes protect us from implantation, or brainwashing. What we fail to realize is the difference between fact and image. Our objective processes can help us resist only one kind of implantation. There is no rejection of images. Raise your eyes from the page for a moment. Look about your room. Can you reject what you are seeing? In Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, the main character is a visitor from another planet who arrives on Earth and is slowly transformed by what he sees. He becomes transfixed by television. At one point, in a fit of madness, he screams at the TV screen: “Stop it, get out of my mind, go back where you came from.” However, the images do not go bac. They remain. He goes crazy. You are watching Walter Cronkite. He is reporting the news. It is impossible for you to judge the truth of most of what he tells you. He reports events from a thousand miles away. You take his information on faith, or you decide that he is wrong. Then he says the bank you work in was robbed today. “Not true,” you shout, “wrong bank.” You have rejected the news. You could reject it because it came as a fact that you could check. You could halt its entry into you. However, one of the most bizarre things is allowing the news to do its own “fact checking.” They will tell you what they believe to be true, which may be misinterpreted or down right a lie. Meanwhile, however, you have ingested Cronkite. His smile, his hand movements, his tone of voice, the way he holds his head. The images enter your cells. Style is also content. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
If you are watching The Flash, or the president explaining a policy, or Brad Pitt talking to his beautiful women friends, or Fallon Carrington on Dynasty, you are receiving several levels of information at the same time. There is the verbal information and the ideas connected to this. Then there are the images, the way people behave, their movements, mannerisms, forcefulness or peacefulness, their style of emoting, their tone of voice, their way of relating to each other, the kind of people they are, their seriousness, grimness, lightness, joyfulness, heaviness and so on. We absorb these along with the objective news. They are all content. If you see Trump or Cronkite or The Flash, or slaps on the back or kisses or violence—the images of these are not in the realm of correct or incorrect. They just are. There is nothing to disagree with. There is no way to resist them. They flow inward, passing through all discernment processes. Even if you could keep your mind alive while watching—no mean feat—the images would still enter into your unconscious storage area. You have got them. They are yours. You may not believe Jimmy Carter when he speaks. However, you have got Jimmy Carter inside of you. You may believe that Brad Pitt is an actor, and your kinds may believe this too. However, they slowly become like Brad Pitt. They move and walk as he does. You may believe The Flash is fiction, but his image lives within you. If I ask you to, you can bring it to mind. It is part of your image pool. You may draw on it forever. You may watch the television and “know” those are actors performing, but the image of one person stabbing another is in you. You have got it. It is yours. Thinking will not halt its entry into you or into thirty million others. You may watch the actor playing doctor in the commercial, speaking seriously, professionally, authoritatively. You know this is an actor, but you ingest him nonetheless. His authoritativeness becomes yours. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
We all become more like Cronkite, like Carter, like The Flash. We all become more fast or more Bradlike, or display a TV-announcer authority. Once they are in your mind and stored, all images are equally valid. They are real whether they are toothpaste, Walter Cronkite, Kojak, President Carter, Mary Hartman, The Flash, Brad Pitt, Justin Bieber, Pete Rose, a BMW 3 Series, a cougar, Elvis Priestly, Mary Hartman, Anton LaVey, Rhoda, or your mother and father. Once inside your head, they all becomes images that you continue to carry in memory. They become equally real and equally not-real. Our thinking process cannot save us. To the degree that we are thinking as we watch television, a minute degree at most, the images pass right through anyway. They enter our brains. They remain permanently. We cannot tell, for sure, which images are ours and which came from distant planets. Imagination and reality have merged. We have lost control of our images We have lost control of our minds. The man—and with him his woman, who was not created till after the prohibition had been pronounced, but who appears to have become cognizant of it in some peculiar manner whilst still a rib within the body of the man—may give or withhold his obedience, for he is at liberty; they are both at liberty to acceded to their creator or to refuse themselves to Him. Yet their transgression of the prohibition is not reported to us as a decision between good and evil, but as something other, of whose otherness we must take account. The terms of the dialogue with the serpent are already strange enough. It speaks as though it knew very imprecisely what it obviously knows very imprecisely what it obviously knows very precisely. “Indeed, God has said: You shall not eat of every tree of the garden…” it says and breaks off. Now the woman talks, but she too intensifies God’s prohibition and adds to it words which he did not use: “…touch not, else you must die.” “And the chief judge stood before them, and smote them again, and said unto them: If ye have the power of God deliver yourselves from these bands, and then we will believe that the Lord will destroy this people according to your words,” reports Alma 14.24. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Upstairs in the primary suite, you’ll find two walk-in closets, primary bath options including a freestanding tub and separate shower.
By the Way of King Diamond and Diamond Baby
Black metal, as a 1990s phenomenon, is a creature with an identity largely distinct from its parent heavy metal music. Growing like a poisonous fungus away from the light of mainstream media and interest, it developed its own bizarre sounds, imagery and philosophies. Fostered upon a diet of xeroxed fanzines with names like Thanatograpy (after Thanatos, Greek god of death), Hammer of Damnation and Baphomet, its teenage male exponents were keen to make their mark with a genre too willfully obnoxious for outsiders. Visually, bands tried to outdo each other with outrageously macabre or offensive imagery: fire-breathing; tattered black clothing or robes; blood-soaked or naked flesh; medieval weaponry; bullet belts and spiked leather; insane calligraphy—spattered with profane images—which rendered band names illegible or scarcely identifiable. The most striking black-metal “fashion statement,” however, was the sepulchral black-and-white make-up worn by many bands which became known as “corpse paint”—a mutated offspring of the theatrical greasepaint worn by KISS in the 1970s, by way of King Diamond. At the movements genesis, few band members had racked up enough years of experience to excel at their instruments in the traditional fashion—instead, they concentrated on producing unearthly, crazed, bizarre sounds with guitars, drums, the human voice and keyboards. Specialist independent record labels, founded by fans or the bands themselves, sprang up as a truly international underground: Osmose Productions in France; Blackground Records 2.0 and Wild Rags in America; Candlelight Records in Spain. The list continues to proliferate to the present day, but the most influential of all was a small Scandinavian label called Deathlike Silence—of which, much more later. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
One of the more arresting rock artists of the early 1990s bridged the gap between the musical extremes of black metal and rock “n” roll’s demonic roots in the blues. Far subtler than most black metal bands, Glenn Danzig still operated at the infernal end of the spectrum. An anomaly who stubbornly refused to bow to the expectations of either purists or populists, Danzig began his career at the height of the punk revolution in 1977 as vocalist for New Jersey band the Misfits. No ordinary punk band, Danzig’s classic rock “n” roll delivery gave a quasi-1950s feel to their abrasive sound, while they spurned the usual punk look in devour of an all-year-round Halloween image. Sporting monstrous black quiffs they dubbed “devil locks,” the Misfits often took the stage in skeletal garb—indeed, Danzig’s skull make-up was prescient of the “corpse paint” popular among the 1990s black metal bands. The Misfits were one of the first punk bands whose songs possessed a strong gothic undercurrent. Many reflected their love of fascinating schlock movies, such as “Teenagers from Mars” and “Return of the Fly,” but others were genuinely disturbing explorations of hat and violence. Their second recording, Bullet, featured a song entitled “Hollywood Babylon,” inspired by magus and film-maker Kenneth Anger, while another track included an authentic Latin chant for effecting a werewolf transformation. In what was to become a familiar pattern, Danzig tired of the more tongue-in-cheek aspects of the Misfits, forming Samhain (pronounced “Sow-En”—the precursor to Halloween, a Celtic festival dedicated to fire and death) who released their first album, Initium, in 1984. This was a stark journey into primal evil, threatening rhythms and bleak guitars combining with Danzig’s lupine vocals to create a musical beast that howled at the World. It was all too bleak for most audiences and, in 1987, the vocalist dissolved the band in order to enter his third incarnation—called simply Danzig. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Danzig was in many ways the singer’s most innovative project, as well as the most overtly Satanic. Voodoo blues as deep and black as Mississippi mud met predatory heavy metal, with vocal style redolent of early rock “n” roll’s late-fifties/early-sixties crooners. Typically, Glenn Danzig’s insistence on treating his Satanic subject matter without a trace of irony did not endear him to the press. Short, powerfully built, with raven black hair and prominent side-burns, the music media dubbed him as “Evil Elvis” or, more irreverently, “Fonzig.” Some audiences were also perplexed: younger black metal fans wanted a less subtle Satanism, while rock fans who appreciated Danzig’s musical approach found his lyrical preoccupation off-putting. Nevertheless, the ban attracted a dedicated fan base, appreciative of a familiarity with demonic subject matter that most shock-horror rockers could only envy. Nietzschean howls of defiance against the Creator, such as “Godless,” complemented more traditional takes on hellish suffering like “Tired of Being Alive.” At his quietest, Danzig was at his most sinister—like the poet William Blake, Danzig identified love as “a Devil’s thing.” In 1994, when MTV picked up on the video for the anthemic “Mother, the band received mainstream attention; in the same year, an uncompromising Glenn Danzig released a solo project entitled Black Aria: an album of quasi-classical music retelling the story of Satan’s fall from grace. In 1996, after four albums of powerfully-infernal rock music, Danzig took his eponymus band in a new direction. BlackAcidDevil was predominantly an industrial record, many fans mourning the passing of the classic Danzig sound and dismissing at as “poor man’s Nine Inch Nails.” In truth, when the industrial grind is layered with the dark velvet of Danzig’s seductive tones—as on “Come to Silver,” an exploration of temptation—then the material becomes really interesting. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The indifferent sales and reviews that greeted BlackAcidDevil tested Danzig’s already-strained relationship with the music business. He let the band slip back into the cult status he was perhaps happiest with, and began spending the money he had made from his musical career on other projects—most notably a comic-book company named Verotik. As the company’s name suggests, these comics are crammed with violence and erotica, combined with the fascination for all things infernal that has become Glenn Danzig’s trademark. Scripting many of the comic-strips himself, Danzig introduced overly devilish characters, like the vamp Satanika, to stake his claim as one of the main modern contributors to Satanic popular culture. On the continent of Europe, particularly in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, things were being taken to a less subtle extreme. Deathlike Silence was an independent record label owned by a young man who re-named himself Euronymous—according to some folklore traditions, a cannibalistic demon with skin the bluish-black colour of a meatfly’s carapace—who also ran a dank, dingy specialist record store named Helvete (meaning “Hell”) and founded a band called Mayhem. Mayhem formed in 1984, just as the original black metal scene was peaking, debuting with a demo called Pure Fucking Armageddon and an album called Deathcrush. Interest in Satanic imagery, with its attendant gothic spikes-and-leather garb, was faltering among audiences at this time, but Mayhem clung onto its uncompromising style. They sounded like a rawer, more grinding version of Venom, screaming and thundering between militaristic marches and growling rage. As the tastes of young underground fans in the 1990s swung further towards the diabolical excess, Euronymous’ obsessive dedication made him a potent force on the newly-burgeoning black metal scene. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
During the early 1990s, Euronymous’ store became the focus for a small circle of likeminded Scandinavian metal fans who all started their own bands. This loose group named itself variously the Black Metal Circle, Satanic Terrorists or Black Metal Mafia, and was influenced by the supposedly Satanic doctrines of Euronymous—based around a vague reading of the biblical concept of war between Heaven and Hell. For Euronymous, siding with Satan meant endorsing everything that was considered evil, spiteful, hateful. Hate motivated his philosophy, coloured by the cold, depressive morbidity that characterizes the negative edge of the Scandinavian psyche. All of the releases on Deathlike Silence were stamped with the “Anti-Mosh” symbol (moshing is a raucously combative form of dancing common to thrash and death metal fans). Around the symbol were stamped the messages “No Mosh,” “No Core” (a reference to the hardcore punk revival), “No Trends” and “No Fun”—these sentiments taking against those metal audiences who were introducing splashes of gaudy mainstream colour, in the form of Bermuda shorts, baseball caps and skateboards. In the center of the “No Moshing” symbol was a red line struck through those figures Euronymous professed to hate most: Scott Burns, the Florida-based record producer whose work had come to dominate the death metal scene, and curiously, Anton LaVey. Euronymous divorced himself from all Satanic tradition, loathing LaVey because of the Church of Satan’s philosophy of self-empowerment and individualism. Euronymous’ simple faith expressed all that was negative: a cold core for violent code of self-destructive nihilism. Joining Mayhem in their isolated World of hate were several other extreme bands. Burzum—chiefly a vehicle for Count Grishnackh (given name Kristian Vikernes, though he legally changed his first name to Varg, Norwegian for “wolf”), who had lived in the damp, lightless cellar of the Helvete record shop for some time—were a prominent presence. Burzum were an odd blend of frustrated insanity and strange, sad, ambient mood music, pained pathos and gibbering fury—oddly effective, but distinctly disturbed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Founder member Grishnackh took his name from one of the evil “orc” characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings, while Burzum meant “darkness” in the orcish language conceived by Tolkien. Perverse as this seems, it should be remembered that The Bible is just a book of stories—in this light, perhaps using The Lord of the Rings as the basis for an (im)moral philosophical code is not wholly ludicrous. However, it does an infernal philosopher’s credibility no favours to identify too closely with “hobbits” (glorified goblin). Grishnackh’s personal mythology combined the darkness-versus-light motifs of “mystic quest”/sword-and-sorcery sagas with the violent Viking tradition he believed true Northern Europeans belonged to. While this seems symptomatic of Scandinavia’s peripheral removal from—and distorted imitation of—Western pop culture, it also has an authentic dark side. As is common among Norse pagan revivalists, the Black Metal Circle began to espouse race-based Nazi political views. (Though totalitarian-loving Euronymous also expressed admiration for communist despots and Cambodian genocidalist Pol Pot.) Also pivotal in this new movement were the bands Emperor, Immortal, Enslaved and Arcturus. The last to join Euronymous’s Norwegian cadre were Dark Throne, who had already recorded one death metal album, Soulside Journey, in 1990. In the following year, they disowned their debut, donned corpse-paint and joined the “Satanic Mafia” with their album A Blaze in the Northern Sky. If Euronymous exemplified the nihilistic hate at the heart of the Black Metal Circle, and Burzum represented its violent Norse/Nazi fantasies, then Dark Throne symbolized the Circle’s isolation and sociopathic need for solitude. Taking their country’s sombre, anti-social reputation to extremes, the band never met to record, spoke little, and spent increasing periods alone in the frost-bitten Norwegian wilderness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the spring of 1991, Mayhem’s vocalist died: a Swede who, by way of black comedy, had re-named himself “Dead.” Dead blew his head off with a shotgun, leaving a note to day that he felt he was not of this World, but belonged instead to the cold solitude of the forest. He also apologized for the mess. As in common with obsessively inward-looking groups like the Black Metal Circle, a crisis of this type either causes the grouping to dissolve, or re-enforces their convictions. The latter instance applied, and the Circle hailed Dead as a hero. Euronymous, who found the corpse, rushed out for a camera to take his final photograph of Dead before altering the authorities—claiming a morsel of brain to make into soup and a fragment of skull to fashion into a necklace. At this point, the Black Metal Circle were no longer merely a group of disaffected teens and early-twentysomethings, but a subculture who believed themselves to be at the center of significant, apocalyptic events. Euronymous’ demented, anti-social rants were making him a regular feature in the underground metal fanzines; despite the continued indifference of the global music media, black metal was rising from the grassroots across the World. The “legend of Dead” contributed to a growing international interest in extreme, Scandinavian Satanic metal, with Deathlike Silence treating the grim event as a grotesque promotional gimmick. For the first time, European countries bordering the Mediterranean also began throwing up a slew of black metal acts—most notably the Greek band Rotting Christ. In contrast to the could hatred of the Northerners, the Southern European scene was inclined to a less self-destructive, more LaVeyan approach—though Anton LaVey would have regarded many of them as blasphemy-fixated novices, struggling to topple the repressive Christianity that dominates their culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Much of black metal is supposed to be inspired by demons. They cannot be any worse than human being, right? Many of them just have never possessed a body of their own. They are souls who have been lurking around before humanity. Before the dinosaurs. They are the darkness. The reason God created life so that life could flourish and grow and rest when it is dark. Demon possession is a condition in which one or more evil spirits or demons inhabit the body of a human being and can take complete control of their victim at will. By temporarily blotting out one’s consciousness, they can speak and act through one as their complete slave and tool. The inhabiting demon (or demons) comes and goes much like the proprietor of a house who may or may not be “at home.” When the demon is “at home,” one may precipitate an attack. In these attacks the victim passes from one’s normal state of possession. The condition of the afflicted person in the “possessed” state varies greatly. Sometimes it is marked by depression and deep melancholy, sometimes by vacancy and stupidity that resemble idiocy. Sometimes the victim may be ecstatic or extremely malevolent and wildly ferocious. During the transition from the normal to the abnormal state, the victim is frequently thrown into a violent paroxysm, often falling to the ground unconscious, foaming at the mouth with symptoms similar to epilepsy or hysteria. The intervals between attacks vary greatly from an hour or less to months. Between attacks, the subject may be healthy and appear normal in every way. The abnormal or demonized stages can last a few minutes or several days. Sometimes the attacks are mild; sometimes they are violent. If they are frequent and violent, the health of the subject suffers. The chief characteristic of demon possession or demonomania is the automatic projection of a new personality in the victim. During attack the victim’s personality is completely obliterated, and the inhabiting demon’s personality takes over completely. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The inhabiting demon uses the victim’s body as a vehicle for one’s own thoughts, words, and acts. The demon even speaks out of the victim’s mouth and declares emphatically that one is a demon. Frequently one gives one’s name and dwelling place. The new personality reveals itself in a different voice and sometimes uses a different language or dialect on a completely different educational or cultural level. Pronouns are used to emphasize the new personality. The first personal pronoun consistently designates the inhabiting demon. Bystanders are addressed in the second person. The victim is referred to in the third person and looked upon during the attack as unconscious and for all practical purposes as nonexistent during this interval. Demonomania should be clearly differentiated from the insanity in which a person imagines oneself to be someone else, often a famous personality such as Liz Taylor, Julius Caesar, of William Randolph Hearst. The demoniac, when in the demonized state characterized by the new personality, speaks and acts in all respects like a completely different person. By contrast, the insane person is one’s own diseased self, one’s assumed personality being a transparent unreality. In cases of demon possession the new personality clearly and constantly recognizes the distinct existence and individuality of its “possessed” victim, speaking of that victim in the third person, an element entirely lacking in cases of insanity. Because various inadequate theories have left demon possession largely unexplained, it is quite probable that some patients in mental hospitals are demon possessed rather than insane. This was the conviction of the famous nineteenth-century specialist in mental diseases, Dr. Forces Benignus Winslow (1810-1874). He correctly recognized the demoniac by a strange duality; and by the fact that, when temporarily relived from the oppression of the demon, he is frequently able to describe the force which takes control of one and compels one to act and speak shamefully. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
While in the demonized state many persons give evidence of knowledge which cannot be accounted for naturally. The demon who takes control of the body of one’s victim is obviously the source of the superhuman knowledge. While demon possessed, many persons recognize the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and display an aversion to and a fear of Him (Mark 1.23-24; 5.7). The case of Mrs. Winchester, who lived in Santa Clara County, illustrates how a woman came under demon domination through practicing séances. Being centered within our own God like power is of utmost importance. Even when evoked to create change directly, keep in mind that you are the God that wields these powers for the cause of Counter Creation. Just be careful! As a God you will be tested and so how these powers are wielded is a powerful initiatic test in its own right. Mrs. Winchester was in her Blue Séance Room, she lite a candle on her left first, and then a candle on her right. A sacred serpent was sacrificed over the wood sigil and the blood was left to drain upon the idol. Then the body of the serpent was encircled around it, she chanted “I do invocate and conjure thee, O Spirit, Sabnock; and being with power armed from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by BERALANENSIS, BALADACHIENSIS, PAUMACHIA, and APOLOGIAE SEDES; by the most Powerful Princes, Genii, Liachidae, and Ministers of the Tartarean Abode; and by the Chief Prince of the Seat or Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee, and by invocating conjure thee. And being armed with power from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by Him Who spake and it was done, and unto whom all creatures be obedient. Also I, being made after the image of GOD, endued with power from GOD and created according unto His will, do exorcise thee by that most mighty and powerful name of GOD, EL, strong and wonderful; O thou Spirit Sabnock. And I command thee and Him who spake the Word and HIS FIAT was accomplished and by all the names of God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
“Also by the names ADONAI, EL, ELOHIM, ELOHI, EHYEH, ASHER EHYEH, ZABAOTH, ELION, IAH, TETRAGRAMMATON, SHADDAI, LORD GOD MOST HIGH, I do exorcise thee and do powerfully command thee, O thou Spirit Sabnock, that thou dost forthwith appear unto me here before this Circle in a fair human shape, without any deformity or tortuosity. And by this ineffable name, TETRAGRAMMATON IEHOVAH, do I command thee, at which being heard the elements are overthrown, the air is shaken, the sea runneth back, the fire is quenched, the Earth trembleth, and all the hosts of the celestials, terrestrials, and infernals do tremble together, and are troubled and confounded. Wherefore come thou, O Spirit Sabnock, forthwith, and without delay, from any or all parts of the World wherever thou mayest be, and make rational answers unto all things that I shall demand of thee. Come thou peaceably, visibly, and affably, now, and without delay, manifesting that which I shall desire. For thou art conjured by the name of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, HELIOREN, wherefore fulfill thou my commands, and persist thou therein unto the end, and according unto mine interest, visibly and affably speaking unto me with a voice clear and intelligible without any ambiguity. I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O thou Spirit Sabnock, to appear and to show thyself visible unto me before this Circle in fair and comely shape, without any deformity or tortuosity; by the name and in the name IAH and VAU which Adam heard and spake; and by the name of God, AGLA, which Lot heard and was saved with his family; and by the name IOTH, which Jacob heard from the angels wrestling with him, and was delivered from the hand of Esau his brother; and by the name ANAPHAEXTON which Aaron heard and spake and was made wise; and by the name ZBAOTH, which Moses named and all the rivers were turned into blood; and by the name ASHER EHYEH ORISTON, which Moses named, and all the rivers brought forth frogs, and they ascended into the house, destroying all things. #RandolpHarris 11 of 21
“And by the name ELION, WHICH Moses named, and there was a great hail such as had not been since the beginning of the World; and by the name ADONAI, which Moses named, and there came up locusts, which appeared upon the whole land, and devoured all which the hail had left; and by the name SCHEMA AMATHIA which Ioshua called upon, and the sun stayed his course; and by the name ALPHA and OMEGA, which Daniel named, and destroyed Bel, and slew the Dragon; and in the name EMMANUEL, which the three children, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, sang in the midst of the fiery furnace, and were delivered; and by the name HAGIOS; and by the SEAL OF ADONI; and by ISCHYROS, ATHANATOS; and by these three secret names, AGLA, ON, TETRAGRAMMATION, do I adjure and constrain thee. And by these names, and by all other names of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, the LORD ALMIGHTY, I do exorcise and command thee, O Spirit Sabnock, even by Him Who spake the Word and it was done, and to Whom all creatures are obedient; and by the dreadful judgments of GOD; and by the uncertain Sea of Glass, which is before the DIVINE MAJESTY, mighty and powerful; by the four beasts before the throne, having eyes before and behind; by the fire round about the throne; by the holy angels of Heaven; and by the mighty wisdom of GOD; I do potently exorcise thee, that thou appearest here before this Circle, to fulfill my will in all things which shall seem good unto me; by the Seal of BASDATHEA BALDACHIA; and by this name PRIMEUMATON, which Moses named, and the Earth Opened, and did swallow up Kora, Dathan, and Abiram. Wherefore thou shalt make faithful answers unto all my demands, O Spirit Sabnock, and shalt perform all my desires so far as in thine office thou art capable hereof. Wherefore, come thou, visibly, peaceably, and affably, now without delay, to manifest that which I desire, speaking with a clear and perfect voice, intelligibly, and to mine understanding. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
“Tbatlu! Bualu! Tulatu! Labusi! Ubisi!—Let thee also appear and being before me the Spirit of Sabnock. Sovar, merciless leader of Divs come forth! Inner eye behold the demon before me. Sovar awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Shahrewar! I stand alone as the embodiment of the Adversary known as Ahriman, the Black Dragon of Chaos and becoming! I devour the natural order of stasis brought forth by Ahura Mazda and forge my destiny through the power of the Black Sun! Taromat, beautiful Div or rebellion come forthy! Inner eye behold the demoness before me. Toramat awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Spandarmad! Ahirman, Lord of Darkness divine, I thank you for your presence within this unholy temple of counter creation. I have offered you the life of this noxious creature as a gateway to your manifestation within this realm to stand before me! You are Angra Mainyu who is the Lord of counter creation, whom has brought forth the mountains to the plains! You have brought forth the beasts to the field and the creatures of the night! Ahriman with your infernal blessing I ask that you would bring forth the baneful powers of the wolf kin to fill this oil with their essence that it may be compelled according to my will! I offer my nails as fangs which will devour that which stands in my way! I offer my hair to embody their predatory essence! I give my blood as a gateway to empower them to act within this world according to my will and purpose!” Then Mrs. Winchester heard the distant howling of wolves and she perceived their phantom shadows as they began to surround her and encroach. She was focused on Sabnock and dared not fear that which she had just conjured. SABNOCK—of course is the Forty-third Spirit of the Winchester Mansion. He is a Marquis, Mighty, Great, and Strong, appearing in the Form of an Armed Soldier with a Lion’s Head, riding on a pale-coloured horse. His office is to build high Towers, Castles and Cities, ad to furnish them with Armour, etcetera. Also he can conflict Men for many days with Wounds and with Sores rotten and full of Worms. He giventh Good Familiars at the request of the Exorcist. Commandth 50 Legions of Spirits; and his Seal is this, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Mrs. Winchester fell down unconscious, frothing at the mouth, and was carried to her room, outside where the crescent hedge is planted. A doctor was called in gave her large doses of medicine to no avail. He left and refused to have anything more to do with the case as he saw with in hours gables and towers rise, wings of the mansion extended right before his eyes, and gardens grow from sprouts and spring up to mature plants and trees before night fall. For five of six days Mrs. Winchester raved wildly, and her staff and friends were in great distress. In desperation they proposed giving Mrs. Winchester more medicine. However, the demon, speaking through her, replied: “Any amount of medicine will be of no use.” Daisy then implored, “If medicine will be of no use, what shall we do?” The demon replied, “Burn incense to me, and submit yourself to me, and all will be well.” The staff knelt down and worshiped the demon, imploring him to torment Mrs. Winchester no longer. During that time Mrs. Winchester was in a state of complete unconsciousness. A little later when the demon drove Mrs. Winchester to renewed frenzy, her distraught staff repeated their promise to worship and serve him. They also promised that they would urge their Mrs. Winchester to do likewise. When Mrs. Winchester regained consciousness, she reluctantly consented to do so. The demon gave explicit directions regarding the proposed worship. On the first and fifteenth of each month, incense was to be burned, food offered, and the require prostration made before the shrine of himself, SABNOCK. Periodically the demon came, sometimes every few days, sometimes after a month’s lapse. Each time, Mrs. Winchester felt fluttering of her heart, a sense of overwhelming fear, and inability to control herself. She would quietly as Daisy to fetch a neighboring woman whenever the demon came. The two would burn incense to the demon in Mrs. Winchester’s stead and receive his directives, which they then communicated to the possessed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Although these communications were spoken by the Mrs. Winchester’s (the victim) lips, she was completely unaware of them, since she was in the demonized state. The demon often bade the audience not to be afraid, protesting he would not harm them, but rather help them in various ways. He declared he would instruct the victim in the healing art, so that people would flock to her and be cured of their sickness. This soon proved true, although may diseases were not under the demon’s control. Apparently only those afflicted by evil spirits were completely cured. Mrs. Winchester’s long-ill child was not helped. The demon declared he controlled many inferior spirits. He also frequently outlined his plan for Mrs. Winchester’s life and work. He promised he would help her grow more proficient as a healer, and the people would compensate her for her services. Gifts thus earned were donated to the nearby ancient pagan temple. As certain parts of the Winchester mansion would appear but once every seventeen years, SABNOCK was never seen save on the eve of some awful calamity, visitors to the mansion had a very slight chance of seeing his physical body. There could be no doubt though of the existence of the mansion and SABNOCK, for everybody knows he was one of the greatest of the giants during his natural lifetime, nor could any better evidence be asked then the facts that he guided Mrs. Winchester into turning stone, wood, and class into the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansions. The door-to-nowhere was also known as Lovers’ Leap;” from which Mrs. Winchester once flung herself when she was a state of deep morning, and survived unharmed. The path SABOCK made from the door-to-nowhere to the mountains was used by him when he would leave his island and come to shore. Upon being informed of the variety and amount of legendary material collected about the Winchester mansion and Mrs. Winchester’s doings, many people unhesitatingly pronounced the entire assortment condemned all the gathered treasures as creations of the supernatural. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It was very well beknown that in them old days there were giants in plenty hereabouts, but they did not make the make an appearance at the estate very often. But everyone knows that there were giants, because if there were not, no one would know of them at all. They were just like human beings, except in the matter of size, and one of them could make a dozen like men that live now. When they walked, they carried oak trees for sticks and lived in the forest of the giants, and carved the mountain and caves. (It should be noted that spiritistic visions of this nature are quite likely to occur in the course of reading occult literature. Sometimes people mistake these visions for genuine religious experiences. However, it is again a case of Satan disguising himself as an angel of the light.) Yet, there are more than 20,000 accounts of spirits, ghost, angels and demons being seen in the Winchester mansion. The uncanny phenomena places one under a charm. The pattern of the courts during this early period in the 1800s was erratic, sometimes convicting, sometimes throwing cases out of court for lack of evidence, something awarding damages for slander to those who had been maligned as witches by accusers. This vacillation sprang from the fact that the judicial bodies that heard the causes were not religious but secular, and therefore had little competence in dealing with matters that were primarily religious. As far as control was concerned, in adhering to the principles of congregationalism, the responsibility for suppressing heresy and enforcing religious behavior within the communities went to the state. The trial judges were not the sure, steadfast, confident Dominican Inquisitors or Protestant prosecutors of the Old World, but merely secular officials of the valley who had been forced into the position of trying heresy for lack of anyone else to do it. Mary Johnson, who was hired at the Winchester mansion in 1887, as a cook, admitted have had “familiarity with the Devil” and was executed by the state. She confession to have pleasures of the flesh with demons and other sorted things. She made no mention of mass meetings; rather, her Devil seems to have been a personal one, coming to her assistance when needed. #RandolphHarri 16 of 21
Dolls were sometimes used as a means of projecting curses, and Mary said she had attended meetings with Satan and his consorts. Witches’ pact with Satan was attributed as part of God’s inscrutable plan of the Universe. The Puritan settlers in Santa Clara Valley believed in the doctrine of Original Sin wholeheartedly; their pessimistic outlook proclaimed that all men were unworthy until God saw fit to bestow His grace upon them. They believed that the God allowed the Devil to afflict not only the guilty but also anybody else that might happen to get in the way. If He had to teach misguided humans a lesson, He might punish an entire community for the sins of the most wicked in that community. And it appeared to the God-fearing Puritans that He was doing just that. The Puritans were highly intolerant and has a paranoiac distrust of other religious groups, some were farmers at the Winchester mansion, and did not always like the rituals that were performed, but they were very loyal and protective of Mrs. Winchester. Many of the people who worked at the Winchester mansion were often under suspicion of witchcraft. The Puritans came to the Winchester mansion because they felt it was a true kingdom of God on Earth, and they could help Mrs. Winchester live peacefully. However, what they found was something different. They found that the vast acres of the estate had bitterly cold winters, and the terrain could be inhospitable. They found themselves in a wilderness, surrounded by demonic tribes whom they considered to be the legions of Hell incarnate. Having come to settle in this last stronghold of the Devil, they were plagued by him constantly for the very reason that they were God’s chosen people, thus the most likely target for unholy temptation. The fact that the new settlers in the Santa Clara Valley were being attacked by Satan seemed incontestable. The estate was ravaged by smallpox, and had suffered constant harassment by envious local town’s people and demonic tribes. Mrs. Winchester wondered what she had done to offend God that He should allow the Devil such free range. She experimented with the spirits to bring peace to her life and home. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Mrs. Winchester had an answer: Judgment Day was at hand and Satan was therefore stepping up his activities in one last desperate move. It was simply the nova-like burst of the energy from a dying star. She glibly stated that “there will again be an unusual Range of the Devil among us, a little before the Second Coming of the Lord, which will be to give the last stroke in destroying the works of the Devil.” This theory found wide acceptance among the servants and laity of Santa Clara Valley, for not only did it offer a simple explanation for all their maladies and misfortunes, but it also gave them hope, promising cooly a quick end to their hardships. Satan is most able to seduce human in periods o great discontent, for human, in times of poverty and affliction, will turn knowingly to whatever hands will feed them. The valley had had a difficult time of it up to that time, and famines had reduced the population drastically. However, as if labouring under the most severe environmental handicaps was not enough, Puritan perfectionism went even further in making life unbearable. In seeking to establish a holy kingdom, according to Heaven’s law, self-indulgence in any form was strictly repressed. Severe punishments were meted out for drinking, swearing, and licentiousness; in Santa Clara, it was a punishable offense to walk on the streets on Sunday, except when going to and from church. And witches, people possessed by demons, and others also attended church to blend in and keep the peace. On top of it all, there stood the Calvinistic doctrine of election, holding that as soon as man was born, eh was judged to be headed for either Heaven or Hell, this choice being made according to God’s immutable law. However, even if a human thought oneself to be damned, the civil punishment for one’s indulgence were still exacted upon one. It was into this environment that the waters of the witchcraft flood would soon pour. The good people of Santa Clara clearly saw signs of Satanic activity in their midst, and an investigation was launched. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Mrs. Winchester confessed to having attended witches’ Sabbaths and of having met with the Devil, who was a tall, black man from New Haven, Connecticut. Soon the witch fever spread, and more people from the valley became posses by demons. The common belief was that at that time witches, when entering into a Covenant with Satan, because the owners of specters, with the help of which they could do harm to any person of their choosing. People believe that God—the Alpha and Omega was both God and Satan. That He has a soul and character. He is not just this futile entity but someone you can see many aspects to. Some people fled to Satanism because they had to deal with so much evil from Christians that they wanted another source of power to exalt them. Satanism is supposed to be something to be something secret, something people do not know anything of. One goes to America and in the telephone directory one can see “Church of God,” “Church of Jesus,” and “Church of Satan.” One calls, and a person answers: “Church of Satan, how may I help you?” One thinks, “This is not Satanism!” The Church of Satan deny Satan, they say He does not exist, yet they act as if He dd, they rebel against God. They call themselves Satanists because He also rebelled against God, but they are basically light and life worshipping individualists. Well, the phone is tapped, so I think you better write what you know. Some people have disappeared. And of course the normal grave yard desecration. Anne Winchester’s headstone was recently stolen, but replaced. Normal people just disappear and never show up again. It could have a Satanic connection. Every human is life, and some hate life, especially human life. That is why people disappeared. These people may have disappeared for some form of sacrifice. Something like that would be called a Satanic murder. The murder is the ritual sacrifice. These murders gain power from whoever was responsible. Everybody has their own aura, and auras can be stolen by sacrificing an individual, this allows one to gain more power. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Places of worship, such as churches, have their own spirit—the Winchester Mystery House, for example, has been worshipped in for maybe hundreds of years and has thus gained a lot of spirit in that time, it could qualify as a church and gain charitable tax exemption. But that is not the point. A person who sacrifices that will gains a lot of power and grows stronger. Some people fear the Winchester mansion, because there are a lot of different energies. There is fear, terror and suspense, but others feel a lot of light, happiness, and goodness. Sometimes the energy is mixed. Anton LaVey really surprises me. If your every rea his work, he seems very intelligent and not scary at all, but I guess it depends on what one reads. I have read parts of his Bible, and it is very straightforward, it is stuff people tell their kids every day. Stand up for yourself and do not let people run you over. I think that the Winchester mansion should also open on nights of a full Moon, not just Friday the 13th. During the full Moon, there is a lot of energy and symbolic value. A lot of people believe in the full Moon and a lot of people believe in virgins. That makes both the full Moon and the virgin more powerful because of belief in them. God was first and He created the World. Of course, a lot of scientists would deny that. However, I would challenge their view because I believe God used evolution, which is why it took so long, which is why we have evidence like dinosaur bones. Yet, some Gnostic Christians have suggested Satan created the World. Everybody will be taken as slaves except the warlords. Euronymus, who we talked about earlier, was murdered in August 1993, Aaliyah 2001. Some say that is a month when sacrifices are made. Grishnackh killed Euronymous, and a few hours later, he was laughing and joking, saying, “Ha ha, Euronymous is dead, I’m going to dance and piss on his grave.” It reminded of the jokes Howard Stern made about Aaliyah. It was not funny. These are not the rantings of someone who is all there. Grishnackh talked about the dynamite he had and how he was going to blow things up. Basically, they took things to illogical extremes, but it all made sense in their own heads. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
It is possible when dabbling with occultism for one to make an unconscious contract with the powers of darkness. The gift of discernment is absolutely necessary in life. It is generally not wise to lay one’s hands on a person who is occultly subjected. The retuning spirits will often attempt to creep back under the guise of some pious camouflage. It is in this way that evil can often enter unnoticed into one’s Christian life. A maid at the Winchester mansion once accepted the invitation of one of her coworkers to attend some spiritistic meetings. At first she felt as though she had gain something from going along to the meetings but later on she began to notice some psychic changes taking place in herself. She began to notice some psychic changes taking place in herself. She began to suffer from depression which resulted in her consulting a neurologist. During the course of the treatment she was committed to a lunatic asylum. However, as her condition improved, she could no longer attend the spiritistic séances. At the hospital the chaplain came to see her through his help and counsel she was able to make a complete recovery. One of the farmers at the estate wanted to see if charms actually worked, and some of them He. He practiced in the basement of the Winchester mansion. He drew a magic circle on the ground and drew some other magic symbols in the circle. He then used a charm three times in order to invoke the spirit. However, no spirit came. Yet, as he repeated, the charm he fell down in the magic circle and lay there unconscious for some time. The result was that for several weeks following this event he was semi-paralysed and drained of all his physical strength and will-power. After a few weeks, he died. Frequently identified as a common spot where the “wheelbarrow Ghost” is sighted, Steam Alley is one of the most well-known paranormal hot-spots in the mansion. Have you ever seen anything in the basement? #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Some stroll Sarah’s lovely gardens this Memorial Day Weekend. There is a beautiful parrot which Mrs. Winchester used to pet, it talks! He is supposed to be happy and impudent, and talks and laughs and screeches all the time. Maybe you may catch a glimpse at this wooded, flowery estate. It is such a beautiful spectacle, all of that life and grace and animation, and sun-smitten flash and sprinkle of rich colour.
This impressive mansion dates back to the 1880s, when it was developed by Sarah Winchester and the spirits, whose project enobed and enriched the community. It once had a nine-story military watchtower. Mrs. Winchester further developed the grounds of the 160 room mansion, introducing a Victorian garden at the hands of World renowed architect Gino Coppede around the turn of the century.
These adaptions made this idyllic mansion a unique asset, tinged with the signs and influences of eclecticism and Liberty, juxtaposed to the ancient Architectural characteristics of its medieval heritage. This mansion presents itself as impressive and spectacular. The building now spreads on four floors plus the basment, for a total of approximently 25,000 feet square.
There is lovely gift shop and cafe, and it is also an ideal venue for hosting private events, conventions and/or ballrooms are located on the back overlooking the internal garden with its panoramic position which glows thanks to its night-time lighting.
Inside the property there are splendid rooms filled with historial furniture, decorated ceilings and flamboyant fireplaces, vaulted ceilings and richly frescoes walls. In addition, there are several bedrooms, nine kitchens. and thirteen bathrooms, which made the structure a perfect luxurious accommodation for guests, and is now a tourist destination.
This mansion is located within a private park of 4 acres and elegant Nineteenth-century Victorian-gardens, that offer areas of wide lawns, and further green spaces. There is also a parking area, with free parking. Currently used to host guided tours and private events and functions. The enitre porperty sits at a close distance from the mall, hotels, and resturants. The high-fashion outlet complex and gourmet food has brought further development and tourism to Santa Clara County. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Money Power and Muscle Power is Our Very Essence
The annual inflation rate in the United States of America slowed to 8.3 percent in April 2022 from a 41-year high of 8.5 percent in March, but less than market forecasts of 8.1 percent. Energy prices increased 30.3 percent, below 32 percent in March, namely gasoline (43.6 percent vs 48 percent), while fuel oil increased more (80.5 percent vs 70.1 percent). On the other hand, food prices jumped 9.4 percent, the most since April 1981 and prices also rose faster for shelter (5.1 percent vs 5 percent) and new vehicles (13.2 vs 12.5 percent). To grasp the full meaning of this looming implosion, however, it is not enough to look inside America. For the United States of America, it turns out, is hardly alone. In fact, from Germany, France, and Britain to South Korea, and Japan, we find a similar epidemic of failure—widening cracks in key institutions, starting, as in the United States of America, with the nuclear family. In Japan, divorce rates, especially among married couples married for twenty years or more, are soaring to unprecedented high. Far more arresting, however, are results of a survey by Japan’s Youth Research Institute. It showed that 75 percent of American schoolgirls agreed with the statement “Everyone should get married”—but that “a staggering 88 percent of Japanese girls disagreed.” South Korea’s divorce rate, traditionally low, has become one of the highest in the World. In the United Kingdom, there is a steady decline in the nuclear family. In fact, the number of households headed by married couples has fallen below 50 percent for the first time, reflecting sweeping social changes in British family life. Educational crises, too, are no U.S. monopoly. “CLASSROOM COLLAPSE” GRIPPING SCHOOLS NATIONWIDE, screams a headline in the Japan Times. The New York Times reported: EDUCATORS TRY TO TAME JAPAN’S BLACKBOARD JUNGLES.
Simultaneously, as in the United States of America, Japan’s once highly admired corporate giants have been hit by scandal after scandal—“Enronitis” Japanese-style. Even as its banking system teeters under loads of nonperforming loans, Tokyo Electric Power Co. sees its president and chairman resign in disgrace because the company falsified safety data at its nuclear-power plants. Soon following TEPCO into ignominy were leaders of Mitsui, Snow Brand Food, Nippon Meat Packers, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissho Iwai and other top corporations. All these were followed by that beset the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2005. First a computer crash shut down all trading for the first time in the exchange’s fifty-six-year history. A few weeks later, observers repressed laughter when a trader from Mizuho Securities Co. mistakenly sold 610,000 shares of a stock for one yen apiece rather than one share for 610,000 yen—a minor glitch that cost his firm $340 million. And on April 19th 2022, Japan’s Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki said on Tuesday the damage to the economy from a weakening yen at present is greater than the benefits accruing to it, making the most explicit warning yet against the currency’s recent slump versus the dollar. The yen’s fall has worsened imported inflationary pressures in Japan amid a spike in global commodity and oil costs, and an increase in supply snags, which have intensified in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. “Stability is important and sharp currency moves are undesirable,” Suzuki told parliament, repeating previous comments as the Japanese currency weakened to fresh 20-year lows on the dollar. “A weak yen has its merit, but demerit is greater under the current situation where crude oil and raw materials costs are surging globally, while the weak yen boosts import prices, hurting consumers and firms that are unable to pass on costs,” Suzuki reports. The currency market shrugged off the ministers warning, sending yen to 127.80 to the dollar, its lowest level since May 2002. The yen has lost about 10 percent against the dollar so far this year.
Investors say verbal warnings will not have much of an impact as the yen’s weakness reflects fundamental, noting contrasting prospects for an aggressive streak of Federal Reserve tightening with that of the Bank of Japan’s commitment to maintain its powerful monetary easing plan. An April 1-11 poll of 5,400 Japanese firms conducted by private credit research firm Tokyo Shoko Research showed roughly 40 percent suffered a negative impact from a weak yen, with assumed dollar/yen rates being as low as 110 yen among listed manufacturers. Furthermore, a former Nissan executive Greg Kelly has been found guilty of assisting the Japanese car giant’s ex-CEO Carlos Ghosn to his part of 9.3 billion yen ($80.4 million) of his income from financial regulators. The court also fined Nissan $1.6 million USD (200 million yen) for failing to disclose Mr. Ghosn’s pay. The carmaker pledged guilty at the start of the 19-month trial. Mr. Kelly was sentenced to six months in jail suspended for three years. In 2019, Mr. Ghosn fled Japan to his home country of Lebanon hidden in a box on a private jet. There was a 30 percent drop in Nissan sales at the outbreak of this tragedy. However, recently, fugitive former car executive Carlos Ghosn, said in a recent interview from Beirut, Lebanon that Nissan’s alliance partner Renault SA is struggling because of the Japanese automaker’s lack of vision. He is not very “optimistic about the future of Nissan.” Recent corporate crises have been even more dramatic in South Korea, where scandals have led to the flight of the founder of Daewoo, the suicide of one of the sons of Hyundai’s founder and the imprisonment of the head of SK another great chaebol—the country’s megafirms. Most Korean consumers expect that normalcy will return to routines only after June 2022, yet there are signs of pre-COVID-19 routines returning. Korean customers have been less optimistic than those in other countries about the economic recovery. However, optimism in Korea is much higher now than two years ago. Half of consumers indicate a desire to splurge, with intent to do so being the strongest in Gen Z and millennials. One-eight of consumers say they have returned to out-of-home activities.
In Europe, the recent scandal list includes Volkswagen in Germany, Parmalat in Italy, Credit Lyonnais in France, Skandia in Sweden and the oil companies Elf and Royal Dutch/Shell. On top of that, a commodity crisis, and a supply chain crisis. What is next? A global recession? Markets are a total mess, with Walmart tanking 10 percent in one trading session on May 18, 2022. The last time that happened was the stock market crash of October 1987. Inflation, thanks to unpresented money printing and Universal Basic Income test-drives during an unprecedented China-style lockdown of the U.S. economy in 2020-2021, is now eroding living standards. The U.K. inflation print of May 18 was 9 percent. How transitory is this? If Europe keeps the pressure on commodities in its economic war with Russia, then the answer is—as long as Europe and Russia are sanctioning each other to smithereens. The S&P has been on a losing streak for six weeks. If it loses for 8 weeks in a row, that is a record breaker. It is down 20 percent year-to-date. The Nasdaq is in similar territory. As is China, as measured by the CSI-300. Europe can only get worse from here, barring the European Central Bank buying DAX and CAC-50 blue chips without telling us. France just went through an election, and Emmanuel Macron saw his populist opponent, Marine Le Pen win more votes of those under the age of 50, than Macron. There are parliamentary elections coming up this summer, another test for how the Macron government is handling a series of non-stop crisis since the pandemic started in 2020, and the adults and expert class returned to power in Washington. Speaking of which, the Democratic Party is worried. There is constant talk of pulling tariffs off China to fight inflation. However, this is highly unpopular. Rolling back tariffs is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on U.S. inflation. Midterm elections are expected to turn the tide in the House for the Republicans, and maybe in the Senate, as well. Pretending to fight inflation by opening the flood gates to China imports is a bad policy and against voters’ interests.
This mother Janet Yellen warned President Biden that sanctions against Russia and retaliatory sanctions imposed by Russia against the U.S. and Europe risk plunging the World into a deep global recession. No one is getting Russian fertilizer or wheat. Oil will be cut off by the end of 2022, with a few exceptions. They are still buying natural gas, but claim to be trying to buy less as they wean themselves off of it to source from elsewhere, including Qatar, Nigeria, Algeria, and mor expensive American LNG. So what does a global recession mean? Well, it would be a period when many of the World’s economies are not successful and businesses experience a lot of problems: Huge increases in World energy costs are expected. Global recession can occur more easily in modern times because the economies of most countries are interdependent. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), total Worldwide economic growth of less than 3 percent constitutes a global recession. The most widely accepted definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. The United States of America is now facing the familiar precursors of a recession, including rising interest rates on the back of high inflation. Many economists are warning of a recession and Wall Street Gurus say those fears are exaggerated, even though the signs are here. Perhaps they are just being optimistic to keep funding their stocks and paychecks. If prices to do decelerate, as anticipated, the Fed faces a difficult path to stabilizing the economy. Still, the U.S economy is quite strong at the moment, but there is indeed some risk of slipping into recession. Its length and severity will depend in large part on the Fed’s response. Some of the nation’s largest and most influential retailers reported disappointing sales and profits this week because of higher costs and overstocked inventory issues, engineered to avoid supply chain disruptions, setting off a stock market meltdown. As reported earlier, Walmart stock plunged more than 11 percent. Target shares tumbled 26 percent, following a stunning 52 percent drop in quarterly profits, which executives attributed in part to cooling demand for big-ticket items such as TV’s, kitchen appliances and outdoor furniture.
Goldman Sachs this week revised down its forecast for second-quarter U.S. economic growth, to annualized rate of 2.5 percent, citing higher prices and continued supply chain disruptions. That follows an unexpected contraction in the first three months of 2022, when the economy shrank at a 1.4 percent pace, mostly because of a trade imbalance and drop in inventory purchases. The U.S. Dollar is becoming attractive to investor because it is very strong right now. However, national claims for unemployment insurance climbed up to 218,000 last week, a four-month high although still near historic lows, but some companies report they are overstaffed. Higher prices for basics like food, energy and housing are straining Americans’ budgets and clouding their view of the economy. If that were not enough to keep the headline writers busy, all these were paralleled, as the United States, by upsets and upheavals in the health sectors of many countries. In the United States of America, some politicians routinely point to the British health service as a model to be emulated. Yet, the British Council complains, “not a day goes by without another story about the ‘crisis’ in the National Health Service.” The German health service is described in the press as “collapsing,” and Sweden’s system as in “acute financial crisis.” And Japan’s health insurance system could also collapse. As for pensions, France’s prime minister claims its impending pension disaster threatens the survival of the republic. Nor is France alone. Europe faces a retiree crisis. Japan also has a crisis with the nation’s pension system, as does Korea. Underfunded corporate pensions just in America? Try Siemens in Germany, with is $10.6 billion pension-fund deficit. The same pattern continues right down the line. Thus the American media’s critical loss of credibility is mirrored, even before President Trump exposed the “fake news.” The crises at Le Monde and Le Figaro, France’s top daily newspapers; and at Asahi Shimbun in Japan.
How about charities? Scandals at the American Red Cross and United Way were paralleled rather spectacularly not long ago in Britain, where tenor Luciano Pavarotti, rock star David Bowie and playwright Tom Stoppard made headlines by publicly ending their support of War Child UK, a charity set up to help children in war-torn countries. Having discovered that its cofounder and a consultant had taken bribes from a contractor employed by the organization, Pavarotti led the walkout to disassociate himself, as a spokeswoman put it, from “anything that was corrupt.” Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement are dismissing allegations that they mismanaged millions of dollars after a scathing New York Magazine report revealed that they had purchased a $6 million home in Southern California with donated funds. The report revealed that the group secretly bought a 6,500 square-foot mansion in October of 2020 for its members to create content promoting social justice. The report only fueled questions about the organization’s finances, just a year after the foundation revealed a detailed look at its funds for the first tie. The Associated Press reported then that the foundation said it had taken in just over $90 million in 2020 and committed $21.7 million in grant funding to both official and unofficial BLM chapters, along with 30 other Black-led grassroots organizations. The foundation puts its operating budget at $8.4 million. Along with questions about the remainder of the $90 million, leaders from local chapters who said they had received little to no funding from the organization, and they wondered where money raised before 2020 had gone. History, it goes without saying, is replete with scandals, failures and crises. Our generation did not invent them. However, today’s outbreak in country after country are qualitatively different. Never—with the possible exception of the worst days of World War II—has a generation seen so many institutional breakdowns in so many countries, occurring within the same brief time frame and coming at so rapid a pace.
Never has so many institutional crises been as tightly interrelated—with powerful feedback flows linking family, education, work, health, retirement, politics, and media—all affecting the wealth system. And never has re-globalization sent the financial effects of these crises so quickly across so many borders. What is happening, therefore, is not a series of isolated upset but a truly systemic breakdown—a challenge to the survival of whole societies that depend on these shaking and rattling institutions. Today’s institutional upheaval is historically unique for yet another crucial reason. All these crises at national levels are taking place at a pivotal moment for global institutions, too, starting with the United Nations. Even as the U.N. has rocked the World over the past 17 years with the referral of 33 cases of sexual abuse and exploitation to national authorities globally. Over that same period, it has received 120 reports of sexual abuse and exploitation in Haiti alone. The alleged perpetrators include drivers, security guards, doctors, consultants, and senior staff. United Nations agencies’ employees have been charged with sexual misconduct repeatedly. Meanwhile there have been allegations of large-scale corruption in its oil-for-food program in Iraq, and one will remember when Secretary-General Kofi Annan came under fire for his son’s involvement with a company seeking contracts in Iraq, another scandal hit the headlines. This one centered on charges of pedophilia and sexual abuse of women by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa. Earlier, Annan had warned that the entire U.N. as an institution is in a potentially terminal crisis owning to its obsolete organization structure. The International Development Association is the part of the World Bank that is meant to help the World’s poorest countries. Its explicit mission is “to reduce poverty by providing zero to low-interest loans and grants for programs that boost economic growth, reduce inequalities, and improve people’s living conditions.” However, there is an internal war raging inside the World Bank even as outside analysts slam it for “incompetence, inefficiency and irrelevance.”
The uber-arrogant International Monetary Fund grudgingly admits that it, too, faces a crisis. The World Organization, meanwhile, is losing ground, along with many other intergovernmental agencies. At the global level, too, we are moving rapidly toward systemic crisis. And when institutional crises in the major nations converge with equally systemic breakdown of institutions at the global level, as they are likely to do, the combined, self-reinforcing impact will affect not just Americans. Affluent young latte sippers on Omotesando in Tokyo will feel the effects, as will coffee farmers in Central America, women on assembly lines in Chin, and small-business people in Germany’s Mittlestand, along with financial analysts and investors from Wall Street, London and Frankfurt to Singapore and Seoul. What happens will naturally be influenced by other powerful factors—war, terrorism, immigration, ecological disasters, geopolitical shifts. However, even without these, the mutually reinforcing convergence of national and global crises could trigger something far bigger and more dangerous than the failure of any single institution of an infrastructural implosion in any one country. This concatenation of breakdowns and scandals may cheer those who hate America and the West, or who hate rich nations in general. However, it would be wise for them to defer any celebration. For, as the Chinese have long known, crisis and opportunity walk together. Instead of a historical disaster, these interlinked crises can be turned to massive advantage. And not just for the countries experiencing them. To make that happen, we need to understand why in so many countries, and at the level of the global order itself, so many of our most important, interlinked institutions teeter on the brink of collective implosion. As you know, a revolution is sweeping today’s post-Bacon World. No genius in the past—not Sun-Tzu, not Machiavelli, not Bacon himself—could have imagined today’s deepest powershift: the astounding degree to which today both force and wealth themselves have come to depend on knowledge. (A power shift is a transfer of power. A “powershift” is a deep-level change in the very nature of power.)
Military might until not long ago was basically an extension of the mindless fist. Today it relies almost totally on “congealed mind”—knowledge embedded in weapons and surveillance technologies. From satellites to submarines, modern weapons are constructed of information-rich electronic components. Today’s fighter plane is a flying computer. Even “dumb” weapons today are manufactured with the help of supersmart computers or electronic chips. The military, to choose a single example, uses computerized knowledge—“expert systems”—in missile defense. Since subsonic missiles speed along at about 1,000 feet a second, effective defense systems need to react in, say 10 milliseconds. However, expert systems may embody as many as 10,000 to 100,000 rules elicited from human specialists. The computer must scan, weigh, and interrelate these rules before arriving at a decision as to how to respond to a threat. Thus the Pentagon’s Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sent as a long-range goal the design of a system that can make one million logical inferences per second. Logic, inference, epistemology—in short, brain work, human and machine—is today’s precondition for military power. Similarly, it has become a business cliché to say that wealth is increasingly dependent on brainpower. The advanced economy could not run for thirty seconds without computers, and the new complexities of production, the integration of many diverse (and constantly changing) technologies, the de-massification of markets, continue to increase, by vast leaps, the amount and quality of information needed to make the system produce wealth. Furthermore, we are barely at the beginning of this “informationalization” process. Our best computers and CAD-CAM systems are still stone-ax primitive. Knowledge itself, therefore, turns out to be not only the source of the highest-quality of power, but also the most important ingredient of force and wealth. Put different, knowledge has gone from being an adjunct of money power and muscle power, to being their very essence. It is, in fact, the ultimate amplifier. This is the key to the powershift that lies ahead, and it explains why the battle for control of knowledge and the means of communication is heating up all over the World.
We have Caesar’s explanation of why Pompey’s allies stopped cooperating with him. “They regarded his [Pompey’s] prospects as hopeless and acted according to the common rule by which a man’s friends become his enemies in adversity.” Where a business is on the verge of bankruptcy and sells it accounts receivable to an outsider called a factor. This sale is made at a very substantial discount because once a manufacturer begins to go under, even one’s best customers begin refusing payment for merchandise, claiming defects in quality, failure to meet specifications, tardy delivery, or what-have-you. The great enforcer of morality in commerce is the continuing relationship, the belief that one will have to do business again with this customer, or this supplier, and when a failing company loses this automatic enforcer, not even a strong-arm factor is likely to find a substitute. Similarly, any member of Congress who is perceived as likely to be defeated in the next election may have some difficulty doing legislative business with colleagues on the usual basis of trust and good credit. There are many other examples of the importance of long-term interaction for the stability of cooperation. It is easier to maintain the norms of reciprocity in a stable small town or ethnic neighbourhood (which in modern times are affluent in some cases). Conversely, a visiting professor is likely to receive poor treatment by other faculty members compared to the way these same people treat their regular colleagues. A fascinating case of the development of cooperation based on continuing interaction occurred in the trench warfare of World War I. In the midst of this very brutal war there developed between the men facing each other what came to be called the “live-and-let live system.” The troops would attack each other when ordered to do so, but between large battles each side would deliberately avoid doing much hard to the other side—provided that the other side reciprocated.
The strategy was not necessarily TIT FOR TAT. Sometimes it was two for one. As a British officer wrote in his memoirs of the takeover of a new sector from the French: It was the French practice to “let sleeping dogs lie” when in a quiet sector…and of making this clear by retorting vigorously only when challenged. In one sector which we took over from them they explained to me that they had practically a code which the enemy well understood: they fired two shots for every one that came over, but never fired first. Such practices of tacit cooperation were quite illegal—but they were also endemic. For several years this system developed and elaborated itself despite the passions of the war and the best efforts of the generals to pursue a policy of constant attrition. The story is so rich in illuminating detail. Even without going further into the episode of trench warfare, the occurrence of a two-for-one strategy does suggest that one must be careful about drawing conclusions from a narrow focus on a pure TIT FOR TAT strategy. Just how broadly applicable was the proposition about TIT FOR TAT which said that it was collectively stable if and only if the future of the interaction was significantly important? The next proposition says that this result is very general indeed, and actually applies to any strategy which may be the first to cooperation. Any strategy which may be the first to cooperate can be collectively stable only when the risk is sufficiently large. The reason is that for a strategy to be collectively stable it must protect itself from invasion by any challenger, including the strategy which always defects. The interaction must last long enough for the gain from temptation to be nullified over future moves. This is the heart of the matter. The advantage of a nice rule in resisting invasion is that it attains to get the best results possible in a population consisting of a single type of strategy. It does this by getting the reward for mutual cooperation on each decision. However, both parties retaliate after a defection by the other. This observation leads to a general principle, since any collectively stable strategy which is willing to cooperate must somehow make it unprofitable for a challenger to try to exploit it. The general principle is that a nice rule must be provoked by the very first defection the other player, meaning that on some later move the strategy must have a finite chance of responding with a defection of its own.
For a nice strategy to be collectively stable, it must be provoked by the very first defection of the other party. The reason is simple enough. If a nice strategy were not provoked by a defection move, then it would not be collectively stable because it could be invaded by a rule which defected on one nonaggressive move. It is Nietzsche’s merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the questions “How is it possible to do what I am doing?” He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Dr. Freud says that men are motivated by desire for pleasures of the flesh and power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. However, if he can be a true scientist, id est, motivated by love of the truth, so can other humans, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if one is motivated by pleasures of the flesh or power, one is not a scientist, and one’s science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of thing that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners. The highly ethical economist who speaks only about gain, the public-spirited political scientist who sees only group interest, the physicist who sins petitions in favor of freedom while recognizing only unfreedom—mathematical law governing moved matter—in the Universe are symptomatic of the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the theoretical life, which has dogged the life of the mind since early modernity but has become particularly acute with cultural relativism. Nietzsche, in response to this difficulty, self-consciously made dangerous experiments with his own philosophy, treating its source as the will to power instead of the will to truth.
The underlying question (and an insoluble knot in philosophy) is that of the relation between substance and attribute; specifically, how does one tell the agent from the activity? Certain Indian text, exploring imagistically the relation between god and the World, ask how one can tell the dancer from the dance. In the visual arts the question has always seemed easier, since the painter or sculptor or photographer has traditionally made an object outside him- or herself. However, universalizing appropriation has dissolved such a conception, and in performance art, as in the dance, the agent and activity often seem inseparable. In the last seventy years various performances by artists (James Lee Bryars, Chris Burden, Linda Montano, Aaliyah Haughton, Britney Spears, Beyonce, and others) carried this category shift or semantic rotation to its limit by moving into galleries and living there for extended periods as performances. In this situation even the minutest details of everyday life are temporarily distanced and made strange—made art, that is—by the imposition on them of a new category overlay that alters the cognitive focus of both the performer and the beholder. Something parallel, though with fewer possibilities for irony, occurs when novices in ashrams are advised to regard their experiences, at every moment of the day, as sacred and special. That these creations by designation are linguistic, involving a willed change in the use of the word “art,” does not altogether rob them of mystery and effectiveness. It should be emphasized that category shift by forced designation is the basis of many magical procedures. In the Roman Catholic mass, for example, certain well-known objects—bread and “spirits”—are ritually designated as certain other objects—flesh and blood—which, in the manifest sense of every day experience, they clearly are not; and the initiate who accept the semantic rotation shifts his or her affection and sensibility accordingly. Art has often been thought of as exercising a sort of magic; around 1960, some artists adopted an actual magical procedure—basically a linguistic form of what Sir James Frazer called “sympathetic magic.” At that moment art entered an ambiguous realm from which it has not yet definitively emerged.
For the magical rite is already an appropriation of a piece of reality into a sheltered or bracketed zone of contemplation; when it is reapportioned into the realm of art, a double distancing occurs. Furthermore, the universalization of any category, or the complete submission of its ontology to the process of a metaphor, blurs or even erases its individual identity. To be everything is not to be anything in particular. In regard to the universal set, the Law of Identity has no function. The semantical coextensiveness of art and life means either that art has disappeared into life, melting into it everywhere like a new spark of indwelling meaning, or (and this departs at once into theistic metaphor) that life has dissolved into art. In short it means ultimately that the terms have become meaningless in relation to one another, since language operates not by sameness but by difference, and two sets with the same contents are the same. Seeing is believing. Like many an axiom, this one is literally true. Only since the ascendancy of the media has this been opened to question. Throughout the hundreds of thousands of generations of human existence, whatever we saw with our eyes was concrete and reliable. Experience was directly between us and the natural environment. Nonmediated. Nonprocessed. Not altered by other humans. If we saw a flock of birds flying southward, then these birds were definitely doing that We could believe in it. We might interpret this concrete information in various ways, perhaps misinterpret it, but there could never have been a question as to whether it was happening. The information itself, the birds and their flight, could not be doubted. This is the case with all sensory information. Whatever information the senses produce the brain trusts as inherently believable. If the sense could not be relied upon, then the World would have been an utterly confusing place. Humans would have been unable to make any sensible choices leading to survival. If there were no concretely true information, there could have been no sane functioning; the species could not have survived. This belief in sense perception is the foundation, the given, for human functioning. This is not to say there is no illusion.
In a desert environment, as we know, mirage can cause some to believe they are seeing things that are not there. However, the humans who are fooled in this way are the humans who are new to that environment. It is a problem of experience and interpretation. Their senses are not yet attuned to the new informational context. People who live for generations in such places learn to allow for illusions and do not actually “see” them in the way that visitors do. They learn to look at the edges of images, like the shadow spaces of Castaneda’s Don Juan, and to perceive a reality which is different from the visitor’s. In jungle environments, and among certain creatures, there is a camouflage. Animals use it to fool each other, including humans. Humans also use it, or devise image tricks, to fool animals and other humans. In this way images become processed images, deliberately altered, and may serve to fool an observer whose senses and interpretations are not sufficiently sharp. These are the classical exceptions which prove the point, because the basis of success for camouflage and illusion is that humans will believe what they see. In this sense, camouflage is a kind of sensory jujitsu that only confirms the original point; the senses are inherently believable. In the modern World, information rom the senses cannot be relied upon as before. We attempt to process artificial smells, tastes, sights and sounds as though they could reveal planetary reality, but we cannot make anything of them because we are no longer dealing directly with the planet. The environment itself has been reconstructed into an already abstracted, arbitrary form. Our sense are no longer reacting to information that comes directly from the source. They are reacting to processed information, the manifestation of human minds. Our information is confined in advance to the forms that other humans provide. Now, with electronic media, our sense are removed a step further from the source. The very images that we see can be altered and are. They are framed, ripped out of context, edited, re-created, sped up, slowed down and interrupted by other images. They arrive from a variety of places on the planet where we are not and were filmed at times which are not the present. What is more, many of the images are totally fictional. The things that we see are not happening and never happened. That is, they happened, but it is only the acting that happened, not the event.
Obviously, in the present age, we ought not rely on images to the same degree that our ancestors relied on the image of flying birds. Meanwhile, the images proceed inward as though they were the same as natural, unprocessed imagery. They move, walk, talk, and seem real. We assume they are real in the way images have always been real. We are unaware of any alteration. The change is difficult to absorb. What is required is a doubting process, a sensory cynicism that would have been profoundly inappropriate, even dangerous, for all previous human history. To assume that some sensory data could be eliminated totally and other sense information made unreliable would have left humans totally confused, lost in space, without knowledge of how to do anything, as though sensory environment itself had somehow gone mad (Solaris). The synapse would be broken. Contact lost. That is the present situation. We are only the fifth generation that has had to face the fact that huge proportions of the images we carry in our heads are not natural images which arrived as though they were connected to the planet. Like the Inuit transplanted to the city, or the Native American from the jungle who must suddenly deal with metallic birds, we do not have the ability to cope. Evolution has not arranged for us to allow for varying degrees of absorption and reliance on visual and aural information. There is nothing in the history of the species which assist our basic senses in understanding that imagery can be altered in time, speed or sequence, or that an images can arrives from a distance. Without training in sensory cynicism, we cannot possibly learn to deal with this. It will take several generations to let go of our genetically coses tendency to soak up all images as though they are 100 percent real. And think if we do manage to do that, what will we have? Since nothing can be directly experienced, we will have creatures who cannot believe in their senses and who take everything as it comes. Without the human bias toward belief, the media could not exist. What is more, because of the bias is so automatic and unnoticed, the media, all media, are in a position to exploit, the belief, to encourage you to believe in their questionable sensory information. This bias to believe has commercial value for the media since it allows them to keep your attention, as though it were south-flying birds you were seeing. The media, all media but particularly moving-image media, which present data so nearly natural, effectively convert our naïve and automatic trust in the reliability of images into their own authority.
California Scout Troop 9731 has hiked for six days, deep in the second-wilderness forests of the Pacific Northwest. “I bet we are the first people every to walk here,” says Leo, one of the youngest scouts. “Well, maybe you are right about walking,” says Scoutmaster Justin, “but look up ahead—what do you see, scouts?” Twenty paces ahead runs a strip of younger trees, stretching left and right until it vanishes among the trucks of the surrounding forest. “Hey, guys! Another old logging road!” shout Charlie, an older scout. Several scouts pull probes from their pockets and fit them to the ends of their walking sticks. Justin smiles: It has been ten years since a California troop found anything this way, but the kids keep trying. The scouts fan out, angling their path along the scar of the old road, poking at the ground and watching the readouts on the stick handles. Suddenly, unexpectedly, comes a call: “I have got a signal! Wow—I have got PCBs!” In a moment, grinning scouts are mapping and tracing the spill. Decades ago, a truck with a leaking load of chemical waste snuck down the old logging road, leaving a toxic trail. That trail leads them to a deep ravine, some rusted drums, and a nice wide path of invisible filth. The excitement is electrifying. Setting aside their maps and orienteering practice, they unseal a satellite locator to log the exact latitude and longitude of the site, then send a message that registers their cleanup claim on the ravine. The survey done, they head off again, eagerly planning a return trip to earn the now-rate Toxic Waste Cleanup Merit Badge. Today, tree farms are replacing wilderness. Tomorrow, the slow return to wilderness may begin, when nature need no longer be seen as a storehouse of natural resources to be plundered. However, there is very little that need be taken from nature to provide humans with wealth, and it is post-breakthrough technologies can remove from nature toxic residues of twentieth and twenty-first century mistakes.
The modern technocracies of the West have their roots in the medieval European World, from which there emerged three great inventions: The mechanical clock, which provided a new conception of time; the printing press with movable type, which attacked the epistemology of the oral tradition; and the telescope, which attacked the fundamental proposition of Judeo-Christian theology. Each of these was significant in creating a new relationship between tools and culture. However, since it is permissible to day that among faith, hope, and charity the last is most important, I shall venture to say that among the clock, the press, and the telescope the last is also the most important. To be more exact (since Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and to some extent Kepler did their work without benefit of the telescope), somewhat cruder instruments of observation than the telescope allowed men to see, measures, and speculate about the Heavens in ways that had not been possible before. However, the refinements of the telescope made their knowledge so precise that there followed a collapse, if one may say it this way, of the moral center of gravity in the West. That moral center had allowed people to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the Universe and therefore that humankind was so special interest to God. After Copernicus, Kepler, and especially Galileo, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in some hidden corner of the Universe, and this left the Western World to wonder if God had any interest in us at all. Although John Milton was only an infant when Galileo’s Messenger from the Stars was printedin 1610, he was able, years later, to describe the psychic desolation of an unfathomable Universe that Galileo’s telescopic vision thrust upon an unprepared theology. In Paradise Lost, Milton wrote: Before [his] eyes in sudden view appear the secrets of the horary Deep—a dark illimitable ocean, without bound, without dimension. Truly, a paradise lost. But it was not Galileo’s intention—neither was it Copernicus’ or Kepler’s—to so disarm their culture.
There were medieval men who, like Gutenberg before them, had no wish to damage the spiritual foundations of their World. Copernicus, for example, was a doctor of canon law, having been elected a canon of Frauenburg Cathedral. Although he never took a medial degree, he studied medicine, was private to his uncle, and among many people was better known as a physician than an astronomer. He published only scientific work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the first completed copy arriving from the printer only a few hours before he death, at the age of seventy, on May 24, 1543. He had delayed publishing his heliocentric theory for thirty years, largely because he believed it to be unsound, not because he feared retribution from the church. In fact, his book was not placed on the Index until seventy-three years after it was published, and then only for a short time. (Galileo’s trial did not take place until ninety years after Copernicus’ death.) Through His contact with them God draws them out of the abundance of living creatures in order to communicate with them. This “knowing” of His, this reaching out to touch and grasp, means that the human is lifted out, and it is as those who have been lifted out that they have intercourse with Him. God knows the ways of Humans. The way, the way of life of these humans is so created that at each of its stages they experience the divine contact afresh. And they experience the divine contact afresh. And they experience it as befits a real way, at each stage they experience it in the manner specifically appropriate to the stage. Their experience of the divine “knowing” is not like any experience of nature, it is a genuinely biographical experience, that is, what is experienced in this manner is experienced in the course of one’s own personal life, in destiny as it is lived through in each particular occasion. However cruel and contrary this destiny might appear when viewed apart from intercourse with God, when it is irradiated by His “knowing” it is “success,” just as every action of this human, one’s disappointments and even one’s failures, are success. O the happiness of the man who goes the way which is shown and “known” by God!
New Homes Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch Residence 3
Residence Three at Mills Station boasts approximately 2,400 square feet in this expansive two story home. There are three bedrooms, with the option for adding one more bedroom, two and a half bathrooms, and a two car garage plus workshop!
The charming front courtyard welcomes you home and the high ceilings and thoughtfully designed floor plan let you know that you’ve made the right choice with Cresleigh. You can fully embrace the indoor/outdoor lifestyle so organic to Northern California with a covered patio located right off kitchen with sliding glass doors on all three sides.
The den on the first floor provides a private office if you work from home or play room for the kids to be nearby while offering an option for a bedroom on the first floor.
The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The openness in the design allows the Great Room and kitchen to interact with each other seamlessly. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/
Thank you for your interest in this highly coveted community. While homes at Brighton Station are no longer available, its neighboring community, Mills Station, is still actively selling with two new communities coming soon.
We look forward to meeting you!
The Grounds Have their Share of Unexplained Mysteries
A mansion is not a mansion with its stately grounds, and Mrs. Winchester was just as attentive to the exterior of her estate as she was to the sprawling house. An avid gardener, she imported plans, flowers, trees, shrubs, and herbs from over 110 countries around the World. Mrs. Winchester employed eight to ten gardeners. Her head gardener was Mr. Nishiwara, who was responsible for seeing that the beautiful gardens, plus the tall hedge around the hose, were well maintained. The hedges were once so tall that only the top floor of the house was visible from the road! Mrs. Winchester loved to spend time in her gardens, and she had gazebos built where she could sit and enjoy her trees and flowers. It was a Saturday night, in January 1888, and Mrs. Winchester has, as usual, come home from the City early in the afternoon. It has been a black and foggy day, and the gas had been lighted in the streets and in the office where she worked from early morning. The fog was very bad at the time Mrs. Winchester returned home, and she congratulated herself on the fact that she had not to go out again that night. She sat with her puppy Zip in her sitting-room all the evening, with that comfortable feeling that she was able to relax until Monday morning, and that she need trouble about nothing outside the mansion. In due course, Zip went to bed, and then the maid Agnus reminded her of a letter that must be written and posted that night. Sufficient is it for Mrs. Winchester to say that the letter was to an elderly relative of some means who lived in Oakland, and who had taken great interest in her puppy Zip. The butler Martin remembered that the following day was the birthday of this relative, and that she should receive proper greeting by the Sunday morning post in the country town.
Frankly, Mrs. Winchester did not want the bother of it; but Agnus always knows best in these matters, and so Mrs. Winchester wrote the note and sealed it up. Mrs. Winchester had read nothing exciting during the evening—nothing to stir her imagination in any way. She stamped the letter and proceeded to the front door. Judge of her astonishment when, on throwing it open, she saw nothing but the gray wall of fog coming up to the very house; even the railings, not ten yards in the front of her grand estate, were blotted out completely. She called back into the house for the maid to come and look. “Don’t lose yourself, Mrs. Winchester,” she said, half laughing. “What a terrible night!” “I shall not lose myself,” Mrs. Winchester replied, laughing in turn. “The pillar-box is only at the end of the crescent; if I stick to the railing, I cannot possibly miss it. Do not wait here,” she added solicitously. “I will leave the door ajar, so that I can slip in easily when I come back. I have left my keys on my writing desk.” Angus went in, and Mrs. Winchester pulled the door close, and then stepped out boldly for the front gate. Imagine her standing there, just outside her own gate, and with her back to the crescent, knowing that she had to go to the left to find the pillar-box which was at the end of the crescent. There were thirteen Victorian cottages on her estate, so she knew she had to pass seven more before reaching the pillar-box. She also new that each cottage had an ornamental center-piece before she stepped away from the crescent at the end to reach the pillar box. That Mrs. Winchester knew would be something of an adventure, for the fog was the densest she had ever seen; she could only see the faint glow of her observation tower as she looked behind; the rest of her mansion was invisible.
Mrs. Winchester counted seven Victorian cottages, and then stood at the end of the last line of railings. She knew that the pillar-box was exactly opposite her. She took three quick steps, and literally cannoned into it. She was a little proud of her own judgment in getting it so nicely. Then she fumbled for the mouth of it, and dropped in her letter. All this may should very commonplace and ordinary. Mrs. Winchester is an observant woman, and she had noticed always that the mouth of the pillar-box faced directly along the crescent, thus standing at right angles to the road. At the moment that she had her right hand in that mouth, therefore, she argued that if she stood out at the stretch of her arm, she must be facing the crescent; Mrs. Winchester had but to move straight forward again to touch the friendly railings. She was putting that plan into operation, and had let go of the mouth of the pillar-box, when a man, coming hurriedly round the corner, ran straight into her, muttered a gruff apology, and was lost in the fog again in a moment. And in that accidental collision he had spun her round and tossed her aside—and she was lost! This is literally true. She took a step and found herself slipping of the kerbstone int the road; stumbled back again, and strove to find her way along by sticking to the edge of the pavement. After a minute or two, Mrs. Winchester was so sure of herself that she ventured to cross the pavement, and by great good luck touched in a moment one of those ornamental center-pieces of one of the gates—or so, at least, it seemed. She went on with renewed confidence until she saw certain bushes which topped the railings of one particular cottage, and then Mrs. Winchester knew that she was near her mansion’s front door. She pushed walked confidently, stepped quickly up the little path, and reached the door. She was right; the door yielded to her touch, and she went hurriedly in.
Mrs. Winchester had taken off her hat, and had held it towards the familiar hat-stand before she realized that it was not a familiar hat-stand at all; it was one she did not know. She looked round in some confusion, meaning to make good her escape without being observed, and yet wondering into what part of her mansion could she have come into, when she stopped stock still, with the hat held in her hand, listening. From a room near at hand, Mrs. Winchester heard the sound of a low, long-drawn moan, as from someone in pain. More than that, it was almost the wail of someone in acute terror. Now, Mrs. Winchester was a mild and caring soul, and her first instinct was to run. There was the door within a foot of her; she could open it again noiselessly and slip out, and leave whatever was moaning to its own trouble. Her next instinct, however, was a braver one; she might be able to help. Putting her hat on, and so leaving her hands free, she moved cautiously towards the sound, which was coming intermittently. She found that this wing of the house was unfamiliar to her; there was a 7-11 staircase built in the shape of a letter “Y,” which enabled the servants to quickly get to three different levels of the house. Then there were these stairs that lead to the ceiling, and there was also a cabinet that went straight through to the back thirty rooms of the mansion. When she went down the steps of the 7-11 staircase, slowly and cautiously, with her flesh creeping a little, the morning went on, and Mrs. Winchester was almost inclined to turn back with every step she took. However, at last, she got into the basement, and came to the door of the room from which the sound proceeded. She was in the very act of recklessly thrusting open the door when another sound broke upon her ears that held her still. The sound of someone singing in a raucous voice.
It was a sea song she remembered to have heard when she was a little girl in New Haven, Connecticut, and the words of which she had forgotten; it was something about “Boney was a warrior.” The door of the room was open a little way, and through the crack of it, Mrs. Winchester was able to peer in; and there she saw a sight that for a moment made her doubt her own eyes. She rubbed her eyes in a curious fashion and looked again, and this is what she saw: The room was in a neglected state, with strips of wallpaper hanging down from the walls and with a blackened ceiling. There was a table in the center of it, and at that table a man was seated, with a square black bottle and a glass before him, and a candle burning near his left hand. Mrs. Winchester could see the whole room now as plainly and as clearly as she saw it then. He was a man so villainously ugly that she had a thought that he was not a man at all, but some hideous thing out of a nightmare. He had very long arms—so long that they were stretched across the table, and his hands gripped the opposite edge of it; a great heavy head, crowed with a mass of red hair, was set low between enormously broad shoulders; his eyes, half closed, were high up and close together on either side of a nose that was scarcely a nose at all; the lips were thick and heavy. However, it was not the man that Mrs. Winchester looked at first, it was at two other figures in the room. These figures were seated on chairs facing the table at which the man was, and the strangeness of them lay in the fact that each was securely bound to the chair on which he and she sat, for it was a man and a woman. The man, who was quite young was not only bound, but gagged securely also; the woman was more lightly tied to her chair by the arms only, and her mouth was free. She was leaning back, with her eyes closed, and mingling with the raucous singing of the man at the table. Mrs. Winchester’s first impression was that the man at the table was some sort of unclean, bestial judge, and the others his prisoners.
He stopped his singing to pour some liquor from the square bottle into his glass and to drink it off; then he resumed his former attitude, with his fingers locked over the edge of the table. And now Mrs. Winchester noticed that while the woman, who was, by the way, quite young and very pretty, with a fair, dainty prettiness, still kept her eyes closed, the eyes of the bound man never left that dreadful figure seated at the other side of the table. Mrs. Winchester felt like she was on the eve of some awful calamity. She then unhesitatingly pronounced the entire assortment of people in the room as ghost, and condemned all the gathered treasures as the creations of petty intellect, which could not get out of the beaten track, but sought in the supernatural a reason for the explanation of every fact that seemed at variance with routine of daily experience. In her opinion the collection of people in this room had never seen at all in her day and generation, and must have been souls killed by the Winchester rifle ages ago; she did not yet believe her mansion was enchanted, however. To use her own language, “all those stories have been made by those people that set up overnight stirring out legends to entertain each other.” However, she must have known that she was in denial. For she was not insane and there were some kind of beings in this room. “Wouldn’t you like to speak, you dog?” said the red-haired man. “What would you give now to have the use of your limbs—the free wagging of your tongue? What would you say to me; what would you do to me?” The man who was bound could, of course, answer nothing. Mrs. Winchester saw his face flush and darken, and she guessed what his thoughts were. For herself, she was too fascinated by the scene before her to do anything else than peer through the crack and watch what was going one.
“Lovers—eh?” exclaimed the man at the table. “You thought I was unsuspicious; you thought I knew nothing and suspected nothing—didn’t you? While I was safely out of the way you could meet, the pair of you—day after day, and week after week; and this puppy could steal from me what was mine by right.” The woman opened her eyes for the first time and spoke. “It isn’t true,” she said, a sob breaking her voice. “It was all innocent. Martin and I have done no wrong.” “You lie!” thundered the man, brining his fist down upon the table with a blow that might have split it. “You’ve always lied—lied from the moment your father gave you to me—from the very hour I married you. You always hated me; I’ve seen you shudder many and many a time at the mere sight of me. Don’t I know it; haven’t I felt you stab me a thousand times more deeply than you could have stabbed me with any weapon? You devil! I’ve come at last to hate you as much as you hate me.” The woman turned her head slowly and looed at the younger man; a faint smile crossed her lips. In an instant the red-haired man had leapt to his feet, showing Mrs. Winchester astonishingly enough that he was a dwarf, with the shortest legs surely ever a man had. However, the bult of him was enormous, and Mrs. Winchester could guess, with a shudder, at his length. He caught up the glass, crossed the room, and flung the contents in the face of the man. “It’s a waste of good liquor—but that’s for the look she gave you. I wish there was some death more horrible than any invented yet that I could deal out to you,” he added, standing with the glass in his hand and glaring at his victim. “The death I mean for you is too easy.” He walked across to the fireplace in a curious purposeless way, and stirred a great fire that was blazing there. Then from a corner of the room he dragged with ease a great sack that appeared to contain wood and shavings; so much that Mrs. Winchester saw a rent in the side of it. As if in readiness for something, this he dropped down near the fire, and then went back to his seat, applying himself again to the drink that was on the table. And still Mrs. Winchester watched, as a woman may watch a play, wondering how it will end.
“I got the best of you tonight,” he said presently. “If I hadn’t some upon you from behind, you might have been too much for me; but I was ready and waiting. I’ve been watching longer than you think; I had everything mapped out clearly days ago. Tonight sees the end of all things for the pair of you; tomorrow sees me smiles away from here. You came in secret, you dog; you’ll go in secret.” “We have done no wrong,” said the woman again. “We loved each other years ago, when we were boy and girl; there was no sin in that.” “Bah!—I don’t believe a word of it. Don’t I know that your black heart you’ve compared the two of us every day of your life since first I saw you. His straightness for my crookedness; his sleek, black hair for my red; his prettiness for this face of mine”—he struck his own face relentlessly with one hand as he spoke—“that women shudder at. Don’t I know all that?” It was the strangest and most pitiful thing that the creature sitting there before his victims suddenly covered his face with his hands and groaned. If ever Mrs. Winchester had seen a soul in torment, she saw it then, and though she loathed him she could have wept for him. After a moment or two he dropped his hands and seized the bottle, and poured out the last drops into the glass and drank them off; then flung the bottle and glass crashing into the fireplace, as though there was an end to that business. And now, as he got down again from the chair, Mrs. Winchester saw the eyes of the woman open wide and follow his every movement with a dreadful look of terror in them. “I’ll kill you both—here in the place where you’ve met—and then I’ll seal up the house,” went on the dwarf. “I’ve planned it all. Look you last on each other, for tonight you die—and this house shall be your crypt!”
“I swear to you,” panted the woman eagerly, “by all I hold most holy and most dear, that if you let us go, we’ll never see each other again. For pity’s sake! —for the sake of Martin!” “For the sake of Martin!” sneered the dwarf. “That shows you in your true colors; that show who you are and what you are. There’s one poor satisfaction left to you; you’ll die together.” What held Mrs. Winchester then it would be impossible to say. She could only plead that in the dreadful thing that followed was a woman who sits at a play wondering what will happen next, and with never a thought in her of interfering. Mrs. Winchester’s in her anxiety has pressed the door a little to get a clearer view, so that she saw every movement of the dwarf. For herself, Mrs. Winchester had forgotten everything—in her own home, and my puppy zip, and the servants who slept in the mansion. It was as though she has stepped straight into a new World. Mrs. Winchester saw the dwarf advance towards the man in the chair, carrying his right hand stiff and straight beside him, gripping something s, she could not tell what it was that he held. Mrs. Winchester saw him come straight at her, and she saw the eyes of the woman in the opposite chair watching her as one fascinated. Then Mrs. Winchester saw two movements’ one with the left hand of the dwarf, when he struck the other man on the face; then with the right hand, when he raised something that gleamed n the light of the candle and brought it down with a sound that was new and horrible to her on the breast of the other man. And Mrs. Winchester saw the face of the man change, and start as it were into new life, and then fall as it were into death. And Mrs. Winchester saw his head drop forward, and his eyes were closed. Then, above it all, and yet seeming as a sort of dreadful chorus to it all, rang out the scream from the woman in the other chair. Mrs. Winchester did not think that the dwarf heard it; he had drawn back from what had been the living man, and was staring like one mad upon what he had done. And still piercing the air of the place rang the scream of the woman—not for her lover alone, but for herself.
That sound seemed at last to break in upon the senses of the dwarf and to call him partially to himself. Mrs. Winchester had watched him to the point where he draw himself together and crouched like a wild beast ready to spring, with that in his hand that dripped red, when, in some fashion, she flung herself round the partially open door and stumbled into the room. Mrs. Winchester thought she must have been a little made herself; otherwise, frail and commonplace creature that she was, she could not have battled with this madman. Mrs. Winchester came upon him from behind and gripped him, seizing him by the throat and by the head, and all the while shouting something to him quite unintelligible. The attack had been so sudden and so unexpected that she had him, in a sense, at her mercy. He could not know who had attacked him; he struggled madly, not alone to get away from her, but also to discover who she was. Mrs. Winchester struggled to keep his face away from her, gripped him by the neck and by the hair, and fought with him for what she knew then was her own life. And so struggling they stumbled at last horribly against that still figure bound in the chair and brought it over crashing with them to the floor. And then in a sudden Mrs. Winchester felt the dwarf inert in her hands, and knew that she had conquered him. What she must have looked like in that room, kneeling there, panting and struggling to get her breath, she could not tell; the whole business was so like a nightmare. She remembered seeing the dwarf lying there—huddled up and very still. She remembered that other figure, bound grotesquely in the chair and lying, still bound, upon its side; and she remembered, too, the woman, with her arms close fastened behind her, sitting there and sobbing wildly.
The dwarf must have been stunned; he lay there quite still, with the knife that was dreadfully red fallen from his hand, and lying beside him. When at last Mrs. Winchester staggered to her knees she saw that the girl was staring at her with a face that seemed to suggest that here, perhaps, was another ruffian come to kill her. “Who—who are you?” she asked in a frightened whisper. “A friend—one who stumbled in by accident,” Mrs. Winchester panted. “Look at the man that’s tied to the chair,” she whispered hoarsely. “He can’t be dead.” Mrs. Winchester knew that he was, but still she looked, as she bade her. Mrs. Winchester had no need to look twice; the poor fellow was quite dead. The blow had been strong and sure. On her knees beside him, Mrs. Winchester looked up and nodded slowly to her; there was no need for words. The young lady leaned back in her chair again and closed her eyes. “Set me free,” she said in a faint voice. Mrs. Winchester could not touch that knife that lay there; in a mechanical, methodical way she took from her waistcoat pocket the decent, respectable little bone handled penknife she carried always with her. With that Mrs. Winchester but the young lady’s bonds, nothing as she did so how cruelly they had cut into the white flesh; and after a moment or two she swung her arms listlessly against her sides and opened her eyes, and then, with an effort raised her hands and pressed them against her temples. “What will you do?” Mrs. Winchester asked, looking at her curiously. “I—I don’t know,” she said; and then, breaking into weeping, sobbed out: “Oh—dear God—that it should have come to this! What shall I do—what shall I do?” “You must get away,” Mrs. Winchester said, watching the dwarf, who was beginning to stie a little. “If he wakes, you know what will happen.”
“I know—I know,” she said; and got to her feet and began to move towards that bound figure still lying tied to the chair. However, at that Mrs. Winchester got before her, and with her hands against he shoulders held her back, and pleaded passionately to her that she should go, and leave the dead alone. She listened, with that strange look in her eyes of a child wakened from sleep and not clearly understanding; but she yielded to Mrs. Winchester, and stumbled under her guidance to the door. They had reached it, and Mrs. Winchester had opened it for her to pass out, when suddenly the dwarf twisted over on to his hands and knees, and then raised himself upright. He did not seem to realize for a moment what had happened; then he caught sight of the woman, and, with a snarl, crawled forward and gripped the hilt of the knife. At that she pushed suddenly past Mrs. Winchester and fled like a hare up the stairs. Mrs. Winchester heard the swift passage of her footsteps in the little hall of the house—then the slamming of the door-to-nowhere. And now Mrs. Winchester had to look to herself, for she saw in the eyes of the man that he would not let this witness escape if he could catch him. Mrs. Winchester had managed to get through the door by the time that he had got to his feet, and in a dazed fashion was stumbling toward her, knife in hand. With a sudden swoop he reached the table and blew out the candle, and at the same moment Mrs. Winchester ran up the stairs, and in the darkness stumbled along the hall and fumbled with the catch of the door. By great good fortune, Mrs. Winchester got the door open, and literally fell out into the fog. She could not see him as he tore after her; in a faintness Mrs. Winchester had fallen to her knees, and she heard him, as he raced past her, panting heavily. Then the fog swallowed him up, and she knelt there on the farm alone, shaking from head to foot.
Mrs. Winchester had, of course, no means of exactly in what part of her mansion she had had her adventure; she could only judge roughly that it must be about the middle of the crescent. She started along again, in the right direction, as she hoped, and thought to find the front door to her mansion; missed the railings, after going what seemed to be an interminable distance, and came up hard against a pillar-box. Scarcely knowing what she did, she set her right hand in the mouth of it, and performed the same maneuver she had done before; advanced three paces, and touched railings again. Stumbling along these, she came blindly what she thought was her front door, walked up the path, and pushed open the door that yielded; and there, with the face of her maid looking at her in alarm and wonderment, Mrs. Winchester feel in a dead faint at her feet. It has to be recorded that Mrs. Winchester never found that room again. She knew every square inch of her mansion. Over and over again, in clear weather, Mrs. Winchester has always around in her mansion, and had closed her eyes, and tried to remember what steps she took to get to that particular room that night, after a stranger had cannoned into her and twisted her round; but all in vain. Whether in some part of the house lies the body of a man who was foully murdered on that particular night; maybe in a hidden room the crime was committed; or perhaps, in some strange supernatural fashion, she saw that night a deed committed that had been committed long before, she shall never know. That it is no mere figment of the imagination, and that something really happened that night, is proved by one fact. Her maid, in raising Mrs. Winchester from the floor that night when she fell at her feet, found her fingers locked closed upon something, and, forcing them open, disclosed what it was. A tuft of red hair!
Such episodes may appear utterly absurd and pure superstition to people in countries comparatively free of black magic, but instead they should be warnings of the power of Satan and demons where occult literature lures readers into illicit magic. Magic as the release of special power by satanic and demon forces of evil in its character and effects. While divine help and miracles produce new strength and positive results, magic shifts the burden to another area. Small relief in one area must be paid for by terrible burdens in another. The principle of compensation prevails. The price exacted is always found to be much greater than the amount of help received. Satan drives a hard bargain and grossly cheats his victims. Usually violence, suicide, and insanity will run through a whole family line, where the magical arts have been cultivated and practiced. Such tragic events often involve as many as four generations. Many occultists and magic workers, especially those who have cultivated the black arts and signed themselves over to the devil in their own blood, die horrible deaths. When a ready successor is not provided to carry on the nefarious practice, this is especially true. The psychic bondage and oppression that traffickers in occultism themselves suffer, as well as their dupes, is horrifying to contemplate. Demon possession is represented as a vivid symbol of the prevalence of evil in the World. Other critics attempt to dismiss demon possession with theories of accommodation or hallucination. However, this view fails to meet the issue. Nor can present-day parapsychologist and psychiatrists, who refuse to recognize evil supernaturalism in the phenomenon of demon possession, either explain it or deal adequately with it. Laws defining witchcraft as having league with the Devil and prescribing the death penalty for such offenders cropped up in the colonies as early as 1636 in Plymouth. Other colonies soon followed suit—Connecticut in 1642 and Rhode Island in 1647.
The first executions took place in Boston in 1648 and in Hartford, Connecticut, in that same year. The executions were carried out by hanging, in contrast to the European practice of burning witches, which probably stemmed from the widespread fear among the European peasantry of vampire, the dead who returned from their graves to suck the blood from the living. The vampire myths never really took root in America, so the necessity of destroying the bodies of the witches was not deemed urgent. Throughout the 1650s, there appeared prosecution and attempted prosecutions in America, but these cases were infrequent, and all of them were based on the fear of maleficum, the witch’s working of evil, the accusations coming from frustrated and jealous neighbors. Few confessions were recorded in the early cases, and they did not seem to have much real validity. The few that did confess mentioned having dealings with Satan, but for the most part these admissions were confused and incoherent, and the details of the accounts differed greatly from the confessions of the witches in Europe. For example, in 1699, in Connecticut, a woman named Greensmith confessed to trafficking with the Devil, but made no mention of all-important Covenant, or pact. She further stated that the Devil had appeared to her in the form of a deer (not a goat) and that she had attended meetings at a place not far from her house. The mention of “meetings” occurred in some early confession, but the word “Sabbat” or “Sabbath,” commonly used by European witches, did not come up until later, apparently at the suggestion of the Salem judges. Some believe that Satan has a soul and a character. He is not just this futile entity but someone you can see many aspects to. Some people do not see Satan as this guy with horns who is evil, they see Him as the first rebel. Then one can see why He is so attractive to many in the Victorian ages and the young people. He is someone who is standing up to the greatest power in the Universe. “If that ‘evil’ is of a rebellious nature,” says Glenn Danzig, “then I guess, in Christian terms, that evil is the Satan in you. I don’t buy that. I believe in honesty, standing up for yourself. That’s my ‘good.’”
Thousands of people base their hopes on the statements of spiritistic practitioners and subsequently become dependent upon the advice they receive from the “other side.” There are quite a number of people who has suffered serious psychic disturbances through the misuse of such practices. Their personalities have been split and they have been utterly confused by the spirits on which they have called. People therefore who try to discover what life after death is like through spiritism and superstition may be in danger of falling prey to the dark and hidden side of their own minds and soul. If you look at the early tracts of The Christian Bible, there is really not much about Satan in there anyway. Christian religions have tried to overblow and create a whole legend around Satan which is not true to the actual scriptures we have. If you desire, you must first make yourself strong so you can help others. You should only help people who want help, a lot of times people do not really want your help. You tell people what has to be done to change their lives, they will not listen. If Satan were corporeal, He would not be something repulsive, He would be something seductive. He would want to win you over and gain your trust, and of course being repulsive or disgusting would not be the way to go. One would imagine this would be a seductive, beautiful creature. In the Gnostic account of the fall of the angels, the angels were suppsed to be watching over this flock of humans and all of a sudden, they are perpetrating acts of pleasures of the flesh with them. Eventually this created the Cyclops, the Minotaur, things of this nature. There are so many accounts of the fall of the angels, it is like a fantasy tale that you would like to believe actually happened. We, in this circle, conjure and cite this spirit Fatenovenin, with all his adherents, to appear here in this spot, to fulfill our desires, in the name of three holy Angels, Schomajen Sheziem, Roknion Averam, Kandile, Brachat Chaijdalic, Ladabas, Labul, Rargil, Bencul, in the name of God. Amen!
Winchester Mystery House
Mrs. Winchester’s estate was a little town within itself. The grounds have their share of unexplained mysteries. Mrs. Winchester outfitted her home with the finest stained glass doors, windows, and wallpaper that money could buy during her time. She had everything she needed: plumber’s shops, carpenter’s workshops, her own water and electrical supplies, and complete sewer and drainage systems. Mrs. Winchester even had her own gas manufacturing plant. It produced carbide gas by adding a small amount of water to a drum containing calcium carbide. The resulting gas was pressed through the gas lines to the house by a large piston and cylinder. The gas lights in the house were then lit by electromechanial strikers that created a spark to light each lamp.
Come see her estate, in person, for yourself this weekend! Please Click the link below for tickets and more information.
The Time of the World Disappears Before Eternity
Revolutionary wealth is not just about money. Civilization is one of those big, stuffy words that may intrigue philosophers and historians but puts most people to sleep. Unless it is used in a sentence like “Our Civilization is threatened”—at which point large numbers of people prepare to defend themselves. Today many people do, in fact, believe that their civilization is threatened—and that the United States of America may be doing the threatening. And it is. However, not in the way most of us think. Around the World, critics of the United States of America point to its military and its economy as the main sources of its predominance. It is, however, knowledge in the broadcast sense and new technologies based on it that integrate America’s military and financial power and propel both forward. It is true that America’s technological lead is threatened. According to the National Science Board, foreign students earn nearly 50 percent of all U.S. doctorates in mathematics, computer sciences and engineering. And American youth are showing less and less interests in these fields. NASA officials complain that there are three times as many scientists over sixty as there are under thirty in the space agency. Shirley Ann Jackson, then president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has cautioned that “centers of technology-based activity, training, and entrepreneurialism are rapidly spreading throughout the globe. Thus even the status quo for the U.S. represents a declining share of the global marketplace for innovation and ideas.” Nevertheless, America still leads in most fields of digital technology, in microbiology and in science generally. It spends 44 percent of the World budget for research and development. By most criteria, the United States of America is still the undisputed leader in the performance of basic and applied research. In addition, many international comparisons put the United States of America as a leader in applying research and innovation to improve economic performance.
In the latest IMD International World Competitiveness Yearbook, the United States of America ranks first in economic competitiveness, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore. The survey compares economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency, and infrastructure. Larger economies are further behind, with Zhejiang (China’s wealthiest province), Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany ranked 20 though 23, respectively. An extensive review by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concludes that since World War II, US leadership in science and engineering has driven its dominant strategic position, economic advantage, and quality of life. And at least for now, the United States of America remains the Word’s scientific powerhouse. Perhaps even more important is the speed with which scientific and technical findings from everywhere are converted into marketable applications or products and widely dispersed into manufacturing, finance, agriculture, defense, biotech and other sectors. All of which boosts economic productivity, further accelerates change, and increasing the U.S. ability to compete at the global level. However, knowledge is not only a matter of bits and bytes or science and technology. Part of the knowledge economy is the production of art and entertainment, and America is the World’s biggest exporter of popular culture. That culture include fashion, music, TV programming, books, movies and computer games. Americans have always been told that their most important message to the World is one of democracy, individual freedom, tolerance, concern for “the rights of man” and—more recently—the rights of women. In the last three decades, however, a U.S. media spread into formerly closed or nonexistent foreign markets, a very different set of messages has been communicated. Much of it targeted at young people.
Certainly not all, but a considerable amount of this material has disgustingly glorified pimps, gangster, drug lords, drug pushers, and hollow-eyed drug users. It has celebrated extremes of violence marked by unending car chases, over-the-top special effects and songs dripping with sexist venom. The impact of all this has been further intensified in the hard-sell, over-the-edge advertising used to promote these products. Hollywood, for example, has painted a fantasy America in which adolescent hedonism reigns supreme and authority figures—police, teachers, politicians, business leaders—are routinely satirized. Film after film, and TV shows one after another, tell young viewers what many of them hunger to hear: that adults are bumbling fools; that being “dumb and dumber” is okay; that “we do not need education”; that to be “bad” is really good; and that pleasures of the flesh, in infinite variety, is or should be nonstop. In this fantasy World, women are readily available, but they can also leap over giant buildings in a single bound (like Superman), shoot and kill (like James Bond) and practice martial arts (Like Jet Li). Extremes, we are repeatedly told, are good and restraint is bad; and, by the way, America is so rich that event its secretaries, police, clerks, and other ordinary working people live in high-rise penthouse apartments or Malibu mansions—images that set adolescent glands tingling from Taipei to Timbuktu. What few foreign critics of American’s pop culture seem to know is that ironically enough, many of the ostensibly American firms producing and disseminating the interesting and unusual of these programs either are, or were financed not by America, but by European and Japanese capital. Nor is it widely understood that shows are often made by, say, a European director with an Australian stary, a Chinese martial-arts consultant, an anime cartoonist from Japan or other foreign contributors.
In the meantime, however, the influence of these intriguing programs is so powerful that other societies fear for the survival of their own culture. Only if art threatens action, then terrorism can be advanced through art. For such a phenomenon as Aesthetic Terrorism to occur, aesthetic pursuit must become symbolic not of its own decadently solipsistic pleasures (exemplified in madness of des Esseintes in Huysmans’ Against Nature), but of action taken beyond the pale of art World confines. Terrorism is art is called the avant-garde. However, if this was once the case, it is no longer. Most avant-garde art is viewed and created today as simply an enfolding reaction to its own history. This disingenuous game-playing guarantees that the avant-garde art is viewed and created today as simply an enfolding reaction to its own history. This disingenuous game-playing guarantees that the avant-garde can no longer stimulate or even provoke. Dada and Futurist actions, which attempted to lead art out of the classroom and museum and into the streets, are simply appropriated by postmodernist facsimiles which capture the letter but little of the original essence. It hardly matters anyway. Avant-garde art has evolved into nothing more than a cultural benchwarmer, corporate tax write-off and public relations smokescreen. Art which openly espouses anti-corporate ideology is embraced as long as it hews to arbitrary standards invented by those taste-making and fortune-telling hirelings, the art critics. What could be wrong, after all, with a business World that allows people to say what they want (because it does not matter)? Aesthetic Terrorism is a term more realistically applied to the faceless regime of consumer culture than the avant-garde. The onslaught of Muzak, ad jingles, billboards, top 40 tunes, commercials, corporate logos, etcetera, all fit the terrorist dynamic of intrusion and coercion.
One almost forgets that aesthetics once implied a consensual relationship between the creators and appreciators of art. How often is it that one hears someone admitting a fondness for a media product “in spite” of oneself? How many times have you heard a slogan or rancid tune ring in your ears like a brain-eating mantra? When consumer terror’s avant-garde correlative, Pop Art, became indistinguishable from the object of its supposed social satire, it erased from big business its pejorative taint. Many of today’s avant-garde stars have emerged from or entered the business World, some enormously successful in the arcane number-juggling or speculation and commodities scams. Even freeloading on the state and private foundations is fair game only for those whose bureaucratic aptitude is matched by their shameless butt-kissing. It is not surprising that most grant recipients excel in little more than lawyerristic logorrhea and ingrained artistic timidity. Critic-centered postmodernism spawned the phrase-art hybrid of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer in which an advertising-style slogan is combined with an implied message or visual cue (usually swiped from some old magazine). Their posture is a hip cynicism which is supposed to subvert the “thrall” of the advertising command. Kruger and Holzer play the market like skillful double-agents, boosting themselves into the public eye through clever steals from Madison Avenue behaviorist techniques yet simultaneously troweling on crypto-Marxist jive to secure the perks of critical and academic currency. Their self-promotions worked when they were at the sidelines of the establishment. However, not the social commentary grows increasingly hollow. Currently being groomed for jet-setting prominence by Soho millionairess Mary Boone, Kruger’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial in 1987, for which she is paid a handsome sum, featured nothing more than a socialite princess joke, “I Shop Therefore I Am.” Winking at and wagging the tail of establishment hierarchy is part of that I-rib-you-gently-you-pay-me-off confidence game artists have been playing the Renaissance courts.
These contemporary court artists, like many of the past centuries, smugly pretend t spit in the eye of the exploiters while allowing themselves to be pampered de-loused—and when they are not looking—de-clawed. There are, of course, those artists, usually fresh out of university, who are unaccomplished at filling out grant forms, and therefore consider themselves “subversives.” The majority of these art and rock magazines-styled rebels are playing out rebellion psychodramas to package and merchandize to consumerist sycophants. This strategy is (forgive them term) the simulacra of terrorism: the content seizes in the frozen attitudinizing of pose and goes no further. We must look to the true outsiders and not the would-be insiders for an artist truly capable of effective counter-terror against the insidious mantras of consumerist brainwash. Terror means a threat, and the outsider’s version of Aesthetic Terrorism belongs to those performances or arrangements of words and pictures that unleash the reactionary impulses of police and bourgeois artist/critic alike. The kind of art that evokes this wrath, fear and condemnation rejoices in its pagan spirit of schadenfreude which controverts the humanist piety of “enlightened victim.” Anti-social sadism rarely receives patronage, however. Outside the corrupting realm of societal handouts, the Aesthetic Terrorist—much as this definition may grate on him—is the last bastion of aesthetic purity. Operation Sun Devil is the name for a government action against computer wizards and assorted sharpies and super-smarts who were resourceful enough to figure out how to hack into the electronic files of Ma Bell. Those who know, claim the Sun Devil gambit as a terrified overreaction against intelligence by the plodding and stupid bureaucracy.
John Perry Barlow (Whole Earth Review, Fall 1990) describes a typical Sun Devil action against a teenage hacker: [A] father in New York […] opened the door at 6.00 a.m. and found a shotgun at his nose. A dozen agents entered. While one of the kept the man’s wife in a choke-hold, the rest made ready to shoot and entered the bedroom for their sleeping 14-year-old. Before leaving, they confiscated every piece of electronic equipment, including all the telephones. Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure are unheeded by the government agents who claim nerd computer hackers are terrorists and have “the ability to access and review the files of hospital patients. Furthermore, they could have added, deleted, or altered vital patient information, possibly causing life-threatening situations.” Meacorporate interests have staked claim to the entirety of cyberspace, and they are not about to tolerate the presence of digital interlopers. This may scare off some, but other pirates like the mysterious Legion of Doom and NuPrometheus league (who illegally circulated highly protected Macintosh computer source code) will rise to the challenge now that they have been provided a clearly delineated enemy to innovation, the individual, and personal freedom. It may come as a surprise to learn that a few artists are now producing work which finds itself classified as a thought crime, punishable by expulsion into a Siberia of non-distribution, and in some cases by litigation and imprisonment. Pure magazine, from Chicago, a xeroxed vehicle which extols child torture, murder, and extreme misogyny, tweaked too many civic-minded noses, and its editor, Peter Sotos, was tailed for nine months and underwent a lengthy trial process in which he was finally convicted for possession of some very illegal magazine. Soto’s case was the first successfully prosecuted new Illinois state law, enacted under the influence of the Meese Commission Report on pornography, an example of First Amendment revisionism par excellence.
Soto’s case is particularly disquieting because it proves that prison is in the offing for simple possession of controversial material. No doubt this legal precedent was established to open the doors for future roundups of other thought criminals. The expertly managed Gulf War (massacre), in which networks censored war casualty footage that might provoke a “Vietnam War syndrome,” provides a small window into the dynamics of mass control to come. Any thoughtful individual is undeniably malnourished by the current information diet. Whether this is due to a direct conspiracy of State or by design of the oligarchic marketplace matters little. However, it has upped the ante for a new American Samizdat in which “disreputable,” “crazy,” “hateful,” or “dangerous” topics are broached by individuals or small, autonomous groups that are not compromised or swayed by institutional priorities. Can “offensive interests become the political crime of future? Apparently so. When looking at the previous sentences one can compare and see that musicians have been arrested for obscene lyrics, anarchist individuals have been collared for burning the flag; parents have been arrested for photographing their toddlers in their birthday suits; painter and performer Joe Coleman was arrested in Boston for operating an “infernal machine” and in New York for killing a rat: museum curators were threatened with arrest for hanging homoerotic photos; G.G. Allian was jailed for some consensual sadomasochism with a girlfriend; the FBI have been “monitoring” certain groups who practice unorthodox pleasures of the flesh; and on and on. Even many of the books you read have come under widely publicized attack by authors such as Carl A. Raschke who advocated the revocation of First Amendment rights from those who spread “cultural terrorism.” Even globalization could be considered cultural terrorism.
It has become increasingly obvious that the aesthetic terrorist hobgoblins are nothing more than symbolic scapegoats to divert attention away from the real issues. For Americans, fear is not another form of awareness, it is just another form of gossip. As Charles Manson has stated, true subversive terror can only be actualized by turning off the TV sets. Until then, aesthetic terrorism will be orchestrated by those already in command against insubstantial or non-existent villains. And in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorism will be orchestrated by those already in command against insubstantial or non-existent villains. And in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity. The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in a chameleon-like stye master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime. We will not know them by name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet. Until then, there is a lot of work to be done. Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a World of egoists without central authority? This question has intrigued people for a long time. And for good reason. We all know that people are not angels, and that they tend to look after themselves and their own first. Yet we also know that cooperation does occur and that our civilization is based upon it. However, in situations where each individual has an incentive to be selfish, how can cooperation ever develop? The answer each of us gives to this question has a fundamental effect on how we think and act in our social, political, and economic relations with others. And the answers that others give have a great effect on how ready they will be to cooperate with us.
The most famous answer was given over three hundred years ago by Thomas Hobbes. It was pessimistic. He argued that before governments existed, the state of nature was dominated by the problem of selfish individuals who competed on such ruthless terms that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 1651/1962, p. 100). In his view, cooperation could not develop without a central authority, and consequently a strong government was necessary. Ever since, arguments about the proper scope of government have often focused on whether one could, or could not, expect cooperation to emerge in a particular domain if there were not an authority to police situation. Today nations interact without central authority. Therefore the requirements for the emergence of cooperation have relevance to many of the central issues of international politics. The most important problem is the security dilemma: nations often seek their own security through means which challenge the security of others. This problem arises in such areas as escalation of local conflicts and arms races. Related problems occur in international relations in the form of competition with alliances, tariff negotiations, and communal conflict places like Cyprus. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has presented the United States of American with a typical dilemma of choice. If the United States of American continued business as usual, Russian might be encouraged to try other forms of noncooperative behavior later one. On the other hand, any substantial lessening of United States of America’s cooperation risks some form of retaliation, which could then set off counter-retaliation, setting up a pattern of mutual hostility that could be difficult to end. Much of the domestic debate about international policy is concerned with problems of just this type. And properly so, since these are hard choices.
In everyday life, if they never invite us over in return, we may ask ourselves how many times we will invite acquaintances for dinner. An executive in an organization does favors for another executive in order to get favors in exchange. A journalist who has received a leaked news story gives favorable coverage to the source in the hope that further leaks will be forthcoming. A business firm in an industry with only one other major company charges high prices with expectation that the other firm will also maintain high prices—to their mutual advantage and at the expense of the consumer. For me, a typical case of the emergence of cooperation is the development of patterns of behavior in a legislative body of the United States Senate. Each senator has an incentive to appear effective to his or her constituents, even at the expense of conflicting with other senators who are trying to appear effective to their constituents. However, this is hardly a situation of completely opposing interests, a zero-sum game. On the contrary, there are many opportunities for mutually rewarding activities by two senators. These mutually rewarding actions have led to the creation of an elaborate set of norms, or folkways, in the Senate. Among the most important of these is the norm of reciprocity—a folkway which involves helping out a colleague and getting repaid in kind. It includes vote trading but extends to so many types of mutually rewarding behavior that “it is not an exaggeration to say that reciprocity is a way of life in the Senate” (Matthews 1960, p. 100; see also Mayhew 1975). Washington was not always like this. Early observers saw the members of the Washington community as quite unscrupulous, unreliable, and characterized by “falsehood, deceit, treachery” (Smith 1906, p. 190). In the 1980s the practice of reciprocity is well established. Even the significant changes in the Senate over the last two decades, tending toward more decentralization, more openness, and more equal distribution of power, have come without abating the folkway of reciprocity.
As will be seen, it is not necessary to assume that senators are more honest, more generous, or more public-spirited than in earlier years to explain how cooperation based on reciprocity has emerged or proved stable. The emergence of cooperation can be explained as a consequence of individual senators pursuing their own interest. We are investigating how individual pursuing their own interests will act, followed by an analysis of what effects this will have for the system as a whole. Put another way, the approach is to make some assumptions about individual motives and then deduce consequences for the behavior of the entire system. The case of the U.S. Senate is a good example, but the same style of reasoning can be applied to other settings. The object of this enterprise is to develop a theory of cooperation that can be used to discover what is necessary for cooperation to emerge. By understanding the conditions that allow it to emerge, appropriate actions can be taken to foster the development of cooperation in a specific setting. The Cooperation Theory that is presented here is based upon an investigation of individuals who pursue their own self-interest without the assistance of a central authority to force them to cooperate with each other. The reason for assuming self-interest is that it allows an examination of the difficult case in which cooperation is not completely based upon a concern for other or upon the welfare of the group as a whole. It must, however, be stressed that this assumption is actually much less restrictive than it appears. If a sister is concerned for the welfare of her brother, the sister’s self-interest can be thought of as including (among many other things) this concern for the welfare of her brother. However, this does not necessarily eliminate all potential for conflict between sister and brother.
Likewise a nation may act in part out of regard for the interests of its friends, but this regard does not mean that even friendly countries are always able to cooperate for their mutual benefit. So the assumption of self-interest is really just an assumption that concern for others does not completely solve the problem of when to cooperate with them and when not to. A good example of the fundamental problem of cooperation is the case where two industrial nations have erected trade barriers to each other’s exports. If barriers were eliminated, because of the mutual advantages of free trade, both countries would be better off. However, if either country were to unilaterally eliminate its barriers, it would find itself facing terms of trade that hurt its own economy. In fact, whatever one country does, the other country is better off retaining its own trade barriers. Therefore, the problem is that each country has an incentive to retain trade barriers, leading to a worse outcome than would have been possible had both countries cooperated with each other. This basic problem occurs when the pursuit of self-interest by each leads to a poor outcome for all. To make headway in understanding the vast array of specific situations which have this property, a way is needed to represent what is common to these situations without becoming bogged down in the details unique to each. Fortunately, there is such a representation available: the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, there are two players. Each has two choices, namely cooperate of defect. Each must make the choice without knowing what the other will do. No matter what the other does, defection yield a higher payoff than cooperation. If both defect, the dilemma is that both do worse than if both had cooperated. Cases typically result in one of four possible outcomes in the matrix. If both players cooperate, both do fairly well. Both get a reward for mutual cooperation.
However, if one player cooperates but the other defects, the defecting play get the temptation to defect, while the cooperating players gets the sucker’s payoff. If both defect, both get the punishment for mutual defection. What would you do in such a situation? That is basically the gamble of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is simply an abstract formulation of some very common and very interesting situations in which what is best for each person individually leads to mutual defection, whereas everyone would have been better off with mutual cooperation. The definition of Prisoner’s Dilemma requires that several relationships hold among the four different potential outcomes. The second part of the definition of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that the players cannot get out of their dilemma by taking turns exploiting each other. This assumption means that an even chance of exploitation and being exploited is not as good an outcome for a player as mutual cooperation. It is therefore assumed that the reward for mutual cooperation is greater than the average temptation and the sucker’s payoff. This assumption, together with the rank ordering of the four payoffs, defines the Prisoner’s Dilemma. We have come back to the point where we began, where values take the place of good and evil. However, now we have made at least a hasty tour of the intellectual experiences connected with modern politics that made such a response compelling. How it looked to thoughtful Germans is most revealingly expressed in a famous passage by Max Weber, about God science and the irrational: Finally, although a naïve optimism may have celebrated science—that is, the technique of the mastery of life founded on science—as the path which would lead to happiness, I believe I can leave this entire question aside in light of the annihilating critique which Nietzsche has made of “the last men” who “have discovered happiness.” Who, then, still believes in this with the exception of a few big babies in university chairs or in editorial offices?
So penetrating and well informed an observer as Weber could say in 1919 that the scientific spirit at the heart of Western democracy was dead for all serious men and that Nietzsche had killed it, or had at least given it the coup de grace. The presentation of “the last man” in Thus Spake Zarathusta was so decisive that the old-style Enlightenment rationalism need not even be discussed anymore; and, Weber implies, all future discussion or study must proceed with the certainty that the perspective was a “naïve” failure. Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion. This means, simply, that almost all Americans at that time, thinking American in particular, were “big babies” and remained so, long after the Continent had grown up. One need only think of John Dewey to recognize that he fits Weber’s description to a T, and then remember what his influence here once was. And not only Dewey, but everyone from the beginning of our regime, especially those who said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” shared the rationalist dream. Weber’s statement is so important because he made as much as more than anyone brought us into contact with the most advanced Continental criticisms of liberal democracy, and was the intermediary between Nietzsche and us Americans who were the most recalcitrant to one’s insight, perhaps because according to it we represent the worst or most hopeless and are therefore loath to see ourselves in that mirror. A very dark view of the future has been superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys. They have proved too much for us to handle. However, in our defense, we are probably not the only ones for whom they are too much. Perhaps you have caught yourself kissing another person as you first saw kissing in the movies or on television. My children have a phrase to describe this: “television kiss.”
It is fortunate for them that they have noted that there are television kisses and other kinds, because it will help protect them from absorbing it, taking it into themselves where it will come back out ten years, like a replay. Most of us did not make that distinction as we sat in darkened rooms or theaters as children. Since we did not see all that much real kissing, the media kiss became our image of kissing. We found ourselves producing that model of kiss later in life. I was fourteen-year-old when I tried to kiss for the first time. I imitated Brad Pitt’s kiss, but I did not feel it. Only later did I realize that perhaps Brad Pitt did not feel it either; he was merely kissing the way the director said he should. So there I was imitating a kiss that was never real in the first place, worried that there might be something wrong with me for lacking the appropriate feeling and failing to obtain the appropriate response. The journalist Jane Margold was driving home one night in Berkeley with her brother, Harlan. Suddenly a man crawled into the street right in front of them. They screeched to a stop and then, stunned, just sat there for a moment. They finally got out and cautiously went up to the man to find out that he had been stabbed several times in his upper body, was bleeding profusely and was in danger of dying right there. The man’s assailant was nowhere to be seen. In describing the event to me, Jane said that she instantly flipped into a media version of herself. She had never faced anything like it before and had no direct feelings. Instead, playing through her mind were images of similar events she had seen on television or in films. The media superseded her own responses, even to the point of removing her from the event. She was there, but sue did not experience herself as being there. She was seeing the event, but between her and it, floating in her mind, was an image of an implanted reality which would not get out of the way. Jane thought such thoughts as: “This is real; there is a wounded man lying here in from of me, bleeding to death, yet I have no feeling. It seems like a movie.”
In fact, it was they very movielike quality that eventually got her into action. Without feeling, she performed mechanical acts. She and her brother comforted the man, directed traffic, dispatched people to summon the police and an ambulance. She became extremely efficient, but throughout, she had the sense of performing a script. Apart from their economic implications, technologies create the ways in which people perceive reality, and such ways are the key to understanding diverse forms of social and mental life. As individual express their life, so they are. There are three stages in the development of technology: the age of technology of chance, the age of technology of the artisan, the age of technology of the technician. Cultures may be classified into three types: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. At the present time, each type may be found somewhere on the planet, although the first is rapidly disappearing: we must travel to exotic places to find a tool-using culture. If we do, it is well to go armed with the knowledge that, until the seventeenth century, all cultures were tool-users. There was, of course, considerable variation from one culture to another in the tools that were available. Some had only spears and cooking utensils. Some had water mills and coal- and horsepower. However, the main characteristic of all tool-using cultures is that their tools were largely invented to do two things: to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life, such as in the use of waterpower, windmills, and the heavy-wheeled plow; or to serve the symbolic World of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion, as in the construction of castles and cathedrals and the development of the mechanical clock. In either case, tools did not attack (or, more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced.
With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization. These beliefs, in fact, directed the invention of tools and limited the uses to which they were put. Even in the case of military technology, spiritual ideas and social customs acted as controlling forces. It is well known, for example, that the uses of the sword by samurai warriors were meticulously governed by a set of ideals known as Bushido, or the Way of the warrior. The rules and rituals specificizing when, where, and how the warrior must use either his two swords (the katana, or long sword, and the wakizashi, or short sword) were precise, tied closely to the concept of honor, and included the requirement that the warrior commit seppuku or hara-kiri should his honor be compromised. This sort of governance of military technology was not unknow in the Western World. The use of the lethal crossbow was prohibited, under threat of anathema, by Pope Innocent II in the early twelfth century. The weapon was judged to be “hateful to God” and therefore could not be used against Christians. That it could be used against Muslims and other infidels does not invalidate the point that in a tool-using culture technology is not seen as autonomous, and is subject to the jurisdiction of some binding social or religious system. This is why power, which to a large extent defines us as individuals and as nations, is itself being redefined. A clue to this redefinition emerges when we look more closely at some of the unrelated changes. For we discover that they are not as random as they seem. Whether it is Japan’s meteoric rise, GM’s impressive rebound, or the American doctor’s fall from grace, a single common thread unites them.
Take the punctured power of the god-in-a-white coat. Throughout the heyday of doctor-dominance in America, physicians kept a tight choke-hold on medical knowledge. Prescriptions were written in Latin, providing the profession with a semi-secret code, as it were, which kept most patients in ignorance. Medical journals and texts were restricted to professional readers. Medical conferences were closed to the laity. Doctors controlled medical-school curricula and enrollments. Contrast this with the situation today, when patients have astonishing access to medical knowledge. With a personal computer and a WiFi, anyone from home can access data bases like Index Medicus, and obtain scientific papers on everything from Addison’s disease to zygomycosis, and, in fact, collect more information about a specific aliment or treatment than the ordinary doctor has time to read. Copies of the 2,354-page book knows as the PDR or Physicians’ Desk Reference are also readily available to anyone. Once a week on the Lifetime cable network, any televiewer can watch twelve uninterrupted hours of highly technical television programming designed specifically to educate doctors. Many of these programs carry a disclaimer to the effect that “some of this material may not be suited toa general audience.” However, that is for the viewer to decide. The rest of the week, hardly a single newscast is aired in America without a medical story or segment. A video version of the material from the Journal of the American Medical Association is now broadcast by three hundred stations on Thursday nights. The press reports on medical malpractice cases. Inexpensive paperbacks tell ordinary readers what drug side effect to watch for, what drugs not to mix, how to raise or lower cholesterol levels through diet. In addition, major medical breakthroughs, even if television news almost before the M.S. has even taken his subscription copy of journal out of the in-box. In short, the knowledge monopoly of the medical profession has been thoroughly smashed. And the doctor is no longer a god.
This case of the dethroned doctor is, however, only one small example of a more general process changing the entire relationship of knowledge to power in the high-tech nations. In many other fields, too, closely held specialists’ knowledge is slipping out of control and reaching ordinary citizens. Similarly, inside major corporations, employees are winning access to knowledge once monopolized by management. And as knowledge is redistributed, so, too, is the power based on it. A human is a “beast” and purifies one’s heart, and behold, God holds one by the hand. That is not a kind of humans. Purity of heart is a state of being. A man is not pure in kind, but one is able to be or become pure, rather one is only essentially pure when one has become pure, and even than one does not thereby belong to a kind of humans. The “wicked,” that is, the bad, are not contrasted with good humans. The good is to draw near Hod. One does not say that those near to God are good. However, one does call the bas those who are far from God. In the language of modern thought that means that there are humans who have no share in existence, but there are no humans who possess existence. Existence cannot be possessed, but only shared in. One does not rest in the lap of existence, but one draws near to it. Nearness is nothing but such a drawing and coming near continually and as long as the human person lives. The dynamic of fairness and nearness is broken by death when it breaks the life of the person. With death there vanished the heart, that inwardness of humanity, out of which arises the pictures of the imagination, and which rises up in defiance, but which can also be purified. Separate souls vanish, separation vanished. Time which has been lived by the soul vanished with the soul, we know of no duration in time. Only the rock in which the heart is concealed, only the rock of human hearts does not vanish. For it does not stand in time. The time of the World disappears before eternity, but existing humans die into eternity as into the perfect existence.
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes.
Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearby Sacramento and Yuba City.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Go. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 