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The Question is Not Who Steals, the Question is Who Does Not Steal
Observing better than Sarah L. Winchester is an industrial spy’s greatest asset, for as the master of detection would agree, mere seeing never catches the latent truth. By observing, the spy penetrates beyond the surface meaning of people, places, events, or things. To further highlight this illustration, a tourist visiting The Winchester Mystery House does not give much thought to the parking lot on the side of the mansion’s exterior. A trained intelligence specialist counts the number of parking spaces. He or she notes whether drivers park vehicles outside the existing lot’s bounds, and the number of people around, and also what they are doing. Furthermore, this parking lot may be considered an overflow space and may in the future be used to expand the building. Additionally, the expert may approximate a rough idea of the incomes the business generates derive from mentally averaging the workers’ vehicles’ years and by nothing the vehicles’ makes. Do the same for the managers’ vehicles. (Managers’ vehicles have reserved spots next to the plant’s exterior walls.) Furthermore, including the automobiles, the intelligence gather will record the arrivals and departures of commercial trucks. The trucks’ logos reveal the identities of suppliers and vendors. And, the pace of commercial traffic may indicate the tempo of production at the facility. Jotting down license plate numbers from the management parking spaces assists in identifying who those people are. Such information, tying the person to their vehicle, may be useful in latter surveillance. The markings on boxes and crates stored outside of the facility often yields clues on what materials or parts the manufacturing processes use. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
In other words, trained eyes learn a great deal about a business even before they enter the doors. Wait a minute, you say, and point out that none of what has been described above is illegal. If it is not illegal, why is it spying? Whether an activity is legal or ethical or even socially acceptable really does not mean much. If your proprietary secrets leak out legally, you client still has lost an asset. While intelligence specialists may spend many hours debating what is permissible business intelligence and what is industrial espionage, we do not have time to waste performing a witch hunt of the commercial intelligence community. The smart ones realize legal boundaries exist, and they wisely stay behind them by using legal and, depending upon one’s definition, ethical methods. However, as a security professional, you need to look at the information security issues from all perspectives. The criminals you will work to catch and prosecute. Your client may seek criminal and civil remedies against the parties that hired them. The other you will try to block in every legitimate way you can. Just because they agree not to break the law or to violate obvious ethical standards does not equate to them being entitled to your sensitive information. If the information were easy to get, their clients would not hire them to do the business of intelligence work. And, you are allowed to cloak and hide (by legal means) as much as you can from these people. Some corporations even after running background checks on their employees have them further investigated. To see what they are doing on the free time, who they interact with, if they are in danger and what kind of places they visit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
When I was a teenager, I was shopping for cars. I went to the BMW lot and there were a lot of sedans. My boss said, “Those BMW coupes are hot, huh?” At the time, I did not understand the laws of supply and demand. I replied, “I don’t know. I see a lot of sedans on the lot.” He then says, “That is what I mean. They are all sold out.” Then I understood. If a product is in short supply, it means demand is extremely high. It does not mean that there is no demand for the other products, just they there may be more of them and the demand may not be as high. A factory tour takes several forms. An industrial spy may simply walk into a plant, which has low security, posing as a prospective employee, a graduate student writing a research paper, a utility meter reader, or as a vendor. If construction is occurring at the site, a spy may don a hard hat, work clothes and gloves, and wear a utility belt. By blending in, the operative can wander around the site asking questions, observing, and even taking photographs. The FBI is great at being undercover, but one thing to take note of is they very seldomly ever drink or do drugs, on or off the job. So, if someone is doing drugs or drinking on the job, they are likely a hack, especially if whatever they are pretending to investigate is pretty benign. When greater security exists, the spy may join a public tour of the facility, if available. Sometimes such tours serve up an information buffet for an observant intelligence gather. Doing research beforehand enhances the tour; knowing what to loo for enables the spy to focus in on critical details in limited time. Library and Internet research, interviews with industry experts and former employees, and discussions with suppliers and vendors constitute good preparation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
If public tours are not available, the spy may try to join a vendor, or a service provider’s firm, which permits regular access to the premises. The copy machine technician, for example, gets to see a lot, to hear a great deal, and even to handle documents. Effective spes know what they are after. The shopping list usually includes: Identifying parts and materials used in manufacturing. (Also identifying sources of supply.) Understanding industrial processes and manufacturing steps. The amounts of raw materials andfinished goods on hand. Proprietary techniques, formulas, and control systems used. Software and computer systems employed. Production schedules, shifts, and the number of workers employed. The number of workers in each job classification. Production records, reports, lab notes, or engineering reports and drawings. Machinery or equipment used. Physical dimensions and layout of the plant. Physical characteritics of support areas such as incoming roads, railroads, waterways, docks, parking lots, and employee facilities such cafeteria and break areas. Financial records pertaining to manufacture. Marketing records or sales records petrtaing to production or manufacturre. Any production problems at the site. Any construction in progress at the site. Security measures in place at the facility. If the target contains a research facility, then the intelligence effort will seek: Relevant content of research databases. The identity and job description of key research staff. Project plans, descriptions, and progress reports. Research supplies, materials, and equipment used. Project managers’ reports. Costs or cost account records associated with projects. Any prototypes, models, or preproduction goods created by research efforts. And because some corporations know they are being spied on, they may new employees wait several months before see areas of the business that are off limits. This gives them time to do an adequate investigation of staff. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Rarely will any of these targets be lying on a desk with large arrows pointing to them saying “Valuable Secrets.” Instead, the industrial spy learns to gather bits and pieces to build the larger picture. One rivets them together into coherent intelligence. You may notice their reports are detailed, including dates and times, which can be back up by facts, and upon even further investigation, more details and instances than they mentioned are discovered, and placed in a discovery file. Constructing the picture defines the craft of intelligence, a passionate endeavor requiring cunning and filled with intellectual challenge. Any good spy is not physical walking around taking note nor recording people with archaic devices. They may not even record anyone at all. Certain types of recordings are illegal anyway, and could be punishable by penal code, and/or inadmissible in court, especially if they are illegal. The security professional’s response demand equal passion and the ability to stretch one’s mind. And another thing to keep in mind, if you gather illegal evidence (which may not be allowed in court), a judge may allow the opposing side to inter into evidence material that is questionable. Often, the inner commitment required struggles against bureaucratic inertia and politics. For example, the company may remain committed to public tours of the plant despite information security risks. Many corporate officers consider such programs good public relations. A resourceful security specialist, thinking and seeing with a hawk’s predatory eye, must develop ways to blunt the spy’s vision and to cloak any clues the tour affords. Intelligence gathering is a continuum. A plant tour may reveal small clues, moderate clues, or big ones. Security’s aim seeks to keep the collection efforts end of the continuum. Defending everything may be impossible or simply not feasible. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Keeping any yardage gained to short distances is a reasonable protection strategy. Some information leaks will occur, especially if your business has size and complexity. Placing roadblocks to deter a spy from climbing high on the information tree remain within the real of effective action. A tour of the plant may allow outsiders to see from the established path processing vats and lines on the worker’s side and not on the path’s side reduces any information telegraphed during the tour. Many such cloaking strategies are available and inexpensive; one just needs to see from a rogue’s viewpoint. Walk through your plant with the operations manager, and point out clues a visitor discovers when doing a “friendly tour.” Such a step will build a relationship with management, and it demonstrates that you are paying attention to detail. Espionage is not a game; it is a struggle we must win if we are to protect our freedom and our way of life. Espionage is the World’s oldest profession. Industrial espionage is the theft of trade secrets by the removal, copying, or recording by technical surveillance of a company’s confidential or protected information for use by a competitor or foreign nations. The protected information may include trade secret, client lists, and other non-public information. If a company is working under a U.S.A. government contract that involves U.S.A. classified information at a company’s facility, then that may be the target of industrial espionage. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation espionage is: whoever knowingly performs targeting or acquisition of trade secrets to knowingly benefit any foreign government, foreign instrumentality, or foreign agent. (Title 18 U.S.C., Section 1831). #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines trade secrets and theft of trade secrets as: Trade secrets are al forms and types of financial, business, scientific, technical, economic or engineering information including patterns, plans, compilations, program devices, formulas, deigns, prototypes, methods, techniques, processes, procedures, programs, or codes whether tangible or intangible, and whether or how stored, compiled, or memorialized physically, electronically, graphically, photographically or in writing, which the owner has taken reasonable measures to protect; and to have an independent economic value. “Trade secrets” are commonly called classified proprietary information, economic policy information, trade information, proprietary technology, or critical technology. The released information, no matter how interesting it is, may not be as fascinating as what a company is keep a secret. Theft or trade secrets occurs when someone knowingly preforms targeting or acquisition of trade secrets or intends to convert a trade secret to knowingly benefit anyone other than the owner. Commonly referred to as industrial espionage. (Title 18 U.S.C., Section 1832). Industrial espionage must not be confused with or compared to competitive intelligence. Competitive intelligence is the legal and ethical activity of systematically gathering, analyzing, and managing information on industrial competitors. This is non-protected information that is collected from open sources such as organizations’ websites, news articles, information presented at trade shows, or company brochures. Competitive intelligence may also include information obtained from public filings such as property records and permits. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
As previously stated, industrial espionage is not only unethical, but is also a criminal offense under all state criminal statutes and federal law. Over the years, there have been a series of serious industrial espionage cases. One case involved the Avery Dennison Corp, a major United States of America adhesives company, in which company secrets were stolen and sold to Four Pillars, a Taiwanese company that also makes and sells pressure-sensitive production. Another case of corporate espionage was dubbed “Japscam” by the press. Hitachi came into possession of an almost full set of IMB’s Adirondck Workbooks. The workbooks contained IBM design documents and technical secrets that were prominently marked FOR INTERNAL IBM USE ONLY. Hitachi did not return them to IBM. Gillette had a close shave with industrial espionage when company secrets were stolen and offered for sale to a company in the same market. The company reported the attempt to Gillette and an arrest was made of the individual. US Espionage Acs of 1917 was passed to protect the United States of America during a time of war and made it a criminal offense to pass information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed force of the United States of America or to assist the enemies of the United States of America. These offenses were punishable by death or by imprisonment for not more than thirty years of both. Under the US Espionage Act of 1917, it was also an offense to convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United State of America. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
This also included the promotion of enemies of the United States of America when the country is at war and to cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, munity, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States of America, or to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment of service of the United States of America. These offenses were punishable by a maximum fine of $10,000 or by imprisonment for not more than twenty years or both. While the Espionage Act of 1917 dealt with espionage and subversion against the United States of America, it did little to provide for the prevention and prosecution of individuals taking part in industrial espionage against private industries. The US Economic Espionage Act of 1996 was passed into law to provide for the prosecution of individuals taking part in industrial or economic espionage and theft of trade secrets that would benefit any foreign government, foreign instrument, or foreign agent. The law specifically addressed trade secrets. An important aspect of the Economic Espionage Acts of 1996 was that it not only allowed for the prosecution of perpetrators, but it also allowed the target company to seek financial reimbursement for losses the organization suffered as a direct result of the theft of trade secrets. This aspect of the law also holds responsible the organization that facilitated, or would have gained from, the industrial espionage and trade secrets stolen from the targeted company. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The federal espionage laws deal with the protection of US government’s interests and espionage perpetrated by foreign government, businesses, and agents. To resolve this situation, the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, published by the Uniform Law Commission in 1979 and later amended in 1985, has the goal of providing a uniform act as a legal framework for trade secrets protection for the private industry within the United States of America. The Uniform Trade Secrets Act aimed to codify standards and remedies regarding the misappropriation of trade secrets that emerged in common law on a state-to-state basis. In order to provide for the prosecution of private individuals and organizations without foreign influence, most states have passed industrial espionage laws. Depending on the state where one is located, that state’s laws need to be examined. No matter how many changes our country has experienced in deciding who is an ally and who is an adversary, the role of intelligence gathering has not changed; America’s interests are paramount. And monitoring and helping to protect those interests has been our constant mission for more than sixty years. In the course of fulfilling that mission, we have brought talent, creativity, and even genius to bear in shaping and refining the business of intelligence. Intelligence is a high-risk endeavor—a lot can go wrong. The fact that we have achieved so many successes over the years, even in the face of spectacular failures, attests to the commitment and persistence of the extraordinary men and women who have developed the field-tested practices and techniques that have brought about intelligence breakthroughs. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
There have been intelligence operations throughout history, but the American services are in many ways the most highly developed intelligence-gathering organizations in the World. And the country’s leadership expects much from our individual intelligence officer in carrying out the challenging requirement assigned to them to serve our country’s intelligence. Economic espionage cost U.S.A. companies $100 billion each year. More than 56 percent of the Fortune 1000 admit to having been victimized, and more than likely, a considerable portion of the other 44 percent are either too reticent to admit or simply have not yet discovered that they, too, have been targeted and/or victimized by corporate spies and thieves. America’s nationwide economic espionage crisis is unique in several respects. It represents the first time a crisis of such mammoth proportion has been acknowledged to affect every company in every industry group without exception and at the same time. Without question, economic espionage is a gargantuan growth industry and one of the biggest crises to hit U.S.A. businesses en masse in history. And in an age of globalization, economic espionage gets bigger and easier to commit every day. When, in 1999, then FBI Director Lousi Freeh called economic espionage the most severe threat to our nation’s security since the Cold War, he went on to claim that U.S.A companies are under constant economic attack from foreign countries, stating that in the mid-1990s, FBI investigation uncovered “23 countries are engaged in economic espionage activity against the United States.” However, Former Congressman Dave McCurdy, who served as chair of the House of Intelligence Committee, thinks Mr. Freeh grossly understated the problem. Mr. McCurdy believes 100 of the World’s 173 nations re actively waging economic espionage against U.S.A. businesses. “The question is not who steals,” Mr. McCurdy said. “It is who doesn’t steal.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
In medieval society the economic organization of the city had been relatively static. The craftsmen since the later part of the Middle Ages were united in their guilds. Each mast had one or two apprentices and the number of masters was in some relation to the needs of the community. Although there were always some who had to struggle hard to earn enough to survive, by and large the guild member could be sure that he could live by his hand’s work. If he made good chairs, shoes, bread, saddles, and so on, he did all that was necessary to be sure of living safely on the level which was traditionally assigned to his social position. He could rely on his “good works,” if we use the term here not in its theological but in its simple economic meaning. The guilds blocked any strong competition among their members and enforced co-operation with regard to the buying of raw materials, the techniques of production, and the prices of their products. In contradiction to a tendency to idealize the guild system together with the whole of medieval life, some historians have pointed out that the guilds were always tinged with a monopolistic spirit, which tried to protect a small group and to exclude newcomers. Most authors, however, agree that even if one avoids any idealization of the guilds they were based on mutual cooperation and offered relative security to their members. Medieval commerce was, in general, carried on by a multitude of very small businessmen. Retail and wholesales business were not yet separated and even those traders who went into foreign countries, such as the members of the North German Hanse, were also concerned with retail selling. The accumulation of capital was also very slow up to the end of the fifteenth century. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Thus the small businessman had a considerable amount of security compared with the economic situation in the late Middle Ages when large capital and monopolistic commerce assumed increasing importance. Much that is now mechanical about the life of the medieval city, was then personal, intimate and direct and there was little room for an organization on a scale too vast for the standards that are applied to individuals, and for the doctrine that silences scruples and closes all account with the final plea of economic expediency. This leads us to a point which is essential for the understanding of the position of the individual in medieval society, the ethical views concerning economic activities as they were expressed not only in the doctrines of the Catholic Church, but also in the secular laws. This position cannot be suspected of attempting to idealize or romanticize the medieval World. The basic assumptions concerning economic life were two: “That economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct, upon which as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding. Material riches are necessary; they have secondary importance, since without them men cannot support themselves and help one another…But economic motives are suspect. Because they are powerful appetites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to applaud them…There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a constant and measurable force, to be accepted like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, would have appeared to the medieval thinkers as hardly less irrational and less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as pugnacity and the sexual instinct. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
One must exist for man, not man for riches. At every turn therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade is legitimate; the different resources of different countries show that it was intended by Providence. However, it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits which he takes are no more than the wages of his labor. Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen World; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. However, it is to be tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself. The estate must be legitimately acquired. Today the World is changing again, and the overwhelming majority of Americas are neither farmers nor factory workers. Instead, they are engaged in one or another form of knowledge work. America’s fastest growing and most important industries are information-intensive, and the Third Wave sector includes more than high-flying computer and electronic firms and biotech start-ups. It embraces advanced, information-driven manufacturing in every industry. It includes the increasingly data-drenched services—finance, software, entertainment, the media, advanced communications, medical services, consulting, training and education. In short, it includes al the industries based on mind-work rather than muscle-work. The people who work in this sector will soon be the dominant constituency in American politics. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Unlike the “masses” during the industrial age, the rising Third Wave constituency is highly diverse. It is de-massified. It is composed of individuals who prize their differences. Its very heterogeneity contributes to its lack of political awareness. It is far harder to unify than the masses of the past. Thus the Third Wave constituency has yet to develop its own think tanks and political ideology. It has not systematically marshaled support from academia. Its various associations and lobbies in Washington are still comparatively new and less well connected. And except for one issue, NAFTA, in which the Second Wavers were defeated, the new constituency has few significant notches on its legislative belt. Yet there are key issues on which this broad constituency-to-come can agree. To start with: liberation. Liberation from all the old Second Wave rules, regulations, taxes and laws laid in place to serve the smokestack barons and bureaucrats of the past. These arrangements, no doubt sensible when Second Wave industry was the heart of the American economy, today obstruct Third Wave development. For example, depreciation tax schedules lobbied into being by the old manufacturing interests presuppose that machines and products last for many years. Yet in the fast-changing high-tech industries, and particularly in the computer industry, their usefulness is measured in months or weeks. The result is a tax bias against high tech. Research and development deductions also favor big, old Second Wave companies over the dynamic start-ups on which the Third Wave sector depends. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The current tax treatment of intangibles means that a company with a lot of obsolete sewing machines may well be favored over a software firm that has very little in the way of physical assets. (Even accounting standards, set not by government but by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, favor investment in hardware over information, human resources and other intangibles on which Third Wave companies depend.) Yet changing such rules will mean winning a bitter political fight against the Second Wave firms that benefit from them. Companies in the Third Wave sector have special characteristics. They tend to be young—both in corporate age and in the age of their work force. Work units in them tend to be small compared with those in Second Wave firms. They tend to invest more than average in research and development training, education and human recourses. Ferocious competition forces them to innovate continuously. That means short product lifecycles, and it often implies a rapid turnover of people, tools, and administrative practices. They key assets of these firms are symbols inside the skulls of people. Should these firms and industries be expected play the game according to rules that penalize them for precisely their Third Wave characteristics? Is not this tying America’s hands behind its back? Much of the Third Wave Sector is engaged in providing a dazzling, ever-changing array of services. Instead of decrying the rise of the service sector and continually attacking it as a source of low productivity, low wages, and low performance, should not it be expressly supported and expanded? Should not it at least be freed of old shackles? #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
American needs more, not less, service sector employment to improve the quality of life of its people. That means jobs for everyone from electronics repairment to recyclers, from health-care providers and people who help the elderly to police and firefighters, and—yes—it even means jobs for child-care providers and for domestic workers who are desperately needed in millions of two-income homes. A Third Wave economic policy should not pick winners and losers, but it should clear away the obstacles to professionalization and development of the services needed to make life in America less stressed-out, less frustrating and impersonal. Yet no political party as yet has even begun to think this way. Despite the political lag, the Third Wave constituency is outside the conventional political parties because neither party has so far noticed its existence. Thus it is Third Waver who dominate the new electronic communities springing up around the Internet. And it is these same people who are busy demassifying the Second Wave media and creating an interactive alternative to it. Traditional party politicians who ignore these new realities will be swept aside like M.P.s in nineteenth-century England who imagined their rural, “rotten borough” seats in Parliament were permanently secure. The Third Wave force in America have yet to find their voice. The political part that gives it to them will dominate the American future. When that happens, a new and dramatically different America will rise from the ruins of the late-twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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The Tranquility of Order
Peace is perfection, a gift from God, a beneficial, dynamic, and healthy state within the soul. Human beings have feeling and emotions, awareness and sensitivity of our environment. However, without order, our attention is divided, distracted, confused, unreliable, and ineffective. We must take responsibility for our actions to receive true peace. One of the greatest secrets in life is the ability to navigate your emotions in a ways that helps you win influence. Emotional intelligence makes it possible to navigate the course of your life without feeling burnt out or frustrated. Depending only on your emotional or rational thinking abilities will only make your life distorted or imbalanced. The automatic or impulsive reaction does not allow you to properly process your thoughts and emotions before taking actions. However, once you can understand how your emotions work, then you can bridge the gap between reaction and adequate response. Remember, no one is responsible for how you are feeling, but you. Just because you are having a bad day does not mean you can lash out at another person for being themselves. If things are not going your way, and you are not feeling like tolerating the public, it may be an excellent idea to take a day off work, stay home, stay inside and get yourself in order before having contact with the outside World. There is a right and wrong way to do everything. A person who has self-control, has strength to see situations clearly. Judge them for what they are. It depends upon the attitude of your mind. Negative attitude disturbs and positive attitude provides peace to the mind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The structure of society and the personality of man changed in the late Middle Ages. The unity and centralization of medieval society became weaker. Capital, individual economic initiative and competition grew in importance; a new moneyed class developed. A growing individualism was noticeable in all social classes and affected all spheres of human activity, taste, fashion, art, philosophy, and theology. This whole process had a different meaning for the small group of wealth and prosperous capitalists on the one hand, and on the other hand for the masses of peasants and especially for the urban middle class for which this new development meant to some extent wealth and chances for individual initiative, but essentially a threat to its traditional way of life. It is important to bear this difference in mind from the outset because the psychological and ideological reactions of these various groups were determined by this very difference. The new economic and cultural development took place in Italy more intensely and with more distinct repercussions on philosophy, art, and on the whole style of life than in Western and Central Europe. In Italy, for the first time, the individual emerged from feudal society and broke the ties which had been giving one the security and narrowing one at one and the same time. The Italian of the Renaissance became the first-born among the sons of Modern Europe, the first individual. There were a number of economic and political factors which were responsible for the breakdown of medieval society earlier in Italy than in Central and Western Europe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Among them were the geographical position of Italy and the commercial advantages resulting from it, in a period when the fight between Pope and emperor resulting in the existence of a great number of independent political units; the nearness to Asia, as consequence of which certain skills which were important for the development of industries, as for instance the silk industry, were brought to Italy long before they came to other parts of Europe. Resulting from these and other conditions, was the rise in Italy of a powerful moneyed class the members of which were filled with a spirit of initiative, power, ambition. Feudal class stratifications became less important. From the twelfth century onwards nobles and burghers lived together within the walls of the cities. Social intercourse began to ignore distinctions of caste. Birth and origin were of less importance than wealth. On the other hands, the traditional social stratification among the masses was shaken too. Instead of it, we find urban masses of exploited and politically suppressed workers. As early as 1231, Frederick II’s political measures were aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal state, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree to the exchequer. The result of this progressive destruction of the medieval social structure was the emergence of the individual in the modern sense. In Italy this veil (of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession) first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this World became possible. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such. In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, the Arabian had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race. Man discovers himself and others as individuals, as separate entities; he discovers nature as something apart from himself in two aspects: as an object of theoretical and practical mastery, and in its beauty, as an object of pleasure. He discovers the World, practically be discovering new continents and spiritually by developing a cosmopolitan spirit, a spirit in which Dante cant say: “My country is the whole World.” The Renaissance was the culture of a wealth and powerful upper class, on the crest of the wave which was whipped up by the storm of new economic forces. The masses who did not share the wealth and power of the ruling group had lost the security of their former states and had become a shapeless mass, to be flattered or to be threatened—but always to be manipulated and exploited by those in power. A new despotism arose side by side with the new individualism. Freedom and tyranny, individuality and disorder, were inextricably interwoven. The Renaissance was not a culture of small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois but wealthy nobles and burghers. Their economic activity and their wealth gave them a feeling of freedom and a sense of individuality. However, at the same time, these same people had lost something: the security and feeling of belonging with the medieval social structure had offered. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
They were more free, but they were also more alone. They used their power and wealth to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure out of life; but in doing so, they had to use ruthlessly every means, from physical torture to psychological manipulation, to rule over the masses and to check their competitors within their own class. All human relationships were poisoned by this fierce life-and-death struggle for the maintenance of power and wealth. Solidarity with one’s fellow men—or at least with the members of one’s own class—was replaced by a cynical detached attitude; other individuals were looked upon as “objects” to be used and manipulated, or they were ruthlessly destroyed if it suited one’s own ends. The individual was absorbed by a passionate egocentricity, and insatiable greed for power and wealth. As a result of all this, the successful individual’s relation to his own self, his sense of security and confidence were poisoned too. His own self became as much an object of manipulation to him as other persons had become. We have reasons to doubt whether the powerful masters of Renaissance capitalism were as happy and as secure as they are often pictured. It seems that the new freedom brought two things to them: an increased feeling of strength and at the same time an increased isolation, doubt, scepticism, and—resulting from all these—anxiety. It is the same contradiction that we find in the philosophic writings of the humanists. Side by side with their emphasis on human dignity, individuality, and strength, they exhibited insecurity and despair in their philosophy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
This underlying insecurity resulting from the position of an isolated individual in a hostie World tends to explain the genesis of a character trait the became noticeable in the individual of the Renaissance and not present, at least in the same intensity, in the member of the medieval social structure: his passionate craving for fame. If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one’s relations to other and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one’s doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one’s individual life from it limitations and instability to the plane of indestructibility; if one’s name is known to one’s contemporaries, and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one’s life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others. It is obvious that this solution of individual insecurity was only possible for a social group whose members possessed the actual means of gaining fame. It was not a solution which was possible for the powerless masses in that same culture nor one which we shall find in the urban middle class that was the backbone of the Reformation. The Renaissance was the period which we saw the beginning of modern individualism and also because the work done by historians of the period throw some light on the very factor which are significant for the main process which this study analyzes, namely the emergence of man from a preindividualistic existence to one in which he has full awareness of himself as a separate entity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
However, in spite of the fact that the ideas of the Renaissance were not without influence on the further development of European thinking, the essential root of modern capitalism, its economic structure and its spirit, are not to be found in the Italian culture of the late Middle Ages, but in the economic and social situations of Central and Western Europe and in the doctrines of Mr. Luther and Mr. Calvin. The main difference between the two cultures is this: the Renaissance period represented a comparatively high development of commercial and industrial capitalism; it was a society in which a small group of wealth and powerful individuals ruled and formed the social basis for the philosophers and artists who expressed the spirit of this culture The Reformation, on the other hand, was essentially a religion of the urban middle and lower classes, and of the peasants. Germany, too, had its wealthy businessmen, like the Fuggers, but they were not the ones to whom the new religious doctrines appealed, nor were they the main basis from which modern capitalism developed. As Max Weber has shown, it was the urban middle class which became the backbone of modern capitalistic development in the Western World. According to the entirely different social background of both movements we must expect the spirit of the Renaissance and that of the Reformation to be different. In discussing the theology of Mr. Luther and Mr. Calvin some of the differences will become clear by implication. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
However, before we go any further, let us cover a few things in more modern times. In 1984, when Gary Hart campaigned for the Democratic Party presidential nomination and won the New Hampshire primary by calling for “new thinking,” the old Second Wave barons in the Democratic Party united to stop him and nominated solid, safe, Second Wave thinker Walter Mondale instead. It is why, more recently, Second Wave Naderites and Second Wave Buchananites found common cause against NAFTA. It is why, when Congress passed an infra-structure bill in 1991, $150 billion was allocated to roads, highways, bridges and potholes—providing profits to Second Wave companies and jobs for Second Wave—unions, while a ere $1 billion was allocated to help build the much-touted electronic superhighway. Necessary as they may be, roads and highways are part of the Second Wave infrastructure; digital networks are the heart of the Third Wave infrastructure. The point here is not whether or not the government should subsidize the digital network, but the imbalance of Second and Third Wave forces in Washington. This imbalance is why Vice President Gore—with one toe wet in the Third Wave—has been unable, despite his efforts, to “reinvent” the government along Third Wave lines. Centralized bureaucracy is the quintessential form of organization in Second Wave societies. Even as advanced corporations, driven by competition, are desperately trying to dismantle their bureaucracies and invent new Third Wave forms of management, government agencies, blocked by Second Wave civil service unions, have managed to stay largely unreformed, unreengineered, unreinvented. They retain, in short, their Second Wave structures. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Second Wave elites fight to retain or reinstate an unsustainable past because they gained wealth and power from applying Second Wave principles, and the shift to a new way of life challenges that wealth and power. However, it is not only the elite. Millions of middle-class and poor Americans also resist the transition to the Third Wave because of an often justified fear that they will be left behind, will lost their jobs and slide further down the economic and social slope. To understand the vast inertial power of Second Wave forces in America, however, we need to look beyond the old muscle-based industries and their workers and unions. The Second Wave sector is backed by those elements of Wall Street that service it. It is further supported by intellectuals and academics, often tenured, who live off grants from foundations, trace associations and lobbies that serve it. Their task is to collect supportive data and hammer out the ideological arguments and slogans used by Second Wave forces: for example, the idea that the information-intensive service industries are “unproductive,” or that service workers are doomed to work in low wage jobs or that the economy must revolve around manufacturing. With all this firepower continually battering them, it is hardly surprising that both political parties reflect Second Wave thinking. The Democrats’ reflexive reliance on bureaucratic and centralist solutions to problems like the health insurance crisis is drawn straight from Second Wave theories of efficiency. Despite an occasional politician like Vice President Gore, who recognizes the importance of high technology and who once served as cochair of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, the Democrats remain so heavily indebted to their Second Wave backers in industry, the unions and civil service, that as a party, they remain largely paralyzed in the face of the twenty-first century. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
From Hart in the ‘80s to Gore in the ‘90s, the party’s core constituencies make it impossible for the Democratic Party to follow its most forward thinking leaders. The party thus finds itself still trapped by its blue-collar image of reality. The failure of the Democrats to make themselves the party of the future (as indeed they once were and have become again in the first quarter of the twenty-first century) had thrown the door wide open for their adversaries. The Republicans are less rooted in the old industrial Northeast, and thus have an opportunity to position themselves as the party of the Third Wave—although their recent Presidents have signally failed to seize this opportunity. And the Republicans, too, rely on knee-jerk Second Wave rhetoric. Republicans are basically right when they call for a broad scale deregulation because businesses now need all the flexibility possible to survive global competition. Republicans are basically right in calling for privatization of government operations because governments, lacking competition, do not generally run things well. Republicans are basically right when they urge us to take maximum advantage of dynamism and creativity that market economies make possible. However, they, too, remain prisoners of Second Wave economics. For example, even the free-market economists on whom Republicans rely have failed, as yet, to come to terms with the new role and inexhaustibility of knowledge. Republicans also are still beholden to some of the corporate dinosaurs of the Second Wave past and to their trade associations, lobbies and policy formulating “round tables.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Moreover, Republicans tend to play down potentially immense social dislocations that are likely to flow from any change as profound as the Third Wave. For example, as skills become obsolete overnight, large numbers of the middle class, including highly trained people, may well find themselves thrown out of work. California defense scientists and engineers are a chastening case in point. Free-marketism and trickle-downism twisted into rigid theological dogma are inadequate responses to the Third Wave. For example, as skills become obsolete overnight, large numbers of the middle class, including highly trained people, may well find themselves thrown out of work. California defense scientists and engineers are a chastening case in point. Free-marketism and trickle-downism twisted into rigid theological dogma are inadequate responses to the Third Wave. A party facing the future should be warning of problems to come and suggesting preventative change. For example, today’s media revolution will bring enormous benefits to the emerging Third Wave economy. However, TV shopping and other electronic services might well slash the number of entry-level jobs in the traditional retail sector, precisely the place some people can find work, and some can get their starts. If free markets and democracy are to survive the great and turbulent transitions to come, politics must become anticipatory and preventive. Yet asking our political parties to think beyond the next election is hard and thankless work. Instead, both parties are busy mainlining nostalgia into their constituents’ veins. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
The Democrats, for example, until recent years, spoke of “reindustrializing” or “restoring” American industry to its period of greatness in the 1950s. The Republicans, meanwhile, appeal to nostalgia in their rhetoric about culture and values, as though one could return to the values and morality of the 1950s—a time before universal television, before the birth-control pill, before commercial jet aviation, satellites and home computers—without also returning to the mass industrial society of the Second Wave. One side still dreams of River Rogue, the other dreams of Ozzie and Harriet. The religion-based wing of the Republican Party, seeking a return to “traditional” verities, blames liberals, humanist, and Democrats for the “collapse of morality.” It fails to grasp that this crisis in our value system reflects the more general crisis of Second Wave civilization as a whole, and that this upheaval is not limited to America. Rather than asking how to bring about decent, moral, and democratic Third Wave America, most of its leaders merely urge a return to an idealized past. Instead of asking how to make a de-massified society moral and fair, many give the impression that they really want to re-massify America. The difference between the parties, however, is that while the Second Wave “nostalgia pushers” in the Democratic Party are concentrated in its core constituencies, their counterparts in the Republican Party tend to be found on its frenetic fringe. This leaves room for the center of the party, if it is inclusive and open to change, to seize the future—lock, stock and barrel. This is the message that Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, has been trying, but o far with only limited success, to deliver to his own party. If Mr. Gingrich succeeds, and the Democrats remain chained to their pre-computer ideology, they could, for good or ill, be trampled in the political dust. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
In 1980, Lee Atwater was a top political advisor to President Regan. Later he became President Bush’s jogging companion and campaign manager. Not long after Mr. Regan was elected, Mr. Atwater said that neither party, has a positive image of the future, “and that’s why the campaigning is so negative.” All of America is poorer for our bipartisan myopia. China, in some ways is like no other country in the World. China has positioned its state-owned companies as major cross-border acquirers. Also, most of the major Chinese acquisitions (even by non-state-owned firms) are feared to be state-backed. In the end it often turns out that, in fact, it is the Chinese state that is acquiring Western private companies one after another, albeit indirectly. On the contrary, almost all Western acquirers are purely private firms. As a rule, Chinese acquirers get the foreign currency they need to carry out the transaction not through the foreign exchange market but in a nontransparent way, directly from a state-owned bank—eventually from the state. If the Chinese government considers a particular transaction strategically important to access mineral resources, technologies, and brands, or to boost its geopolitical clout in general, it can allocate much greater funds than those affordable for a private company sticking to the market rationale. Again, China drastically changes the rules of the game in the global business arena. This West has no choice but to put every Chinese acquisition under scrutiny. On the other hand, at this point not only Chinese, but Western governments have not clearly articulated their basic policy concept on the acquisitions pursued by foreign state-owned or government-linked companies. As long as it is not done, their responses will remain spontaneous. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
When dealing with perspective on family-serving agencies, the arts come into play. It is apparent that the arts recapitulate the range of human activity, just as other forms of recreation are re-creations of workday task. Thus dancing can be seen as an abstraction and idealization of sports; the applied arts, as representations of crafts; storytelling and drama, of sociability; graphic and plastic arts, of intellectual interests; poetry, of reverie (poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity). Music is the most distilled of all the arts, an evoker of all the forms and feelings of experience, of images suggestive of all the sense, a medium falling not short of words but transcending poetry in its power of abstraction. In pure music, the spirit is free of every toilsome entanglement; music is thus the apotheosis of play, the singer, the paragon of all players. While the practice of artistry may be either by individuals or groups (orchestra, chorus, dramatic companies), and there is some development of artistic contests, there are no games consisting of artistry. Other types of recreation acquire spectators and auditors, but none invite them to quite the degree that artistry does. The way in which the element of chance enters into the artistic situation is largely in terms of the size and composition of the audience it draws. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Audience reception is vital to most artists, suggesting that in this type of recreation something occurs between artist and public which is uniquely social. What that something is—the expansion of experience or its unification, the affirmation of human brotherhood or the criticism of life—must still be left to philosophers to ponder, but that such a relation exists seems as true for the amateur milliner as for the professional painter. The phenomenon of style as localized in time, space, and segments of society also testifies to the intensely social aspects of artistry, to the sharing of artistic experience, and its intensification by sharing. The elusive phenomenon of taste is at once a most individual and most social experience; critics testify to the unceasing dialectic of expression and communication in artistic production; art historians, to the efforts of publics to discriminate the ephemeral from the eternal. Like other forms of recreation, it is unquestionable that artistry adds new elements and dimension to experience; at the same time, art always bears a definite and necessary relation to the realities which it represents, it is an idealization or selection of the actual; decoration is always decoration of something; this something is not the design itself but a feature of existence which would be necessary with or without decoration. It is this subtle relationship to the more strictly purposeful and obligatory that puts art and artistry into the realm of play, however intense the seriousness with which they may be themselves pursued. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Now what has all this to do with families? Why should recreational agencies be considered as family agencies? If the family is viewed only in traditional terms, as an institution to be preserved, the connection adduced between family welfare and contemporary recreation must appear trifling, or even inimical. If, on the other hand, the measure of a family is taken as its effect in developing competent personalities among its members, the provision of recreational opportunity assumes an importance compounded of functions performed by all the other types of family agencies. It is evident that sports contribute to the development of physical health; crafts, to purposeful choice of vocational identity, and the acquisition of manipulative understanding; sociability, to practice in empathy; reverie, to the integration of self-conceptions; intellectual interests, to the stimulation of intelligence and the improvement of judgement; and the arts, to creativity. Furthermore, beyond these direct contributions to competence lie all the overlapping, complementing, and mutually reinforcing contributions of each type of recreation to the other aspects of competence, as for example, when experience on a baseball team brings out leadership ability, which is then usable in a government job. The evolution of recreational agencies to the present has occurred in less time than the invention of the concrete forms of recreation. It should therefore not be surprising that the current procedures of recreational agencies only faintly foreshadow the shape of their future responsibilities toward the family, and the changes of method which will be necessary to discharge them. Fortunately a number of contemporary thinkers are working on these problems. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Americans have resorted to recreation as an escape for the boredom of enforced leisure before they have ceased to think of play as an escape from the drudgery of work. While writings about recreation are scarce, there is some literature on leisure, and it seems significant that much of this was produced during the depression of the nineteen thirties, when so much of traditional social philosophy was being reassessed. As employment resumed, leisure came to be talked of less as a problem and more as a positive value to be pursued. Neither family agencies nor anyone ese has yet devised community-wide, positive programs to fill the vacuum of leisure with recreation. Since play ceases to be play when it is not undertaken for its own sake, an insistence on wholesomeness frequently destroys the appeal of a play program. Yet the family agency which exists simply to promote recreation is rare; so far the agencies which have sought to provide recreation to families have justified their actions by reference to some ulterior, utilitarian purpose. Recreation unquestionably has all the values attributed to it, but these must be trusted to accrue spontaneously; they cannot be forced or directly seized. Only programs which accord recreation a raison d’etre of its own can truly be called positive; only agencies set up to create the optimum conditions for its growth among the whole community have grasped its relevance for the whole society as well as for the whole of culture. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Now, when it comes to religious aspects of life, believers may unknowingly develop mediumistic conditions, of which deceiving offenders are not slow to take advantage. They are careful not to frighten the believer by doing anything which will open one’s eyes, so they keep within the range of what one will receive without question. They will portray the Lord Jesus Christ in the particular way which will most appeal to the person, exempli gratia, to some as Bridegroom; to other as King on a throne, and coming in great glory. They will also impersonate the dead to those who grieve after their loved ones, and as they have watched them during life and known all about them, they will give ample “proofs” to confirm the deceived ones in their deception. Visions may come from one of thee sources: the divine, from God; the human, such as hallucinations and illusions because of the disease; and the psychopathological, giving purposely false portrayals. Visions given by psychological offenders can describe anything supernatural presented to and seen by the mind or imagination from outside, such as terrible pictures of the “future,” the flashing of texts as if they were lit up, visions of wide-spreading “movements”—sometimes almost paralleling either a true vision of the Holy Spirit given to the “eye of the understanding” or a normal and healthy action of the imagination. The Church is thus often made a whirlpool of division through pool of division through believers relying upon “text” for guiding their decisions instead of depending on the principles of right and wrong set forth in God’s Word. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
“The Fall” as a symbol for the transition from essence to existence is broader in scope than the Fall depicted in Genesis, although the latter is its classic expression. Mr. Plato’s myth of “the Fall of the souls” conveys the same notion of the tragic passage from potentiality to actuality. The Fall has universal anthropological significance. To speak of its transition from essence to existence is demythologizing, but only to a limited extent, for in dealing with this question the philosopher commits himself in a matter of ultimate concern and so cannot avoid using myth and symbol. Yet a certain amount of demythologizing is necessary, since the theologian must employ philosophical ideas to explain the Fall. The philosopher cannot avoid existential decisions, and the theologian cannot avoid ontological concepts. Genesis in the Christian Bible, chapters one to three, are the profoundest and richest expression of man’s awareness of his existential estrangement. There are four elements in the transit from essence to existence: the possibility of the Fall, its motives, the event itself, and its implications. The possibility of the Fall lies in the fact that man alone possesses finite freedom. He can contradict his essential nature and destroy his own humanity. Yet man’s freedom is not absolute; it operates within the context of universal destiny. The Fall, although always presented as the Fall of man, is a cosmic event. However, return to the words of Genesis, the Fall is possible because man is made in the image of God, that is, he had freedom of destiny. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The motive for the Fall involves a discussion of essential being, of Adam before the Fall. It is a psychological state of dreaming of innocence. A dream anticipates actuality, and, although reality differs from it, still there is a certain correspondence between the two. Innocence is the state of nonactualized potentiality characterized by the absence of experience, responsibility, and guilt, but which, if actualized, puts an end to innocence. The growth of awareness of pleasures of the flesh is a good example of innocence and its loss. The symbol Adam before the Fall must understood as the dreaming innocence of undecided potentialities. In the state of dreaming innocence, freedom and destiny lie within each other, distinct but not separate, intension but not in conflict. They are held in polar unity by the ground of being in which they are rooted. The motives for the Fall are seen in the anxiety which besieges man from without and from withing. From without, the command not to eat the forbidden fruit testifies both to mans aroused freedom, his desire to actualize himself, and to his instinct for self-preservation by obeying the divine prohibition. From within, man is torn by the same anxiety to actualize the freedom of which he is aware and to preserve his innocence by not realizing his potentialities. In either case, under the pressure but not the compulsion of anxiety, man decides for self-actualization. In what sense is the Fall an event? It certainly is not an historical event that happened “once upon a time.” It is a fact, the original fact, in that it is an ontological condition that recedes but touches all of creation. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
It means that the transition from essence to existence is a universal quality of finite being. The Genesis story stresses the moral element of this quality by highlighting the ethical act of Adam. However, the tragic element which involve the whole cosmos is not absent: The serpent represents the dynamic trends of nature; there is the magical character of the two trees, the rise of sexual consciousness, the curse over the heredity of Adam, the body of the woman, the animals and the land. These symbols point to a cosmic myth which teaches that the individual act of freedom is embedded in a universal destiny. The polarity of freedom-destiny is asserted. Existence is rooted both in ethical freedom and in tragic destiny. The cosmic implications of the Fall introduce the problem of how universal existence is related to man’s existence. These implications are distilled into two questions: How is nature related to fallen man? What is the relationship between creation and the Fall? The Fall rules out a before and after, a change in the structure of nature due to the divine curse laid upon the land. The transition from essence to existence is not an event in time; Adam before the Fall and nature before the curse are man and the World now exist, and it was never otherwise. A simple solution would be to separate innocent nature and guilty man, to speak no more of a fallen World. However, to do so neglects the tragic element of destiny. For within man himself nature is implicated in the Fall. First, in the course of human evolution, there is no absolute discontinuity between animal bondage and human freedom. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Secondly, in the development of the human individual, who can say where and when responsibility beings and ends? Thirdly, the discovery of the unconscious reveals a hidden but determining power that influences man’s decision. And, lastly, the social dimension of the “collective unconscious” contributes to the limitation imposed by destiny. In a word, biological, psychological, and sociological factors affect the individual’s decision. However, freedom is the possibility of a total and centered act of the personality, an act in which all the drives and influences which constitute the destiny of man are brought into the centered unity of a decision. None of these drives compels the decision in isolation. Yet, they are effective, and in this way nature represents destiny and participates in the act of freedom. It is possible, in fact necessary, to speak of a fallen World. The tragedy of nature is bound to the tragedy of man, as the salvation of nature is dependent on the salvation of man…for man is in nature and nature is in man. Nature, also, mourns for a lost good. There is no point in time and space in which created goodness was actualized and had existence. There was no paradise just as there will be no utopia. Actualized creation and estranged existence are identical. For example, the newly created infant falls into the state of existential estrangement. Creation and Fall coincide, but not logically, for, when the child matures, it affirms its existential good, but its self-actualization through freedom and destiny results in sin. However, this sin is not a structural necessity; the transition from essence to existence is a leap. Existence can never be derived from essence. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parent have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice. Human history begun with an act of disobedience. Human history was ushered in by an act of disobedience according to the Hebrew and Greek myths. Adam and Eve, living in the Garden of Eden, were part of nature; they were in harmony with it, yet did not transcend it. They were in nature as the fetus is in the womb of the mother. They were human, and at the same time not yet human. All this changed when they disobeyed an order. There are moments of sudden illumination in which man stretched out a commanding arm, as if creating a World, light shining forth and spreading out around him. He is then filled with the deeply gratifying certainty that what enraptured and exalted him into the farthest regions, the height of this one sensation, can never be denied to posterity; in the eternal necessity of this rare illumination for all those to come man sees the necessity of his frame. Far into the future, mankind needs him, and just as that moment of illumination is the embodiment and epitome of his innermost essence, so, too, he believes himself, as the man of this moment, to be immortal, dismissing all others as dross, rot, vanity, brutishness, or pleonasm, leaving them to perish. We view all disappearance and demise with discontent, often with astonishment, as if we experienced in it something at bottom impossible. We are disturbed when a tall tree breaks, and a crumbling Victorian home aggrieves us. Every New Year’s Eve, we feel the mystery of contradiction of being and becoming. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
What offends moral man above all, though, is that an instant of supreme universal perfection should be destroyed. European and American history since the end of the Middle Ages is the history of the full emergence of the individual. It is a process which started in Italy, in the Renaissance, and which only now seems to have come to a climax. It took over four hundred and fifty five years to break down the medieval World and to free people from the most apparent restraints. However, while in many respects the individual has grown, has developed mentally and emotionally, and participates in cultural achievements in a degree unheard-of before, the lag between “freedom from” and “freedom to” has grown too. The result of this disproportion between freedom from any tie and the lack of possibilities for the positive realization of freedom and individuality has led, in Europe, to a panicky flight from freedom into new ties or at least into complete indifference. Western society underwent radical changes which were accompanied by an equally radical change in the personality structure of man. A new concept of freedom in modern society must start with that period in which the foundations of modern culture were laid, for this formative stage of modern man permits us, more clearly than any later epoch, to recognize the ambiguous meaning of freedom which was to operate throughout modern culture: on the one hand the growing independence of man from external authorities, on the other hand his growing isolation and the resulting feeling of individual insignificance and powerlessness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Our understanding of the new elements in the personality structure of man is enhanced by the study of their origins, because by analyzing the essential features of capitalism and individualism at their very roots one is able to contrast them with an economic system and a type of personality which was fundamentally different from ours. This very contrast gives a better perspective for the understanding of the peculiarities of the modern social system, of how it has shaped the character structure of people who live in it, and of the new spirit which resulted from this change in personality. The period of the Reformation is more similar to the contemporary scene than might appear at first glance; as a matter of fact, in spite of all the obvious differences between the two periods, there is probably no period since the sixteenth century which resembles ours as closely in regard to the ambiguous meaning of freedom. The Reformation is one root of the idea of human freedom and autonomy as it is represented in modern democracy. However, while this aspect is always stressed, especially in non-Catholic countries, its other aspect-its emphasis on the wickedness of human nature, the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual, and the necessity for the individual to subordinate himself to a power outside of himself—is neglected. This idea of the unworthiness of the individual, his fundamental inability to rely on himself and his need to submit, is also the main theme in the ideology of some who are arguably great leaders, but may, however, lack the emphasis on freedom and moral principles which are inherent in Protestantism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
This ideological similarity is not the only one that makes the study of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a particularly fruitful starting point for the understanding of the present scene. There is also a fundamental likeness in the social situation. Then as now a vast sector of the population was threatened in its traditional way of life by revolutionary changes in the economic and social organization; especially was the middle class, as today, threatened by the power of monopolies and the superior strength of capital, and this threat had an important effect on the spirit and the ideology of the threatened sector of society by enhancing the individual’s feeling of aloneness and insignificance. The picture of the Middle Ages has been distorted in two ways. Modern rationalism has looked upon the Middle Ages as an essentially dark period. It has pointed to the general lack of personal freedom, to exploitation of the mass of the population by a small minority, to its narrowness which makes the peasant of the surrounding country a dangerous and suspected stranger to the city dweller—not to speak of a person of another country—and to its superstitiousness and ignorance. On the other hand, the Middle Ages have been idealized for the most part by reactionary philosophers but sometimes by progressive critics of modern capitalism. They have pointed to the sese of solidarity, the subordination of economic to human needs, the directness and concreteness of human relations, the supranational principle of the Catholic Church, the sense of security which was characteristic of man in the Middle Ages. Bother pictures are right; what make them both wrong is to draw one of them and shut one’s eyes to the other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
What characterized medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom. Everybody in the earlier period was chained to one’s role in the social order. A man had little chance to move socially from one class to another, he was hardly able to move even geographically from one town or from one country to another. With few exceptions he had to stay where he was born. He was often not even free to dress as he pleased or to eat what he liked. The artisan had to sell at certain price and the peasant at a certain place, the market of town. A guild member was forbidden to divulge any technical secret of production to anybody who was not a member of his guild and was compelled to let his fellow guild members share in any advantageous buying of raw material. Personal, economic, and social life was dominated by rules and obligations from which practically no sphere of activity was exempted. However, although a person was not freed in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social World from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need, for doubt. A person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation. The social order was conceived as a natural order, and being a definite part of it gave a feeling of security and of belonging. There was comparatively little competition. One was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood determined by tradition, just as it carried economic obligations to those of higher in the social hierarchy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
However, within the limits of his social sphere the individual actually had much freedom to express one’s self in one’s work and in one’s emotional life. Although there was no individualism in the modern sense of the unrestricted choice between many possible ways of life (a freedom of choice which is largely abstract), there was a great deal of concrete individualism in real life. There was much suffering and pain, but there was also the Church which made this suffering more tolerable by explaining it as a result of the sin of Adam and the individual sins of each person. While the Church fostered a sense of guilt, it also assured the individual of her unconditional love to all her children and offered a way to acquire the conviction of being forgiven and loved by God. The relationship to God was more one of confidence and love than of doubt and fear. Just as a peasant and a town dweller rarely went beyond the limits of the small geographical area which was theirs, so the universe was limited and simple to understand. The Earth and man were it center, Heaven and Hell was the future place of life, and all action from birth to death were transparent in their causal interrelation. Although society was thus structuralized and gave man security, yet it kept him in bondage. It was a different kind of bondage from that which authoritarianism and oppression in later centuries constituted. Medieval society did not deprive the individual of his freedom, because the “individual” did not yet exist; man was still related to the World by primary ties. He did not yet conceive of himself as an individual except through the medium of his social (which then was also his natural) role. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Man did not conceive of any other persons as “individuals” either. The peasant who came into town was a stranger, and even within the town members of different social groups regarded each other as strangers. Awareness of one’s individual self, of others, and of the World as separate entities, had not yet fully developed. The lack of self-awareness of the individual in medieval society had found classical expression on both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the World and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. When psychopathological offenders are able to give visions it I an evidence that they have already greatly deceived the man, be he a Christian or an unbeliever. The ground for this is not necessarily known as conduct disorder, but a condition of passivity, id est, nonaction of the mind, imagination, and other faculties. This essential condition of submissive non-action as the means of obtaining supernatural manifestations is well understood by spiritist mediums, clairvoyants, crystal gazers, and others, who know that the least action of the mind immediately breaks the clairvoyant state. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Believers not knowing these basic principles can unwittingly fulfill the conditions for psychopathological offenders to work in their life and ignorantly induce the passive state by wrong conceptions of the true things of God. For instance, they may sink, during seasons of prayer, into a passive mental condition which they consider is “waiting on God”; deliberately will the cessation of their mind action, in order to obtain some supernatural manifestations which they believe to be of God; in daily life practice a passive attitude which they think is submission to the will of God; endeavour to bring about a state of personal negation, in which they have no desires, needs, wishes, hopes, plans—which they think is full surrender to God, with their “will” lost in God. “To exist” means to “stand out.” On the most fundamental level, to exist means to be, to stand out of nonbeing. Since nonbeing can be the absolute nonbeing of ouk on (the God who is not) or the relative nonbeing of me on, existence can take two directions. If something stands out of absolute nothingness, it exists in the sense that it has being. If something stands out of relative nothingness, that is, potentiality, then it exists in the sense that it has actuality. Etymology, then, indicates two senses of existence: “to stand out” of either absolute nonbeing or relative nonbeing. However, in either case, the metaphour “to stand out” connotes the metaphour “to stand in,” just as trees “stand out” of the Earth and yet “stand in” it. A being stands out of nonbeing, but not completely, for it is a mixture of being and nonbeing. An actual being stands out of potentiality, but not completely, for it never fully realizes all its potentiality. Existence, therefore, is an imperfect being, for to exist means to have being and yet to “stand in” non-being, to have actuality, and yet to “stand in” potentiality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Historically, however, attention has been focused upon the second meaning of existence and split between potentiality and actuality. This is the overriding meaning of existence: to stand out of potentiality. Upon this means we build the distinction between essence and existence. Essence is real, is actualized in existence, but only in fragments, never totally. This situation gives rise to two conflicting view point exemplified in Mr. Plato and Mr. Hegel. Mr. Plato viewed the gap between potential and actual being as a fall. For him, existence is a fall from essence. Mr. Hegel, on the contrary, considered the gap as merely part of the process of divine self-realization. For him existence is the expression of essence. Mr. Hegel’s essentialism set the stage for the existentialist revolt. Mr. Schelling, Mr. Schopenhauer, Mr. Marx, and Mr. Kierkegaard all share a common insight: that human existence is a state of estrangement from its essential nature. Existence is dehumanization and not the expression of essential humanity. This is the truth about man’s predicament which existentialism has laid bare. However, it is the question of existence, not the answer. Whenever existentialist, atheistic, or theistic, go beyond their analyses and provide answers, they draw upon religious sources. For the answer to existence is a matter of ultimate concern, and hence is religious, even though it be disguised in secular or atheistic grab. The religious character of existentialism stems from the very nature of philosophy which embraces both scientific detachment and the involvement of faith in an ultimate concern. Christianity proclaims the “New Being” in Christ; the merit of existentialism lies in its graphic portrayal of the “old being,” namely, the tragedy and anxiety of a cosmos estranged from its essential nature. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The history of the family is one perpetual crisis. Social justice requires that the state treat its citizens as equals, and that requirement has serious distributive implications, demanding much more equal distributions, of a variety of gods, than exist in any contemporary societies. However, as liberals, we recognize that it is valuable for people to make and act on their own judgments about how they should live, and important that they be accorded the freedoms necessary for them to live well. The problem, of course, a World in which we were required to treat everybody the same—friend, spouse, child, stranger—would be a dystopic nightmare, a World were nobody enjoyed the relationships tht make us human. Some of the most valuable element in human lives depends precisely on our treating particular other as special. The family, the natural home of such relationships, is a particularly a stark locus of the tensions embodied in the view that people should enjoy equal freedom, or have equal opportunity to live valuable lives. A completely harmonious reconciliation may not be possible. We do not show that plausible understandings of the family, equality, and liberty can be constructed in a way that eliminates all conflicts between the family and equality, or resolves all difficulties concerning authority over children. Our more modest aim is to offer an account of “family values properly understood” that shows the possibility of child-rearing practices and institutions that realize the values distinctively made available by familial relationships, that respects those individual liberties that are indeed worthy of respect, and that mitigates—massively mitigates—the conflict with equality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The family has only recently begun to receive the careful attention needed to provide satisfactory responses to the challenges it faces in society. Public declarations of human rights, devised specially to provide a consensual focal point, can hardly be expected to venture into controversial matters, so we should not be surprised if their pronouncements are rather vague. Thus, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights tells us that “the family is the natural and fundamental group of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State” (Article 16.3), while the European Convention on Human Rights announces that “everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life” (Article 8) and that “men and women of marriageable age have the right to marry and found a family (Article 12). Family values and practices arise out of this family-centered view of the World. Mormons are very conservative about pleasures of the flesh before marriage. Pleasures of the flesh are valued as an expression of love and commitment between eternal partners. It is the means God uses to bring spirit children out of the preexistence into this mortal World and has the power to create an eternally increasing family. Pleasures of the flesh outside marriage is forbidden, including any non-traditional relationships, premarital pleasures of the flesh, adulty, and pornography. Pleasuring of one’s self is strongly discouraged. Young people are encouraged to remain chaste until marriage and to marry early in order to develop their morality within the proper boundaries. Marriage is so strongly encouraged that an unmarried man approaching age thirty will raise questions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Women are given the benefit of the doubt, but men are strongly expected to do what it takes to find a mate. It is much like how in conservative families, if one does not have a college degree, a house, a car and a career by the age of twenty-five, people start to question the individual’s competence. When it comes to identity and interpersonal competence, intellectual play includes those interest which have as a primary focus the exercise of mental skills and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake (puzzles, card games, debating, reading, collecting, sightseeing). They have much similarity to sports and crafts, save that they are directed only to exploring and knowing the World, not manipulating it, except symbolically. Like crafts, they recapitulate the whole range of serious intellectual pursuits; like sports, the various individual forms test all the intellectual powers such as: memory, imagination, problem-solving, dissimulation, and anticipation of others. On this account, intellectual play is readily professionalized, and conversely, serious intellectual pursuits can readily be motivated by the fun involved. The constant elements of intellectual play are these underlying aspects of curiosity—about the nature of the World, and of other men, and one’s own powers for grasping them. When such abilities are compared with those of others, there is a nonphysical contest or game. Guessing the moves of others appears to have far more attraction than mere comparisons of mental ability, undoubtedly because the element of chance is involved. In American culture, however, the attraction of intellectual contests and games seems underdeveloped; some other civilizations in the past seem to have gone further in this direction. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The volume of reading, and use of other media of communication and education—apart from the arts—are steadily mounting and probably differentiating into new forms. As education becomes fun instead of duty, through the decline of the sense that is must be profitable before it can please, the student of popular culture at the intermediate level will probably find a vast efflorescence of intellectual play. Young minds are worked and winced and shaped curiously by a vision of Life—the American Dream. The American Dream is so widely used that it has become a powerful metaphour of core American values. While economic success is first among these values, others are almost equally important. Among thee values is being able to grow to grow to fullest development as men and women, unhampered by the barriers which have slowly been erected for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. The American Dream mandates that all these values can be accomplished through hard work and individual effort. Although Well Street has melted down, personal savings and investments have been vaporized and rebounded, businesses are going bust, while other flourish, and certain populations are facing high unemployment, the American Dream is still alive and worth aspiring to, despite the nightmare some American are living through. The American Dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank is the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the World. That hope has been present from the start. Every since we became an independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of the ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces which appeared to be overwhelming and dispelling it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
It is not about becoming rich and famous overnight, but is more of a verbal contract that states, if you work hard, you, too, can buy a house, have a family and live well. Ordinary man has held fast to those rights t “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” which were vouchsafe to us in the past in vision and on parchment. The Providence, the eighteenth and nineteenth century term for God, had ordained that the United States of America extend its unique and relatively new form of government, the so-called “great experiment of liberty and federate self-government.” Manifest Destiny embodies a higher law—God’s law—and so hold the moral high ground. Manifest Destiny means expansion, prearranged by Heaven, over an area not clearly defined. Therefore, the expansion of America’s boarders may not be finalized yet. Many believe that the United States of American will some day encompass the entire Western Hemisphere, and possibly beyond. Regardless of the interpretation, the concept of Manifest Destiny spurred a political movement in the 1840s. The justifications for Manifest Destiny is that first of all, American society and citizens are virtuous. Because of their virtue, they are justified in expanding. Second, it is the mission of American to undertake the task of accomplishing these things. That is why the National Anthem means so much to Americans because it speaks of expanding her boarder “from sea to shining sea.” And China understands this, which is why they are not allowing American corporations to purchase large companies in China. This is also why Americans are also worried about companies overseas buying American land and corporation. Many understand that political parities may not really matter so much anymore because so many politicians are looking to get rich quick and may not care about America. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
To further highlight this illustration, on March 1 2017, less than two months after Vice President Joe Biden left public office, State Energy HK Limited, a Chinses Company, wired $3 million to Rob Walker’s company. The next day, the company wired $1,065,000 to a company associated with James Gillar, another Biden associate. Afterwards the Biden family received approximately $1,065,000 in payments over a three-month period in different bank accounts. From the bank records, it appears that the Biden family received approximately one-third of the money obtained from the China wire, which leads many people to believe that the Biden administration of compromised. “Over the course of several years, members of the Biden family and their companies received over $1.3 million in payments from accounts related to their associate, Rob Walk. Most of this money came as a result of a wire from a Chinese energy company and went not only to Hunter and James Biden, but also to Hallie Biden and an unknown ‘Biden.’ It is unclear what services were provided to obtain this exorbitant amount of money. The Oversight Committee is concerned abut the national security implications resulting from President Biden’s family receiving millions of dollars from foreign nationals. We will continue to follow the money trail and facts to determine if President Biden is compromised by his family’s business scheme and if there is a national security threat,” reports Chairman James Comer (R-ky). Millions of upper-class, middle-class and poor American have a justified fear that they will be left behind, will lose their jobs and slide further down the economic and social slope. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The West is also cautious about China’s acquisitions of its firms, but overall the restrictions it imposes are less tight than those that Western acquirers are facing in China. Take a close look at the Chinese attempts to acquire Western companies. First, China is buying ailing but famous firms striving to keep afloat. While you may think the classic American brands you see every day are entirely domestic, many are actually owned by Chinese investors. The United States of America is home to many iconic American brands that dominate the global market; however, while these brands may seem All-America, even they have important stakeholders all over the globe. AMC, a popular cinema company, short for American Multi-Cinema, has been around for over a century and is headquartered in Leawood, KS. In 2012, Beijing-based Dalian Wanda Group became the majority stakeholder, giving them the power to make decisions at the executive level. Wanda invested $2.8 billion in the historical deal. General Motors, based in Detroit, Michigan, is known as America’s largest automobile manufacturer. While this company is not owned by a Company from China, it relies on its partnership with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp (SAIC) to stay profitable. In 1998, the two auto giants teamed up to form SAIC-GM, a Chinese brand with a 6 million square-foot facility in Shanghai. While GM is still extremely popular in the U.S.A., its extra sales in China through SAIC help to being in revenue regularly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
General Electric covers a wide range of industries and their appliance division is manufactured in the U.S.A. with global parts (and with domestic parts whenever possible). However, in 2016, Chinese investor Haier bought the company’s appliance division for $5.4 billion. While all products are still made in America, the ideas are generated in China. It is quite different from other American brands because GE has been around since 1892. While investors do not necessarily affect where a product is made, in many cases, they have a large influence in how a business is run and marketed. It is dangerous when any large American brand is partially owned by companies from China or other foreign investors because they have greater responsibilities in their homeland. China is purchasing American brands and obtaining technologies, know-how, distribution networks, and high-skilled personnel. Furthermore, they are interest in buying dynamic technology companies, including small and medium entities, and they are targeting natural resource firms. If information flow in a group is sufficiently good, a cooperative outcome may emerge automatically as an equilibrium of the repeated game of random pairwise matching. Otherwise, the group has to seek other institutions of governance, and these many include more formal court-like organization. One might think that modern technology has improved information flows to perfect. Indeed, eBay had developed a good system where buyers give ratings to sellers and vice versa, and each transactor can check the average rating of the person with whom one is contemplating doing business. However, this too has its limits, and eBay has expanded, it had found it necessary to institute more formal methods to prevent fraud. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
A system based on voluntary information flows and self-enforcing equilibrium works for small or well-knit groups, large groups need more formal institutions of information dissemination and enforcement. Self-enforcing “relation-based” based groups face rising marginal costs: members added at the margin are almost by definition less well connected, making it harder to communicate information with them and to ensure their participation in any punishments. Formal or “rule-based” governance has high fixed costs of setting up the legal system and the information mechanism (disclosure rules and auditing procedures), but once these costs have been incurred, the marginal costs of the relation-based system will be smaller at small sizes, and those of the rule-based system will be smaller at large sizes. This makes intuitive sense, but for a deeper understanding one must make more precise the way in which diminishing returns or rising marginal costs set in as a relation-based system grows larger. This is also necessary to understand what happens at intermediate sizes. Relation-based governance works well in small groups that are connected by extended family relationships, neighbourhood structures, and ethno-linguistic ties, because such links facilitate repeated interactions and good communication. This idea is similar to the sociologists’ concept of embeddedness. Economists recognize the importance of family and social networks in less-developed economies, but often regard them as being unimportant in modern advanced economies, and therefore ignore them in that context. The differences are much less sharp than is commonly thought. The persistence or relational arrangements under the shadow of the law in advanced economies is now well recognized. However, the relation-based governance does indeed lose its relative efficacy as the scale of economic transaction grows. This supports the usual economic distinction as a matter of degree, if not as a sharp dichotomy between less-developed and advanced economies. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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American Dream, a fact that the United States of America is a land of opportunity that allows the possibility of upward mobility, freedom, and equality for people of all classes who work hard and have the will to succeed.
An Artifact from Another Level of Being
The silence closed in. Something was building in Llanada Villa. Something was happening in the very air itself. Something changed in the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon. And as I heard the music, a long stab of terror drove through my heart. I assented to the window. As I looked out, I saw a handsome old-fashioned carriage, with a troop of couriers and footmen. I saw the slim figure of the pale gentleman in black, as he held a thick velvet cloak. He looked about him at the others as he went on, his voice ringing clear in the silence. “Never such a place as this has existed before. A place where demons have been invented by aggrieved souls. I wondered if Mrs. Winchester was perhaps a member of the Freemasons, or some other secret society. Maybe she holds some exalted rank.” I felt a great shudder pass through me at these words. However, there had been a conviction in those appalling words. Secret societies were very fashionable just then. Secret societies and psychiatry were the contrasting en vogue activities of the moment. I folded my arms and leaned against the frame of the door, obscuring for the moment the light behind me. I had an urge to venture outside, to walk in silence amongst the trees. However, the fruit orchard was dark enough even in daylight; by moonlight it would be all too easy to imagine terrors—as I keep imagining I can hear soft footsteps moving across the floor above my head. But when I sit on the sofa to listen, I hear only the beating of my heart. I walked for hours examining the trees and the splendid fruit that would be harvested. Before long, I was overtaken by night while still in the fruit orchard. Utterly bewildered and overcome with fatigue, I had lain down near the root of a large plumb tree and fallen into a dreamless sleep. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
It was hours later, in the very middle of the night, that one of God’s mysterious messengers, gliding ahead pronounced the awakening word in my ear. Waking from a deep sleep at night in the midst of what seemed like a forest, front among the tree on either side I caught broken and incoherent whispers in a strong tongue which I partly understood. They seemed to me fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy against my body and soul. It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable fruit orchard through which I journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion, for in its mysterious lamination nothing cast a shadow. A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old well met my eye with a crimson gleam. I stooped and plunged my hand into it. It stained by fingers; it was blood! Blood, I then observed, was about me everywhere. The fallen fruit showed blots and splashes of blood. The girds of the orchards were pitted and spattered as with red rain. Defiling the trunks of the trees were broad maculations of crimson, and blood dripped like dew from their foliage. All this I observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with the fulfillment of a natural expectation. It seemed to me that it was all in expiation of some crime. So frightful was the situation—the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common consent are invested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in my sight conspired against my peace; from overhead and all about came so audible and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously not of Earth—that I could endure no longer, and with a great effort to break some malign spell that bound my faculties to silence and inaction, I screamed with the full strength of my lungs! #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
My voice was broken, it seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went babbling and stammering away into the distant reaches of the orchard, died into silence, and all was as before. Despair succeeded hope. Gratitude gave place to curse. As I preceded down the path, sobbing quietly to myself, in the misery of fear, the stern light of the Observational Tower became a tiny speck, yellower but scarcely bigger than some of the stars, which here and there shone between the clouds. Nearly twenty minutes passed, and my fatigue began to change to exhaustion. The overpowering sense of the inevitable pressed upon me. With the weariness came a strange comfort. On, and on I went through the thicket of trees. I knew of my probable presence in the spirit World. The moon, then in her third quarter, pushed out from behind the concealing clouds and shed a pale, soft glitter upon my mansion. My last appeal had been heard. I made it home. About half an hour after getting home, I still felt energized but I began to feel a sensation around my forehead as I have many times since. I suddenly felt weak. I went in and sat at the foot of my bed and passed out. I have never been given to fainting or passing-out spells, but I did not fall asleep—I passed out cold. When I woke up, I had no concept of time. When I woke up, a low, wild peal of laughter broke out at a measuresless distance away, and growing even louder, seemed approaching ever nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of loon; a laugh which culminated an unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slow gradations, as if the accursed being that uttered it had withing over the verge of the World whence it had come. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
Sitting here in my temple of a house, I felt trapped and compromised, and even terrified. I got a feeling that the presence was still nearby and had not moved. A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of my body and my mind. I could not say which, if any, of my sense were affected; I felt it rather as a consciousness—a mysterious mental assurance of some overpowering presence—some supernatural malevolence different in kind from the invisible existences that swarmed about me, and superior to them in power. I knew that it had uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approaching me; from what direction I did not know—dated not conjecture. All my former fears were forgotten and merged in the gigantic terror that now held me in thrall. Powers were traversing my haunted mansion. My senses were heightened as I found myself starting into the sharply dawn face and blank, dead eyes of my own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave! The apparition confronting me—the thing so like, yet so unlike my mother—was horrible! It stirred no lover nor longing in my heart; it came unattended with pleasant memories of a golden past—inspired no sentiment of any kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed up in fear. I turned to turn and run from before it, but my legs were as lead; I was unable to life my feet from the floor. My arms hung helpless at my sides; of my eyes only I retained controlled, and these I dared not remove from the lusterless orbs of the apparition, which I knew was not a soul without a body, but that most dreadful of all existences infesting my haunted mansion—a body without a soul! #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
In its blank state was neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence—nothing to which to address an appeal for mercy. For a time, which seemed so long that the World grew gray with age and sin, and the haunted forest, having fulfilled its purpose in this monstrous culmination of its terrors, vanished out of my consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition stood within a pace, regarding me with a mindless malevolence of wild brute; then thrust its hand forward and sprang upon me with appalling ferocity! The act released my physical energies without an unfettering my will; my mind was still spellbound, but my powerful body was and agile limbs, endowed with a blind, insensate life of their own, resisted stoutly and well. For an instant I seemed to see this unnatural contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing mechanism only as a spectator. Despite my struggles—despite my strength and activity, which seemed wasted in a void, I felt the cold fingers close upon my throat. Brorne backward to the floor, I saw above me the dead and drawn face within a hands breadth of my own. Its eyes were shallow to the point of blankness, and then all was black. Until I awoke, the passage outside my room had been pitch dark. Now the gasoliers illuminated the hall, but the glass was so blackened that they yielded only a dim, murky light. The air was stale and close. Expecting at every turn to find a housemaid awaiting me with a smile, I made my way through the gloom to the landing. The double doors to the gallery stood open. Along each wall, a row of wavering light receded. Transom windows shone with a faint cold light; higher still, the ceiling was shrouded in darkness. Some twenty feet away from me, candles burned upon a small round table, lighting of the face of the pale man and Mrs. Haas. “Ah, there you are, my dear,” said he, just as if he had last seen my five minutes—rather than several days—ago. I moved reluctantly to join them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Mrs. Haas, resplendent in crimson silk and displaying a large expanse of white bosom, greeted me with disdain. Behind them, the wall at the far end of my gallery was dominated by the immense fireplace, and the armour towering in the shadows beside it. The sword glittered beneath its gloved hand; in the shifting light it seemed alert, alive, watchful. Within the fireplace was a massive chest of dark metal. “Dr. Cottam was about to tell us,” said Mrs. Haas impatiently, “of a discovery he had made amongst your late husband’s papers.” He spoke as if I had kept them waiting. “Indeed I was.” His tone was as cordial as ever, but with an edge of anticipation. His teeth caught the light as he smiled; the pupils of his eyes shone like twin flames. “Now, in going through his study the other day, I found a page of notes you must have missed after relocating from New Haven—scrawled in haste, and sometimes quite impenetrable—which had slipped behind a row of books.” On the table was a crumpled sheet of paper. “I shall not weary you with the tale of my efforts to decipher this. He believed that if he were inside the armour when lighting struck, he would pass unharmed into the next World, jut as the risen body, according to Scripture, will ascend to Heaven upon the day of judgement.” “Oh dear Heavens,” cried Mrs. Haas. “Mrs. Winchester, I have been dying for a grand tour of your estate. My companion Dr. Cottam is rather a bore with such foolish tales of science fiction!” “There is a theory, you know, that the basis of spirit may be electrical. For spirits to communicate with the living,” expressed Dr. Cottam, the man with the very pale face. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
“Dr. Cottom, I have begun to wonder whether your obsession with William Winchester is not, perhaps, quite as mad as I assumed,” explained Mrs. Haas, “but I do wish to get on with this tour. Mrs. Winchester has already delayed us several hours after he invitation, and I am growing quit weary.” “Well, Mrs. Haas, as I do recall, Gods are often said to wield lightening; and whilst this represents primitive awe at the power of nature, it may also shroud a genuine intuition. The same applies to the spiritualist practice of linking hands around a table. Ghosts and spirits are generally depicted as emanations of light; one thinks of St. Elmo’s fire or the very rare phenomenon of ball lightning…a far fetched analogy, you may say, but just as a magnetic field will cause a heap of iron filings to arrange themselves into a complex pattern, so the soul, the vital principle—call it what you will—animates the Earthly body. Might it not be that the vital principle is electrical, perhaps in some subtler form that science has not yet grasped?” said Dr. Cottam. “Dr. Cottam, while your theories are very fascinating, I fear Mrs. Haas is growing impatient and I should like to give her a tour now,” I explained. I liked Mrs. Haas more and more every minute. Her gossip, without being ill-natured, was extremely diverting to me, who had been so long out of the great World. I thought what life she would give to my sometimes-lonely evenings at home. There was a ball going on in the Grand Ballroom, this house seemed to run itself sometimes, which would not be over until the morning sun had almost reached the horizon. It pleased the Grand Duke to dance till then, so loyal people could not go away, or think of bed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
We had just got through a crowded parlor, when Dr. Cottam asked me what had become of Mrs. Haas. I though she had been by his side, and he fancied she was by mine. The fact was, we had lost her. All my efforts to find her were in vain. I feared that she had mistaken, in the confusion of the momentary separation from us, other people for her new friends, and had, possibly, pursued and lost them in the extensive grounds which were thrown open to us. Morning broke. It was clear daylight before I gave up my search. It was not till near two o’clock next day that we heard anything of Mrs. Haas. At about that time a servant knocked at my door, to say that he had been earnestly requested by a young, who appeared to be in great distress, to make out where she could find Mrs. Winchester and Dr. Cottam. There could be no doubt, notwithstanding the slight inaccuracy that my friend had turned up. I had a housemaid go to the guest room and summon Dr. Cottam. I went down to the parlor and reunited with Mrs. Haas. She told me a story to account for having failed to recover us for so long. Very late, she said, she made a detour and wandered around, not before long becoming afraid and getting lost. She got into the Crystal Bedroom in despair of finding us, and had then fallen into a deep sleep which, long as it was, had hardly sufficed to recruit her strength after the fatigues of the ball. It the midst of my perplexities, an anxiety of far more urgent kind presented itself. My dear friend began to lose her looks and health, and that in manner so mysterious, and even horrible, that I became thoroughly frightened. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
People, since as long ago as the 1800s, have reported a vast array of unexplained events, experiences, and sightings at what is now known as The Winchester Mystery House. Over the years, people have reported bone-chilling sightings ghosts, angels, demons, fairies, giants, orbs, lights, mist, vampires, witches, warlocks and werewolves. In 2007, a man was attending Santa Clara University, and he was lucky enough to get hired as a tour guide at The Winchester Mystery House. He had no sooner moved into his apartment and had the telephone installed when he received a call warning him never to return to Sacramento again. During a later call, a woman with a high-pitched voice informed “G” that he was being kept under surveillance by a group who felt that he had acted unjustly in the past by not returning things to their proper owners. G emphasized that he had led a very quiet life as an undergraduate.
Yet he probably received 30 or more telephone calls from anonymous voices advising him not to return to Sacramento. The voices reprimanded him for having taken something that did not belong to him. G said that he did not carry anything with him that was from Sacramento and did not often visit the beautiful city, and he seldom discussed his life with any but a few of his closet acquaintances. He wondered who could have possibly taken such a long-term interest in him? About the third year after working at The Winchester Mystery House, a guest unknown to him stopped to say hello. G knew that such an act was hardly unusual, since guests will often do this to find out interest facts about tour guides and secrets about Sarah L. Winchester’s mansion. However, he noticed the boy was strangely inquisitive. G was astonished when the teenager drew a design on a piece of paper that he had seen somewhere in the mansion. He smiled at G, then asked if he knew what the symbol meant.
When G pressed the boy, in turn for some answers, the guest threw away the design, laughed, and said that he was just fooling around, that he did not mean anything about it. G never saw the alleged guest again. He descried him to a could of tour guides, but no one was able to identify him. After several years of watching at The Winchester Mystery House, G graduated from University. He had not been in possession of his diploma for more than four days when someone rang his apartment and scolded him for taking things that did not belong to him. The voice told G that he should always leave things where they were. He reported to his supervisors that he kept receiving mysterious calls. On one occasion the voice told G that he has discovered a strange key to other dimensions, but the entities had long since reclaimed it. However, apparently, some spirit masqueraders were determined that he should never forget the day he came into contact with an artifact from another level of being. What is The Winchester Mystery House?
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National Ice Cream Day with Goldie and Russell
From the beginning of his existence man is confronted with the choice between different courses of action. We feel and know that there are many delicate differences in cultural psychology, numberless changes that our crude social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely, which explain much of history and social development. At the same time, too, we know that these considerations have never adequately explained or excused the triumph of brute force and cunning over weakness and innocence. It is, then, the strife of all honourabe men and women of the twenty-first century to see that in the future competition of human beings for the survival of the fittest shall means the triumph of the good, the beautiful and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilizations all that is really find and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on green and impudence and cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we are compelled daily to turn more and more to conscientious study of the phenomena of judgement free contact, to a study frank and fair, and not falsified and framed by our wishes or our fears. In the animals there is an uninterrupted chain of reactions starting with a stimulus, like hunger, and ending with a more or less strictly determined course of action, which does away with the tension created by the stimulus. In man that chain is interrupted. The stimulus is there but the kin of satisfaction is “open,” that is, one must choose between different course of action. Instead of a predetermined instinctive action, man has to weigh possible course of action in his mind; he starts to think. He changes his role towards nature from that of purely passive adaptation to an active one: he produces. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
He invents tools and, while thus mastering nature, man separates himself from it more and more. He becomes dimly aware of himself—or rather of his group—as not being identical with nature. It dawns upon him that his is a tragic fate: to be part of nature, and yet transcend it. He becomes aware of death as his ultimate fate even if he tries to deny it in manifold phantasies. One particular telling representation of the fundamental relation between many and freedom is offered in the biblical myth of man’s expulsion from paradise. They myth identifies the beginning of human history with an act of choice, but it puts all emphasis on the sinfulness of this first act of freedom and the suffering resulting from it. Man and woman live in the Garden of Eden in complete harmony with each other and with nature. There is no peace and no necessity to work; there is no choice, no freedom, no thinking either. Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God’s command, he breaks through the state of harmony with nature of which he is a part without transcending it. From the standpoint of the Church which represented authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom. Acting against God’s orders means freeing himself from coercion, emerging from the unconscious existence of prehuman life to the level of man. Acting against the command of authority, committing a sin, is in its positive human aspect the first act of freedom, that is, the first human act. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
In the myth the sin in its formal aspect is the eating of the tree of knowledge. The act of disobedience as an act of freedom is the beginning of reason. The myth speaks of other consequences of the first act of freedom. The original harmony between man and nature is broken. God proclaims war between man and woman, and war between nature and man. Man has become separate from nature, he has taken the first step toward becoming human by becoming an “individual.” He has committed the first act of freedom. The myth emphasizes the suffering resulting from this act. To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid. The newly won freedom appears as a curse; he is free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality. “Freedom from” is not identical with positive freedom, with “freedom to.” The emergence of man from nature is a long-drawn-out process; to a large extent he remains tired to the World from which he emerged; he remains part of nature—the oil he lives on, the sun and moon and stars, the trees and flowers, the animals, and the group of people with whom he is connected by the ties of blood. Primitive religions bear testimony to man’s feeling of oneness with nature. Animate and inanimate nature are part of his human World or, as one may also put it, he is still part of the natural World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The primary ties block his full human development; they stand in the way of the development of his reason and his critical capacities; they let him recognize himself and others only through the medium of his, or their, participation in a clan, a social or religious community, and not as human beings; in other words, they block his development as a free, self-determining, productive individual. However, although this is one aspect, there is another one. This identity with nature, clan, religion, gives the individual security. He belongs to, he is rooted in, a structuralized whole in which he has an unquestionable place. He may suffer from hunger or suppression, but he does not suffer from the worst of all pains—complete aloneness and doubt. We see that the process of individual growth human freedom has the same dialectic character that we have noticed in the process of individual growth. On the one hand it is a process of growing strength and integration, mastery of nature, growing power of human reason, and growing solidarity with other human beings. However, on the other hand this growing individuation means growing isolation, insecurity, and thereby growing doubt concerning one’s own role in the Universe, the meaning of one’s life, and with all that a growing feeling of one’s own powerlessness and insignificance as an individual. If the process of the development of mankind is in one conflict and strife. Each step in the direction of growing individuation threatened people with new insecurities. Primary binds once severed cannot be mended; once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
There is only one possible, productive solution for relationship of individualized man with the World: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the World, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual. However, if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the World which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom. Nevertheless, a line of study which by reason of the enormous race complications with which God seems about to punish this nation must increasingly claim our sober attention, study, and thought, we must ask, what are the actual relations of human beings in America? and we must be answered, not by apology or fault-finding, but by a plain, unvarnished take. In the civilized life of today the contact of men and their relations to each other fall in a few main lines of action and communication: there is, first, the physical proximity of homes and dwelling-paces, the way in which neighbourhoods group themselves, and the contiguity of neighbourhoods. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Secondly, and in our age chiefest, there are the economic relations, the methods by which individuals cooperate for earning a living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, the production of wealth. Next, there are the political relations, the cooperation in social control, in group government, in laying and paying in social control, in group government, in laying and paying the burden of taxation. In the fourth place, there are the less tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversion and commerce, through periodicals and libraries; and, above all, the gradual formation for each community of that curious tertium quid which we call public opinion. Closely allied with this come the various forms of social contract in everyday life, in travel, in theatres, in house gatherings, in marrying and giving in marriage. Finally, there are the varying forms of religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent endeavour. These are the principal ways in which men living in the same communities are brought into contact with each other. It is my present task, therefore, to indicate, from my point of view, how the American race in America meet and mingle with the public in these matters of everyday life. First, as to physical dwelling. It is usually possible to draw in nearly every American community a physical economic-line on the map, on the one side of which the affluent dwell and on the other the less affluent. The winding and intricacy of the geographical socioeconomic line varies, of course, in different communities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
I know some towns where a straight line drawn through the middle of the main street separates nine-tenths of the affluent from nine-tenths of the less affluent. In other towns the older settlement of the affluent has been encircled by a broad band of less affluent individuals; in still other cases little settlements or nuclei of the less affluent have sprung up amid surrounding the affluent. Usually in cities each street has its distinctive economic states, and only now and then do different income brackets meet in close proximity. Even in the country something of this segregation is manifest in the smaller areas, and of course in the largest phenomena of the Poverty Belt. All this segregation by socioeconomic status is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities. A less affluent community may be in dangerous proximity to a master planned residence quarter, while it is quite common to find middle class suburbs planed in the heart of a respectable working class district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the nest of the affluent and the best of the working class almost never live in anything like close proximity. It thus happens that nearly every American town the Affluent and the working class see the worst of each other. This vast change from the situation in the past, when, through close contact of master planned communities with big houses placed in a hierarchal stratification with bordering middle class communities with more modest sized homes, one found the best of both in these semi-diverse communities in which people had close contact and sympathy, while at the time the squalor and dull round of toil among the poor was removed from the sight and hearing of the community. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
One can easily see how a person who saw income inequality from his father’s executive office, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture. On the other hand, the settled belief of the mass of the less affluent that the American affluent people do not have the poor’s best interests at heart has been intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of the middle class and less affluent with the worst representatives of the wealthy individuals. However, work and wealth are too readily overlooked or not thoroughly understood by some. Many cultures, classes, and people lacked the capital to build steel mills, dams, and auto plants they needed to obtain generational wealth, and some were unwilling to work to acquire a better socioeconomic status in life, sometimes due to mental defect. While some wealthy people benefitted from socialist primitive accumulation. This theory formulated by economist E.A. Preobrazhensky held that the necessary capital could be squeezed out of the less affluent by forcing their standard of living down to an emaciating minimum and skimming off their off their surpluses. These would then be used to capitalize heavy industry and subsidize workers. Because the goal of socialism everywhere was to industrialize as rapidly as possible, it was muscle labour that was glorified. This widespread attitude went hand in hand with the tremendous concentration on production rather than consumption, on capital good rather than consumer goods. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Therefore, slavery is essentially a socialist economic strategy to gain wealth, then one a few individuals have obtained great wealth and laws are passed the emancipate the people, the system becomes a capitalistic society that now allows, with great prejudice, for the former slaves to obtain wealth. However, when a country starts to go bankrupt, it may revert to socialism and reinforce slavery, which may be why the democratic party does not want to enforce boarder security. They want to allow as many potential slaves to enter the United States of America because they put the poor and dwindling middle class back to forced muscle labour to help stabilize the country and pay the national deficit off. The computer revolution and the power of knowledge, information, culture, are, law, theories and other intangible product of the mind may be overstated. For societies are not machines, and they are not computers They cannot be reduced so simply into hardware and software, base and superstructure. A more apt model would picture them as consisting of many elements all connected in immensely complex and continually changing feedback loops. As their complexity rises, knowledge becomes more central to both their economic and ecological survival, but it is muscle power that hands a tangible economic benefit. As people are replaced by machines, and machines have a fixed cost, wages will decrease for human beings because they will no longer be essential. The Forth Wave economy may be one based on slavery. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
The list of problems facing our society is endless. We smell the moral rot of a dying industrial civilization, as we watch its institutions, one after another collapse in a welter of ineffectuality and corruption. As a result, the air fills with bitterness and demands for radical change. In response, thousands of proposals are put forward, all claiming to be basic or fundamental or even revolutionary. Yet again and again, new rules, new laws, regulations, plans, and practices, all intended to solve our problems, boomerang and make them worse, adding to the helpless feeling that nothing works. This feeling, which is extremely dangerous for any democracy, feeds the hunger for the proverbial “man on a white horse.” Unless we are bold and imaginative, we, too could find ourselves in “the dustbin of history.” American politics is presented to us by our media as a continuing gladiatorial contest between two political parties. Yet Americans are increasingly alienated, bored and angry at both the media and politicians. Party politics seem to most people a kind of shadow-play, insincere, costly and corrupt. Increasingly, people ask: does it matter who wins this? The answer is yes—but not for the reason we are usually given. We need a political party that is dedicated to preserving the core institutions of industrial mass society—the nuclear family, the mass education system, the giant corporation, the mass trade union, the centralized nation-state and the politics of pseudorepresentative government. This government must also recognize other forms of today’s problems, from energy, war, poverty to ecological degradation and the breakdown of familial relationships and the need for a better frame work to help people achieve the American Dream. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
No political party in existence today has a monopoly on morals and virtue. However, if you take stock in souls, then you cannot distinguish between their income brackets, because souls are priceless. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our child, rich and poor. Meanwhile, companies in China are mostly playing the role of acquirers, not the acquired. For instance, in so many ways, the story of mining and metals, today, is the story of China. Globally, the mining and metals sector has a $1.5 trillion annual value. For many years, it grew more or less in step with global GDP. Starting with the turn of the millennium, the sector and demand for commodities started to grow significantly faster than global GDP. The main reason for that was the takeoff of the Chinese economy, particularly infrastructure and manufacturing. At this point, between 40 percent and 60 percent of every mineral that gets dug up anywhere in the World ends up in China. This is significant because in 2009, China accounted for $17 billion, or 22 percent of all cross-border Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the World. Only between early 2009 and mid-2010, Chinese auto companies conducted 11 acquisitions abroad and their total value was $2.5 billion, while in 2005-2008 there were 12 acquisitions worth $1.3 billion. In 2021, Chinese outbound Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) held steady, while Chinese outbound M&A reached USD 23.7 billion. Outbound FDI boomed after 2014, and reached a high of nearly USD 200 billion in 2016. In following years, outbound FDI flows fell every year to reach USD 117 billion in 2019 before rebounding to USD 134 billion in 2020 and USD 138.4 billion in 2021. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Chinese acquisitions of large Western companies or their departments have become a hot topic of the day. Perhaps you will not think twice before giving such widely known examples as the purchase of IBM’s PC department by Lenovo and Volvo by Geely. Geely also bought Australia’s Drivetrain, one of the World’s leading suppliers of automotive transmission. If you try to recollect more, probably, you will name the acquisitions of Ogihara’s mold models production factory by BYD (Ogihara is one of the largest mold model producers in Japan), of Quorum Systems, a radio equipment maker from San Diego, by semiconductors manufacturer Spreadtrum Communications, or of the Dutch producer of specialized transportation equipment Burg Industries by China’s International Marine Containers Group. On the other hand, you will not find equally famous and impressive examples of large-scale acquisitions of Chinese companies by Western firms, though, of course, they are not at a zero level. For instance, L’Oreal acquired cosmetic brand Yue-Sai, which belonged to Coty Inc., and made a successful bid for Shenzhen-based Raystar Cosmetics, one of China’s top three skincare brands. The U.S.A. restaurant operator Yum! Brands (the owner of Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell) acquired hot-pot restaurant chain Little Sheep for USD 586.5 million. Home Depot bought local home-improvement chain Home Way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Where does this asymmetry come from? One of the major reasons is the Chinese government’s rather negative attitude toward foreign acquisitions of important domestic companies. Existing regulations make an acquisition of any important Chinese company by foreigners extremely difficult and often effectively impossible (though the government is calling on foreign investors to participate in the reorganization of domestic enterprises through equity investment and M&A, especially in high-end manufacturing and energy/environment-related areas, and endorses acquisitions matching its polices). China is channeling the inward FDI toward, first, joint ventures with domestic companies, second, greenfield investment, and third, acquisitions of minority stakes—especially in case an important state-owned/state-holding company is involved. The regulation introduced back in 2006, allegedly in reaction to the blocking by U.S.A. Congress of the acquisition of American oil company Unocal by one of China’s petroleum giants CNOOC, gives the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) the right to examine and declare void any acquisition if, in its opinion, it can adversely affect national security and important industries or if it targets a domestic company possessing a famous or historical brand. Also, if the acquirer is of a certain size and has a sufficient market in China (the size and market are not specified—very Chinese-style), any acquisition has to get an approval from the MOC and the State Administration of Industry and Commerce (SAIC). #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Notably, in 2009 the Chinese government disallowed Coca-Cola’s acquisition of China Huiyuan Juice Group, which would have been the largest in the country’s history. The U.S.A. private equity fund Carlyle Group had to backtrack on its plan to acquire an 85 percent stake in Xudong Construction, accepting 45 percent while the majority stake went to Xuzhou Machinery Group owned by the Xuzhou city government. In February 2011, China announced a plan to establish a ministerial panel to review foreign takeovers of domestic companies. It is to be led by the National Development and Reform Commission and MOC, and overseen by the State Council. Its task is to scrutinize acquisitions involving military industrial companies and other defense-related firms, but also companies in agriculture, energy, and natural resources, and some parts of infrastructure and transportation services. It is said to be modeled after a similar institution in the United States of America and created with the aim of increasing the transparency of procedures. There are often problems of sustaining cooperative outcomes in groups where pairs of traders have little direct reciprocity like what is happening with China and the United States of America. Therefore, it would be logical for the USA to disallow foreign M&A of American companies. To further highlight this illustration, if Player A deviates for an immediate gain in his dilemma game with Player B, the probability of his meeting B in the future is likely to be too low for direct reciprocity to be effective. This adds some further necessary conditions for the achievement of a cooperative in all games played in pairs in the group. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
A’s current cheating can give rise to a future cost for him on only through his interactions with other people C, D,…, in the group. For this, the information that A cheated B had to e conveyed to C, D,…, and these other have to find it in their personal interest to take the actions that have the effect of punishing A for his having cheated B. An interesting example of the importance of information and enforcement of multilateral sanction comes from Guinnane (1994), who attributes to these factors the success of agricultural credit cooperatives in the nineteenth century Germany and the failure to transplant them to Ireland in the early twentieth century Of the two conditions, the second can be problematic because the only wat to inflict the cost on A may be for others to forgo their mutually beneficial interactions with him. In other words, punishment may be a collective-action problem, which is another multi-person prisoner’s dilemma. In theory, this can be resolved by stipulating equilibrium strategies where compliance means no only taking the mutually beneficial actions in the first place, but also taking the appropriate punishment actions in response to anyone’s deviation. In other words, failure to participate in a punishment is itself a deviant. In reality, such solutions are buttressed by people’s instincts to punish, even at a personal cost, other who cheat on an explicit or implicit social contract #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
There is a fourth pathway, nearly group altruism. Groups that successfully instill such preferences in their members, for example by socialization and education, will achieve good outcomes and succeed in their competition with other groups who do not attempt similar socialization or education of their member. More generally, this can explain many instances found by behavioural economists where individual behaviour differs from that predicted by economic theories based on purely selfish preferences. Going even farther, the ability to achieve jointly desirable outcomes in non-zero-sum games is the key to evolutionary success in humans. Fulfillment of the first of the two conditions, namely the transmission of information, depends on the size of the group, the network of contacts among them, and the technology of communication. The additional problems posed by the lack of direct bilateral reciprocity can be avoided if pairs within the group who experience a successful initial meeting can arrange to continue meeting each other. When we consider a heterogeneous population where some people are so impatient that they will cheat in any play of the dilemma game, whereas others are sufficiently patient to sustain a cooperative outcome in a repeated relationship with another patient play, the type of partner cannot be identified in advance. We investigate the possibility of an equilibrium where a patient player will choose the complaint action when playing a new partner, and if this reveals the partner to be patient, the pair will continue their bilateral interaction. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The value of doing so is greater the larger is the fraction of impatient players in the population, because that worsens the expected payoff from the alternative available to each of the patient players in the pair, namely trying to form a new relationship with another random player We expect that in any group such possibilities of direct reciprocity will be exploited to the extent possible. However, there are limits to this: death, retirement, or relocation may break up existing partnerships, and change or expansion of business may require the formation of new ones. Therefore it is important to study the issues of cooperation in groups where pairs meet at random without direct reciprocity, and examine whether and how the information network can work to achieve a cooperative outcome. When analyzing a process of contagion, where a play who is the victim of an episode of cheating “loses trust” and starts to cheat in his own future interactions, someone contemplating the first deviation from a cooperative situation must then recognize the possibility that this spread of cheating will infect his own future partners. Communication flows better in networks that are connected by ties of business, ethnicity, and so on. Another important factor is the size of the group. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Intuition suggests that communication network will weaken as the size of the group increases. Both formal theoretical modeling and case studies support this. A small size is an important condition for successful resolution of collective-action dilemmas. Large groups can overcome this disadvantage, but this requires special arrangements sch as the construction of hierarchies of small groups. So, while FDI is in the early stages, it is best to establish a bilateral trade agreement. Otherwise, if a country allows too many foreign M&As, while they are being cheat out of the opportunity to have equal access, they will eventually lose their power and assets. Now, when it comes to identity and interpersonal competence, a classification is reverie (daydreaming, meditation, wondering, and speculation) which as play may be differentiated from the disciplined purposeful fantasy which is thinking of the critical-creative kind. Reverie continually assimilates new experience within the self, but not with respect to a foreseen end. It must also be differentiated from compulsive fantasy, such as worry, remorse, and grief (although the last of these may have an integrating function, if mourning is enacted without restraint). Reverie appears in children at the age of two or three, and unless discouraged continues throughout life. If the past and the future of the person are to be knitted together by consistent purpose and conscious values, if the identity of the self is to become clear and autonomous, reverie has to be protected and engendered. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Like other forms of play, reverie, save as prayer, has also come under than ban of puritanism, and has only recently received due appreciation. Americans have given it so little explicit attention that their vocabular for dealing with it is limited. Such terms as they possess bear for the most part disparaging, archaic, or foreign connotations—terms like talking-to-one’s self, solitude, intuition, or soliloquy. American law fortifies private property but does much less to restrict attention-getters who disturb the privacy of the person. If each person told the circumstances under which one most freely explored one’s self—as in watching a fire, taking lonely walks, laying abed daytime, or just sitting—these settings would not be classification of the forms of subjective play. Of all types of play, reverie is the most formless, while the most creative of new forms. Springing from unsatisfied longings and vague apprehensions, it is yet an activity which more than any other contributes to consistency of wants and integration of personality. Like other types of play, in being playful only when unforced, it is often least available to those who crave and need it most. At the same time there are souls who are so alarmed at the prospect of confronting themselves with detached objectivity that their response is properly called a flight into activity. Counselors occasionally regard categorically withdrawal from others as a symptom of maladjustment, yet it is the person who cannot endure separation at all who is truly maladjusted. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Loneliness has become almost a national problem, but merely an interest of family researchers. The development of interpersonal competence not only renews sociability; it makes solitude and reverie a form of recreation. The recreative power of solitude is a kind of therapy, when alternated with periods of intensive intimacy. The role of card games in prevailing juvenile society can be far greater in importance then relatively non-competitive persons would guess. People who have but very limited ability for human intimacy can assuage loneliness through these instrumentalities, without any risk of troublesome interpersonal developments. It is no longer considered helpful for a distraught and distracted person to have one’s future planned for one; that kind of counseling may only add another pressure or tension. However, to provide recesses in time and space, where such a person can catch up on one’s deficit in the unceasing labour of organizing one’s behaviour which impose on the integrity of no one. Yet planning to leave people alone may be the hardest kind of planning. Counterfeits of Satan himself also suit this purpose at times, when a psychopathological offender desires to terrorize a man from actions, or prayer, adverse to one’s interests. Fear of the devil may always be regarded as from the devil, to enable one to carry out the plans of a psychopathological offender of hindering the work of the ultimate concern. Of such a character may be the fearsome shrinking from hearing about one and one’s works, and the passive deadness of the mind in regard to all scriptural truth concerning the forces of psychopathology. Also the fear caused by reference to one’s name, given in order to frighten away believer from knowing the facts about the offender. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
And others, who desire the truth, may be given exaggerated impression of the offenders presence, or of “conflict,” “clouds,” “blocks,” “darkness,” et cetera, until they lose the clearness of the light of God. Especially is the work of the Deceiver manifested in one’s efforts to make the children of God believe in one’s non-existence, and in the suggestion that it is only necessary to know about God for the protection from the enemy’s power. On the other hand, a deceived believer may be more deeply deceived by seeing nothing but the psychopathological offender’s counterfeits everywhere. Supernatural visions and manifestations are a fruitful source of revenue to deceiving spirits, especially when the believer make reference to and relies upon these experiences more than the Word of God; for the aim of the wicked spirit is to displace the Word of God as the rock-ground of one’s life. Oh, the Scripture may be referred to and quoted, but often only as a warrant for the experiences, and to strength faith—not in God, but in His apparent manifestations. This covert drawing of faith away from the bare Word of God to manifestations of God, as being more reliable, is keenly subtle deception of the evil one, and it is easily recognized in a believer thus deceived. Theonomy, the solution to the union of religion and culture, is brought about only by the final revelation of the New Being in Jesus Christ. It is the power of the New Being which overcomes autonomy and heteronomy. The Christ as the bearer of final revelation is transparent to the ground be being. By overcoming estrangement, one reunites the creature to its ground and thus opens up the divine depth-dimension. The emptiness of autonomy is filled by the Spiritual Presence which excludes demonic intrusions. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Heteronomy is always imposed by a group or by an institution. The church, as the community of faithful who receive the New Being, ideally should be free from heteronomous tendencies. However, the church is also subject to the ambiguities of existence which tempt it to exercise heteronomous authority. Here is where the Cross of the Christ intervenes as a corrective. For in Jesus crucified the medium of revelation sacrificed himself to the content of revelation. The Cross is the church’s protection against heteronomy if the members embrace it. The power of the New Bing, then, is the foundation of theonomy. Theonomous periods do not feel split, but whole and centered. Their center is neither their autonomous freedom nor their heteronomous authority but the depth of reason ecstatically experience and symbolically expressed. The ecstatic experience which gives birth to theonomy is the experience of the New Being as symbolized in Jesus who is the Christ. The tenor and direction of a theology can usually be gauged by its Christology, since the Christ is the beginning and the end of all theologizing. How religion relates to culture will eventually depend upon how God relates to Jesus and how Jesus relates to the World. Existential estrangement is answered with the theological doctrine of the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. This mirrors the leap from man’s essential nature to its distortion in existence. It is not a logically necessitated sequence, but a jump, from the transition from the essence to existence is “irrational,” the passage from God to the Christ, “paradoxical.” #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Freedom Characterizes Human Existence
Freedom characterizes human existence, and one of the greatest successes lay in planting of the free schools among Americans. The schoolhouses helped students discover apostles of human culture are Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. These individuals characterize freedom of human existence, and help establish man’s awareness and conception of himself as an independent and separate being. The social history of man started with his emerging from a state of oneness with the natural World to an awareness of himself as an entity separate from surrounding nature and men. Yet this awareness remained very dim over long periods of history in a distracted land where wanton abuse, insolently gloating allowed people to be seized, imprisoned, and punished over and over again. Almost ever law and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislation to reduce human beings to serfdom,–to make them the slaves of the State, if not of individual owners. The individual continued to be closely tied to the natural and social World from which he emerged; while being partly aware of himself as a separate entity, he felt also part of the World around him. The growing process of the emergence of the individual from his original ties, a process which we may call “individuation,” seems to have reached its peak in modern history in the centuries between the Reformation and the present. In the life history of an individual, we find the same process. A child is born when it is no longer one with its mother and becomes a biological entity separate from her. Yet, while this biological separation is the beginning of individual human existence, the child remains functionally one with its mother for a considerable period. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
To the degree to which the individual, figuratively speaking, has not yet completely severed the umbilical cord which fastens one to the outside World, one lacks freedom; but these ties give one security and a feeling of belonging and of being rooted somewhere. I wish to call these ties that exist before the process of individuation have resulted in the complete emergence of an individual “primary ties.” They are organic in the sense that they are a part of normal human development; they imply a lack of individuality, but they are give security and orientation to the individual. They are the ties that connect the child with its mother, the member of a primitive community with one’s clan and nature, or the medieval man with the Church and one’s social caste. Once the stage of complete individuation is reached and the individual is free from these primary ties, one is confronted with a new task: to orient and root oneself in the World and to find security in other ways than those which were characteristic of one’s preindividualistic existence. Freedom then has a different meaning from the one it had before this stage of evolution is reached. The comparatively sudden change from foetal into human existence and the cutting off of the umbilical cord mark the independence of the infant from the mother’s body. However, this independence is only real in the crude sense of the separation of the two bodies. In a functional sense, the infant remains part of the mother. It is fed, carried, and taken care of in every vital respect by the mother. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Slowly the child comes to regard the mother and other objects as entities apart from itself. One factor in this process is the neurological and the general physical development of the child, its ability to grasp objects—physically and mentally—and to master them. Through its own activity it experiences a World outside of itself. The process of individuation is furthered by that of education. This process entails a number of frustrations and prohibitions, which change the role of the mother into that of a person with different aims which conflict with the child’s wishes, and often into that of a hostile and dangerous person. The atmosphere of suppression creates in the child a feeling of powerlessness and the hostility springing from it. This antagonism, which is one part of the educational process though by no means the whole, is an important factor in sharpening the distinction between the “I” and the “thou.” A few weeks elapse after birth before the child even recognizes another person as such and is able to react with a smile, and it is not before long the child even ceases to confuse itself with the Universe. Until he or she then shows the particular kind of egocentricity typical of children, an egocentricity which does not exclude tenderness for and interest in others, since “others” are not yet definitely experiences as really separate from himself or herself. For the same reason the child’s leaning on authority in these first years has also a different meaning from the leaning on authority later on. The parents, or whoever the authority may be, are not yet regarded as being a fundamentally separate entity; they are part of the child’s Universe, and this Universe is still part of the child; submission to them, therefore, has a different quality from the kind of submission that exists once two individuals have become really separate. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The more the child grows and to the extent to which primary ties are cut off, the more it develops a quest for freedom and independence. However, the fate of this quest can only be fully understood if we realize the dialectic quality in this process of growing individuation. This process has two aspects: one is that the child grows stronger physically, emotionally, and mentally. In each of these spheres intensity and activity grow. At the same time, these spheres become more and more integrated. An organized structure guided by the individual’s will and reason develops. If we call this organized and integrated wholly of the personality the self, we can also say that the one side of the growing process of the individuation is the growth of self-strength. The limits of the growth of individuation and the self are set, partly by individual conditions, but essentially by social conditions. For although the differences between individuals in this respect appear to be great, every society is characterized by a certain level of individuation beyond which the normal individual cannot go. The other aspect of the process of individuation is growing aloneness. The primary ties offer security and basic unity with the World outside oneself. To the extent to which the child emerges from that World it becomes aware of being alone, of being an entity separate from all others. This separation from a World, which in comparison with one’s own individual existence is overwhelmingly strong and powerful, and often threatening and dangerous, creates a feeling of powerlessness and anxiety. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
As long as one was an integral part of that World, unaware of the possibilities and responsibilities of individual action, one did not need to be afraid of it. When one has become an individual, one stands alone and faces the World in all its perilous and over powering aspects. Impulses arise to give up one’s individuality, to overcome the feeling of aloneness and powerlessness by completely submerging oneself in the World outside. These impulses, however, and the new ties arising from them, are not identical with the primary ties which have been cut off in the process of growth itself. Just as a child can never return to the mother’s womb physically, so it can never reverse, physically, the process of individuation. Attempts to do so necessarily assume the character of submission, in which the basic contradiction between the authority and the child who submits to it is never eliminated. Consciously the child may feel secure and satisfied, but unconsciously it realizes that the price it pays is giving up strength and the integrity of itself. Thus the result of submission is the very opposite of what it was to be: submission increases the child’s insecurity and at the same time creates hostility and rebelliousness, which is the more frightening since it is directed against the very persons on whom the child has remained—or become—dependent. However, submission is not the only way, the only one which is productive and does not end in an insoluble conflict, is that of spontaneous relationship to man and nature, a relationship that connects the individual with the World without eliminating one’s individuality. This kind of relationship—the foremost expression of which are love and productive work—are rooted in the integration and strength of the total personality and are therefore subject to the very limits that exist for the growth of the self. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The problem of submission and of spontaneous activity as two possible results of growing individuation will be discussed later. The dialectic process which results from growing individuation and from growing freedom of the individual are of utmost importance. The child becomes more free to develop and express its own individual self unhampered by those ties which were limiting it. However, the child also become more free from a World which gave it security and reassurance. The process of individuation is one of growing strength and integration of its individual personality, it is at the same time a process in which the original identity with others is lost and in which the original identity with others is lost and in which the child becomes more separate from them. This growing separation may result in an isolation tht has the quality of desolation and creates intense anxiety and insecurity; it may result in a new kind of closeness and a solidarity with others is the child has been able to develop the inner strength and productivity which are the premise of this new kind of relatedness to the World. If every step in the direction of separation and individuation were matched by corresponding growth of the self, the development of the child would be harmonious. This does not occur, however. While the process of individuation takes place automatically, the growth of the self is hampered for a number of individual and social reasons. The lag between these two trends results in an unbearable feeling of isolation and powerlessness, and this in its turn leads to psychic mechanisms, which later on are described as mechanisms of escape. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Phylogenetically, too the history of man can be characterized as a process of growing individuation and growing freedom. Man emerge from the prehuman stage by the first steps in the direction of becoming free from coercive instincts. If we understand by instinct a specific action pattern which is determined by inherited neurological structures, a clear-cut trend can be observed in the animal kingdom. The lower an animal is in the scale of development, the more are its adaptation to nature and all its activities controlled by instinctive and reflex action mechanisms. The famous social organizations of some insects are created entirely by instincts. On the other hand, the higher an animal is in the scale of development, the more flexibility of action pattern and the less completeness of structural adjustment do we find at birth. This development reaches its peak with man. He is the most helpless of all animals at birth. His adaptation to nature is based essentially on the process of learning, not on instinctual determination. Instinct is a diminishing if not a disappearing category in higher animals forms, especially the human. Human existence begins when the lack of fixation of action by instincts exceeds a certain point; when the adaptation to nature loses its coercive character; when the way to act is no longer fixed by hereditarily given mechanisms. Human existence and freedom are from the beginning inseparable. Freedom is here used not in its positive sense of “freedom to” but in its negative sense of “freedom from,” namely freedom from instinctual determination of his actions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Freedom in the sense just discussed is an ambiguous gift. Man is born without the equipment for appropriate action which the animal possesses he is dependent on his parents for a longer time than any animal, and his reactions to his surroundings are less quick and less effective than the automatically regulated instinctive actions are. He goes through all the dangers and fears which this lack of instinctive equipment implies. Yet this very helplessness of man is the basis from which human development springs; man’s biological weakness is the condition of human culture. The failures of American institutions are the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect. Such institutions, from their wide powers, great responsibilities, large control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position, are naturally open to repeated and bitter attack. Taxation without representation has become a rule of political life. And the result of all this is, an in nature have been, lawlessness and crime. On the tainted air broods fear. Centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twenty-first Century is corruption. However, the Third Wave wealth-creation system now spreading also challenges three pillars of the socialist faith. Take the question property. Form the beginning, socialists traced poverty, depressions, unemployment and the other evils of industrialism to private ownership of the means of production. They way to solve thee ills was for the workers to own the factories—through the states or through collectives. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Once this was accomplished, things would be different. No more competitive waste. Completely rational planning. Production for use rather than profit. Intelligent investment to drive the economy forward. The dream of abundance for all would be realized for the first time in history. In the nineteenth century when these ideas were formulated, they seemed to reflect the most advanced scientific knowledge of the time. Marxists, in fact, claimed to have gone beyond fuzzy-headed utopianism and arrived at truly “scientific socialism.” Utopians might dream of self-governing communal villages. Scientific socialists knew that in a developing smokestack society such notions were impractical. Utopians like Charles Fourier looked toward the agrarian past. Scientific socialists looked toward the agrarian past. Scientific socialist looked toward what was then the industrial future. Thus, later on, while socialist regimes experimented with cooperatives, worker-management, communes and other schemes, state ownership became the dominant form of property throughout the socialist World. Everywhere the state, not the workers, thus became the chief beneficiary of socialists revolution. Socialism failed to meet is promise to improve radically the material conditions of life. When living standards fell in the Soviet Union after the revolution, the decline was blamed, with some justification, on the effects of World War I and counterrevolution. Later the shortfalls were blamed on capitalist encirclement. Still later, on World War II. Yet forty years after the war, staples like coffee and organdies were still in short supply in Moscow. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Remarkably, though their number is declining, one still hears orthodox socialist around the World calling for the nationalization of industry and finance. From Brazil and Peru to South Africa and, even in the industrialized nations of the West, there remain true believers who, despite all historical evidence to the contrary still regard “public ownership” as “progressive: and resist every effort to de-nationalize or privatize the economy. It is true that today’s increasingly liberalized global economy, uncritically hailed by the great multinational corporations, is itself unstable. It is also, alas, true that liberalization does not always result in automatic “trickle down” benefits to the less affluent. Nevertheless, incontrovertible evidence proves that state-owned enterprises mistreat their employees, pollute the air, and abuse the public at least as efficiently as private enterprises. Many have become sinkholes of inefficiency, corruption and greed. Their failures frequently encourage a vast, seething illegal market that undermines the very legitimacy of the state. However, wors and most ironic of all, instead of taking the lead in technological advance as promised, nationalized enterprises as a rule are almost uniformly reactionary—the most bureaucratic, the slowest to reorganize, the least willing to adapt to changing consumer needs, the most afraid to provide information to the citizen, the last to adopt advanced technology. For more than a century, socialists and defenders of capitalism waged bitter war over public versus private property. Large numbers of men and women literally laid down their lives over this issue. What neither side imagined was a new wealth-creation system that would make virtually all their arguments obsolete. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Yet this is exactly what happened. For the most important form of property is now intangible. It is super-symbolic. It is knowledge. The same knowledge can be used by many people simultaneously to create wealth and to produce still more knowledge. And unlike factories and fields, knowledge is, for all intents, inexhaustible. A second pillars in the cathedral of socialist theory was central planning. Instead of allowing the “chaos” of the marketplace to determine the economy, intelligent top-down planning would be able to concentrate resources on key sector and accelerate technological development. However, central planning depended on knowledge, and as early as the 1920s the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mise identified its lack of knowledge or, as he termed it, its “calculation problem” as the Achilles heel of socialism. How many does and what sizes should a factory in Irkutsk make? How many left-handed screws or grades of paper? What price-relationships should be set between carburetors and cucumbers? How many rubles, zlotys or yuan should be invested in each of tens of thousands of different lines and levels of production? Generations of earnest socialist planners wrestled desperately with this knowledge problem. The planners demanded ever more data and got ever more lies from the managers afraid to report shortfalls in production. They beefed up the bureaucracy. Lacking the supply-and-demand signals generated by a competitive market, they tried measuring the economy in terms of labour hours, or counting thins in terms of kind, rather than money. Later they tried econometric modeling and input-output analysis. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Nothing worked. The more information they had, the more complex and disorganized the economy grew. Fully three quarters of a century after the Russian Revolution, the real symbol of the U.S.S.R. was not the hammer and sickle but the consumer queue. Today, all across the socialist and ex-socialist spectrum, there is a race to introduce marker economics. Approaches vary, as do the attempts to provide a “safety net” for dislocated workers. However, it is now almost universally recognized by socialist reformers that allowing supply and demand to determine prices (at least within certain ranges) provides what the central plan could not—price signals indicating what is or is not needed and wanted in the economy. However, overlooked in the discussion among economists over the need for these signals is the fundamental change in communication pathways they imply, and the tremendous power shifts that changes in communication systems bring. The most important difference between centrally planned economies and market-driven economies is that in the first, information flowers vertically, whereas in the market, much more in formation flows horizontally and diagonally in the system with buyers and sellers exchanging information at every level This change does not merely threaten top bureaucrats in the planning ministries and in management but millions upon millions of mini-bureaucrats whose sole source of power depends on their control of information fed up the reporting channel. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The new wealth-creation methods require so much knowledge, so much information and communication, that they are totally out of reach of centrally planned economies. The rise of the super-symbolic economy thus collides with a second foundation of socialist orthodoxy. One area of high China-West tensions is company acquisitions. While Chinese companies, including state-owned enterprise (SOEs), are moving to acquire Western firms on an increasingly large scale, acquisitions of Chinese companies by their Western counterparts remain modest in terms of both the number of transactions and their value. In 2010, the total value of cross-border M&A transactions (announced deals) involving Chinese firms reached $80.7 billion, as opposed to $63.6 billion in 2009. The total value of deals involving European firms was $641 billion, and firms for the Americas $1.13 trillion. Greif studies groups of traders, each of whom needs to consign goods to others to sell on his behalf, and needs different partners at different times. Outside the context of trade, when we studied relationships between cattle owners and their herders, while these relationships are reasonably long lived, herder leave to marry or for other work. Therefore each owner will employ several herders over one’s lifetime. The cattle must travel to grazing grounds far from home. To supervise the hired herders and ensure they take good care of the cattle and do not steal, the owners try to maintain at least one close relative in the cattle camp. However, they also develop complex patronage or even include a large back-loaded pat in the herder’s compensation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Of course the owner may then want to back out on this payment; his compliance is ensured by his reputation consideration since he will want to hire other herders in the future. Also, if the owner misbehaves, the social norms among the Orma allow the employee herders to retaliate, including shirking and even selling his cattle. Notice how the governance system uses a mixture of methods to achieve cooperation: rewards and punishments in cases of direct reciprocity, and social norms in group interactions. Studies of farmers in northern California revealed the cattle of one might encroach upon the land of another and cause damage, and different pairs may be involved in such a situation at different times. Again, attempts are made to recolve disputes bilaterally first; if that fails, the aggrieved party can spread negative gossip about the miscreant and invoke social sanctions. Even in countries where courts are believed to function well, relational contracting based on repeated interaction is used extensively. Prior information is important in assessing risk and offering credit in a new relationship. Trust builds up quickly in bilateral relationships in response to good experiences. Relational contracting works better if customers’ switching cost are high. (The intuition derived from one-shot or short-term games says that high switching costs should make the hold-up problem more serious, but in long-term ongoing relationships, worsening the outside option can lead to a better equilibrium of the game.) If it is believed that courts work well, new customers or ones with low switching costs are more likely to be offered credit. However, effectiveness of courts is irrelevant to the functioning of established relationships. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Sociability is more often found mixed with other types of activity than by itself. Nevertheless, there are enough concrete kinds of association for sociability alone, to justify classifying them by this separate category. Though sociability for some may be but a supplementary and entwining motived, it is just as true that for others collaboration is only an excuse for sociability. Ritual, for example, may involve as much effort as the conduct of work; and much work is ritual, a kind of pageantry, not aimed at production but at fulfilling the duty of group solidarity. In a society guided by ideals of work, sociability was not only taken as residual, properly confined to evenings and Sundays, but led to guilt and condemnation except when seen as seriously supporting group existence. To speak of funerals as recreation seems sacrilegious, yet steadily reunions and celebrations have lost their grim aspect of sacred obligation. As a result many forms of sociability are not only recognized as legitimate play, but since their release from old inhibitions, have effloresced with remarkable speed and profusion. Conversations about people, once uneasily viewed as gossip, has become something akin to friendly analysis. Dating has become fully differentiated from courtship, and can be enjoyed on both sides without serious intentions. The giving of gifts and sending of cards has grown in proportion as it has been treated as a form of expression, not merely as a requisite sign of affection. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Where children were once excluded from attention when families visited others, they are now favourite conversation pieces, often in their presence, and with their contribution. Just to watch them is a favorite parental joy. As with sports, one can think of family living as play. Little girls not only entertain other “mothers,” but discuss their dolls in terms of personality. And boys like their fathers speak of holding a “convention.” Conference-going within a half-dozen years has burgeoned as a new national industry, through expense accounts still exclude the family, who only dine out as honestly avowed recreation. The growth of vacations, on the other hand, is going forward on the family plan. These types of examples may serve to show the freedom and range of sociable play. This movement runs parallel with the development of serious associations as group purpose has become less confined to loyal obedience and the performance of sacred duty. Again, the believer is so acutely conscious of a “self” which one hates and loathes that one is never free from the dark shadow of self-condemnation, self-accusation or self-despair, which no appropriation of identification with Jesus Christ in death destroys; or else there is a self-confidence which continually draws the man forward into situations from which he had to retire abashed and disappointed. A spurious personality encompasses the true inner man—which few are aware is possible, but which is a sadly real thing among multitudes of the children of God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
On the part of the soul beset with these constant presentations to his mind of his own personality, he thinks he has a “vivid imagination,” or still more tht some of these things are visions of God, and that he is favoured of God, especially where the vision is of “great plans for God,” or wide visions of what God is going to do! Always with the believer himself as the center and special instrument of this service! Many of the plans for “great movements” (some of which have gone as far as into print) in connection with revivals have been of such a character—plans given by “revelation,” and which have resulted in gaining but the few caught by them, and no others. Of such a character has been the aftermath of a revival where men have left their regular calling and followed a will-of-the-wisp revelation of “launching out on God”—Worldwide plans conceived, and dissipated in a few months. Such deceived believers become ultra-devotional, with an excess of seal that blinds them to all things but the supernatural realm, and robs them of power wisely to meet the claims of other aspects of life. All this comes from an evil spirit’s access to the mind and imagination, through the deception of counterfeiting the presence of God. Symbols do have meaning, a meaning born and developed in the Christian experience and tradition, but they can never claim to have neatly packaged the unfathomable ground of being in tidy concepts and placed it on the shelf next to other objects. To do so is demonism. We take the symbols of revelation and explain them with the symbols of ontology. For once we cross the frontier of ultimate concern, of revelation, of religious experience, we enter a land where the only language spoken is symbolic. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Christianity is something ethereal and unreal. One who says “only a symbol” has completely misunderstood the meaning of symbol; one confuses symbol with sign, and ignores that a genuine symbol participates in the reality of that which it symbolizes. However, the complain of the critics cannot be so easily muffled. Granted that revelatory knowledge cannot be equated with rational knowledge, there must still be a conceptual element, a truth that enlightens our intellects. What is the content of faith, of revelation, of the Christian symbol? God is the symbol for man’s ultimate concern and the answer to the question of being. Symbolism is actually a restatement of theonomy for symbols are born in a theonomous situation by their transparency to the divine. When a person is grasped by an ultimate concern through the medium of a symbol, it means that the depths of this finite reality are opened to reveal the ground of being which sustains it. Substances shines through form, and the symbol radiates the glow of theonomy. In a perfectly theonomous culture, everything is symbolic of God. Since God is the ground of being, He is the ground of the structure of being. He is not subject to this; the structure is grounded in Him…He is the structure; that is, He has the power of determining the structure of everything that has being. The Word of God is compared to honey. It is sweet, rendering man free from the bitterness of hatred. The Word of God is compared to a wall. It protects its adherents from the violence of the wicked. The Word of God is compared to manna. It proclaims the equality of rich and poor before God. Above all, the Word of God is compared to a crown. It sets all humans above all of God’s creatures. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Would Satan Have Found Companions without this Overpowering Craving?
The extraordinary powers of the TV news media threaten the civil rights and health of all humans because it is like a constant signal of unbalanced propaganda being fed through a tube into minds of people who may not be aware that the news media often lies, and the some of their stories are engineered and totally untrue. If smoking cigarettes comes with a warning, because they can be hazardous to your health, then so should the TV news media. Stories presented over the air can be dangerous, especially to young, influential minds. For instance, a TV news program explained to viewers how they could barbeque meant in the oven by placing it on the rack. However, they did not explain that underneath the rack there should be a drip pan to catch any liquids that come from the meat, so they do not drip on the heating elements, which could cause a fire. And that may not be common sense to all people, which the TV director probably assumed. Therefore, all TV new media should contain a warning, letting the audience know that the story, even if it has some facts in it, is based on an opinion and may not be the full truth, so viewers know to use discretion and do further research of themselves. In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all aspects essential to mutual progress. The economic structure of a society in determining the mode of life of the individual operates as condition for personality development. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
These economic conditions are entirely different from subjective economic motives, such as the desire for material wealth which was looked upon by many writers, from the Renaissance on up to certain Marxist authors who failed to understand Mr. Marx’s basic concepts, as the dominant motive of human behaviour. As a matter of fact, the all-absorbing wish for material wealth is a need peculiar only to certain cultures, and different economic condition can create personality trait which abhor material wealth or are indifferent to it. The physiologically conditioned needs are not the only imperative part of man’s nature. There is another part just as compelling, one which is not rooted in bodily processes but in the very essence of the human mode and practice of life: the need to be related to the World outside oneself, the need to avoid aloneness. To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death. This relatedness to others is not identical with physical contact. An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and “belonging.” On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances represent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
This lack of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we may call moral aloneness and state that moral aloneness is as intolerable as the physical isolation, or rather that physical seclusion becomes unbearable only if it implies also moral lonesomeness. The spiritual relatedness to the World can assume many forms; the self-actualized in his cell who believes in God and the political prisoner kept in isolation who feels one with his fellow fighters are not alone morally. Neither is the English gentleman who wears his dinner jacket in the most exotic surroundings nor the petty bourgeois who, though being deeply isolated from one’s fellow men, feels one with one’s nation of its symbols. The kind of relatedness to the World may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone. Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with other, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation. The compelling need to avoid moral isolation is a deep concern However, learn one thing, impress it upon your mind which is still so malleable: man has a horror for aloneness And of all kind of aloneness, moral seclusion is the most terrible. The first hermits lived with God, they inhabited the World which is most populated, the World of spirits. The first thought of man, be he a leper or a prisoner, a sinner or an invalid, is: to have a companion of one’s fate. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In order to satisfy this drive which is life itself, man applies all his strength, all his power, the energy of his whole life. Would Satan have found companions without this overpowering craving? On this theme one could write a whole epic. Any attempt to answer the question why the fear of isolation is so powerful in man would lead us far away from the main road we are following in this report. However, in order not to give the reader the impression that the need to feel one with others has some mysterious quality. One important element is the fact that men cannot live without some sort of co-operation with other. In any conceivable kind of culture man needs to co-operate with others if he wants to survive, whether for the purpose of defending himself against enemies or dangers of nature, or in order that he may be able to work and produce. Even Robinson Crusoe was accompanied by his man Friday; without him he would probably not have become insane but would have actually died. Each person experiences this need for the help of others very drastically as a child. On account of the factual inability of the human child to take care of itself with regard to all-important functions, communication with others is a matter of life and death for the child. The possibility of being left alone is necessarily the most serious threat to the child’s whole existence. There is another element, however, which makes the need to “belong” so compelling: the fact of subjective self-consciousness, of the faculty of thinking by which man is aware of himself as an individual entity, different from nature and other people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Although the degree of this awareness varies. Its existence confronts man with a problem which is essentially human: by being aware of himself as distinct from nature and other people, by being aware—even very dimly—of death, sickness, aging, he necessarily feels his insignificance and smallness in comparison with the Universe and all others who are not “he.” Unless he belonged somewhere, unless his life had some meaning and direction, he would feel like a particle of dust and be overcome by his individual insignificance. He would not be able to relate himself to any system which would give meaning and direction to his life, he would be filled with doubt, and this doubt eventually would paralyze his ability to act—that is, to live. Human nature is neither a biologically fixed and innate sum total of drives nor is it a lifeless shadow of cultural patterns to which it adapts itself smoothly; it is the product of human evolution, but it also has certain inherent mechanisms and laws. There are certain factors in man’s nature which are fixed and unchangeable: the necessity to satisfy the physiologically conditioned drives and the necessity to avoid isolation and moral aloneness. We have seen that the individual has to accept the mode of life rooted in the system of production and distribution peculiar for any given society. In the process of dynamic adaptation to culture, a number of powerful drives develop which motivate the actions and feelings of the individual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The individual may or may not be conscious of these drives, but in any case they are forceful and demand satisfaction once they have developed. They become effective in molding the social process. How economic, psychological, and ideological factors interact and what further general conclusion concerning this interaction one can make are things for future discussion that deals with the reformation and of fascism. Man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an “individual,” has no choice but to unite himself with the World in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the World as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self. However, the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads to some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interest are most nearly touched,–criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led,–this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society. If the best of the Americans receives by outer pressure a leader whom they had not recognized before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also irreparable loss,–a loss of that peculiarly valuable education which a group receives when by search and criticism it finds and commissions its own leaders. The way in which this is done is at once the most elementary and nicest problem of social growth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
History is but the record of such group-leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character! And of all yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character! And of all types and kinds, what can be more instructive than the leadership of a group within a group?—that curious double movement where real progress may be negative and actual advancement where real progress may be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression. All this is the social student’s inspiration and despair. Nonetheless, the spirit of play can and does invade every department of culture. Every kind of work has its counterpart in play. Crafts include recreational forms which represent the categories of serious economic activity all the way from hunting and fishing, which have their counterparts in extractive industries, through fabrication and construction, distribution and communication, to services and consumption. Although such activities, as distinguished from the work the represent, are engaged in for their own sake, they all involve practice in the intelligence adaptation of physical means to envisaged ends. Thus “industrial” play is distinguished from physical play in being directed toward the exploration and manipulation of the physical environment rather than toward the exercise of the body. While some product or service of economic value may result from engaging in crafts, this is not primary objective. The distinction between work and play is perhaps less obvious where crafts are concerned than any other type of play. Also, any hobby which is pursued as recreation may also be undertaken as a livelihood, just as every hobby is in a direct sense an imitation of a serious occupation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Even though work merges into play and there are no hard and fast margins between the two, it is yet useful to make some polar contrast between them. Work seems to be performed in response to the routine obligations. In the economic sense it provides the goods and services to maintain a customary standard of living. Play—including economic play—is a break in routine. It is free, not required. It explores new possibilities and potentialities, so that invention and discovery bear the closet relation to it. Treating familiar pursuits as play permits their idealization. Work is most fully work when it evokes no free release of energy and when it is all drudgery and chores, making demands for a minimum, not an optimum performance. Play is most fully play when it is spontaneous, unrestrained and unforced. To look upon play as a childish preparation for adult activity is therefore to run the risk of making it work. The ambiguities of play are at their liveliest in crafts, which makes sketchy resort to common sense in defining them a less futile strategy than attempts to define them with more precision. In economic activity, as in sport, chance can according to taste play a great or a small part; or economic activity can entirely be reduces to pure chance, as in gambling. Likewise with competition, though of course competition in economic life is different from competition in sport. Competition in sport is most zestful and fair when it occurs between equals, or when rules and devices, such as handicapping, are employed to simulate equality between competitors. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Rivalry between teams is perpetuated through this balancing of powers. In business, by contrast, the effort of each competitor is to enlarge rather than to diminish the advantages one possesses, with the ultimate effect of eliminating competitors. To be sure, there are many similarities between the two kinds of competition, for example, competition between business institutions is often, as in sport, invoked simply as an added stimulus to effort. Certain large organizations in particular, which have largely lost their external competitors, encourage a nondestructive sort of sporting competition among their internal units for the sake of the gains in motivation it brings. Perhaps it is not too crude a simplification of economic evolution to suggest that as the one type of competition in business runs its course, the other which emphasizes competition within, rather than between, organizations may take its place. A significant distinction is made by farmers between regular kinds of work known as chores and the work that different from day to day. The latter kind is for many farmers very close to play, just as the work of some professions gives such scope and variety to the expression of capacities that they continue to be absorbing. It is evident that the skilled practitioner of every kind of play can change from amateur to professional status, and that many people have found their vocations by this route. Happy is the person who can make one’s living by getting paid for what one loves to do. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
In other kind of play is the shift from amateur to professional status of such broad social significance as in crafts, because in the possibility of conducting industry as the crafts are conducted lies—as thinkers like William Morris foresaw long ago—the means of restoring joy to work, and of ending the alienation from work which plagues so many contemporary occupations. The democratic revolution which has been abolishing the division of society into leisure and working classes may be completed when work and play, vocation and avocation, are merged in economic activity itself. This extreme polarization in conceptual analysis may therefore frustrate the full understanding of their interrelation. With minor exceptions, state socialism led not to affluence, equality, and freedom, but to a one-party political system, a massive bureaucracy, heavy-handed secret police, government control of the media, secrecy and the repression of intellectual and artistic freedom. Setting aside the oceans of spurting blood needed to prop it up, a close look at this system reveals that every one of these elements is not just a way of organizing people but also—and more profoundly—a particular way of organizing, channeling and controlling knowledge. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
A one-party political system is designed to control political communication. Since no other party exists, it restricts the diversity of political information flowing through the society, blocking feedback and thus blinding those in power to the full complexity of their problems. With very narrowly defined information flowing upward through the approved channel and commands directed downward, it becomes very difficult for the system to detect errors and correct them. In fact, top-down control in the socialist countries was based increasingly on lies and misinformation since reporting bad news up the line was often risky. The decision to run a one-party system is a decision, above all, about knowledge. The overpowering bureaucracy that socialism created in every sphere of life was also a knowledge-restricting device, forcing knowledge into pre-defined compartments of cubbyholes and restricting communication to “official channels,” whole delegitimating informal communication and organization. The secret police apparatus, state control of the media, the intimidation of intellectuals and the repression of artistic freedom all represent further attempts to limit and control information flows. In fact, behind each of these elements we find a single obsolete assumption about knowledge: the arrogant belief that those in command—whether of the party or of the state—should decide what others should know. These features of all the state socialist nations guaranteed economic stupidity and derived from the concept of the precybernetic machine as applied to society and life itself. Second Wave machines for the most part operated without any feedback. Plug in the power, start the motor, and they run irrespective of what is happening in the outside environment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Third Wave machines, by contrast, are intelligent. They have sensors that such in information from the environment, detect changes and adapt the operation of the machine accordingly. They are self-regulating. The technological difference is revolutionary. However, Marxist theoreticians remained stuck in the Second Wave past, as even their language suggests. Thus for Marxian socialists the class struggle was the “locomotive of history.” A key task was to capture the “state machine.” And society itself, being machine-like, could be preset to deliver abundance and freedom. Mr. Lenin, on capturing control of Russia in 1917, became the supreme mechanic. A brilliant intellectual, Mr. Lenin understood the importance of ideas. However, for him, symbolic production—the mind itself—could be programmed. Mr. Marx wrote of freedom, but Mr. Lenin, on taking power, undertook to engineer knowledge. Thus he insisted that all art, culture, science, journalism and symbolic activity in general be placed at the service of a master plan for society. In time each branch of learning would be neatly organized into an “academy” with fixed bureaucratic departments and ranks all subject to party and state control. “Cultural workers” would be employed by institutions controlled by a Ministry of Culture. Publishing and broadcasting would be monopolies of the state. Knowledge, in effect, would be made part of the state machine. This constipated approach to knowledge blocked economic development even in intermediate, smokestack economies; it is diametrically opposed to the principles needed for economic advancement in the age of the computer. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
In international economic affairs, the most controversial component of the indigenous innovation policy is China’s government procedure system. According to the government organizations, with a few exceptions, have to be limited to domestically made products. In May 2007, “Measures for Administration of Government Procurement Budgets for Indigenous Innovation Products” prescribed governments at all levels to compile indigenous innovation procurement plans. In December of the same years, the Ministry of Finance issues “Measures for the Administration of Government Procurement of Imported Products.” To purchase imported goods, government entities were obliged to get an approval from a board of experts. Among foreign suppliers, they were recommended to favour those who transfer technologies and train Chinese personnel. Next, in November 2009, the “Circular on Carrying Out the Work on Accreditation of National Indigenous Innovation Products” announced the creation of a new national level catalog of high-tech indigenous innovation products (in the areas of computers and communication, office equipment, software, energy devices, and so on) that were eligible for preferential treatment in government procurement. An indigenous innovation product was defined as the one that has intellectual property rights (IPR) owned by a Chinese company and a commercial trademark initially registered inside China. A month later the government produced a catalog of 240 types of equipment whose production by domestic companies would be encouraged in order to upgrade the country’s manufacturing base. Along with a priority status as indigenous innovation products suppliers, their makers were promised tax incentives and R&D subsidies. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Western government procurement system as it effectively deprived foreign companies of the access to this very substantial augment of the Chinese market. In April 2010, the Circular was reversed. The requirements about IPR ownership by a Chinese company and initial registration of the trademark in China were dropped. Also, the Chinese side proclaimed that preferential treatment of and incentives for procedures of indigenous innovation products were fully applicable to foreign-owned companies operating in China. The government procurement system was modified to prioritize domestically designed and manufactured goods (meaning that the value created inside China exceeds a certain percentage of the total value—normally 50 percent) including those designed and manufactured by foreign-invested firms. From the very start of the market reforms, China’s message to foreign companies has been “Better produce in China than export to China.” This time it added a new message of similar character: “Better innovate in China (and share your technologies) than in your home country or anywhere else.” It looked almost like an ultimatum: Unless you innovate and produce inside China you will not be allowed to sell to the government. The West protested. In January 2011, President Hu Jintao promised President Obama to cancel the rule requiring foreign companies to design and manufacture inside the country the products they wanted to sell to Chinese government entities. In May the same year, at the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue it was reportedly confirmed that the Chinese government would not buy indigenous innovation products on a preferential basis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
However, at the time of writing Western businessmen working in China are still complaining that procurement practices have not changed and provincial authorities appear or pretend to have heard nothing about the promises made by the central government. It is just a familiar bureaucratic muddle and incoherence or a new way of pursuing the old policy? At this point it is still to early to give an accurate answer. However, there is little doubt that China will continue to press foreign companies hard not only to bring in advanced technologies and products, but also, more and more, to develop them within its borders—even though they are already doing it at a rapidly growing scale on their own initiative. Given the advantages of direct reciprocity when it comes to sustaining cooperation, we should expect that traders will try to sustain good bilateral relationships, and that is indeed the case. For instance, when we surveyed firms in the transition economy of Romania, and gave weighted scores to the importance these respondents attached to various mechanisms that support their transactions, almost 56 percent of the weight was on bilateral mechanisms (“personal relationships and trust,” and “relying on each other’s own incentives”). However, in many economic situations, each member of a group plays the dilemma game against different others at different ties. For example, a seller may meet different buyers at different times, and any one buyer of a durable good does not meet the same seller at all frequently. Thus almost half of the weight in our survey went to non-bilateral mechanisms, and in turn half of that was on the kinds of non-state mechanisms that are the focus of this essay (third-party social or business relationships” and “using private dispute-resolution services”). #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Psychopathological offenders can also counterfeit conduct disorder, by causing some apparent manifestation of the psychopathological nature in one’s life. Mature believers should be able to tell whether such a manifestation really is conduct disorder from the old nature or a manifestation from psychopathological offenders. The purpose in the latter case is to get the self-actualized to take what comes from them as from oneself, for whatever is accepted from the psychopathological offenders gives them power. When a self-actualized individuals knows the cross and one’s position of death to conduct disorder, and one’s will and practice rejects unflinchingly all known conduct disorder, if a “manifestation” of personal conduct disorder takes place one should at once take a position of neutrality to it until one know the source. If one calls it conduct disorder from oneself when it is not, one believes a lie just as much as in any other way; and if one “confesses” conduct disorder that did not come from oneself, one brings the power of the enemy upon one—power to drive one into the conduct disorder which one has confessed as one’s own. Many believers are thus held down by supposed “besetting conduct disorder” which they believe is theirs, and which no “confessing to the ultimate concern” removes, but from which they would find liberty if they attributed them to their right cause. There is no danger of “minimizing conduct disorder” in the recognition of these facts, because, in either case, the self-actualized desires to be rid of the conduct disorder or one would not trouble oneself about it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
We have developed a positive doctrine of God as the ground and power of being, a God whose sustaining and vitalizing activity constantly touches every corner of the Universe and penetrates to the deepest level of every creature, its very being. With this positive conception we replace the divinity of the supranaturalists and deists, a God so remote from the World that He is irrelevant once His creative push has set the wheels of time in motion. God is not at the farther fringe of our Universe as the last, desperate answer when the natural sources of knowledge have run dry for people. The danger is that, as man’s circle of knowledge widens, God recedes father and father from the center of one’s life. For example, is it not true that, in the minds of most people, evolution dispenses with, or greatly diminishes, God’s role in the creation of man? A theology for an adult World places God at the hub of human activity as the wellspring of man’s strength, love, accomplishments, and hopes, instead of establishing Him as an oracle that sends answers from the darkness beyond the frontier of science. By this ontological approach, we bring God into the heart of the cosmos, for there is nothing closer to beings, nothing more fundamental than the structure of being and its ground. In more human terms, the interplay of anxiety (non-being) and courage (being) is the very stuff of life. Love, power, and justice—the profoundest beneficial motivations of human behaviour—are rooted in God as being-itself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The divine power is a thoroughly biblical doctrine, and I believe in God the Father almighty. In our age of power—nuclear, electronic, ballistic, to cite examples only of physical power—the God who is power-itself is especially apropos. By finding God at the depth of life and not at its fringes, we are paying the way for our close union of religion and culture. However, this is possible only if creation is essentially good, it there is no independent negative power which escapes the divine dominion. Non-being is a dialectical notion, that is, it is dependent upon being and helps to explain the positive power of being and the negative weakness of finite beings, but it is not a self-sufficient evil power. While, admittedly, there may be obscurities, perhaps even deficiencies, in this principle, but the divine and demonic are two aspects of the same creative surge from the abyss of being. The difference is that, in the demonic, the destructive aspect predominates over the creative, while, in the divine, creativity controls the destructive tendency. However, even in the latter cause destructivity is not entirely absent, for the old form has to be broken and cast off so that the new creation can come to be. Consequently, it is hard to see how the divine and the demonic constitute a dualism in the pejorative sense any more than do being and nonbeing. A symbol, then, is a door which opens into a religious experience and which opens out to communicate it. In both cases the pivotal hinge is analogy, the participation of the symbol in the ground of being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
However, the symbol primarily mediates and communicates the experience of God, not conceptual knowledge about him. Symbols yield knowledge of God only in the biblical sense of knowledge, that is, an existential relationship which enkindle the fire of love. When theology comes along with its conceptual, rational apparatus, its task is to show the relevance of the Christian symbols to the human situation, not to discover propositions which contain “revealed knowledge.” It is evident that the center of our symbolism is the religious experience of ultimacy. The “point” of immediate awareness of the unconditional which is empty but unconditionally certain; and the “breadth” of a concrete concern which is full of content but has the conditional certainty of venturing faith. Theology deals with the second element, while presupposing the first and measuring every theological statement by the standard of the ultimacy of the ultimate concern. Studying and wandering, thinking and enduring, learning and suffering, fill long periods of time. Thinking is as characteristic a trait of the Christians as suffering, or, to be more exact, thinking rendered suffering possible For it was our thinkers who prevented the wandering nation, this true “wandering Christian” from sinking to the level of brutalized vagrants, or vagabonds. The Word of God is compared to water, it cleanses man from what is debasing in life. The Word of God is compared to spirits, time cannot render it useless; yea, time increases its power. The Word of God is compared to oil, it mixes not with other elements but preserves its own distinctiveness. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Rancho Cordova, CA | low $600s
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Models now open at Magnolia Station! Located at the corner of Rancho Cordova Parkway and Douglas Road, residents of Cresleigh Ranch will benefit from a brand new neighborhood with convenient access to the new Raley’s Shopping Center, Sunrise Boulevard, and much more!
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The Harshest Feasible Punishment Best Deters Deviating Actions
The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the political-line,–the relation of Republicans to Democrats in America. It is such a problem that it could cause a civil war. As we know, official misconduct is the real cause of the conflict. No sooner had Democratic armies touch office, this old question, newly guised, sprang from the Earth,–What shall be done with the Constitution of the United States of America? Democratic rules seemed but to broad and intensify the difficulties of enforcing law and order and honouring God. Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, companionship, which are common to the humans, those drives which make for the differences in humans’ characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most unattractive inclinations of human beings is not part of a fixed and biologically given huma nature, but result from the social process which creates humans. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function—although it has that too—but it has also a creative function. Humans’ nature, one’s passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, humans themselves are the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history. Men, thin, with gray and tufted hair; women, with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,–a horde of starving people without homes, helpless, and worried are all in dark distress due to a loss of representation and displacement of Constitution rights. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Americans have been accepting encroachments on established liberties, and as a result, much of their government no longer represents American citizens. American taxpayers and those who used to pay taxes are going without necessities because much of their representation no longer serves the people. Millions of men and women made the greatest sacrifice to protect their liberties, but when they need their government, sports complexes, entertainment centers, decorative flowers hanging from street lights, and renovation of state buildings take precedence over affordable housing. Our core purpose should remain clear: We must resolve that it is an essential part of winning the war on our freedoms to insist that we keep intact the civil liberties and other freedoms that we have gained over the past 247 years. The stream of fugitives have swelled to a flood in public office and private corporations, and anxious Americans keep inquiring: “How will we survive? Major crimes are happening everywhere.” Petitions have come to President Biden from distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a comprehensive and unified plan for dealing with the abolishment of law and order and sanity in the United States of America. The American people want the execution of measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and humanly aiding, the passage of laws to increase the budgets of law enforcement and reinstate their authority to keep our streets safe and allow for the safe removal of dangerous criminals. Also, city, state, federal and private employees would like to be emancipated from what seems like forced labour, as a result of inflations and declining wages. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
American farmers would also like a bill to establish protection for them, their owned and leased lands, and for subsidies to help the produce more meat, poultry and produce so we once again can feed our own people and export our products to other nations, which will help bring America back to being a creditor nation. This is essentially a wake-up call for the American people. The American people want the government to be their friend again. The United States of American became the World’s largest debtor country in 1985. This was because America was seen as this beacon on the hill. The land of prosperity. Instead of lending other nations money, America started giving away billions of dollars, until it put them in debt. This is why people are calling on the government to find ways to balance the budget through other ways than raising taxes because the higher taxes become, the less money people have to spend and the less corporations will invest in America. It is recommended that, perhaps, America should change its laws to allow the government to have some competition with private businesses. For example, California Highway Patrol (CHP) often deals with traffic accidents and other incidents where tow trucks are needed. If the CHP dispatch center had their own tow truck division, they could send the proper equipment to the scene and have the roads cleared much faster. The revenues they earned could be reinvested into their budget, which would allow for them to operate more efficiently. Many people would also like the government to sponsor farms so we can keep our heartland strong before all of our land is used up on roads, highways, and for urban and suburban communities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
America also needs to return to being a country of family values. Men are now becoming emasculated by a peculiarly complete systems of degradation, in effort to destroy the nuclear family. In the midst of this war on the Christian family, people are becoming embittered that they are losing their representation and poor examples are being set for their children by offices as high as the president of the United States of America, and as low as the local news media. This is a curious mess we are looking upon: little despotisms, communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized charity, unorganized almsgiving, taught gender confusion–all reeling on under the guise of helping equality, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of riots and the cursing and silence of angry human beings. This is all a violation of simple and good faith, as human rights, virtues, morals and responsibilities are being discharged from the traditional American way of life, as psychopathological offenders pretend to promote equality and the general welfare. Human beings are not only made by history—history is made by human beings. The solution of this seeming contradiction constitutes the field of social psychology. Its task is to show not only how passions, desires, anxieties change and develop as a result of the social process, but also how humans’ energies thus shaped into specific forms in their turn become productive forces, molding the social process. We can accept alternative lifestyles without forcing them on to our children. It is our goal as American people, however, to promote God’s idea of a nation and family so that future generations will follow in our footsteps and the human family will naturally live on. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The concept of a united family that lives and progresses forever is at the core of the American doctrine. Within families led by a father and a mother, children develop virtues such as love, trust, loyalty, cooperation and service. Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children. The purpose of family is to create a safe, stable, and loving environment where a husband and wife can support and strengthen each other where children and learn, grow, and develop. God organizes us into families so we can experience happiness and learn patience and selflessness. These traits help us become more like God and prepare us to live happily as families throughout eternity. Family life is perhaps most significant for children. It is in the home that children learn to love others, show compassion, build trust, and express loyalty. The family is also a crucial building block of society. Strong marriages and families help maintain a prosperous society as they contribute hardworking and well-educated individuals. Because Christians believe that families are forever, they seek to identify generations of relatives through family history work. By discovering where your family came from, who your ancestor were, and what motivated them, you learn about your core family values, and you build a bridge connecting you to your ancestors. A family’s importance extends beyond mortal life. We highly value the promise that families can be together forever. Family structure began with God. God is your Heavenly Father, and you are His child. You live with your family now, and we believe that even after you and your family members pass on, you can live together again in Heaven. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
This is possible through God’s power and through eternal marriages performed in temples. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, unlike civil marriages performed in churches and courthouses that last “until death to you part,” temple marriages unite a husband and wife forever. A long as they are faithful to the promises they make with each other and with God, their children can be with them forever, too. Having strong families requires effort, both from parents and children. Fathers and mothers must work together closely to raise their children. They should act as equal partners while fulfilling the many different roles that come with parenthood. The success of a family depends on that partnership. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. Other things, such as exotic vacations, big homes, and money are not necessarily the basis of family happiness. Solid, happy families result when family members treat each other with the kind of love and respect that Jesus Christ showed. In “counterfeiting” the believer, the psychopathological spirit gives one exaggerated views, almost visions, of one’s own personality: one is “wonderfully gifted,” and therefore becomes puffed up; one is “miserably incapable,” and so is in despair; one is “amazingly clever,” and thus undertakes what one cannot do; one is “helpless,” “hopeless,” “too forward” or “too backward”—in brief, a countless number of false pictures of oneself are presented to the mind of the human when once the lying spirit has gained a footing in one’s imagination. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Or this falsifying may take another form. So subtle is the identity of the deceived spirit with a believer’s individuality that only others will see what may be described as a “spurious personality.” Sometimes the person appears to be “full of pride” when the inner human is sincerely humble. In fact, the whole outer appearance of the human in manner, voice, actions, words, is often quite contrary to one’s true character, and so one wonders why “others misunderstand,” misjudge and criticize. Some believers, of course, will go on happily satisfied with what they themselves know of their own inner motives and heart life—oblivious of this manifestation of the spurious self which others behold, and pity or condemn. The spurious personality caused by the psychopathological offenders can also be in a beautiful form, in order to attract or mislead others in various ways, all unwitting to the person or to the victim. This is sometimes described as “unaccountable infatuation,” but if it was recognized as the work of evil spirits, refused and resisted, the “infatuation” would pass away. It is so wholly apart from the action of the will in the persons concerned that the work of psychopathological offenders is clearly to be recognized, especially when the supposed “infatuation” follows supernatural experiences. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Many critics conclude that God as being-itself leaves no room for a personal God in any sense, despite our protestations to the contrary. Some claim that we suffer from ontological schizophrenia, being pulled in two opposite directions, toward the personal God of the Bible and toward the impersonal God of ontology. However, to all these critics, we do preserve the ultimacy of a personal encounter between God and humans. The proof is the simple fact of ultimate concern. No one can be ultimately concerned about something less than a person, but, at the same time, God is more than a person He is the ground and abyss of everything personal. Perhaps the reason why our doctrine has not been more readily accepted is that people do not seem to understand how an encounter with more than a person is still a personal encounter. It is like trying to sell a white car to a customer who wants a multicoloured car by telling him or her that white includes all the colours and they can all be derived from it. We do not like to designate God as a person because it seems to make Him a being next to other beings—and, with that step, one plunges over the precipice into theism and supranaturalism. We all have a need, want, and the basis for a personal God. God is a New Being, which appears in and overcomes existence. Grace is not completely beyond humans’ conscious life, uncreated grace as quasi-formal causal communication of God Himself shows a close connection between creation and the incarnation, the possibility of supernatural acts by the unjustified de facto situation that the state of pure nature does not exist, but that there is only a nature in a supernatural order. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
There are theories in behaviouristic psychology that have an assumption that human nature has no dynamism of its own and that psychological changes are to be understood in terms of the development of new “habits” as an adaptation to new cultural patterns. These theories, though speaking of the psychological factor, at the same time reduce it to a shadow of cultural patterns. Only a dynamic psychology, the foundations of which have been laid by Dr. Freud, can get further than paying lip service to the human factor. Though there is no fixed human nature, we cannot regard human nature as being infinitely malleable and able to adapt itself to any kind of conditions without developing a psychological dynamism of its own. Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology. It seems useful to differentiate between “static” and “dynamic” adaptation. By static adaptation we mean such an adaptation to patterns as leaves the whole character structure unchanged and implies only the adoption of a new habit. An example of this kind of adaptation is the change from the traditional Asian habit of eating with chopsticks to the typical Western habit of using a fork and knife. Many people who come to America, choose to adapt themselves to this new pattern, but this adaptation in itself may have little effect on one’s personality; it does not necessarily arose new drives or character traits. However, while we were in China, we did acquire the habit of eating pizza with a fork and knife. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
By dynamic adaptation we refer to the kind of adaptation that occurs, for example, when a boy submits to the command of his strict and threatening father—being too much afraid of him to do otherwise—and becomes a “good” boy. While he adapts himself to the necessities of the situation, something happens to him. He may develop an intense hostility against his father, which he represses, since it would be too dangerous to express it or even to be aware of it. This repressed hostility, however, though not manifest, is a dynamic factor in his character. It may create new anxiety and thus lead to still deeper submission; it may set up a vague defiance, directed against no one in particular but rather toward life in general. While here, too, as in the first case, an individual adapts himself to certain external circumstances, this kind of adaptation creates something new in him, arouses new drives and new anxieties. Every neurosis is an example of this dynamic adaptation; it is essentially an adaptation to such external conditions (particularly those of early childhood) as are in themselves irrational and, generally speaking, unfavourable to the growth and development of the child. Similarly, such sociopsychological phenomena as are comparable to neurotic phenomena (why they should not be called neurotic will be discussed later), like the presence of strong destructive or sadistic impulses in social groups, offer an example of dynamic adaptation to social conditions that are irrational and harmful to the development of humans. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Besides the question of what kind of adaptation occurs, other questions need to be answered: What is it that forces man to adapt himself to almost any conceivable condition of life, and what are the limits of his adaptability? Well, certain sectors in a humans’ nature are more flexible and adaptable than others. Those striving and character traits by which men differ from each other show a great amount of elasticity and malleability: love, destructiveness, sadism, the tendency to submit, the lust for power, detachment, the desire for self-aggrandizement, the passion for thrift, the enjoyment of sensual pleasure, and the fear of sensuality. These and many other strivings and fears to be found in humans develop as a reaction to certain life conditions. They are not particularly flexible, for once they have become part of a person’s character, they do not easily disappear or change into some other drive. However, they are flexible in the sense that individuals, particularly in their childhood, develop the one or other need according to the whole mode of life they find themselves in. None of these needs is fixed and rigid as if it were an innate part of human nature which develops and has to be satisfied under all circumstances. In contrast to those needs, there are others which are an indispensable part of human nature and imperatively need satisfaction, namely, those needs that are rooted in the physiological organization of humans, like hunger, thirst, the need for sleep, and so on. For each of those needs there exists a certain threshold beyond which lack of satisfaction is unbearable, and when this threshold is transcended the tendency to satisfy the need assumes the quality of an all-powerful striving. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
All these physiologically conditioned needs are a notion of a need for self-preservation. This need for self-preservation is that part of human nature which needs satisfaction under all circumstances and therefore forms the primary motive of human behaviour. Man must eat, drink, sleep, protect himself against enemies, and so forth. In order to do all this he must work and produce. “Work,” however, is nothing general or abstract. Work is always concrete work, that is, a specific kind of work in a specific kind of economic system. A person may work as a slave in a feudal system, as a peasant in an Indian pueblo, as an independent businessman in capitalistic society, as a salesgirl in a posh art gallery, as a worker on the endless belt of a big factory. These different kinds of work require entirely different personality traits and make for different kinds of relatedness to others. When men is born, the stage is set for him. He has to eat and drink, and therefore he has to work; and this means he has to work under the particular conditions and in the ways that are determined for him by the kind of society into which he is born. Both factors, his need to live and the social system, in principle are unalterable by him as an individual, and they are the factors which determine the development of those other traits that show greater plasticity. Thus the mode of life, as it is determined for the individual by the peculiarity of an economic system, becomes the primary factor in determining his whole character structure, because the imperative need for self-preservation forces him to accept the conditions under which he has to live. This does not mean that he cannot try, together with others, to effect certain economic and political changes; but primarily his personality is molded by the particular mode of life, as he has already been confronted with it as a child through the medium of the family, which represents all the features that are typical of a particular society or class. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
In only a very limited sense is it true to speak of a transfer of recreational functions from the family to other institutions; most of such activity simply did not occur previously. And since this is a new situation that has only existed previously in embryo, we are ill stocked with generalizations for describing and explaining its character. As the mahogany tree cannot be deduced from the acorn, earlier thinkers, though familiar with limited forms of play, could not have discussed its modern growth and differentiation. If current students have not yet made it the subject of substantial research, perhaps the degree of its novelty excuses them. However, social scientists can no longer scorn its importance. There is a wide range of activities which are primarily physical play. These we shall group as sports, and under this rubric include all those activities which simply explore and exercise the faculties and capabilities of the body, for motion, function, or sensation. They may utilize physical instruments, but not for the sake of manipulating and changing the environment. The range of physical play could also be classified in terms of elaboration from the simple individual exercise of some organ of the body through increasing degrees of complexity until it reaches the institutional size of the World Series. The facets in this sequence o elaboration of forms; number of persons involved; increase of skill, strength, speed, endurance, accuracy, dexterity, facilities, competition; rules; chance; formation of teams; formation of permanent fostering organizations; spectators; adoption of the sport by regular publics, and the season for its play becoming recognized in the calendar of the community. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Equipped with a somewhat more precise analysis than this brief schema, it is more than possible that someone may sit down and invent an ideal sport which could overnight become more popular than baseball. Baseball itself was just such an invention; it was one of the first team games to become popular in this country, which for its first few centuries possessed very few team games. Social historians could make much, in terms of cultural change, out of the shift in interest late in the last century from contests to games. Contests and games both conspicuously include the element of competition, but whereas the contest emphasizes displays of strength and skill, the game includes a large mixture of chance. Matching maximizes this tension of skill and chance, and so the game can be played again immediately. The contest if repeated at once would turn out exactly as before, though of course there are marginal forces like boxing, which are neither clearly a game nor a contest. In the evolution of sports, a step beyond the team game might be said to occur with professionalization, and its arduous practice, coaching, and even development of abstract theory. Whether individual or group, simple exercise or elaborate game, a competitive or concerned effort, physical play in its various forms creates the opportunity for its participants to explore and develop the powers of their bodies in compensatory, and normally salutary ways, beyond those permitted or called for by routine physical work. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The drama of success and failure, the prestige of demonstrated superiority, even the delights of graceful or dexterous movement, can be shared by spectators, though only the participants share in the enhancement of health and physical competence. Every sport recapitulates and idealizes the everyday bodily experiences. However, in evaluating the ultimate contribution of recreational institutions to interpersonal competence, it is vital to note how physical sports can foster other elements of competence besides health. The vicarious feature of all kinds of play is visible here on closer look. Now, we move on to socialism’s collusion with the future. The dramatic death of state socialism in Eastern Europe and its bloody anguish from Bucharest to Baku to Beijing did not happen by accident. Socialism collided with the future. Socialist regimes did not collapse because of CIA plots, capitalist encirclement or economic strangulation from outside. Eastern European communist governments toppled domino-fashion as soon as Moscow sent the message that it would no longer use troops to protect them from their own people. However, the crisis of socialism as a system in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere was far more deeply based. Just as Mr. Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the mid-twentieth century smashed Moscow’s control of the mind in the countries it ruled or held captive. Mind workers were typically dismissed as “nonproductive” by Marxist economists (and many classical economists as well). Yet it is these supposedly nonproductive workers who, perhaps more than any other, have given Western economics a tremendous shot of adrenalines since the mid-fifties. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Today, even with all their supposed “contradictions” unresolved, the high-tech capitalist nations have swept far ahead of the rest of the World in economic terms. It was computer-based capitalism, not smokestack socialism, that made what Marxists call a “qualitative leap” forward. With the real revolution spreading in the high-tech nations, the socialist nations had become, in effect, a deeply reactionary bloc led by elderly men imbued with nineteenth-century theology. Mikhail Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to recognize this historic fact. In a 1989 speech, some thirty years after the new system of wealth creation began to appear in the United States of America, Mr. Gorbachev declared, “We were nearly one of the last to realize that in the age of information science the most expensive asset is knowledge.” Mr. Marx himself had given the classic definition of revolutionary moment. It came, he said, when the “social relations of production” (meaning the nature of ownership and control) prevent further development of the “means of production” (roughly speaking, the technology). That formula perfectly described the socialist World crisis. Just as feudal “social relations” once hindered industrial development, now socialists “social relations” made it all but impossible for socialist countries to take advantage of the new wealth-creation system based on computers, communication and, above all, on open information. In fact, the central failure of the great state socialist experiment of the twentieth century lay in its obsolete ideas about knowledge. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The indigenous innovation policy is officially defined as the one enhancing original innovation through co-innovation and re-innovation based on the assimilation of the imported technologies. The idea itself, by and large, looks quite relevant. If you want to become an innovator yourself, developing original technologies and products, you should first of all learn what has been achieved by your predecessors, and it would be logical to start with innovating together with them or adding new elements or features to their inventions. It helps to accumulate knowledge and develop skills necessary to proceed to your own original research and development. This is the way it is was done by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and others who followed America and Europe on the innovation path. The problem, however, is that China seeks to achieve this basically relevant goal using a Chinese cocktail of policies that create unequal conditions for competition between domestic and foreign firms, effectively help the former to steal overseas technologies against their will. The Patent Law makes it possible for Chinese firms to obtain patents for odds and ends which are quickly issues and without in-depth examination. They serve as a tool to retaliate against overseas intellectual property rights (IPR) lawsuits. Testing and approval procedures for imported products have been deliberately made complicated and time-consuming in order to erect import barriers on the one hand and to learn foreign designs and production process on the other. The Anti-Monopoly Law can be used against foreign companies refusing to disclose their technologies and know-how. For instance, the list of the “abuses” of the law by MNCs included Cisco’s refusal to license its Internet protocol (IP) to Chinese companies that wanted to connect to its network. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Direct reciprocity is the case most conducive to resolving prisoners’ dilemmas. In it, the same two (or more) players repeatedly play the dilemma game. Evidence from cases studies in economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, and biology, and game-theoretic analysis, have given us a good understanding of the mechanisms for accomplishing good outcomes, and the conditions under which they succeed. All successful mechanisms, in theory as well as in practice, work by creating a future cost to the individual of taking an action that brings one an immediate personal benefit. The nature and the size of the cost can vary widely across different situations; the common requirement is that the future cost should outweigh the immediate benefit in the individual’s own calculation based on one’s own preferences, whether for material things, social standing, internal guilt, or whatever. Theory and cause studies agree on several of the desiderata for successful resolution of prisoners’ dilemmas by direct reciprocity. First and foremost, the players should have sufficient regard for the future. If the payoffs are monetary, this requires a low interest rate at which the future is discounted. If the payoffs are subjective, it requires the players to be more patient. However, an even more potent force that reduces the importance of the future in the players’ minds is uncertainty about continuation of the relationship. Therefore successful resolution of multi-person dilemmas, like the ones in most case studies, requires a stable group: members should not be able to exist after deviating from the cooperative action, and newcomers who are not part of the agreement should not be able to enter. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Second, any deviation should be detected quickly and accurately, and in multi-person dilemmas, the news of deviation by one member should be transmitted quickly and accurately to all. Then the prescribed punishment can be meted out to the miscreant equally quickly and accurately. The speed is important: if punishment may be unleashed in error even if one has not deviated, then the deterrent effect is lessened. Third, in multi-person dilemmas, the news of deviation by one member should be transmitted quickly and accurately to all. Then the prescribed punishment can be meted out to the miscreant equally quickly and accurately. The speed is important: otherwise the punishment would become more distant in time and get discounted more heavily in a potential miscreant’s calculation. The accuracy is also important: if punishment may be unleashed in error even if one has not deviated, then the deterrent effect is lessened. Third, in multi-person dilemmas, participation in the collective action of punishing a miscreant is sometimes individually costly; this turns the punishment process into another prisoner’s dilemma game requiring its own resolution. In the smaller-scale common property resources (CPR) [where] individuals repeatedly communicate and interact with one another in a localized physical setting,…[they] learn whom to trust,…[and] develop shared norms and patterns of reciprocity. The general method is to make contingent commitments to follow rules that define a set of appropriators who are authorized to use a CPR, relate to the specific attributes of the CPR and the community, are designed, at least in part, by local appropriators, are monitored by individuals accountable to local appropriators, and are sanctioned using graduated punishments. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The first item in the list pertains to the need for a stable group, and items 2-4 pertain to the speed and accuracy of detection any cheating and spread of the information around the group. The emphasis on the importance of local knowledge and information networks is noteworthy. Theory and case studies are agreed on most of these points, with an important exception. In the theory of repeated games, punishments are usually drastic and long lasting, like the grim-trigger strategies. The argument is that the harshest feasible punishment best deters deviating actions, and therefore sustain an equilibrium with the most cooperative outcome. In reality, however, graduated punishments fare better. That is why God in the Old Testament was so much. Look how society has fallen without the God of the Old Testament. The intuition is that one player may inflict occasional harm on others through inattention or miscalculation rather than deliberate deviation. Then a friendly notification, and an opportunity to make restitution, will remedy the situation without triggering the collapse of mutually beneficial future compliance with the tacit agreement. Only if the deviation persists should it be interpreted as deliberate and lead to harsher punishment. While some models of repeated games with imperfect monitoring, can be interpreted as suggesting graduated punishment, to my knowledge there is no explicit treatment of this in the theoretical literate. Some of this literature is also restricted in its practical applicability, because it focuses on the limiting case where the players are extremely patient (the so-called folk theorem). #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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First World War was regarded by many as the final struggle and its conclusion the ultimate victory for freedom. Existing democracies appeared strengthened, and new ones replaced old monarchies. However, only a few years elapsed before new systems emerged which denied everything that men believed they had won in centuries of struggle. For the essence of these new systems, which effectively took command of man’s entire social and personal life, was the submission of all but a handful of men to an authority over which they had no control. Disappointment became all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded. The holocaust of war, the terror of communist, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the American people bewildered with no new watch-word beyond the old cry for freedom. Many found comfort in the thought that the victory of the authoritarian system was due to the madness of a few individuals and that their madness would lead to their downfall in due time. Others smugly believed that the Italian people, or the Germans, were lacking in a sufficiently long period of training in democracy, and that therefore one could wait complacently until they had reached the political maturity of the Western democracies. Another common illusion, perhaps the most dangerous of all, was that dictators had gained power over the vast apparatus of the state through nothing but cunning and trickery, that they and their satellites rules merely by sheer force; that the whole population was only the will-less object of betrayal and terror. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In these years that have elapsed since, the fallacy of these arguments has become apparent. We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for. We also recognize that the crisis of democracy is not a peculiarly Italian or German problem, but one confronting every modern state. Nor does it matter which symbols the enemies of human freedom choose: freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism than that outright Fascism. This truth has been forcefully formulated by John Dewey that I express the thought in his words: “The serious threat to our democracy,” he says, “is not the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon the Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here—within ourselves and out institutions.” If we want to fight Fascism, we must understand it. Wishful thinking will not help us. And reciting optimistic formulae will prove to be as inadequate and useless as fat free mayonnaise on a double bacon cheese burger. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
In addition to the problem of the economic and social conditions which have given rise to Fascism, there is a human problem which needs to be understood. It is the purpose of in the character structure of modern man, which made him want to give up freedom in Fascist countries and which so widely prevail in millions of our own people. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, and freedom was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the American youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those somber forests of one’s striving one’s own soul rose before one, and one saw oneself,–darkly as through a veil; and yet one saw in oneself some faint revelation of one’s power, of one’s mission. One began to have a dim feeling that, to attain one’s place in the World, one must be oneself, and not another. For the first time, Americans sought to analyze the burden they bore upon their backs, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind the name of a developed nation problem. They felt their poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, without tools, or savings, people had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbours. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
To be poor person is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. These outstanding questions that arise when we look at the human aspect of freedom, the longing for submission, and the lust for power: What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something inherent in human nature? It is an identical experience regardless of what kind of culture a person lives in, or it is something different according to the degree of the individualism reached in a particular society? Is freedom only the absence of external pressure or is it also the presence of something—and if so, of what? What are the social and economic factors in society that make for the striving for freedom? Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat? The facing of so vast a prejudice cannot but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came born upon the four winds: Lo! We are diseased and dying, cried the hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we never progress? And the fake news media echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for Americans? Away with the Republican ballot, by force or fraud,–and behold the suicide of the American race! Nevertheless, out of the evil is coming something of good,–the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Americans’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Analysis of the human aspect of freedom and of authoritarianism forces us to consider a general problem, namely, that of the role which psychological factors play as active forces in the social process; and this eventually leads to the problem of the interaction of psychological, economic, and ideological factors in the social process. Any attempt to understand the attraction which Fascism exercises upon great nations compels us to recognize the role of psychological factors. For we are dealing here with a political system which, essentially, does not appeal to rational forces of self-interest, but which arouses and mobilizes diabolical force in man which we had believed to be nonexistent, or at least to have died out long ago. The familiar picture of man in the last centuries was one of a rational being whose actions were determined by his self-interest and the ability to act according to it. Even writers like Mr. Hobbes, who recognized lust for power and hostility as driving force in man, explained the existence of these forces as a logical result of self-interest: since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present. However, Mr. Hobbes’s picture became outmoded. The more the middle class succeeded in breaking down the power of the former political or religious rulers, the more men succeeded in mastering nature, and the more millions of individuals became economically independent, the more did one come to believe in a rational World and in man as an essentially rational being. The dark and diabolical forces of man’s nature were relegated to the Middle Ages and to still earlier periods of history, and they were explained by lack of knowledge or by the cunning schemes of deceitful kings and priests. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
One looked back upon these periods as one might at a volcano which for a log time had ceased to be a menace. One felt secure and confident that the achievements of modern democracy had wiped out all sinister forces; the World looked bright and safe like well-lit streets of a modern city. Wars were supposed to be the last relics of older times and one needed just one more war to end war; economic crises were supposed to be accidents, even though these accidents continued to happen with a certain regularity. The bright ideals of the past,–physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,–all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,–all false? No, not that, but each alone was oversimple and incomplete,–the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the found imaginings of the other World which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or for yearnings for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak. Mr. Nietzsche had disturbed the complacent optimism of the nineteenth century; so had Mr. Marx in a different way. Another warning had come somewhat later from Dr. Freud. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
To be sure, Dr. Freud and most of his disciples had only a very beginning notion of what goes on in society, and most of his applications of psychology to social problems were misleading constructions; yet, by devoting his interest to the phenomena of individual emotional and mental disturbances, he led us to the top of the volcan and made us look into the boiling crater. Dr. Freud went further than anybody before him in directing attention to the observation and analysis of the irrational and unconscious forces which determine parts of human behaviour. He and his followers in modern psychology not only uncovered the irrational and unconscious sector of man’s nature, the existence of which had been neglected by modern rationalism; he also showed that these irrational phenomena followed certain laws and therefore could be understood rationally. He taught us to understand the language of dreams and somatic symptoms as well as the irrationalities in human behaviour. He discovered that these irrationalities as well as the whole character structure of an individual were reactions to the influence exercised by the outside World and particularly by those occurring in early childhood. However, Dr. Freud was so imbued with the spirit of his culture that he could not go beyond certain limits which were set by it. These very limits became limitations for his understandings even of the sick individual; they handicapped his understand of the normal individual and of the irrational phenomena operating in social life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,–else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,–the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,–all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but all together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal what swims before the American people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the American, not in opposition to or contempt of others, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that someday, we may give all humans those characteristics we sadly lack. Dr. Freud accepted the traditional belief in a basic dichotomy between man and society, as well as the traditional doctrine of the evilness of human nature. Man, to him, is fundamentally antisocial. Society must domesticate him, must allow some direct satisfaction of biological—and hence, ineradicable—drives; but for the most part society must refine and adroitly check man’s basic impulses. In consequence of this suppression of natural impulses by society something miraculous happens: the suppressed drives turn into strivings that are culturally valuable and thus become the human basis for culture. Dr. Freud chose the word sublimation for this strange transformation from suppression into civilized behaviour. If the amount of suppression is greater than the capacity for sublimation, individuals become neurotic and it is necessary to allow the lessening of suppression. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Generally, however, there is a reverse relation between satisfaction of man’s drives and culture: the more suppression, the more culture (and the more danger of neurotic disturbances). The relation of the individual to society in Dr. Freud’s theory is essentially a static one: the individual remains virtually the same and becomes changed only in so far as society exercises greater pressure on his natural drives (and thus enforces more sublimation) or allows more satisfaction (and thus sacrifices culture). Like the so-called basic instincts of man which earlier psychologist accepted, Dr. Freud’s conception of human nature was essentially a reflection of the most important drives to be seen in modern man. For Dr. Freud, the individual of one’s culture represented “man,” and those passions and anxieties that are characteristic for man in modern society were looked upon as eternal forces rooted in the biological constitution of man. While we could give many illustrations of this point (as, for instance, the social basis for the hostility prevalent today in modern man, the Oedipus complex, the so-called castration complex in women), I want only to give one more illustration which is particularly important because it concerns the whole concept of man as a social being. Dr. Freud always considers the individual in his relations to others. These relations as Dr. Freud sees them, however, are similar to the economic relations to others which are characteristic of the individual in capitalist society. Each person works for oneself, individualistically, at one’s own risk, and not primarily in co-operation with others. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
However, one is not a Robinson Crusoe; one needs others, as customers, as employees, or as employers. One must buy and sell, give and take. The market whether it is the commodity or the labour market, regulates these relations. Thus the individual, primarily alone and self-sufficient, enters into economic relations with others as means to one end: to sell and to buy. Dr. Freud’s concept of human relations is essentially the same: the individual appears fully equipped with biologically given drives, which need to be satisfied. In order to satisfy them, the individual enters into relations with other “objects.” Other individuals thus are always a means to one’s end, the satisfaction of strivings which in themselves originate in the individual before one enters into contact with others. The field of human relations in Dr. Freud’s sense is similar to the market—it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end itself. Contrary to Dr. Freud’s view point, the key problem of psychology is that of the specific kind of relatedness of the individual towards the World and not that of the satisfaction or frustration of this or that instinctual need per se; furthermore, on the assumption that the relationship between man and society is not a static one. It Is not as if we had on the one hand an individual equipped by nature with certain drives, and on the other, society as something apart from one, either satisfying or frustrating these innate propensities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The purpose of institutions and mechanisms of economic governance is to induce individuals to take cooperative or honest actions that achieve and sustain mutually beneficial outcomes in their economic interactions, countering the temptation of each individual to take opportunistic or cheating actions that promote one’s interest at the expense of the aggregate good. Similar issues arise in other fields, most prominently in evolutionary biology. Dugatkin gives a fourfold classification of the approaches to cooperation: kin and family selection; direct reciprocity; selfish teamwork; and group altruism. The first of these is inherently biological. Each individual is genetically programmed to follow a specific behavioural strategy (phenotype), and natural selection favours the fitter genes, namely those that get higher reproductive payoff from the interactions over resources, mates, et cetera. However, that does not imply individually selfish behaviour. If a phenotype will engage in self-sacrifice to save n others when it shares a fraction f of the relevant genes with each of them, and f n > 1, then this strategy will work to the net benefit of the shared genes. The other three of Dugatkin’s pathways have more immediate economic relevance. Selfish teamwork arises in assurance games, where it is in the interest of each person to take the jointly desirable action if, but only if, the other do likewise. Such games have multiple equilibria, one where all take the jointly desirable action and another where none do. Then the players need a way to select the better of the two equilibria. For this, they must create common knowledge, or jointly held expectation, of the necessary actions, that is, they must make it a focal point. This is must easier than resolving a prisoner’s dilemma, where each person wants to take the selfish or deviating action even if all others are taking the jointly desirable or complaint action. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Enforcing contracts is of great importance these days. China is no longer just a global factory. It is also establishing its position as a global center of high-tech manufacturing and a global research lab, opening unique opportunities to combine advanced technologies and high quality of products with competitive costs. The transfer of advanced foreign technologies to China is intensifying by itself, driven by the and of the global market. However, the Chinese government wants to speed up the process and, most of all, to raise the innovative capability of Chinese domestic institutions and companies. This is the major motive behind the policy of the so-called indigenous innovation launched in 2006 which is causing a lot of controversy today. It is the National Medium and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology for 2006-202. Officially this policy was elevated to the same strategic levels as the openness and reform policy launched under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The task has been to turned China into a big technological power by 2020 and a global technology leader by 2050. The gross R&D expenditure has to be increased from 1.3 percent to 2.5 percent of GDP. The plan designates eight key technological fields where 27 breakthrough technologies have to be pursued: biotechnology, IT, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, advanced energy technology, marine technology, laser technology, and aerospace technology. The four major basic research programs are in protein science, nanotechnology, quantum physics, and developmental and reproductive science. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The core of the plan is 16 megaprojects supported by massive government, financing, in such areas as core electronic components, high-end chips, and basic software products; large-scale integrated circuits manufacturing equipment; advanced NC machinery; advanced nuclear reactions; breeding new varieties of genetically modified organisms; pharmaceutical innovation and development; and so on. The plan sets the goal of reducing overall reliance on foreign technologies to 30 percent from an estimated 60 percent in 2006. These are the type of goals America need to focus on, besides their green energy. The companies, institutions and people with a strong stake in the Third Wave economy have not yet fashioned a coherent counter-rationale. Scientists today are asking how systems behave in turbulence, how order evolves out of chaotic conditions and how developing systems leap to higher levels of diversity. Such questions are extremely pertinent to business and the economy. In a storm of takeovers, divestitures, reorganizations, bankruptcies, start-ups, joint ventures and internal reorganizations, the entire economy is taking on a new structure that is light-years more diverse, fast-changing and complex than the old smokestack economy. This “leap” to a higher level of diversity, speed and complexity requires a corresponding leap to higher, more sophisticated forms of integration. In turn, this demand radically higher levels of knowledge processing. The culture of industrialism rewards people who can break problems and processes down into smaller and smaller constituent parts. This disintegrative or analytic approach, when transferred to economics, led us to think of production as a series of disconnected steps. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The new model of production that springs from the super symbolic economy is dramatically different. Based on a systemic or integrative view, it sees production as increasingly simultaneous and synthesized. The parts of the process are not the whole, and they cannot be isolated from one another. We are in fact discovering that “production” neither begins nor ends in the factory. Thus, the latest models of economic production extend the process both upstream and downstream—forward into aftercare or “support” for the product even after it is sold, as in auto-repair warrantees or the support expected from the retailer when a persons buys a computer. Before long the conception of production will reach even beyond that to ecologically safe disposal of the product after use. Companies will have to provide for post-use cleanup, forcing them to alter design specs, cost calculations, production methods and much else besides. In so doing they will be performing more service relative to manufacture, and they will be adding value. “Production” will be seen to include all these functions. Similarly, they may extend the definition backward to include such functions as training of the employee, provision of day care and other services. An unhappy muscle-worker could be compelled to be “productive.” In high-symbolic activities, happy workers produce more. Hence, productivity begins even before the worker arrives at the office. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
To old-timers, such an expanded definition of production may seem fuzzy or nonsensical. To the new generation of super-symbolic leaders, conditioned to think systematically rather than in terms of isolated steps, it will seem natural. Production is receptualized as a far more encompassing process than the economists and ideologist of intermediate economics imagined. And at every step from today on, it is knowledge, not affordable labour, and symbols, not raw materials, that embody and add value. This deep reconceptualization of sources of added value is fraught with consequence. It smashed the assumptions of both free-marketism and Marxism alike, and the material-ismo that gave rise to both. Thus, the ideas that value is produced by the glorious capitalist entrepreneur, both implied in material-isom, are revealed to be false and misleading politically as well as economically. In the new economy the receptionist and the investment bank who assembles the capital, the key punch operator and the salesperson, as well as the systems designer and telecommunications specialist all add value. Even more significantly, so does the customer. Value results from a total effort rather than from one isolated step in the process. The rising importance of mind-work will not go away, no matter how many scare stories are published warning about the dire consequences of a “vanishing” manufacturing base or deriding the concept of the “information economy.” Neither will the new conception of how wealth is created. For what we are watching is a mighty convergence of Third Wave changes—the transformation of production coming together with the transformation of capital and money itself. Together they form a revolutionary new system for wealth creation on the planet. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The picture of recreation in the United States of America is impressively novel, and novel in a variety of ways. In contrast to most other countries, leisure here is not the possession of a privileged class but of the mass of citizens. Its development has been little influenced by the tradition which scorns work and fosters the cultivation of aristocratic pleasures. On the contrary, American recreation has made its way against a tradition which held work a virtue and play—if not a vice—a secondary and residual activity, a tradition which still persistently seeks to impose upon recreation some criterion of moral worth or practical gain. Yet for all these lingering puritanical inhibitions, probably no people has been more abundantly blessed with leisure time and recreational facilities than American in recent times. Enriched by the cosmopolitan extraction of its people, watered by the volume of ideas transmitted through its unparalleled channels of communication, the field of play has effloresced in unequalled variety and profusion. Idealistic emphasis on the civic virtues engendered through sportsmanship has reinforced commercial incentives to promote recreation. The multiplication o jobs consisting of routine drudgery has for many depreciated the value of work and enhanced the appeal of avocations. And the reduction of the average working week to five days of eight hours each has created a vacuum of leisure which ingenuity has not been slow to fill. The result has been an elaboration playful pursuits almost beyond comprehensive grasp. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
However, it is important to keep in mind counterfeits of God and the divine things are not only the counterfeits the angel of light has at his command. Psychopathological offenders can also counterfeit human personality traits. This falsifying may involve strangers, close acquaintances, and even the believer oneself. Individual will be made to appear different from what they really are—to be jealous, angry, critical, or unkind. Self-centeredness is made to appear in others, in enlarged form, where there is really the very opposite tendency—selflessness and love. Wrong motives seem to govern acquaintances and friends; simple actions are coloured, and words are made to mean and suggest what is not the mind of the speaker—sometimes to the confirmation of supposed wrong-doings by that person. Individuals of the opposite gender may also be supernaturally portrayed to a believer, in either a repulsive or beautiful form, with the object of arousing various formant thoughts in the innocent believer which one does not realize exist within. Sometimes the reason for the inspection is masked as “for prayer,” “for increased fellowship,” or “for spirit-communion in the things of God.” When their influence is centered in the body, the lying spirits’ counterfeit representation of these others may be in the realm of the passions and affections, seeking to rouse or feed these emotions in the oppressed one. The individual’s face, voice, “presence,” may be presented as if that person was equally affected. This is accompanied with a counterfeit “love” or drawing to the other one, with a painful craving for one’s company which almost masters the victim. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
This subject of love, and its painful arousing and communicating or counterfeiting by evil spirits, is one that touches multitude of believers of all classes, Many are made to suffer poignant agonies of craving for love, with no specific person involved; others are wrought upon in their thoughts so as not to be able to hear the word “love” mentioned without embarrassing manifestation of colour (blushing)—none of these manifestation being under the control of the will of the believer. God is not only the ground of being, but also the abyss of being which infinitely surpasses finite beings and thus prevents Him from being identified with them. However, it is possible that, although God is not identified with finite beings, they are identified with Him. Man has the power to contradict even the ground being. God is beyond potentiality and actuality, beyond essence and existence. The theonomous union of religion and culture can be achieved only by grace, by being grasped in the ultimate concern which is faith. Consequently, a far more serious problem is the personal encounter demanded by an ultimate concern. The problem would not be so serious if it were not for the situation of prayer. The ego-thou relation is essential for it. Therefore, God is not less than we. As the ground of everything personal, He is also personal in relation to a person…But God also transcends the personal…The reason is that God as Spirit means that He is not-personally present to not-personal life, personal to personal life, and supra-personal to all life. Wisdom gives greater strength than ten rulers in a city. The true guardians of a city are not its armed men and women; it is consecrated teachers are its guardians. A city that has no school which teaches the word of God, that city cannot endure. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Old Magic, Luminous Legend
Takes glimpses of thee; thou art a relief to the poor patient oyster, where it sleeps within its pearly house. The halls of Llanada Villa are said to draw people closer to death, while fear gripped them in a sovereign vision of the unexplained. A symphony of malice, a ballet of madness echoes through the walls. Solid mahogany doors straining to contain the ghastly images, the torture, and the demons. Stepping into the stairwell of the Observational Tower, some are caught in a whirlwind of cries, and secret activities. Unusual blood stains sometime appear on the wall and seep up through the oaken floors. Thousands, if not millions, of lost souls lie trapped within this mansion. It would take more than a century to understand this assaulted vision of reality. I found what I never would have imagined during construction of my home. Proportions and values upside-down; the exquisite things I expected, the delightful things of my faraway youth, but when I had too promptly waked, there was a sense of uncanny phenomena, happening under the charm of this intelligent labyrinth. There were so many traps for displeasure for the restless tread of the undead constantly pressing floors. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting had not a certain finer truth saved the situation. “Boom—boom—boom!” like a million thunderstorms occurring at the same time, would make the Heavens rock. A sudden glare of light would appear all about us, and in that very instant, as far as anyone could see legions of angels would appear singing—the whirring thunder of the wins made a body’s head ache. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
One could follow the line of the procession, slanting upward into the glittering sky until it was only a faint streak in the distance. There were gorgeous mansions standing side by side in the place of honour, and thirteen noble thrones of gold, all embedded with jewels, and the most glorious and gaudy giants, with platter-halos and beautiful amour. All of my servants went down to their knees, and looked glad. Yes, there were also times of great beauty and enjoy within the enchanted walls of The Winchester Mansion. Everybody was saying, “Did you see them?” Renovation, this estate at a high advance, had proved beautifully possible. I scarce knew what to what to make of this lively stir, other than gathering a sense for construction. The vision was the charm in the vast wilderness, breaking through the mere gross generalization of wealth and force and success to fabricate the most beautiful home in the West. The housemaids dusted off the antiques, trimmed the lamps, and polished the silver. The spirits had given me a grand vision of mystifying grace. As a pressed flower, I gave Mr. Hansen the blueprints for the new additions, overlaid with the freedom of a wanderer, shrouded by pleasure, by passages of life that were strange and dim to him, but unobscured, still exposed and cherished, which his experience could handle. He never neglected his real gift as an architect, and as towers and gables in my home rose and expanded, I truly discovered his genius. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
The memory of death had visited me. The of the deaths of my husband and infant daughter. I wanted to counterbalance that wretchedness of death with the vibrant life of a living memorial. This estate was a discovery of what life had stolen, likely to give future generations true insight into the mind and motivations of this enigmatic World. That and the hankering for magic which seemed to have seduced so many. The thought filled me with an excitement and anticipation, which made me realise afresh that this whole obsession was going far beyond what it had originally set out to be. Obsession? Surely it was not quite that, was it? At five o’clock sharp, in the splendid autumn weather, a flood of light illuminated the graceful roofed arches, that had been built in the Gothic Queen Anne Victorian style. Above the arches rose walls of shimmering green wood, its ornament visible in the reflected light. With its richly decorated loggias, niches, colonnades, balustrades, belvederes, and magnificent tower and turrets—this home was for pleasure, for the arts, for merrymaking and fairytales. It seemed to be the largest building in the World devoted solely to extravagance, elegance, and splendour. The Winchester Mansion was a break rom the nearly crushing issues and worries of the day. The Observational Tower was the tallest in the city, the loftiest tower in the West, and the estate was a fairytale complex nearly complete. For most of its life, however, Llanada Villa became known not only for its marvelous architecture, perfect location, and magnificent garden, but also for its ghosts. As heiress to the most important industry in the West, I borrowed from the past to combine the classical orders and monumental scale with richly coloured mosaics and craved fifteenth-century Italian fireplaces, murals, light, and air to create a grand new Victorian style. However, it could not conceal the deepest groans of ambitious spirits. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
The secrets struck into me, of nameless monsters. I onward kept; wooing these thoughts to steal about the labyrinth in my soul of love. The humidity was quite extraordinary. There was not the faintest breath of wind outside; thick grey clouds hung low and motionless overhead, darkening slowly as the hours passed. By three o’clock, my head felt as if steel pincers were being driven through my temples, and I knew I must retire to my room. After an indefinite interval, the pain began to ease. I was in the midst of a dream that vanished beyond recall as I was jolted wide awake by a searing flash lighting up the room even through drawn curtains, followed a few second later by a deafening crack of thunder which rolled and rumbled and reverberated, shaking the house to its foundations. Within second I heard a great rush of wind, a spatter of raindrops against the windowpane, and then the roar of a deluge upon the roof. My headache was quite gone; I felt my way to the door, where I found the lamps in the passage lit and saw that it was almost half past six. I ran downstairs. My thoughts were lost in a blinding flash and a clap of thunder right above the house, after which the lightning flashed continuously, bolt after jagged bolt accompanied by a tumult so deafening it seemed the roof must give way at any moment. Gradually, the lightning died away and the wind dropped until there was no sound but the rush of steady, drenching rain. The night passed unimaginably slow. I went down to the second floor at first light; the rain had ceased, the air was chill and damp and laden with the scents of bruised and broken foliage. Debris was strewn across the garden, from sodden twigs and leaves to great branches, and water lay in pools across the grass. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
On a damp December morning, the air was laden with the scent of decaying leaves; thin strands of mist drifted amongst the trees. Returning to the sitting room at the front of the house, I gazed out of the window reflecting on how raw, and dismal the day outside was; I had slept badly. Dr. Wayland, whom my housemaid had sent for without telling me a word about it, arrived to see me. Hattie accompanied me to the library; and there the proud doctor, was waiting to receive me. I told him my story, and as I proceeded he grew graver and graver. We were standing, he and I, in the recess of one of the windows, facing one another. A chill draught touched my cheek. The candle flared and almost blew out, so that the bodiless features opposite seemed to writher and convulse. I cannot go on, I thought. When my statement was over, he leaned with his shoulders against the wall, and with his eyes fixed on me earnestly, with an interest in which was a dash of horror. After a time, my face was pale and although I felt very weak, I did not feel ill; and strength, one always fancies, is a thing that may be picked up when we please. I wore a morning dress and the doctor asked to examine me. He noticed upon my breast were but a small blue spot, about the size of the tip of my little finger. “Id there any danger?” I urged, in great trepidation. “I trust not, Mrs. Winchester,” answered the doctor. “I don’t see why you should not recover. I don’t see why you should not begin immediately to get better. That I the point at which the sense of strangulation begins?” “Yes, I answered.” He called the housemaid Hattie to him and said: “I find Mrs. Winchester is far from well. It won’t be of any great consequence, I hope; but it will be necessary that some steps be taken, but in the meantime, Hattie, you will be so good as to not let Mrs. Winchester be alone for the moment. That is the only direction I need give you for the present. It is indispensable.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
The doctor did not return. I saw him mount his horse there, take his leave, and ride away eastward through the fruit orchard. In the meantime, the housemaid and I were both busy, lost in conjecture as to the reasons of the singular and earnest direction which the doctor imposed. The housemaid, as she afterwards told me, was afraid the doctor apprehended a sudden seizure, and that, without prompt assistance, I might either lose my life in a fit, or at least be seriously hurt. This interpretation did not stroke me; and I fancied, perhaps luckily for my nerves, that the arrangement was prescribed simply to secure a companion, who would prevent my taking too much exercise, or eating unripe fruit, or doing any of the fifty foolish things to which young people are supposed to be prone. At times such as these, I tried to summon William’s face in memory, he would come to me only as a blur; then, at other times, he would appear unbidden, as vivid to my inner eye as if he were standing next to me. This was one of those times; I heard the exact accents of his voice: his face came back to me, alight with joy and hope, and yet I felt no grief; I could feel his presence here, now, beside me in the dark room. I remained vaguely conscious of my glittering amulet, and of the housemaid behind me, but William was calling me into the clear light of fay, speaking what I knew to be words of great comfort, words I strained to hear but could not quite distinguish, and his presence remained with me until, with no perceptible transition, I found myself in grey twilight, with the acrid scent of a snuffed candle in my nostrils. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Through the curtains, I saw mist swirling against the window. Emptiness here. And the quiet I had told myself that I wanted—just to be alone. I reached into my pocket and drew out a handful of gold coins. I gave them to Hattie and told her to enjoy the rest of the night. She took them in both hands and stared at them as if they were burning her. She looked up and in her eyes I saw the image of myself. Candles were burning in all the candelabra and in the wall scones. I went to pass the library quickly, when without warning a soundless voice shot out and stopped me. It was like a hand touching my throat. I turned and saw a shadow crawling across the wall in a slow, and terrifying manner. The room became unnaturally cold. There was a monstrous growl coming from the shadow figure. A wave of sadness and terrible fear overcame me. The shadow then called out, “Sarah.” The voice called me again leaving me shaken and puzzled. I hurried up the stairs to enter one of the rooms I rarely used. Suddenly, my eyes were drawn to the window. There I saw two green eyes looking out at me. I knew this to be the demon that was calling out to me down stairs. As I closed my eyes, I had become increasingly stressed and frightened. I opened my eyes to see if the astounding horror was gone, but it was not. The shadow moved around the room to stand beside me. I thought I would die from heart failure when it bent over me to stare into my face with those piercing green eyes. And the next thing I knew, it was morning. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
Old magic, luminous legend, a beautifully bizarre atmosphere in which all the shadowy things thrive, an intoxication with forbidden knowledge in where the natural things become unimportant. Most of the souls that inhabit The Winchester Mystery House are thought to have come here after being laid to rest. There once were 600 rooms, and a nine-story tower. However, today, there remains an astounding four story mansion, with 160 rooms, of which 110 are open for tours. Some have wanted to become better acquainted with The Winchester Mystery House, and have ventured beyond the designated touring areas. Exposing forbidden areas of the house comes with some dangers, such as being lost for hours, or never finding your way out. The portion of the mansion that is off limits can get very confusing. It was late one night in February 2007. One man was caught by surveillance cameras after he had lost his way. He appeared as if he was being chased as he ran hither and tither from room to room. When tour guides finally found him, he was in a state of panic. Cold, sweating, shivering and his eyes were as large as saucers. They asked him if he was okay, and after setting down for a few moments, he explained that he saw a tall, dark hooded figure standing right beside him. “I couldn’t see much detail because it was dark, but I could make out the round hood facing me. It stood very tall. Maybe seven or eight feet. The hooded entity looked as startled—momentarily at least—to see me as I was to see it. When it saw that I saw it, it reached out to me, touching me on my shoulder with its ice-cold hands, grabbing me so tightly that it tore my shirt as I started to run. The thing just seemed to hover over the floors and kept pace with me no matter which way I turned.” https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 