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America is Struggling to Retain its Supremacy
Present political developments and the and the dangers which they imply for the great achievement of modern culture, individuality and uniqueness of personality have interrupted the culture of America and have created a social crisis for our day, as the calamity has challenged the meaning of freedom for modern humans. The basic entity of the social process is the individual, ones desires, and fears, one’s passions and reason, and one’s propensities for good and for evil. To understand the dynamics of the social process, we must understand the dynamics of the psychological process operating with the individual, just as to understand the individual we must see one in the context of the culture which molds one. Modern humans freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave them their individual self; that is, the expression of one’s intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought human beings independence and rationality, has mode them isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternative one is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of one’s freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individual of man. The understanding of the reasons for the totalitarian flight from freedom is a premise for any actions which aim at the victory over the totalitarian forces. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
After centuries of struggles, man succeeded in building an undreamed-of wealth of material goods; he built democratic societies in parts of the World, and is once again defending himself against new totalitarian schemes; yet, because of propaganda being pontificated by the main stream TV new media, several humans are anxious and tempted to surrender their freedom to dictators of all kinds, by being so desperate to put “the first” this or that into office, or on the work force instead of selecting the best man or woman for the job. This has caused people to become small cogs in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free human but an automaton. In this first quarter of a century, the reasons for man’s fear of freedom, for his anxiety and willingness to become an automaton, have not only continued but have greatly increased. In this highly technological society also comes job insecurity. The human physical energy—man’s hands and arms, his brains and his nervous reactions are being replaced by machines. Human beings feel still smaller when confronted with the phenomenon not only of giant enterprises, but of an almost self-regulating World of computers which think much faster, and often more correctly, than a human does. Another danger has increased, rather than diminished: the population explosion. Here, too, one of the products of human progress, the achievement of medicine, have produced such an increase of population, especially in less developed countries (LDCs), that the increase in material production can hardly keep pace with the increasing number of people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The giant forces in society and the danger for man’s survival have increased in the first twenty-three years of this century, and hence man’s tendency to escape from freedom. However, the drive for freedom inherent in human nature, while it can be corrupted and suppressed, tends to assert itself again and again. Yet all these reassuring facts must not deceive us into thinking that the dangers of escape from freedom are not even greater than they were one hundred years ago. It would seem that majority of humans have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself. Most humans repress the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; they worship power, money, the sovereign state, the nation, which can be just as dangerous. In the process, humans beings pay lips service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, and has transformed their teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can humankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical over maturity and emotional backwardness? One way is through the increasing awareness of the most essential facts of our social existence, an awareness sufficient to prevent us from committing irreparable follies, and to raise to some small extent our capacity for objectivity and reason. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
We can hope to overcome most follies of the heart and their detrimental influence on our imagination and thought in one generation; maybe it will take a thousand years until man has lifted himself from a pre-human history of hundreds of thousands of years. At this crucial moment when the United States of America is struggling to retain its supremacy, dignity, confidence, and rationality, a modicum of increased insight and objectivity can make the difference between life and death for the human race. For this reason, the development of a scientific and dynamic social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine. No one could be more aware of the inadequacy of our knowledge than the students in this field. Ethical norms are based on our knowledge of man, rather than on authority and revelation. Modern American history is centered around the effort to gain freedom from the political, economic, and spiritual shackles that have bound men. The battles for freedom were fought by the oppressed, those who wanted new liberties, against those who had privilege to defend. While a class was fighting for its own liberation from domination, it believed itself to be fighting for human freedom as such and thus was able to appeal to an ideal, to the longing for freedom rooted in all who are oppressed. In the long and virtually continuous battle for freedom, however, classes that were fighting against oppression at one stage sided with the enemies of freedom when victory was won and new privileges were to be defended. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Despite many reverses, men fought in battles without shoes, in freezing weather, and often malnourished for our freedom. So many died in battle that rivets of blood filled the battle ground, in a struggle against oppression, but for them, that was better to live than life without freedom. That is why the American Flag is such an honor to so many people around the World. For many, it is as sacred as God’s word. Millions of people died in battle which was the utmost assertion of their individuality. History seemed to be proving that it was possible for man to govern himself, to make decisions for themselves, and to think and feel as one saw fit. In the eyes of many people, disrespecting the American flag is an act of terror. The full expression of man’s potentialities seemed to be the goal toward which social development was rapidly approaching. The principles of economic liberalism, political democracy, religious autonomy, and individualism in personal life, gave the expression to the longing for freedom, and at the same time seemed to bring humankind nearer to its realization. One tie after another was severed. Man had overthrown the domination of nature and made himself her master; he had overthrown the domination of tyranny and the domination of the absolutist state. The abolition of external domination seemed to be not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition to attain the cherished goal: freedom for the individual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
It is paradoxical that Americans at large should have ambivalent feelings toward their schools. Not only has this country carried free public education further than elsewhere in the World, but it is constantly extending its range; higher education will soon be claimed as a common right, judging by the increasing public support for colleges and universities. Yet alongside this attitude lies a fear that the school may lead pupils too far from the beliefs of their parents, or fail to develop traditional habits. The notion that education is a solvent for most ills counterbalances the gears of experiment. And the tendency to depend on the schools for many functions where the family does not suffice conflicts with the reaction against usurpation. This paradox, however, may not be strange, if viewed in terms of family development. The professional who comes between parent and child can expect to be regarded with suspicion. Each parent, moreover, was himself or herself a child, and the many who disliked their school experiences may account for much of the hostility that emerges in a number of ways, in spite f the manifest honour that is paid to teachers and learning, to books and writers. The identification with their child’s development is likely to tempt parents into encouraging the personal rivalry that countless teachers have fought to assuage, and demanding a show of relative ranking, instead of judging performance against potential. If the paradox yields to this explanation, then educational policy may gain in effectiveness if it is guided by a similar analysis. What would follow if the classroom were explicitly conceived as an extended projection of family relations? #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
If the entire curriculum over the ten-to-twenty-year school experience were organized as a continuous venture in family living, the results to be obtained from single courses on the family would pale by comparison. If classes were conceived as quasi-families, they would have to be kept small and stable. Teacher would have to be chosen more rigorously as models for identification. Experiment could soon establish how valuable it would be to put each class in charge of a pair of teachers, a man and a woman, one observing interaction while the other conducts the program. The optimal audience and timing for performance by each pupil could likewise be determined by trial and observation. A wide vista of possibilities is opened up by taking this view (which should not be confused with what is advanced as the life adjustment curriculum, despite some similarities). Of course, research and experiment represent the furthest expression of the planning stage of agency development. Perhaps the paucity of private educational agencies in America, below the college and university level, accounts for there being less research and experiment than there might otherwise be. Some of the private schools are the least progressive, and some the most. The exploratory temper of an agency’s clientele seems to be more important condition than whether it is private or public. State teachers’ colleges may tend, as often charged, toward uniformity, yet state colleges of home economics, through their extension services, have the most inviting opportunity in sight for getting involved in the rapid developments in family living occurring in the suburbs and schools of American cities. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
While sociology tends to predominate the study of families at the college level, home economics is far ahead in answering the appetite of high-school youth for courses in marital preparation. And the suburban high school, as a community center, involves parents far more than do country town or metropolitan schools. The high schools because of their coverage are also the soundest hope for producing a whole generation competent for family living. On the whole, therefore, the evidence seems abundant that hopes invested in the public school are justified. And as for adults, to the degree they are involved as participants in experimentation first as pupils, and then as parents, the ambiguities in their reactions to the professional educator may perhaps diminish. The atmosphere of public interest in family relations as shown in the commercial media, libraries, and churches is already quite intense. The rising enrollments in volunteer courses and child study groups, the attendance at forums and the purchases of books on marriage and parenthood, attest convincingly to the demand for educational aid in the adult years. Taken as a whole, therefore, the educational agencies serving the family whatever the resistance they still encounter, are no doubt further ahead in terms of development than any of the other five types of family agency. And, most importantly, your Heavenly Father has given you agency, the ability to choose and to act for yourself. Agency is essential in the plan of salvation. Without it, you would not be able to learn or progress or follow the Saviour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
With agency, you are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of psychopathological offenders. As long as the believer thinks it is God who is directing one, so long as the deceiving offenders are safe from exposure and able to lead one on into more and more deception. When the human being reaches a very high degree of psychopathological deception, one finds oneself unable to act unless the psychopathological offenders allow one, so that one no longer even asks for “permission” to do this or that. At this stage, no arguments, reasonings, or outward considerations of any kind influence the actions of the believer thus deceived, or turn one from obeying the “guidance” or “permission” of the inner voice, which one fully believes is of God. Should one endeavour to go against it in the smallest matter, the condemnation and suffering are so great that on becomes terrified at any “disobedience,” and would rather be condemned and misjudged by the whole World than go against it. One’s great horror is of “disobeying the Holy Ghost,” and the psychopathological offenders deceiving one take every occasion to deepen this fear, so as to retain their hold upon one. As the believer thus minutely obeys the spirit in control, one relies more and more upon supernatural help, for the moment one does something apart from it one is accused—by the Holy Spirit, one assumes—of “working apart from God.” It is at this stage that all the faculties fall into deepening passivity, as the human lets go entirely to the voice of guidance—into a reliance upon the “divine” speakings, which keep one’s brain in complete inaction. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Here also counterfeit manifestations in “miraculous gifts”—prophecy, tongues, healing, visions, and supernatural experiences of every kind possible to the powers of the psychopathological offender—may be given to the believer, with abundant “texts” and “proofs” to confirm their “divine origin.” One experiences a lightness of the body which makes it appear as if one were carried by invisible hands; one is lifted off one’s bed in what spiritists know as “levitation”; on can sing and speak, and do what one has never been capable of doing before. Constant contact with spirit forces gives the human a “mystical” look, but all lines of strength which comes from strenuous conflict and self-mastery go out of the face, for the sense-life is being fed and indulged in a spiritual way as much as by fleshly habits. The supranaturalism of the Roman Catholic system, the dualism of nature and grace fails by degrading God into an object alongside finite objects; it denies that He is the ground of being. On the other hand, naturalism defaults by identifying the finite and the infinite; it denies that God is the abyss. Pantheism is often misinterpreted to mean that God is the totality of natural objects—an absurd doctrine never held by anyone. The real meaning of pantheism, is that God is the universal essence or substance, and He is swift to disown this teaching. For pantheism is bondage. It incarcerates God in finite beings and, at the same time, shackles their freedom. Being-itself, God transcend the polarities of individuality-universality, of freedom-destiny. He transcends essence and existence. Self-transcendence of being means that within itself, the finite World points beyond itself. Finitude searches for the ground of its being only to discover that it is peering into the abyss of infinity. God stands for the World and against the World. Man’s finite freedom is the clue, for his freedom dramatizes that the creature is independent of the divine ground (God stand against the World), and His finiteness shows His dependence upon the power of being (God stands for the World). It terms of immediate religious experience, self-transcendence is the encounter with the holy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Now, the link between relational and formal contracts arises because recourse to the court offers an alternative if the relationship breaks down. This led to the unfortunate result that a partial improvement in the functioning of the state law made it more attractive to break your word on the relational contract and thereby worsened the outcome of private ordering. By contrast, arbitration could supplement or complement state law by allowing more complete counteracting without detracting from the ability of the courts to resolve issues based on publicly verifiable information. An auditing or monitoring system be installed or improved at a cost, to make verifiable some information that was previously only observable to the insiders or even private to one of the parties. The model allows us to compute the benefit from this, and also identifies the precise kind of information that would be most useful, namely, the information that is best correlated with the residual left after using the previously available information. This can help the state law, or any alternative private governance method, improve its information structure and therefore its usefulness. Formal modeling has thus deepened and sharpened our understanding of each of these modes of private ordering, and of their connections with state law. However, these advantages come at a cost. Each institution has a rich and multidimensional structure. Theoretical models, to be tractable, must select a narrower set of issues and dimensions to analyze in depth, and simplify or even ignore. For example, two parties are involved in only one interaction. In reality, such pairs often simultaneously interact in several dimensions, including not only business dealings but also social meetings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Private governance can sometimes advantageously use this multiplicity to create punishments in one dimension to deter cheating in another. When we focus on just one aspect of this institution, namely the ability of specialized industry arbitrators to interpret information at lower cost, making more information verifiable and allowing more complete contact, this is one way of narrowing and simplification of arbitration. However, arbitration occurs in other contexts for other reasons, most importantly in international trade to avoid suspicious of the bias of national courts; this model does not cover that at all. Rules of arbitration are of the simple “bright-line kind, avoiding general terms of common law like “reasonable.” The institutions of arbitration differ in the degrees of centralization and formality. At one extreme, arbitration can be institutional or centralized, using a preexisting organization or arbitration center with formalized rules and procedures that guide the conduct of, and supervise, the arbitrators. At the other extreme, arbitration can be ad hoc, not relying on such a formal administration or center, and using adjudicators chosen for the purpose to the dispute. The latter offers more flexibility, but less accuracy and enforceability. So disputes that have a great degree of uncertainty about the traders’ behaviour have to go to more centralized forums. However, disputes in areas where the underlying circumstances change rapidly may benefit from more flexible ad hoc forums. Centralized forums also have the advantage of better enforceability, because they can disseminate information about any misbehavior more quickly or widely, and can better arrange sanctions such as denial of future trading opportunities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Therefore parties to disputes with serious potential problems of enforcement have to use more centralized methods. Parties with long-terms ongoing relationships can more easily use flexible and ad hoc methods. Such issues of the relative merits of different kinds of arbitration, and of the choice among different forums, will need other models. There is always the risk that the aspects simplified or omitted in theoretical modeling interact in significant ways with those the model is trying to focus on. Therefore modeling involves judgment, which may turn out to be wrong. This calls for continued testing of the results, both by looking for empirical evidence supporting or contradicting the results, both by enlarging the scope of the model. In the latter activity, the understanding of concepts and techniques gained from the original model play an important part. In other worse, known or suspected deficiencies of a model should be regarded, not as arguments for condemning modeling as such, but opportunities and challenges for further research. China is rushing to access the World’s most advanced technologies and to become a leader in research and development. The China-West technology was has begun. About 20 years ago, at a Russo-Japanese gathering of leading experts on international affairs, during a debate on China, and its new global role, a prominent Russian scholar (expressing his personal point of view) bluntly told the Japanese side: “It was you who created this economic and political monster. Now we all have to pay the price.” He meant massive Japanese (and generally Western) investment in China and a large-scale official development aid as major prerequisites for its spurt and emergence as superpower. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The formula is largely correct if you accept the wording. Let us put it this way: Western investment and development aid contributed a lot to the birth of a new superpower of a size and character never seen before, which is now posing unprecedented challenges for the West itself. As far as the economic dimension is concerned, until recently the formula applied to production and exports. Why did the West do it? Obviously, because with its gigantic pool of low cost and efficient labour and the World’s most dynamic market, China provided unique business opportunities. Due to this uniqueness, it faced no big problems with using Western capital, technologies, and expertise to become the World’s largest manufacturer and exporter of a wide range of low-end products. Nowadays, China is interested in foreign capital for a different reason. As far as low-end manufacturing is concerned, it has accumulated more than enough capital, technologies, and expertise to do it all by itself. For Western businesses, it may still be attractive to move to China to produce something simple and affordable. However, this is not the major thing today’s China wants them to do. Furthermore, it often does not want them to do it at all. Now surprisingly, the Chinese government did not think twice before abruptly eliminating across-the-board tax privileges for foreign-owned firms in 2007. Sometimes it does not even stop short of blocking a foreign investment project altogether when it targets a low-end and, especially, environment-unfriendly manufacturing. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Nowadays China does not need just money. It needs advanced technologies to upgrade its industries and wants Western companies to bring them in. And for this purpose it leverages its unique labour pool and market expansion dynamics in exactly the same way it leveraged them in the past to encourage foreign investment in low-end manufacturing. And this time, too, Western companies are doing what China wants them to do: They are becoming important contributors to its technological upgrading. Today it is largely the West itself that is creating China as a new technological superpower. Foreign company research and development (R&D) activities play a significant role in China’s plan to move up the value chain. Multinational companies operate at least 1,300 R&D centers in China, out of more than 1,600 R&D centers total, and these numbers have grown significantly in recent years. This expansion has occurred even while companies remain concerned about protecting their intellectual property rights (IPR) in China. China’s spending on research and development climbed 10.3 percent to 2.44 trillion Chinese yuan ($378 billion) in 2020. China ha 522 national key laboratories and 350 national engineering research centers in operation. There are nearly half a million projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2020, and 3.6 million patents were granted. By contrast, the U.S.A. spent around $134 billion on R&D in 2020. As the World’s supply chains have become more unstable, China and other nations have taken steps to try to boost their technology sovereignty and become more self-reliant on core critical technologies like 5G and semiconductor chips. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Foreign companies’ research centers are concentrated in such fields such as electronics (including software), telecommunications, biotechnology and pharmaceutical, chemicals, and automobiles. Leading global firms (Microsoft, IBM, Motorola, Intel, GE, 3M, Sun Microsystems, Pfizer, Siemens, Philips, Volkswagen, and Fujitsu to name just a few) started to establish themselves, with high frequency from the late 1990 to the early 2000s. As far as other foreign companies go, GM, Nissan, and Hyundai have opened R&D centers in China; as well as other companies such as Roche, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, AstraZeneca, and Merck Serono in pharmaceuticals; Dow, Exxon Mobile, and Bayer in Chemicals, and so on. As time goes by, the pace is accelerating. Under the organization and guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the four major mobile operators in China—China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Broadnet, jointly announced the laugh of what they claimed as the World’s first 5G inter-network roaming service trial. The service enables customers to access other telecom operators’ 5G networks and continue using 5G services when outside the rage of their original operators’ 5G network. Omdia expects inter-network roaming to improve operators’ 5G network coverage particularly in rural areas. Driven by better 5G network coverage, 5G will overtake 4G’s leading position and become the largest technology in China’s mobile market by 2026. By the end of 2028, we anticipate 5G will account for 65.1 percent of the total mobile subscriptions. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Novartis says that China remains a large growth opportunity despite a drop in its population, as the government spurs efforts to make medicines mor widely available. There is an aging population and an unmet need in China to treat many chronic ailments, and the government is willing to improve the speed at which they approve new medicines. Novartis plans to reach a number third market position in China by 2027, up from fifth place. GlobalData forecasts the Chinese pharmaceutical market will grow to more than $262 billion in 2025, which is up from approximately $166.7 billion in 2020. Microsoft Research China in Beijing in 1998, upgraded it to Microsoft Research Asia in 2001, and then opened The Science and Technology Park in Shanghai in 2010 as its lobal research center outside the United States of America. Going beyond product development for the Chinese market, foreign companies’ centers are increasingly engaged in basic research. With a certain time lag, R&D activities are globalizing in the same way as production. Global companies are doing their research on a global basis, choosing venues providing high-qualified human resource and attractive in terms of cost, infrastructure, and legal and regulatory environment. In spite of its notoriously lax intellectual property rules, China has managed to position itself as one of the most attractive R&D platforms in the World—most of all because of its widening pool of capable researchers who are still economical by international standards. On its part, the Chinese government exempts taxes on R&D centers’ equipment imports and provides R&D subsidies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Products manufactured by foreign companies at their Chinese factories are also significantly upgraded. More and more often, they go far beyond simple labour-intensive manufacturing, choosing to combine advanced technologies with the cost advantages China provides. It applies to both final and intermediate products, giving multinationals new important benefits. For instance, manufacturers of cars or electronic devices transferring production of parts or materials to China get much greater cost advantages than those who transfer assembly operations only. A close look at the new investment projects launched by foreign firms in China nowadays clearly shows that many of them are related to production upgrading, the transfer of advanced technologies, or to the creation of R&D facilities. Mitsubishi Chemical and Mitsubishi Plastic Engineering established a joint venture with Sinopec to make high-end resins used in the manufacturing of auto and electronic parts, optical disks, and construction materials. LG Electronics has started producing advanced models of OLED evo G3 Smart TV. Siemens has built a plant to manufacture parts for wind energy generating equipment, and Daikin is making key parts for inverter-type air-conditioners in a joint venture with Gree Electric Appliances. Honda has started local production of electric vehicles. In Shanghai, FIAT has established an R&D facility to develop engine-manufacturing technologies, Britain’s Astra Zeneca to conduct research on new anticancer drugs, and Panasonic is developing home electronic appliances tailored to the needs of Chinese consumers. Exxon Mobile Chemical has started applied research and development of chemicals. The list can be continued. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
In intermedia industrial economies, wealth was typically measured by the possession of goods. The production of goods was regarded as central to the economy. Conversely, symbolic and service activities, while unavoidable, were stigmatized as nonproductive. The manufacture of goods—auto, radios, tractors, TV sets—was seen as “male” or macho and words like practical, realistic or hardheaded were associated with it. By contrast, the production of knowledge or the exchange of information was typically disparaged as mere “paper pushing.” A flood of corollaries flowed from these attitudes. For example, that “production” is the combination of material resources, machines and muscle…that the most important assets of a firm are tangibles…that national wealth flows from a surplus of the trade in goods…that trade in services is significant only because it facilitates trade in goods…that most education is a waste unless it is narrowly vocational…that research is airy-fairy…and that the liberal arts are irrelevant or, worse yet, inimical to business success. What mattered, in short, was matter. Ideas like these were by no means limited to the Babbitts of capitalism. They had their analogs in the communist World as well. Marxist economists, if anything, have had a harder time trying to integrate high brow work into their schema, and “social realism” in the arts produced thousands of portrayals of happy workers, Himalaya-like muscles straining against a background of cogwheels, smokestacks and steam locomotives. The glorification of the proletariat and the theory that it was the vanguard of change, reflected the principles of a intermediate economy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
What all this added up to was more than a welter of isolated opinions, assumptions and attitudes. Rather it formed a self-reinforcing, self-justifying ideology based on a kind of macho materialism—a brash, triumphant “material-ismo!” Material-ismo, in fact, was the ideology of Second Wave mass manufacture. There was a time when material-ismo may have made sense. Today, when the real value of most products lies in the knowledge, embedded in them, it is both reactionary and imbecile. Any country that chooses to pursue policies based on material-ismo condemns itself to becoming the Bangladesh of the twenty-first century. Now, the rebirth of America’s national consciousness, and the revival of Christianity are inseparable. When America found itself, it found its God. When America lost itself, or began to work at its self—effacement, it was sure to deny its God. The selection of America, the indestructibility of God’s covenant with America, the immorality of America as a nation, and the final restoration of America to Heaven, where the nation will live a holy life, on holy ground, with all the wide-reaching consequences of the conversion of humanity, and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth—all these are the common ideals and the common ideas that permeate the whole American literature extending over nearly four thousand years. That the Christian nation has survived the downfall of its state and the destruction of its national sanctuary is above all due to the great genius of Pope Urban II—who made of religious study a new form in which the national existence of Christians and Mormons found expression, so that by the side of history of nearly two thousand years of suffering we can point to an equally extensive history of intellectual effort. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Commonwealths as Free as Angels
By education, I would be understood to mean not only the instruction given to a youth for the regulation of one’s manners, and for one’s improvement in literature and morals; but every opinion, which one had imbibed, and every habit, which one has contracted; whether from reading, observation, and reflection; or from the influence of one’s propensities and passions, and the example of one’s companions and friends’; the whole system of thought and action, which one has acquired at that period of life, when one is released from the authority of one’s parents and teachers, and permitted to be master of one’s own conduct. The importance, and therefore the necessity, of a well-directed education, in this comprehensive sense of the term, is so readily and so generally confessed, that to enlarge upon it may perhaps be thought an unnecessary waste of time both of the author and the reader. However, there are humans, who do not willingly admit the value of studies, which have no tendency to lower the price of bread; and indeed the general truth seems to be acknowledged without definite ideas of what is comprehended under it; without the due impression of its utility upon the mind. A statement more in detail, therefore, of its use and advantages may possibly awaken a more rational and vigorous attention; and may form no unsuitable introduction to a professed treaty on the subject. Every human is what one’s education has made one in a much greater degree, than superficial observers will easily believe. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
How far one’s principles and one’s conduct, one’s successes or one’s misfortunes, the happiness or misery of one’s life depend upon it, seems to be not fully known, or not duly considered. So helpless is the condition, in which man is left by nature; so incapable is one, not only of attaining science and enjoyment, but of providing for ones own subsistence and safety; so much is one the creature of the care of others, and of one’s own exertions; so wonderful is the difference between what one is at birth, and what one becomes at one’s maturity; that amongst the other instances of one’s superiority over the rest of the terrestrial creation, one has been said, with hardly more boldness of language, than force of truth, to enjoy the proud preeminence of being one’s own maker; of enlarging and forming one’s various powers by one’s own diligence and skill. The human mind in its infancy has often been compared to a portion of paper without any imperfection; to an empty reservoir, or a vacuum in nature; and the comparisons are sufficiently accurate to illustrate the truths, which they are intended to support; that the most simple of our ideas are not innate and unborrowed; that we have no acquaintance with external objects, but what I received through the medium of the sense; and consequently no principles of reasoning upon them, but such as are acquired by instruction and reflexion: in one word, no knowledge, but what we on to education. Human knowledge has frequently been considered under three principal divisions of history, of science, and of the arts. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
These subjects of education have been respectively assigned to three great powers of the mind, the memory, and the reason, and the imagination. It is the peculiar province of memory to retain such facts as have been collected respecting the operations of nature and the transaction of mankind; of reason, to form comparisons, distinctions and conclusions throughout the whole circle of ethical and mathematical science; and of the imagination, to combine or diversify the ideas already acquired, and to exhibit them in the various and elegant productions of the statuary, and the musician, the painter, and the poet. Of these powers, however, the strength and extent in so small degree depend upon the cultivation they have received. However, it is an ironical fact that the school after audaciously taking over so many functions of the family now is beginning to provide instructions on how to conduct family life itself. Across the country during the past few years, high school or college students in hundreds of institutions have asked for courses in marriage and family living. When their demand is granted, as it usually is, no one is likely to consider this a revolutionary event. Nor is the so-called family life educator very likely to be regarded as a great innovator. All this shows how basic assumptions have changed. To be sure, when family life education is confused with sex education (as when the course is assigned to a biology teacher), and when parental anxieties about public discussion of sex are aroused, there may be a temporary hullaballoo. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
It seems surprising that some adults strongly oppose the matter-of-fact presentation of the facts of life to high school or college students, facts known to the usual farm child before he or she reaches kindergarten age. Nevertheless such anxieties persist in considerable segment of American communities. Family life educators, while disappointing young people, have often made it easier for parents to accept them, by distinguishing carefully between sex education and education for marriage and family living. To do so is not merely a matter of practical diplomacy; it makes sense theoretically. Not only is the student likely to know the basic physiology of reproduction, thanks to the mass media if not to the parents, but of course the most important content of family life education is the realm of interpersonal relations. The major studies of sexual adjustment over the past generation have all converged on the finding that sexual difficulties in marriage have their origins primarily in personality, not in physiology. The arts of achieving and maintaining intimacy, communication, and consensus are learned, not inborn. Moreover, they are learned much better by children in some families than in others. The child of parent low in social skill has in the past been most likely, statistically speaking, to fail in marriage. One is a poor risk as a potential partner, because in a very real sense one carries on the tradition of one’s family. As everyone dealing with problem families knows, not only may a person’s character difficulties be traceable to those of one’s parents, but their difficulties, to their parents, and so on, as far back perhaps as the biblical seven generations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Recent researchers, instead of falling into fatalistic acceptance of the chains of transmission by which the habit of frustration and failure becomes virtually immortalized, have pondered means of breaking these chains. Yet to announce such an aim is almost to say that the expert will counter the influence of parents. What the family life educators are doing is searching around for means by which deficits in social skill, passed on to children like debts of their parents, may be made up by the schools. In a groping and confused way, this objective probably informs the impulse which leads young people to ask for courses in marriage and family living. Some of them say quite explicitly that they do not want their marriages to be like those of their parents, or that they do not want to bring up their children as they were brought up. Others, less condemnatory but still critical, imagine that family living could be better than it is at present. And some of course, strongly attracted to marriage and parenthood in their own account, want to improve their technique for practicing them as arts. This demand for greater knowledge about family living poses a more serious problem than opposition by groups who fear encroachment of schools on the prerogatives of home and church: it raises the problem of whether the schools can claim to possess the knowledge and means for instruction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Social science can help, of course, but is well advised not to promise too much too soon. On the other hand, scientific caution cannot be used as a warrant for refusing to do as much as can be done; to offer functionless theory and stale description to students who sincerely put answerable questions is to give them a stone when they ask for bread. Practical educators, pressed by importunate queries and pleas, are greatly tempted to supply answers and prescriptions which have not been validated. This in a way is the characteristic position of the practical administrator of any agency; one cannot wait for certainty but must make decisions and go ahead on the basis of the best knowledge available. One needs from the social scientist not the promise of an unspecified utopian future, in which unassailable truths will ultimately be available, but rather a means of rating the reliability of one’s current predictions about various lines of action. The researcher in family relations who can bring one’s investigations to bear at this point may seem to offer less to the family life teacher than either the latter had hoped for, or one oneself has aspired to, but the assistant will be real, not indefinitely potential. It can avoid those painful episodes in which a tentative finding of research is converted into a sweeping dictum by a teacher or popularizer, with consequent scorn by the scientist. Such scorn is the futile reciprocal of the scorn of the practical human for useless theory. Many of the materials and methods now employed in family life and education—textbooks, pamphlets, movies, lectures—consist of popularized research findings, interlarded with invalid opinions and prescriptions, not even suggested by previous research. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
It is not a counsel of perfection to suggest that closer ties between teachers and researchers have fewer hazards for either than their alienation from each other. If teaching and research are to discipline each other there must be a closer association between teachers and researchers. The fact that teaching and research are often done by the same person has not in the past automatically produced the sort of research that can be applied to family living. The steady growth of scientific evaluation procedures in education already indicates the proper channel for such collaboration. If the over-all objective of education is conceived as the production of desired changes in behaviour (or potential behaviour), then the evaluation of whether and how those desired changes can be produced becomes a mater of scientific measurement and understanding. And the teaching of a course can be seen as an experiment. Of all the subjects in the curriculum of a high school, it would seem that family living most lends itself to the latter construction. Those who speak of functional family life courses means courses in behavioural change, not merely courses that reproduce information. Few courses now given on the family are demonstrably functional in this sense. The average family life teacher today may claim that one’s purpose is to improve the quality of family life in one’s community. Even if one supposes one is doing this only by transmitting knowledge, and not by training one’s pupils in greater social skill, unless the result can finally be measured in terms of changed patterns of behaviour, one’s methods can only be defended by wishful thinking. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
To the extent that one is indeed assuming some responsibility for improving the quality of family living through the school, one is quite radically challenging the traditional assumption that each family is adequate to prepare it offspring for competent marriage and parenthood. The small size of modern families, the rate of change between generations, afford immediate grounds for supposing that the contemporary family is less adequate to impart social skills than older families were; and numerous less direct arguments could be adduced for the same conclusion. The more important question is whether the school is more adequate, and beyond that, whether the school—at least through the medium of the next generation—can make the family more adequate. From the standpoint of parents all this may seem a little bit more than they bargained for. Unless they are progressively involved in such developments, and become committed at each important decision along the way, it is to be expected that they will react against the school’s new roles. The process of exploration into the possibilities of what the school can offer to raise the standard of family living in the community requires a reciprocal relationship between citizens and their public institutions. An increasing number of studies show that children’s performance is intimately related to their family situation. It is thus clear that parents cannot throw total responsibility for the performance of their children upon the schools. In order to share that responsibility most effectively, the parents’ family situation may have to be looked at in the light of what can be learned from family research and educational psychology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
It is by the avenues of reciprocity, rather than by any simple transfer of putative function, rather than any simple transfer of putative functions, that schools of family research and educational psychology may contribute to raising the standard of family life in the community, while the improvement of family life in turn can facilitate the performance of children in schools. A program so conceived is likely to produce results without the cross-purposes and mutual frustrations which result when the family life educator creates the impression that one is threatening the most venerable of institutions. Immense changes cannot come without power conflict, and to anticipate who will gain and who will lose, it may help to think of companies on a mind-work spectrum. We need to classify companies not by whether they are nominally in manufacturing or service but by what their people actually do. CSX, for example, is a firm that operates railroads throughout the eastern half of the United States of America along with one of the World’s biggest oceangoing containerization businesses. However, CSX increasingly sees itself as being in the information business. “The information component of our service package is growing bigger and bigger. It’s not just enough to deliver product. Customers want information. Where their product will be consolidated and de-consolidated, what time each item will be where, prices, customs information and much more. We are an information-driven business.” Which means that the proportion of CSX employees in the middle and higher ranges of the mind-work spectrum is increasing. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
What this suggests is that companies can be roughly classified as “highbrow,” “middlebrow” or “lowbrow,” depending on how knowledge-intensive they are. Some firms and industries need to process more information than others in order to produce wealth. Like individual jobs, they can be positioned on the mind-work spectrum according to the amount and complexity of the mind work they do. Lowbrow firms typically concentrate mind work in a few people at the top, leaving muscle work or mindless work to everyone else. Their operating assumption is that workers are ignorant or that, in any case, their knowledge I irrelevant to production. Even in the highbrow sector today one may find examples of “de-skilling”—simplifying jobs, reducing them to their smallest components, monitoring output stroke by stroke. These attempts to apply methods designed by Frederick Taylor for use in factories at the beginning of the twentieth century are, however, the wave of the lowbrow past, not the highbrow future. For any task that is so repetitive and simple that it can be done without thought is, eventually, a candidate for robotization. As the economy moves more toward Third Wave production, all firms are being compelled to rethink the role of knowledge. The smartest firms in the highbrow sector are the first to rethink the role of knowledge and to redesign work itself. They operate on the assumption that productivity and profits will both skyrocket if mindless work is reduced to a minimum or transferred to advanced technology and the full potential of the worker is tapped. The goal is a better paid but smaller, smarter work force. Even middlebrow operations that still require physical manipulation of things are becoming more knowledge-intensive, moving up the mind-work spectrum. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Highbrow firms, in general, are not charitable institutions. Although the work in them tends to be less physically onerous than in lowbrow operations and the surroundings more agreeable, these firms typically demand more of their employees than lowbrow firms do. Employees are encouraged to use not only their rational minds but to pour their emotions, intuitions and imagination into the job. This is why Marcusian critics see in this an even more sinister “exploitation” of the employee. In November 2009, exactly when America and its allies were urging President Karzai of Afghanistan to be serious about fighting corruption in his regime, China Metallurgical Group Corp. made its entry into the country winning, for $800 million, a bid for the stake in the development of one of the World’s largest copper ore deposits. To become a winner, the Chinese side paid a $30 million bribe to Afghanistan’s minister of mines Muhammad Ibrahim Adel. The Minister denied the allegations. The total amount of the Chinese investment into the deposit development is nearly $3 billion, the largest foreign investment in Afghanistan ever. As there is no railroad to transport the ore and the power plant to supply energy, China pledged to construct both. If concessional loans and government-backed subsidized investments are counted as development assistance, China has already become one of the major sources of assistance for Africa, Latin America, and Asia, comparable to any major donor among the industrially developed states. As its assistance is highly concentrated on the development of natural resources and infrastructure, in these areas, for a non-negligible number of developing countries, especially in Africa, it is already number one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The amount of China’s development assistance increased from less than $1 billion in 2002 to $25 billion in 2007. As of 2007, assistance was extended to 62 states. Africa received the greatest amount: $17,962 million. Latin America got just $401 million, but after $16,425 million in 2006. Southeast Asia’s portion was $6,735 million. Out of the total, 66 percent was provided in the form of concessional loans or credit lines, 29 percent state-sponsored investment, and the remaining 5 percent as grants, debt cancellations, and in-kind aid. For comparison, the U.S. foreign operations budget in 2008 (the total of bilateral development aid, economic security and military assistance, multilateral assistance, and food aid) was estimated at $24 billion. Almost all China’s assistance targets natural resources extraction and infrastructure/public works projects. In 2002-2007, allocations for natural resource extraction projects accounted for $9,432 million of assistance of Africa, $18,525 million for Latin America, and $4,788 million for Southeast Asia. The scale of financing infrastructure/public works projects reached $17,865 million, $7,535 million, and $6,438 million respectively. Aid is highly concentrated on resource-rich countries like Angola, the Congo, Sudan, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Gabon. On the other hand, the scale humanitarian aid, as well as technical and military assistance is minor. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Within less than one decade, China has established direct access to a wide range of natural resources in the developing countries. Through active resource diplomacy, it has also dramatically raised its overall economic and political clout in the Third World. For many developing nations all around the globe, it has rapidly grown into the most or one of the most important economic partners. The West becomes increasingly nervous about Beijing’s rising influence and warns developing states of the dangers of China’s tight embrace. A mode of private ordering has an information advantage over court-based formal governance, and the operation of the private mode in the shadow of the law is the object of analysis. The general finding is that arbitration based on its information advantage works well in conjunction with the formal legal system; the two may be said to be complementary to each other. This may explain why the law takes such a benign view of arbitration, respecting its verdicts and even standing ready to enforce them. It may also offer a good approach to the development of formal institutions in less developed countries and transition economies. These can start with a minimal state law that promises to enforce the judgments of arbitration tribunals. At the early stages of this process, the government should encourage such forums to develop rule and procedures using their information advantage. Gradually, the state law can take over these rules and courts can take over some of the functions of the arbitrators. The emerging systems of commercial law in European states similarly adopted and enforced the practices evolved by the private adjudicators of “the law merchant.” This seems to have occurred despite the fact that private arbitrators do not have the incentive to provide a public good to society, or even to their own profession, by creating rules and precedents. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Deceiving spirits carefully adapt their suggestions and leading to the idiosyncrasies of the believer, so that they do not get found out: id est, no leading will be suggested contrary to any strong truth of God firmly rooted in the mind, or contrary to any special bias of the mind. If the mind, or contrary to any special bias of the mind. If the mind has a practical bent, no visibly foolish leading will be given; if the Scriptures are well known, nothing contrary to Scripture will be said; if the believer feels strongly on any point, the leadings will be harmonized to suit that point. And, wherever possible, leadings will be adapted to previously true guidance from God so as to appear to the continuance of that same guidance. Here we see clearly the way of the enemy’s working. The soul begins in God’s will, but the purpose of the evil spirit is to draw it off into the carrying out of one’s will by counterfeiting the guidance of God. Psychopathological offenders have guidance that alters the points of the life, and misdirects the energies of the human and lessens one’s service value. To frustrate this artifice of the enemy, the believer should know that there are two distinct attitudes with regard to guidance. There can be serious problems if their difference is not understood: id est trusting God to guide, and trust that God is guiding. The firt means reliance upon God Himself, and the second is an assumption of being guided which can be take advantage of by deceiving spirits. In the first, God does guide in response to definite trust in Him, and He guides through the spirit of the man who continues to cooperate with His Spirit. Every faculty is left free to act, and one’s will is able to choose intelligently the right step in the path before one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
In the second, when evil spirits take advantage of an assumption that God “is guiding” independent of momentary watchful cooperation with the Holy Spirit, a slight compulsion may be noticed, slowly increasing in force, until ultimately the believer says, “I was compelled” to do such-and-such, and “I was afraid to resist”—the compulsion being taken as an evidence of the guiding of God instead of recognized as being contrary to God’s principle of dealing with His children. If false guidance is yielded to and believed to be of God, the result is that the believer becomes a slave to a supernatural power which destroys all freedom of volition and judgment. One begins to be afraid to act oneself, lest one should not fulfill what one believe to be a minute obedience to the “will of God.” One asks “permission” to do the most obviously simple duties of life, and fears to take a step without “permission.” As soon as the believer is so passively automatic that one is incapable of realizing one’s condition, the psychopathological spirits do not need to work so much under cover. They insidiously start directing one to do the most absurd or foolish things, carefully working inside the range of one’s passive obedience to their will so as to avoid the danger of awakening one’s reasoning powers. As a matter of “obedience,” and not from any true conviction or true principle, one is bidden to let one’s hair grow long, so as to be like Samson, a Nazarite; to go without his cap, to prove his willingness to obey in the smallest matters; one must wear faded clothes as a “test” of “no pride” and a “crucifixion of self,” or as a mark of “implicit obedience to God.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
These things may seem trifles to others, who use their reasoning powers, but they become great issues in the purpose of the deceiving spirits, who, by these directions, aim at making the believer a passive, unthinking, or unreasoning medium, pliable to their will. By one’s obedience in these trivial matters, their hold deepens upon one. When these foolish and absurd actions are publicly visible, the lying spirits know that they have destroyed the testimony of the deceived human in the eyes of sober people. However, there are vast numbers of devoted believers—people known to the Church at large—who are not pushed to such “extremes” of exterior action but who are equally misled, or in bondage to “supernatural” commands concerning matters of food, dress, manners, et cetera, which they think they have received from God. Their spirit of judgment of others, and the secret self-esteem for their “consecration to God” which accompanies their “obedience,” betrays the subtle workings of the enemy. By “sustaining creativity,” we mean the theological notion of “preservation of the World.” Creaturehood implies a twofold resistance: resistance against nonbeing, and resistance against the ground of being by actualized freedom. God as the creative power of being-itself imparts the power of resistance in both cases. His sustaining creativity preserves the structure of reality. The question arises whether God is immanent or transcendent to the World, and the usual answer is that He is both. However, the real problem is the meaning of these spatial symbols “in” and “above” in ontological terms. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The divine immanence is explained in that God is the permanent creative ground of the World, and His transcendence is accounted by the abyss that divides the finite from the infinite. However, the abyss is the obverse of the ground; the finite is infinitely overshadowed by the infinite upon which it totally depends—and one is right back at immanence again. Religious experience demands a less ambiguous transcendence which is better explained in terms of freedom. The otherness of the wholly other is not merely its infinity, but the freedom of a Thou which conflicts with my freedom. Therefore, the divine transcendence is the possible conflict and the possible reconciliation of infinite and finite freedom. This kind of transcendence corresponds more accurately to the demands of the religious encounter. “Providence” is the more traditional name for “directing creativity.” We do not like the term “the purpose of creation,” because it tends to imply that God created in order to gain something. From the creature’s viewpoint, the goal of creation is the creature itself, the actualization of its potentialities. In regard to God, the end of creation is simply the exercise of the divine creativity. In neither cases does creation have a purpose beyond itself. We like to speak of the telos of creativity—the inner aim of fulfilling in actuality what is beyond potentiality and actuality in the divine life. God’s providence, then, is an inner quality present in every set of circumstances which drives or lures the creature to its fulfilment. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Finitude finds its answer in creaturehood and the divine creativity. However, for centuries theologians discussed God’s relation to the World in terms of the natural and the supranatural. However, because of our preference for thinking in dimensions instead of layers, it is no surprise that we object to the natural-supranatural scheme. However, we do more than object. Our whole system is a concerted campaign to slay the theological dragon called “the supernatural.” We consider the concept of the supranatural and its application to such specific problems as inspiration, miracles, and ethics simply intolerable. It is a metaphysical devaluation of the natural; it is static, without dynamism. It is docetic-monophysitic, sorcery, and leads to superstitious consequences. Our idea of God is not transcendent in a supranatural sense, that is to say, if “transcendent” means the establishment of a “World” behind the World, if “incarnation” means the descent of a divine being from a Heavenly place and its metamorphosis into a human being, if “immortality” is understood as the continuation of temporal existence after death, if the latent church within cultures and religions is denied, if a dramatic end-catastrophe sometime in the future is affirmed. All this is a supranaturalism against which our theology stand. Our concept of the supranatural is dialectic; it is arrived at by opposition to the natural. Whatever cannot be derived from the law of nature is supranatural. This basis of definition is the natural, and the essential element is the supra. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Thus the dialectic of the supranatural involves two movements. The first denies the natural. The second, the supra, duplicated the natural by affirming it on a higher level. From this basic position the supranaturalistic theologians develop their concept of God, His aseity and transcendence. They link Him to the World by causality, yet confine Him to the realm that is above nature, id est, the supranatural order. God is above the World. The rest of supranaturalistic theology marches to the same beat. Its method treats the Christian message as a package of supranatural truth that fell into the natural World. Miracles are the effects of supranatural tinkering with natural laws. Creation is a supranatural act that began time and nature, and eschatology is a cataclysm that ushers in an idealized reduplication of natural life. We characterize supranaturalism as dualistic, in the sense of a theology that imagines a supranatural World beside or above the natural one, a World in which the unconditional finds a local habitation, thus making God a transcendent object. By this standard we are justified in speaking of the supranaturlism of Roman Catholic system, the dualism of nature and grace. Christianity has survived through the ages because it has been a dynamic tradition. It always knew how to adapt itself to a new thought and new conditions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Moses, the Prophets, Joseph Smith, Johanan ben Zakkai, Maimonides—each saved Christianity in an hour of crisis by adjusting it to the times. Our holiest sentiments must be expressed in the tongue that links us with our ancestors and our brothers everywhere. The practices and customs of Mormonism and Christianity are precious to us, because their contents reflect the noblest aspirations of which humans are in the process of showing themselves capable, and because their forms, growing out of our own group experience, are closest to us. Our loyalty to Mormon and Christian life is therefore entirely free from a scorn or dislike for other religions and cultures. On the contrary, Mormonism makes possible our appreciation of other civilizations. Being a Mormon is the least difficult way of being truly human. The recognition of God in the World and the drive for ethical perfection are the two great contributions of the Mormon to the World—two that are really one. Perhaps other civilizations can survive without religion, but not Mormonism. Our history, our customs, our law, our literature, even our music and art, are intimately connected with the religious and ethical ideals of Mormonism. Mormon nationalism and religion are the body and soul of the living organism which is the Mormon people. A vital Mormonism in America includes an optimistic attitude toward Mormon traditions and an equally clear awareness of the necessity for growth and development. It does not deny the patent fact of the peoplehood of America, but places the emphasis properly upon the fundamentally religious character of its civilization. It is genuinely American, yet retains its bond of attachment to Heaven. There will be an inevitable victory of universal justice, freedom and peace, which our prophets and sages envisioned as the Kingdom of God on Earth. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Evils of Ignorance–Creation is the Beginning of the Fall
Public sentiment is a growing power the World over. In our country its influence is most marked. Here it creates law and repeals it. A law in violation of public sentiment is dead letter, and therefore demoralizing, for laws habitually violated tend to lawlessness. Reverence for law is a wholesome sentiment, which should be early implanted in the juvenile mind. Laws in reference alike to the support of schools or attendance upon them must depend largely upon public sentiment. Laws, just and right in themselves, and adapted, if sustained, to promote the greatest good of the greatest number, may yet fail utterly from the want of popular sympathy and support. The question, therefore, of the expediency of compulsory attendance at school in any given State depends on the enlightened public sentiment of the community. Wherever good schools have been so long maintained that the people generally regard them as essential to their individual thrift and happiness and to public security, morality, and prosperity, laws for the prevention of illiteracy may be wisely enacted. In those States where free public schools are still a novelty, or where illiteracy most abounds, where multitudes appreciate neither the advantages of education nor the evils of ignorance, compulsory attendance is considered impracticable. However, in those States where the traditions of the people from their earliest history have fostered the general appreciation of common-school education as their most precious heritage, as the source of their success and prosperity, as indispensable to their future growth, as essential to skilled industry, as the cheapest police-agency comes at length to be recognized as the universal right, duty, and interest of humans. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
If the State has a right to provide for any internal improvements, it has the right to provide for that education which is the condition of all progress. If the State may enforce regulations for the health of the body, it may do the same for the mind. If the State has a right to hang a criminal, it has a better right to prevent one’s crime by proper culture. The right to imprison and to execute implies the right to use the best means to prevent the need of either. What have to get this fatalistic idea out of people’s heads that we are on a downward spiral that cannot be stopped. The public school system in which the United States of America takes pride is one of the most paradoxical if not self-contradictory institutions in American life. On the other hand, it is completely socialized. No family pays directly for the education of those of its children who attend it; each family pays taxes more or less according to its ability, receives according to its need. All the children in the school share its services, expect where segregation and discrimination occur. The public high school in particular is the most cosmopolitan and equalitarian congregation of people in any community. Education is not merely available to all children, but compulsory during certain ages in each state. No child can be rejected as a pupil, save for reason of severe defect. The entire staff of the school—administrative, professional, and maintenance—is salaried. The whole roster of citizens in each community is eligible to participate in selecting members of its board of education and in affecting their policies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
On the other hand, in the actual conduct of teaching and learning, conventional procedure is the incarnation of competitive individualism. The assignment of pupils to grades, rooms, and seats usually ignores the social ties among them. The marking systems rank each on the basis of rivalry with all. Beyond this marking system is the swarm of psychological test devised on the premise of an individualistic psychology to which few theorists remain willing to commit themselves. The tasks imposed on pupils are for the most part individual tasks, with no group decisions and no group responsibilities. To the extent that the problem of motivation is consciously considered at all, it is generally assumed sufficient to rely on the stimulation of rivalry for grades, and on parental interest in fostering the art of getting on in the World. Yet realistically, the spectacle is one of a majority sentenced to unfavourable comparisons and burdensome compulsions, from which they escape daily and yearly as fast as they can—5.3 percent dropouts in the high school years is still the rough national average; but California has a dropout rate of 10 percent. It would be redundant to recite here the long struggle between those who want the school to concentrate upon putting vocationally useful knowledge into children’s heads, and those who have declared their aim as the development of the entire personalities of children. The liberal educationalists tend to be those who emphasize the school’s functions in developing people for their responsibilities of citizenship; the vocationalists, those who emphasize training for economic competition. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Nevertheless, there occur numerous crossings for these lines. To further highlight this illustration, if one considers the method of examination employed in purely vocational schools run on a commercial basis, the pupil is usually passed on the achievement of a standard level of objective competence, rather than upon the calculation of a minimum numerical average maintained in competition with other pupils. As the scope of formal education comes to include adults and the very young, it is notable also that this new population in nursery schools and adult programs is not subjected to the usual competitive apparatus. Methods in adult education especially, where participation is completely voluntary, relay largely on noncompetitive motivation such as: group recognition, recruitment through friends, sociability, a degree of student choice of subject matter, choice of instructors, and design of methods. Forums, workshops, round table, committees, conferences, and seminars characterize adult methods. In public school extracurricular activities, it is obvious that only voluntary methods seem appropriate to induce participation, that motivation depends primarily upon the membership standing of a person in a group. Any teacher in a high school can give examples of seemingly dull, resistant, apathetic youths, who suddenly come alive in extracurricular activities, and exhibit prodigies of ability, energy, and ingenuity when given a responsible share in the tasks of a voluntary group. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Any teacher in a high school can give examples of seemingly dull, resistant, apathetic youths, who suddenly come alive in extracurricular activities, and exhibit prodigies of ability, energy, and ingenuity when given a responsible share in the tasks of a voluntary group. Not as many teachers have grasped the possibility of finding ways in which channels of motivation can be put to the service of serious learning. Since much of the best learning occurs in extracurricular activities, how could this be made to include more of the ordinary curriculum subject matter, thus making the child’s learning a art of one’s active involvement with one’s fellows? The evolution of policy within the school falls readily int our familiar three stages, although this may not be as readily apparent as with other types of family agencies. At the first stage, the intervals of spontaneous activity by pupil—recess, playground periods, assemblies, and singing—are regarded as concessions, as ways for children to let off steam, so they can return more seriously to the work of learning. At the second stage, extracurricular activities are recognized as having some values on their own account, more facilities and encouragement are provided, and these activities become more definitely and extensively organized on a group basis, but with a substantial element of adult guidance; counseling services grow, starting with health and going on to home visits and intensive testing. At the third stage which is far from being realized, the responsible self-governing group which is characteristic of many extracurricular activities permeates school activities, less as a concession to recreational demands, or as an attempt to supply social graces to children from limited home environments, but as a beneficial program of complete education. #RandophHarris 5 of 19
The parent-teacher associations connected with public schools are potentially the bodies through which all adult citizens may participate directly in the planning and evaluation of the educational programs in their communities. At present, however, the bords of education are too remote from ordinary citizens on the one hand, and the parent-teacher associations are too frail on the other. School boards, consisting of a handful of unpaid citizens elected for several years on a normally nonpartisan basis, tend to leave initiative and leadership to the salaried administrators. They are less governing boards than boards of audit and review. Their members are often so busy and exhausted that they have less intimate day-by-day knowledge of what goes on in the schoolrooms than do the parents of school children. Yet, in the hands of boards of education rests the ultimate power to modify what goes on in the schoolrooms day by day. Lacking any such power, parent-teacher associations normally operate (save in certain small school districts) under the handicap of seeming to be purely “social” organizations, where acquaintances may be made, tea drunk, and speeches heard. Biennial elections of school boards, and, in smaller places, annual school meeting to hear and accept reports, are usually pale and bloodless versions of what might be possible if the powers and functions of boards of education and parent-teacher associations could be fused in some workable manner. A few boards have made grouping efforts in this direction, of course, is not peculiar to public school systems. It is the characteristic shortcoming of local government in general. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The frequently heard suggestions for a revival of town meetings or their equivalent fail to appreciate the peculiarly modern nature of the problem—the frustration of citizenship in the city. So far no inventor of social procedures has suggested a solution which has worked as well as town meetings are reputed to have worked in their time. As it is universally admitted that the members of the human family must be prepared by instruction, and training, for the service which devolves upon them in this life, many are advocating for the maintenance of our public schools. Without education, each human must begin jut where one’s ancestors began, and however much wisdom or knowledge on obtains by one’s own efforts, one leaves none of it to one’s posterity when one dies; there is no opportunity for the advancement of one’s race. Humans, uneducated, are not prepared either to serve the World most effectively, or to enjoy the World most fully. The difference between a human who has been well instructed and trained from one’s youth, and what the same human would have been like if one had grown up untaught and untrained, is the difference, in some cases, between a civilized human and an uncultured human. The one may fulfill a noble mission, lead a life of high enjoyment, add to the happiness of one’s fellow humans, many of whom one never saw, and, when one dies, after a brief sojourn here, may leave the World better, richer, and more prosperous for one’s having lived in it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The other, in some cases, may become a burden to one’ fellow humans to oneself, while one adds nothing to the World’s wealth, and, at the best, renders no more service to one’s race than if one had been a horse or an ox. People in China are certainly preparing for the World of the future. China is breaking existing rules in three major ways. First, it combines participation in the resource development projects in Less Developed Counties (LDCs) with large-scale development assistance focused on the building of their infrastructure. The government is acting in tandem with resource companies, providing financial and organizational support. Western firms do not work together with their governments in this fashion and thus cannot offer similar packages. (To compete with China, Japan, and South Korea are starting to rapidly move in the same direction at this point.) Second, the development assistance China provides is, mostly, neither official development aid ( developing country itself, China does not want to bear donors’ responsibilities), nor purely commercial loans and investment. It is something in between: concessional loans (extended on better terms than commercial credit) and investment backed and subsidized by the state. China often extends resources-backed development loans, meaning that the borrowers pay its debt not in cash but with oil, cocoa beans, or metal ores. It is a mutually beneficial scheme. The Chinese side gets resources it needs, while cash-strapped loan recipients do not have to pay in precious hard currency. In the late 1970s, to build its own infrastructure, China obtained similar loans from Japan leveraging its coal, oil, and other resources. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Third, unlike the West and to its great embarrassment, China’s assistance is not conditioned on the recipient states’ record regarding democratization, human rights, economic liberalization, or anticorruption measures. To access natural resources, it does not hesitate to cooperate with the most dictatorial and abusive regimes in the World. In such countries it easily becomes a de facto monopolist as Western firms are prohibited from going there by law. Compared to the West, China provides its assistance quicker and more easily, without complicated screening procedures, and often on a larger scale. Let us pick up Africa as one of the major examples. Here, between 2004 and 2010, Beijing concluded agreements on the resource-backed loans with at least seven states for a total of nearly $14 billion. It extended the oil-backed loan o Angola with Chinese companies building roads, railways, hospitals, schools, and water systems. Nigeria got two loans to finance projects for utilization of gas to generate electricity. The hydropower project in the Congo was prepaid in oil and the one in Ghana in cocoa beans. The former also received a $3 billion copper-backed loan to build infrastructure, hospitals, and universities. In 2004, the Export-Important Bank of China extended three loans to the Angolan government at interest rates ranging from LIBOR plus 1.25 percent to LIBOR plus 1.75 percent, with generous grace periods and long repayment terms. Commercial lenders, such as Standard Chartered Bank, charged Angola LIBOR plus 2.5 percent or more, without any grace periods, and required faster repayment. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
China’s $3 billion joint mining venture in the Congo gives the Congolese government a 32 percent stake, while in the joint ventures (JVs) with companies from other countries its share ranges from 7 percent to 25 percent. Also, China is starting to actively create and manage Special Trade and Economic Cooperation zones in Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Zambia, and so on, building infrastructure and facilities, especially with the aim of boosting low-cost manufacturing production and exports. This is exactly what African countries need to diversify and upgrade their industrial structure and to create jobs. In fact, the Chinese are replicating their own pattern of economic development at its earlier stages. The zones also serve as platforms for the entry by Chinese companies searching for new markets and lower costs. Encouraging the transfer of production of low-end and/or energy-intensive manufacturing items, the government subsidizes part of their start-up expenses. The $5 billion China-Africa Development Fund has acquired equity shares in three of the seven planned zones. In contrast, the U.S.A. Congress does not all the U.S.A. Agency of International Development to finance any activities leading to the relocation of Americans’ jobs overseas. Parties to an economic transaction can exploit their high-quality inside information using a relational contract, and a formal contract that must be based on lower-quality publicly verifiable information acts as a fallback in the event of cheating within their relationship. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Actions are costly to the agent, and observable only to oneself. The principal cares only about one’s own outcome minus one’s payment to the agent. The principal wants to motivate the agent’s actions, but there is some uncertainty so actions cannot be inferred precisely from the outcome. In the standard theory of the agency, the principal’s outcome is assumed to be verifiable, so outcome-based bonus or incentive payments can be designed and written into a contract that can be enforced in a court of law if necessary. However, in reality the principal’s true outcome is rarely verifiable to outsiders, even though the parties may have good information about. External, legally enforceable contracts then have to relay on some other performance measure that is an imperfect proxy for the principal’s outcome, and an even more imperfect proxy for the agent’s action. (The traditional economic theory of agency formulated the problem as a trade-off between giving the agent stronger incentives and making one bear more risk.) The simplest example of this situation is an employment contract, where the principal is the owner of a firm and the agent a manager or worker. However, it can also be interpreted in the context of a firm’s outsourcing decision. The principal firm buys from an agent firm a component that I an input to one of the principal’s final products. The principal firm’s ultimate objective is profit, but the contribution of the component to the final product, and indeed the contribution of the final product to the profit of the firm as a whole, are so thoroughly concealed in the account of the firm as to be unverifiable to a court of law. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Matters like the quantities and time of delivery of the component are recorded and easily verifiable; therefore a contract that specifies the firm’s payment to the component supplier as a function of these matters can be written and enforced by the government’s civil courts. However, the two firms may have a much better idea of other matters, such as the quality of the work, and can base a relational contract on such inside information. The finding that relational contract work best when the parties value the future highly and when the external performance measure is of very poor quality is surprising. However, one result is not so immediately obvious, and repays further thought. This is the finding that when the incentive constraint is binding and the relational contract yields a second best, a partial improvement in the external performance worsens the outcome of the relational contract. This reminds one of various “second-best” propositions in economics: when an economy has two or more distortions, a reduction in the size of one distortion may aggravate the overall distortion and reduce economic welfare. In this instance the explanation is tied to a general property of tacitly cooperative equilibria of repeated games. The harsher is the punishment that faces a deviator, the better the equilibrium that can be achieved. In this model, the punishment consists of having to fall back on the formal contract based on the external performance measure. The more accurate is that measure, the better is the payoff from the formal contract and therefore the weaker the punishment. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Similar results appear in other contexts. For example, Kranton (1996) models self-governing repeated interactions with well-matched partners, when the consequence of cheating is having to go to an anonymous arms-length market with inferior matching but enforceable contracts. A partial improvement in the quality of matching in the market then tightens the incentive constraint on self-governance and worsens its outcome. In Kranton’s context this leads to a cumulative process leading to an equilibrium where one or the other of the modes survives. More generally, one can argue that cooperation within a group is better sustained if the consequences of deviation are made worse, which requires worse outcomes from dealing with people outside the group. This is a trade-off: better within-group cooperation may require worse cross-group relations. In starker terms, a beneficial sense of “us” may be fostered only by sharpening the sense of “us versus them” hostility. In the economic context, the result has potentially serious implications of less-developed countries and transition economies that are attempting to install a formal system of contract law or to improve an existing one. The new institution of governance cannot be expected to leapfrog to perfection. The organizations and people are sure to need a period of trial and error, of experimentation and learning. The above results say tht the process of gradual improvement of state law may inflict an interim cost on the economy, by worsening the outcomes of the currently used relation-based system. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Therefore it is important to explore the results in greater depth, and look for empirical evidence bearing on it. In an established bilateral relationship it is the relationship itself that determines the degree of cooperation, regardless of whether the courts are effective. This is encouraging for the prospects of improving the courts gradually without causing short-term harm. However, the finding runs contrary to the theoretical result. If the theoretical model is broadly right, effectiveness of the courts would be irrelevant to the outcome of relational contract only if the parameters puts the equilibrium in a region that increases one’s temptation to renege on the relational contract. A second possibility is that the accuracy of the external measure is so poor that the alternative relational contract is not recourse to the courts but a total breakdown of the interaction. The third possibility, of course, is that the theoretical model is missing some key aspect of reality; that provides a challenge and an opportunity for future research. The upper-symbolic economy makes obsolete not only our concepts of unemployment but our concepts of work as well. To understand it and the power struggles that it triggers, we will even need a fresh vocabulary. Thus, even the division of the economy into such sectors as agriculture, manufacturing, and services today obscures rather than clarifies. Today’s high-speed change blur once-neat distinctions. Instead of clinging to the old classifications, we need to look behind the labels and ask what people in these companies actually do to create added value. Once we pose this question, we find that more and more of the work in all three sectors consists of symbolic processing, or “mind work.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Farmer now use computers to calculate grain feeds; steelworkers monitor consoles and video screens; investment bankers switch on their laptops as they model financial markets. In matter little whether economist choose to label these as agriculture, manufacturing, or service activities. Even occupational categories are breaking down. To label someone a stockroom attendant, a machine operator, or a sales representative conceals rather than reveals. It is a lot more useful today to group workers by the amount of symbolic processing or mind work they do as part of their jobs regardless of the label they wear or whether they happen to work in a store, a truck, a factory, a hospital, or a office. In what might be called the “mind-work spectrum” we have the research scientists, the financial analyst, the computer programmer or, for that matter, the traditional file clerk. We include file clerks and scientists in the same group because, while their functions obviously differ and they work at vastly different levels of abstraction, both—and millions like them—move information around or generate more information. That makes their work symbolic. In the middle of the mind-work spectrum we find a broad range of “mixed” jobs—tasks requiring the worker to perform physical labour but also handle information. The Federal Express or United Parcel Service driver also operates a computer at one’s side. In advanced factories the machine operator is a highly trained information worker. The hotel clerk, the nurse, and many others have to deal with people—but spend a considerable fraction of their time generating, getting, or giving out information. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Auto science engineers at BMW dealers, for example, may still have greasy hands, but they also use a computer system designed by Hewlett-Packard that provides them with an “expert system” to help them in trouble-shooting along with hundreds of gigabytes of technical drawings accessible via the Internet. The system asks them for data about the car they are repairing; it permits them to search through the masses of technical material intuitively; it makes inferences and then guides them through the repair steps. When they are interacting with this system, are they “auto science engineers” or “mind workers”? It is the purely manual jobs at the lower end of the spectrum that are disappearing. With fewer manual jobs in the economy, the “proletariat” is now a minority, replaced increasingly by a “cognitariat.” More accurately, as the super-symbolic economy unfolds, the proletariat becomes a cognitariat. The key questions about a person’s work today have to do with how much of the job entails information processing, how routine or programmable it is, what level of abstraction is involved, what access the person has to the central data bank and management information system and how much autonomy and responsibility the individual enjoys. We will continue more of this discussion in the upcoming days. The “voice of the devil” as an angel of light is more difficult to detect when it comes with wonderful strings of texts which makes it appear like the voice of the Holy Spirit. Voices from without, either as from God or angels, may be rejected, yet the believer may be deceived by “floods of texts” which one thinks are from God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Therefore, detection of the source of supernatural voices requires further inquiry: Does the believer rely upon these “texts” apart from the use of one’s mind or reason? This indicates passivity. Are these texts a prop to one, an undermining of one’s reliance on God Himself; weakening one’s power of decision and one’s (proper) self-reliance? Do these texts influence one and make one elated and puffed up as “specially guided by God,” or crush and condemn one, and throw one into despair and condemnation, instead of leading one to sober dealing with God Himself over the course of one’s life—with a keen and increasing knowledge of right and wrong obtained from the written Word by the light of the Holy Spirit? If these and other such-like results are the fruit of the “texts” given, they may be rejected as from the deceiving spirits, or at least an attitude of neutrality should be taken concerning them until proof of their source is obtained. The voice of the devil is also distinguishable from the voice of God by its purpose and outcome. If the outcome is not in accordance with the guidance given, then one definitely needs to check with fellow believers regarding its validity. For, obviously, if God speaks directly to a human, the human will then be infallibly correct with regard to the specific matter in question. Thus far, creation has been considered within the order proper to it, the essential order. However, man as the creature the exercises freedom brings us to the boundary line of the existential order of tragedy and dissolution. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
God as the creator is beyond the distinction of essence and existence. He does not depend upon essences or divine ideas which govern His creativity. His creative vision simultaneously embraces both the essence of a creature and each moment of its existence. However, created being does not lie buried within the divine life. It exists in the universe of reality, and its existence is different from its essence. Humans provide the clearest insight into creaturely existence because only they possess finite freedom. Humans, and analogously the rest of reality, is not only grounded in the creative ground of being, but they are also outside it inasmuch as one “stands upon” one’s self when one exercises one’s freedom. One can only actualize one’s essence, be a real human, by positing free acts which inevitably clash with one’s essential nature. Fully developed creatureliness is fallen creatureliness. At this pivotal point of freedom the doctrine of creation (the essential order) and the doctrine of the fall (the existential order) merge and become indistinguishable. Being a creature means both to be rooted in the creative ground of the divine life and to actualize one’s self through freedom. Creation I fulfilled in the creaturely self-realization which simultaneously is freedom and destiny. However, it is fulfilled through separation from the creative ground through a break between existence and essence. Creaturely freedom is the point at which creation and fall coincide. Creation is the beginning of the fall. One who feels in one’s heart genuine tie with the life of one’s people cannot possibly conceive of the existence of the Christian people apart from “Queen Sabbath.” We can say without exaggeration that more than America preserved the Sabbath, the Sabbath preserved America. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
If I were asked to single out one of the great historical institutions more essential for our preservation than all others, I would not hesitate to declare that it is the observance of the Sabbath. Without this, the home of the Church or Mormon Temple, the festivals and the holy days, the language and the history of our people, will gradually disappear. If the Sabbath will be maintained by those who have observed it and will be restored to those who have abandoned it, then the permanence of Christianity or Mormonism is assured. Every Christian or Mormon who has it within one’s power should assist in the effort to restore the Sabbath to the man from whom it has been taken away from. No deeds of charity or philanthropy, no sacrifices of tie or fortune made by anyone, equals in beneficent result the expenditure of time and money looking toward the re-establishment of the Sabbath among God’s people. No amounts of prating about morals will ever take the place of rooted habits ruthlessly plucked out. The observance of the Sabbath brings deep and abiding rewards to the Christian and Mormons. It re-creates one’s spirit as it regenerates one’s physical and nervous system. It brings one into communion and with God, links one with the profoundest aspirations of America, and draws one into the orbit of the Book of Mormon or the Christian Bible. It therefore follows inseparably that the failure to observe the Sabbath brings its penalties in the impoverishment of the spirit, the denudation of Christian and Mormon values and alienation from Christian and Mormon community, literally “that soul is cut off from its kinsmen.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Lay Bare the Secret You Keep from Each Other
It was a lie. A lie I would never forget for as long as I walked the Earth. He would tell us nothing of himself but that he was “a fool,” to be frightened by their talk, and that the rattle of a window, or the dropping of a pin was enough to scare him now. He was now asleep on the sofa. The candles were flaring, and there was a wavering shadow at the door that looked like the head of a man with a long neck, and a long, sharp nose, peeping and drawing back. The fugitive shadow seemed to be breaking up, rearranging itself oddly. I rose, and walking slowly to him, I stood over him and looked at him, at the blood that soaked his lace shirt and stained his face. He did not open his eyes. However, I felt his sorrow. I felt its immensity, and I wished I did not feel it, and for the moment I understood the gulf that divided us, and the gulf that divided his attempt to overpower me from my rather simple defense of myself. And with his eyes closed, and his hand open beside him, he appeared the abandoned offspring of time and supernatural accident, someone as miserable as myself. What had he done to become what he was? His family was ruined, I believe, in some civil wars, long ago. Through the hall door, I could see the moonlight was beautiful. As the night waned on, the young man recovered slowly from his brain fever, but not perfectly. He was not sufficiently strong to remove for change of scene and air, which were necessary for his complete restoration. In the dead of the night, Haze Austin was suddenly awakened. And in this broken child were centuries of evil and centuries of knowledge, and out of him there came no ignominious entreaty but merely the soft and bruised sense of what he was. Old, old evil, eyes that had seen dark ages of which I only dream. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
I shall never forget this sight, for he looked the perfect incarnation of hate. His green eyes blazed with lurid fire, and his white teeth seemed to almost shine through the blood which dabbled his mouth. Desperately he tried to vanquish what he did not comprehend. He was so exquisitely beautiful and so lost. “Is there a chill in the air, dear?” I said. “I almost shiver; have I been dreaming? You look ill, Mrs. Winchester; a little faint,” said Haze. “I am better now. How do you feel now, Haze?” I said. I was beginning to take alarm. Natural enough, was it not, that one of his own should take him away from Llanada Villa. “Papa would be grieved beyond measure,” he said. “If he thought we were inconveniencing you at all.” In a moment he was standing on his own feet. And then he walked drowsily beside me, my arm about his shoulder, bolstering him and steadying him, until we were moving towards his father’s cottage on my estate. I only half glanced at the figures passing us, until I saw a familiar shape under the trees. Somewhere far off in the darkened gardens, other were near. When he pushed open the door to his father’s home, he was laying dead upon the floor. His cravat was drawn halter-wise tight round his throat, and he had done its work well. The body was cold, and had been long dead. In due course the coroner held his inquest, and the jury pronounced that the deceased, Mac Austin, had died by his own hand, in a state of temporary insanity. However, Haze had his own opinion about his father’s death, though his lips were sealed, and he never spoke about it. He went and lived for the residue of his days in York, where there are still people who remember him, a taciturn and surly young man, who attended church regularly, and also drank a little, and was know to have saved some money. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
But there occurred that night an event which gave my thoughts quite a new turn, and seemed to even startle even Haze’s languid nature. When I returned to my drawing-room, and sat down to coffee and chocolate, Elizabeth joined me, and we had a little card party. When the game was over, Elizabeth and I sat down on the sofa, and I asked her, a little anxiously, whether she had heard from her mother since her arrival. She answered “No.” I then asked her whether she knew where a letter would reach her at present. “I cannot tell,” she answered, ambiguously, “but I have been thinking of leaving you; you have been already too hospitable and too kind to me. I have given you an infinity of trouble, and I should wish to take a carriage to-morrow, and post in pursuit of her; I know where I shall ultimately find her, although I dare not tell you.” “But you must not dream such a thing,” I exclaimed. “I cannot afford to lose you so, and I will not consent to your leaving us, except under the care of your mother, who was so good as to consent to your remaining with us till she should herself return. I should be quite happy if I knew that you heard from her; but this evening the accounts of the progress of the mysterious disease that has invaded our community, grow even more alarming; and my beautiful guest, I do feel the responsibility, unaided by advice from your mother, very much. However, I shall do my best’ one thing is certain, that you must not think of leaving Llanada Villa without her distinct direction to that effect. We should suffer too much in parting from you to consent to it easily.” “Thank you, Mrs. Winchester, a thousand times for your hospitality,” Elizabeth answered, smiling bashfully. “You have all been too kind to me; I have seldom been so happy in all my life before, as in your beautiful mansion, under your care, and in the society of your dear niece.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
I accompanied Elizabeth to her room, and sat and chatted with her while she was preparing for bed. She turned around, “Do you think that you will ever confide fully in me about your home?” “Now, Elizabeth, you are gong to talk your wild nonsense again,” I said hastily. “Not I, silly little fool as I am, and full of whims and fancies; for your sake I’ll talk like a sage. Did you ever have a ball in the Grand Ballroom? What was it like? How charming it must be.” “I almost forget, it is years ago.” I laughed. “Mrs. Winchester, you are not so old. Your first ball can hardly be forgotten yet.” “I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent. There occurred that night what has confused the picture, and made it colours faith I was all but assassinated in my bed, wounded here,” I touched my breast, “and never was the same since.” “Were you near dying?” “Yes, a very—cruel love—strange love, that would have taken my life. Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifices without blood. Let us go to sleep now; I feel lazy.” I bid her good-night, crept from the room with an uncomfortable sensation, locked her door and retired to my chambers. I was lying in bed, with my hands buried in my rich wavy hair, under my cheek, and my head upon the pillow. I often wondered whether my pretty guest ever said her prayers. I certainly had never seen her upon her knees. In the morning she never came down until long after our family prayers were over, and at night she never left the drawing room to attend our brief evening prayers in the hall. Ever since the midnight invaders, I locked all the doors in the house at night, and my whimsical alarms about prowling assassins required me to have the servants search every room in the house to make sure there were no lurking assassins or robbers “ensconced.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
After these measures were taken, I got into my bed and fell asleep. A light was burning in my room. This was an old habit, of very early date, ad which nothing could have tempted me to dispense with. Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. However, dreams come through walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exists and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths. I had a dream that night that was the beginning of a very strange agony. I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep. However, I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was. I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as I had seen it last, except tht it was very dark, and I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. However, I soon saw that it was a sooty-black figure that resembled a man. He appeared to me about five or six feet tall, he floated around the room hither and tither with the lithe sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you ay supposed, I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and I could see it was Haze. He looked at me with centuries of evil blazing in his eyes, but there was not the slightest stir or respiration. And I felt a shudder. My heart expanded slightly, against my will. “I curse you,” he said. As I stared at him, I felt danger again, terrible danger. Then he appeared to have changed his place, and was now nearer to the door; then, close to it, the door opened, and he vanished. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
It would be vain my attempting to tell you the horror with which, even now, I recall he occurrence of that night. It seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompassed the apparition. Later that day, I had another strange experience; I walked into the parlor that afternoon where Daisy and Elizabeth had been sitting, and a saw Haze upon the sofa. However, then I realized that he was invisible to the others. He got up and walked toward me—I was not afraid—and then—seemed to dissolve into the air. And so I wondered…whether I might have fallen into a trance. I clasped my hands and struggled to control my breathing. We know that, in the mesmeric trance, a subject may acquire unusual mental powers; The Frenchman Didier, who could read minds, play cards blindfolded, and identify the contents of sealed containers with great accuracy, is one of the best-known instances. Ancient houses, it has always seemed to me, are like Leyden jars, quietly accumulating the influences of the past…and my home is a special case. I lay awake into the small hours, worrying over these anxieties as they became more and more nightmarish until I sank into a troubled sleep. Sleeping had become so difficult one night that I wandered through this vast mansion, searching for a precious jewel William had given me. The jewel had been lost; I did not know how, but I knew that my own carelessness was to blame. To make matter worse, I could not remember what kind of stone it was, for as I went from room to room, a voice kept chanting, “Emerald, sapphire, ruby, diamond,” over and over, and none of them seemed right, because the lost stone was a different, a more beautiful colour than any of those, and I knew I ought to be able to picture it, and thus recall its name, but I could not. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
The mansion was absolutely silent; the light throughout, even in corridors was a pale, uniform grey like that of an overcast sky. The rooms were modestly furnished; each one seemed to have its own miniature flight of stairs, up or down two or three steps, and the corridors kept changing levels in similar fashion. Though the house itself was not especially sinister, my anxiety over the fate of the jewel grew steadily more acute until it had risen to an unbearable pitch. Then it occurred to me that I still had not searched the Venetian Dining Room. The thought precipitated a vertiginous change of scene; the light sank to a dim, murky brown, and I was standing in the doorway of the room where we had dined that night. The curtains were drawn, the candles snuffed; the room seemed to be empty, but as I crept toward the table, I saw, above the back of the chair in which I usually sat, the dark outline of a head. There was time to slip away quietly; but perhaps the jewel had fallen into the lining of my chair, and if I were to tiptoe forward, I might be able to see it. I was within two feet of the motionless figure when a voice spoke from the doorway behind me, a word that rang like a loud gong, louder and louder until it became my own cry of “No!” and I woke in grey dawn light to find myself standing at the head of the stairs. And then I thought I caught sight of a shape, dak in space and light, through the door in one of the bedrooms. There was a tall figure in what I could have sworn was a black top hat, staring directly back at me. The figure was dressed formally in black morning suit. And then, with a movement so spasmodic and sudden, the man turned and stated to walk eastward, out of sight. I dismissed it, as one of the Winchester’s passing enigmas. There was much about the curse of the Winchester Mansion that I did not understand. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
Spirits of Llanada Villa, I awaken the powers of darkness which dwell within you by the power of the blood of the three heeded Dragon Zohak that you may serve to empower Mrs. Winchester’s great work! Through serving the greater cause of dark magick which break the shackles that bind the Blackened Fire of Spirit, may you be uplifted and liberated! Awaken and empower the forbidden rites of Angra Mainyu! Awaken to empower the Mrs. Winchester’s great work of counter creation as an Apostle of the Lord of Darkness eternal and as a warrior of the path of the Lemegeton. I adjure thee, Emperor Lucifer, as the agent of the strong living God, of His beloved Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and by the power of the Great ADONAY, ELOIM, ARIEL, and JEHOVAM, to appear instantly, or to send thy Messenger Astarot, forcing thee to forsake thy hiding-place, wheresoever it may be. Aeshma, Div of wrath and fury! He who wields the bloody mace! Aeshma who is demon of the wounding spear I call you forth into this temple of counter creation! Through devotion to my becoming on this path, your spiritual weapon has been made manifest in this corporeal World through my will and counter creative power so you may fill it with your essence and might! Empower it so that it may serve me here upon the corporeal plane! May it serve as a key to the realms above and below unlocking the power and wisdom for the spirits of the Winchester’s glory and ascent! Fill this weapon with your powers of wrath and fury that it may seek out spiritual attacks made and render them useless and impotent! #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
One Halloween, a tour guide saw a little boy who was no more than six years old. He was dressed in a black hood, and long black robe, and it looked like he did not have a face, as he had a black, opaque nylon covering the opening in the hood. The tour guide asked him who he was supposed to be, and the little boy said, “I’m the Angel of Life.” The tour guide then asked him who the Angel of Life is. The boy replied, “The Angel of Life is someone who comes to talk to you. He tells you things about your life.” The conviction on the little boy’s face and the non-hesitant way in which he explained who he was made the tour guide think that the boy had some knowledge of what he was talking about. Shortly after, objects in the gift shop started floating about, and glimpses of a shadowy figure were spotted in the basement. In the café, according to a female patron, she had been sitting at a table in a back corner of the room when a man suddenly appeared in a chair across the table from her. The man stared straight ahead and refused to react in any way. The female patron looked away to get the waitress’s attention and when she looked back, the man was gone. The woman related that the elusive figure was wearing old-fashioned clothes. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Return in the Darkening Twilight
Llanada Villa is a prime example of Victorian architecture. Its exterior is stately, refined, with a touch of Gothic elegance. Its front doors welcome, even as it seems to be hiding something. Inside the floors creak without warning, without any sense of someone there. The wood is thick with the humidity, as if the walls and floor breathe. Through the years, guest have reported feeling cold spots, or seeing strange, wispy streaks of light. The sense of the uncanny cries out for an explanation. Ghosts bridge the past to the present; they speak across the seemingly insurmountable barriers of death and time, connecting us to what we thought was lost. The townsfolk whispered tales of its dark history, of unspeakable horrors that occurred within the walls of my homes. As I climbed the grand staircase, each step seemed to release a flurry of hidden memories. Voices whispered incantations that send shivers down my spine. I must not faint, I told myself, and summoning all my resolve, made my way to the safety of the back parlour. There I collapsed into a couch, with my head already beginning to throb. The pain soon became so excruciating that I lost all sense of time until someone, I could not tell who, brought me a sleeping draught, and I sank at last into merciful oblivion. Next morning, I was at first bewildered to find myself fully dressed upon the parlour sofa. The parlourmaid, Trinity, brought me a cup of tea. She had set my skin crawling with fear. At this moment the unwonted sound of carriage wheels and many hoofs upon the road, arrested out attention. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
I was haunted with a terror of robbers. My house was robbed once, and two servants murdered, so I always lock my door. It had become a habit. Still, it was a fine autumnal sunset, and melancholy lights and long shadows spread their peculiar effects over the landscape. I was looking out of one of the long drawing-room windows, when there entered the court-yard, a figure of a wanderer who I knew very well. He used to come by twice a year asking to tour my home. He was a tall man, with sharp learn features. He wore a pointed black bread, and he was smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He was dressed in buff, black, and scarlet, and crossed with more straps and belts than I could count, from which hung all manner of things. Behind, he carried a magic-lantern, and two boxes, which I well knew, in one of which was a salamander, and in the other a mandrake. These monsters used to my Mr. Hansen laugh. They were compounded of parts of monkeys, parrots, squirrels, fish, and hedgehogs, dried and stitched together with great neatness and startling effect. He had a fiddle, a box conjuring apparatus, a pair of foils and masks attached to his belt, several other mysterious cases dangling about him, and a black staff with copper ferrules in his hand. His companion was a rough spare dog, that followed at his heels, but stopped short, suspiciously at the front gate, and in a little while began to howl dismally. In the meantime, the mountebank, standing in the midst of the court-yard, raised his grotesque hat, and made us a very ceremonious bow, paying his compliments very volubly in execrable French, and German not much better. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Then, disengaging his fiddle, he began to scrape a lively air, to which he sang with a merry discord, dancing with ludicrous airs and activity, that made me laugh, in spite of the dog’s howling. Then he advanced to the window with many smiles and salutations, and his hat in his left hand, his fiddle under his arm, and with a fluency that never took breath, he gabbled a long advertisement of all his accomplishments, and the resources of the various arts which he placed at our service, and the curiosities and entertainments which it was in his power, at my bidding to display. “Will your ladyship be pleased to buy an amulet against the oupire, which is going like the wolf, I hear, through these woods,” he said, dropping his hat on the floor. “They are dying of it right and left, and here is a charm that never fails; only pinned to the pillow, and you may laugh in his face.” These charms consisted of oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic ciphers and diagrams upon them. I instantly purchased one. He was looking up, and I was smiling down at him, amused. His piercing black eye, as he looked up in my face, seemed to detect something that fixed for a moment his curiosity. “I told you that I am charmed with you in the most particulars,” he said. “You are slender, and wonderfully graceful. Your complexion is rich and brilliant; your features are small and beautifully formed; your eyes large, dark, and lustrous; your hair is quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently think and long when it is down about your shoulder. It is exquisitely fine and soft, and in colour a rich very dark brown, with something of gold.” “Well, I do wonder at a wise man like you,” I replied. And so he walked on, and I heard no more. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Within the space of a week, my colour had returned, and I was sleeping so soundly that I was scarcely aware of my dreams. I walked miles on my estate each day, and I began to see it with new eyes. Every field, every path, even every hedgerow had its own name and its own history. I considered the amulet I purchased as an omen of good luck—and placed in beneath my pillow, to guard against further visitation. That evening, as I reached the top of the stairs, I heard a peculiar flickering sound. Entering my dressing room in the darkness, I made my way to the familiar dressing table on the right side of the room. Now the noise was even more pronounced. It sounded to me as if someone were turning the pages of book, a sound for which there was no rational source. Move over, I suddenly became away of a clammy, cold feeling around me. Since it was a warm evening, this too surprised me. In the dark, I could not be sure if there were not someone else in the dressing room. I quickly existed the room and went to bed. But this night, I was awakened by a violent shaking of my bed. I could see, in the very imperfect light, two figures at the foot oof it, holding each a bedpost. A voice said, “We’ll hang you!” Trembling, I climbed over to the footboard; and saw the figure at the other side, little more than a black shadow, begin also to scale the bed; and there was instantly a dreadful confusion and uproar in the room, and such a gabbling and laughing; I could not catch the words. I found myself on the floor. The phantoms and clamour were gone, but a crash and ringing of fragments was in my ears. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
The great china bowl, from which for generations the Winchester had been baptized, had fallen from the mantelpiece, and was smashed on the hearthstone. I warned the servants not to disregard oaths and curses. A mourning coach drove up, and two gentlemen in black cloaks, and with crape to their hats, got out, and without looking to the right or the left, went up the steps to the Winchester mansion. Mr. Hansen followed them slowly. The carriage had, he supposed, gone round to the yard, for, when he reached the door, it was no longer there. So he followed the two mourners into the house. In the hall he found a fellow servant, who said he had seen two gentlemen, in black cloak, pass through the hall, and go up the stair without removing their hats, or asking leave of anyone. This was very odd, Mr. Hansen thought, and a great liberty; so upstairs he went to make them out. But he could not find them then, nor ever. And from that hour the house was troubled. In a little time there was not one of the servants who had not something to tel. Step and voices followed them sometimes in the passages, and tittering whispers, always minatory, scared them at the corners of the galleries, or from dark recesses; so that they would return panic-stricken. I, myself, had also heard these voices, and with this formidable aggravation, they came always when I said my prayers. I was scared at such moments by dropping words and sentences, which grew, as I persisted, into threats and blasphemies. These voices were not always in the room. They called, as I fancied, through the walls, very thick in this house, from the neighbouring rooms, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other; sometimes they seemed to holla from distant lobbies, and came muffled, but threateningly, through the long paneled passages. As they approached they grew furious, as if several voices were speaking together. Whenever I applied myself to my devotions, these horrible sentences came hurrying towards the door, and, in panic, I would start from my knees, and all then would subside except the thumping of my heart against my stays, and the dreadful tremours of my nerves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
What these voices said, I never could quite remember one minute after they had ceased speaking; one sentence chased another away; gibe and menace and impious denunciation, each hideously articulate, were lost as soon as heard. And this added to the effect of these terrifying mockeries and invectives, that I could not, by any effort, retain their exact import, although their horrible character remained vividly present to my mind. Camile who acted as a housemaid, would not sleep in the house, but walked home, in trepidation, to her father’s, under the escort of her little brother, every night. Mrs. Rendell, the kitchenmaid, endured the nightly terrors. Mr. Hansen was testy and captious about these stories. He was already uncomfortable enough by reason of the entrance of tow muffled figures into the house, about which there could be no mistake. His own eyes had seen them. He refused to credit the stories of the servants. I made a decision not to fuel the stories of the ghost to keep the servants. “If you see ghosts here, it is no place for you, and it is time you should pack,” I would say. Here has been the cook with the kitchenmaid, as white as pipeclay, all in a row, to tell me I must have a parson to sleep among them, and preach down the devil! Upon my soul, I would not allow my home to fall into utter chaos and disarray. “Mrs. Winchester, I know you are no fool,” said the cook. “But supposed there was a such thing as a ghost here, don’t you see, it ain’t just women telling stories.” “I will not dignify such ideas,” I replied. The women left the kitchen, the cook and the butler went down, not altogether unused to such condescension in the household. The fire had gone down and I was chilled. The candles were expiring in the socket and threw on the white all long shadows, that danced up and down from the ceiling to the ground, and their black outlines I fancied resembled the two men in cloaks, whom I remembered with profound horror. I took the candle, with all the haste I could, getting along the passage, on whose walls the same dance of black shadows was continued, very anxious to reach my room before the light should go out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
On night in 1990, there was an unusual buzzing sound in The Winchester Mystery House, one of the staff encountered a dark, hooded figure standing at the door-to-nowhere. In the dim light issuing through the stained glass windows from an outside light, he could see that the intruder, who looked very much like a cowled monk, was waving his arms in a particular manner. Interpreting his movement as threatening, he approached the man and asked him to leave. At the very moment, the employee says he never felt so weak and helpless.
He collapsed in a heap backward onto the floor. He remembered that he actually began to weep in fear and confusion. He was completely at the mercy of whoever or whatever was standing at the door. It was then that the hooded being spoke. “Don’t be afraid,” it said in a quiet whisper. “We won’t hurt you.” And the next thing he knew, the morning sunlight was making him squint into wakefulness. As he reflected on the incident, he became more and more convinced that an actual visitation had occurred and that some kind of entity had come into the mansion. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Some Move to Suburbia Out of Fear of those Unlike them
Sarah L. Winchester stirred, rolling onto her side and clutching her pillow. She had been caught in a strange netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, her uneasy rest punctured by nightmares of loss connections with her daughter and husband, but a noise downstairs had brought her back to reality. Every criminal offense is comprised of a set of behavioural (actus reus) and mental (mens reus) prerequisites. These statutory provisions are clearly sated in the criminal code and establish what an individual must do and think to be in violation of the law. Criminal events transpire when offenders, victims, and audience members intersect in a given setting. These participants engage in a dynamic set of actions and counteractions to produce the criminal outcome. The term “criminal transaction” is used to describe this exchange process. A full discussion of the criminal transaction must consider broad-based issues such as the demographics of the actors, the environment in which the crimes occur, and the way that these events tend to play themselves out. In the case of the offender-victim relationship, it is noted the violent crimes tend to take on a one-on-one offender-victim dynamic. Conversely, property offenders, public order offenders, and many organizational criminals are prone to work in small groups. What is more, robbery, burglary and common property offense are described as stranger crimes while other crimes tend to involve a victim and perpetrator(s) who know one another. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Faith motivated individuals, faith-based organizations, and the transformative power of faith itself are proven keys in reducing crime and improving the effectiveness of our criminal justice system. We now know that intentional partnerships between congregations and law enforcement can lead to dramatic improvement in police-community relations and reductions in crime, youth violence, and gang activity. We also known that faith-based programs can provide an antidote to the harmful culture that permeates so many of our correctional facilities. In this way, religion can help change prisons from an environment for learning even more deviant behaviour to places where rehabilitation is a realistic possibility. Additionally, faith-motivated mentors and faith-based groups can provide both the support and supervision necessary to help not only prisoners but also those former prisoners stay crime-free by learning moral and productive lives. The American suburbs are part of what is called a “global project.” Across the planet, after World War II, America’s image as a democracy and as World economic leaders also became a cultural model for consumerism and community-building. American images and ideas central to the lifestyle of its new suburbs—supermarkets, automobiles, super-highways, and motels—were exported to other nations. The American post-war dream was concretized in the form of the single-family suburban home, the cul-de-ac community, the local shopping center, and the family car, as opposed to the crowded, high crime, industrial cities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
To middle class families the suburbs give a safe, sanitary environment, new houses in styles somewhat in keeping with the conception of family life, and permanent neighbourhoods of people with similar outlook. In an atmosphere of rapid change, the income-graded neighbourhoods render two important service to their residents. Relative evenness of wealth meant neighbours who would reinforce an individual family’s efforts to pass on its values to its children. The surrounding evenness of wealth also gave adults a sense of a community of shared experience, and thereby gave some measure of relief from the uncertainties inherent in a World of highly competitive capitalism. Even those excluded from them, the suburbs offered a physical demonstration that the rewards of competitive capitalism might be within the reach of all. The suburban life is also a spiritual quest. These suburbs are the latest version of the promise of the American frontier—blank slates on which new residents can write their stories. The pioneers who move to these suburbs have made a startling leap into the unknow. The places have no past, no precedent, no settled conventions. The residents have no family connections here. However, people move here with the hope that there soon will be communities and relationships developed among people in the same yacht as themselves. Fellow pilgrims on the journey, as it were. Many people are struck by the significance of suburban living as a spiritual quest or pilgrimage. They are all looking for something. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
People live in the suburbia for any number of reasons. They may have come here because of a job change or for a relationship. They come in search of affordable housing, good school, or safe communities. Or they may have grown up in suburbia by default; indeed, over half of the American population now lives in suburbia, and many of them have been suburbanites for two or three generations. Whatever the case, those who live in suburbia have aspirations for a certain kind of life. For some it is an optimistic vision, while others may be more cynical about ever seeing such a life to come. However, it is still a spiritual longing in either case. Even those who come to suburbia for less than noble reasons do so out of a particular vision of their ideal life. Some move to suburbia out of fear of those unlike them, fleeing from racial diversity and searching for a place “safer” and more comfortable to their preexisting prejudices. Others care little for their neighbours and fashion suburban lives of self-centered materialism, acquisition of possessions and status climbing. These too point to spiritual needs, however misguided or impure the motivations might be. Whenever people describe suburbia, invariably they use phrases like “a good place to raise kids,” or “where people settle down and start a family.” Inherent in these comments is an aspiration of hope for their future and a dream of a good life for their children. Suburbia is the context and the setting for the fulfillment of people’s hopes and dreams. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The suburbs had always promised prosperity, upward mobility, a healthy life in an unpolluted environment, safety and tranquility, and above all, the best place to bring up kids. Although this promise still fuels many dreams and infuses a nostalgic political rhetoric, the future is hopeful. It is a place many people can hear the voice of God. The suburban Christian ought not uncritically absorb all the characteristics of the suburban World but rather should thoughtfully asses and discern how Christians ought to live in this environment, without either capitulating to the culture or abandoning it by fleeing the suburbs and relocating to the country. Given suburbia’s new centrality, Christians, especially suburban Christians, must take the suburbs seriously. In order to detect the “voice of God,” we need to understand that the Holy Spirit alone is charged to communicate the will of God to the believer, and that He works from within the spirit of the disciple, enlightening the understanding so as to bring one into intelligent co-working with the mind of God. No matter where you live, the purpose of the Holy Spirit is, briefly, the entire renewal of the redeemed one, in spirit, soul and body. God therefore directs all His working to the liberation of every faculty, and never in any way seeks to direct a human as a passive machine, even into good. God work in one to enable one to choose the good, and strengthens one to act, but never—even for “good”—dulls one or renders one incapable of free action. One would nullify the very purpose of Christ’s redemption on Calvary, and the purpose of His own coming. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
When the self-actualized understands these principles, the “voice of psychopathological offenders” is recognizable: when it comes from outside the human, or within the sphere of one’s perception, and not from the central depth of one’s spirit where the Holy Spirit abides; when it is imperative and persistent, urging sudden action without time to reason or intelligently weigh the issues; when it is confusing and clamorous, so that humans are hindered from thinking. For the Holy Spirit desires the believer to be intelligent, as a responsible being with a choice, and will not confuse one so as to make one incapable of coming to a decision. The speaking of psychopathological offenders can also be a counterfeit of the apparent inner speaking of the human oneself, as if one were oneself “thinking,” and yet with no concentrated action of the mind; exempli gratia, a persistent and ceaseless “commentary” going on somewhere within, apart from volition or mind action, commenting on the human’s own actions or the actions of others, such as “You are wrong,” “You are never right,” “God has cast you off,” “You must not do that,” et cetera, et cetera. Humans do not grasp God through symbols, but in the experience of faith one is grasped by an ultimate concern expressed in symbols. Every symbol descriptive of ultimate reality originates in an experience of ultimate concern and continues to live only insofar as it can introduce someone into the revelatory constellation by arousing a similar experience. Religious symbols participate in the power of being not merely ontologically, but experientially. They concretely convey the experience of ultimacy, of seizure by an ultimate concern. And lest this affirmation of the symbol open the door to the demonic, we insist upon the negation of the symbol by the ultimate to which it points. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Analogia is more negative-protesting than positive-affirming. Religious symbols participate in that which they symbolize, being-itself; they participate by sharing in the ground of being, as do all finite beings; and they participate by expressing the experience of ultimacy. This last element is decisive. One expresses the experience of the ground being through the religious symbols which are formed in the crucible of the experience itself. God is being-itself is the only nonsymbolic statement about God. The religious experience of God is had through finite beings which participate in being-itself. The principle of analogy justifies this. The expression of this experience is through religious symbols which participate in the experience itself. Theology elaborates the meaning of religious symbols by using ontology. Analogy permits and even demands this procedure. We use the principle of analogy for two purposes: to permit a religious encounter with God through finite beings and to justify the theological use of ontology. Theology speaks ontologically about religious symbols which express the encounter with God, our ultimate concern. The word “creation” is one of the great symbol-words describing the relation of God to the Universe. The doctrine of creation depicts a state; it does not relate an event that happened “once upon a time.” Humans ask the question of their finitude and of finitude in general, and creation answers it by pointing to the situation of creatureliness and to its correlate, the divine life; it is beyond potentiality and actuality. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Hence the question whether creation is a necessary or contingent act of God is meaningless. For nothing higher than God necessitates His creativity; neither does it happen to one as an accidental act. The divine life and the divine creativity are one. All three modes of time must be used to symbolize the infinite scope of the divine dynamism. Therefore creativity originates (the past) sustaining creativity (the present), and directing creativity (the future). The classical phrase to express the Christian doctrine of creation is creatio ex nihilo. We see in it the exclusion of the pagan idea of me on, of the “given” which resists the divine creativity. Though ouk on, absolute nothingness, suffices to explain nihilo, the ex demands something more positive to describe the origin of the creature. The solution lies in the dialectic of being and non-being. Ex nihilo indicates the “heritage of nonbeing” which is the lot of every creature. Yet the creature is; it participates in the power of being which holds nonbeing in check. Being a creature include both the heritage of nonbeing (anxiety) and the heritage of being (courage). Creation is essentially good, for it is not the offspring of me on, of some semi-divine power that opposes being-itself. The way to incarnation lies open, for finitude essentially is not in conflict with God. Secondly, the element of nonbeing in creatureliness provides the potentiality for tragic disruption within finitude itself. Eschatology is forbidden to do violence to the finite by eliminating the possibility of conflict, by locating salvation in an unreal World above or finite, tragic World. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The simple theoretical analysis of the evolution of family agencies into three phases appears to be corroborated by the growth in all six types of agencies of what may indeed be called quasi-families—that is, small groups of persons similarly affected by some distinctive problem, condition or interest, who come together voluntarily to solve, correct, or pursue it by concerted actions, meanwhile providing each other with a degree of understanding, encouragement, and support which they have not found elsewhere in the community. Most of these have only arisen within the past five or six decades. While they are predominately found in urban areas, since only in such centers are there enough persons of any one type of category, exempla gratia, the Townsend Clubs, which considerably outlived the depression. While some of these quasi-families have been the products of invention and experiment by therapists, so many have sprung up apparently quite spontaneously (exempla gratia, child study groups attached to cooperative nursery schools) as to suggest that they are a particularly fitting response to current situations confronted by members of the community. Their fraternal rather than patriarchal structure does not negate the value of construing them as quasi-families; indeed, to recognize their correspondence with the more fraternal character of contemporary families improves the analogy. The desire of many public and private agencies to foster participation “at the grass roots” is most successful when the grass roots consist of strong, intimate, small groups, not collections of strangers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Under urban conditions, such groups do not as a rule get constituted on a neighbourhood basis, but out of common interests; they may primarily focus on these interests, yet they frequently have corrective and therapeutic effects on their members. While the characteristic quasi-family has a fairly homogenous membership, draw from some limited segment of a community, this does not mean that one had to regard them as simply the result of an ever more refined division of labour or fragmentation of interests. An urban quasi-family often recruits only one member of a family, which makes it quite different from those farm organizations whose local units aim to provide some engrossing activity for every member of a family. Yet every quasi-family so rapidly takes on an elaborates other functions, that few persons would ever need or want to belong to more than two or three quasi-families at most. Every member can remain as convinced of one’s own individuality within a quasi-family as within one’s actual family. In fact, scrutiny reveals a number of respects in which membership in quasi-families offers certain advantages which real families cannot. Involvement in these groups, however highly committed and intense it may be, is more like becoming a member of a club or a team in a game. Family commitments, by contrast, have still an inescapable character posing the gravest consequences for the unwilling participant. It is unlikely that individual counseling can or should be dispenses with. Yet, the theoretical shift to recognition of the family origin and interpersonal nature of personality difficulties, justifies the support counseling activity gives to voluntary group procedures. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Sociologists long ago recognized the threat to individual psychological existence in the breakdown of ancient primary group supports. Though the rural village, like Humpty Dumpty, cannot be put back together again, the incessant reorganizing of the various institutions of the urban community can well take account of the means whereby citizens continually reintegrate their selves. If it is granted that small, intimate groups of significant others play a vital part in supporting every self, it is probable that groups formed solely for the sake of such mutual support will be less durable and successful than those which accomplish this in the process of pursuing other ends. It is improbable, therefore, that individual counseling agencies could produce a full solution ever under ideal conditions, since the problem involves the whole structure of the community as this bears upon personality. What the best solutions will be is known to on one, and will only be approached through imaginative experiments of many kinds. However, no matter what, people believe that the United States of America will continue to be a great manufacturing power. There just will not be as high a percentage of people working in factories. Explaining the difference between traditional manufacturing methods and the way Macintosh computers were then being produced, she pointed out that the United States of America was surely one of the great good producers of the World with fewer than two percent of the work force engaged in agriculture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
However, many people would like America to returned to its agricultural roots, while we still have farmland, and to increase the amount of meat, poultry, and produce that is created in America so we will stop importing it, feed our own people, and export our products to other nations. This will help reduce the national deficit and be a step in the right way to help America return to being a creditor nation. Also, the American population will expand, and the labour force is also likely to expand, so more people will be willing to work on farms. While the United States of America is likely to generate 10,000 new jobs a day for the next decade, it is important to regain a presence in the manufacturing business. We do not want to leave the economy hollowed out. Nonetheless, the shift away from Second Wave manual labour toward Third Wave service work and super-symbolic activity has become widespread, dramatic and irreversible. In the United States of America today, these activities account for fully three-quarters of the work force. The great transition is reflected globally in the surprising fact that World exports of services and “intellectual property” are now equal to those of electronics and automobiles combined, or of the combined exports in foods and fuels. Futurists foreshadowed this massive shift as early as the 1960s. However, because the early warnings were ignored, the transition has been unnecessarily rocky. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Mass layoffs, bankruptcies and other upheavals swept through the economy as old rust-belt industries, late to install computers, robots and electronic information systems and slow to restructure, found themselves gutted by more fleet-footed competition. Many blamed their troubles on foreign competition, high or low interest rates, overregulation and a thousand other factors. Some of these no doubt played a role. However, equally to blame was the arrogance of the most powerful smokestack companies—auto makers, steel mills, shipyards, textile firms—that had for so long dominated the economy. Their managerial myopia punished those in the society least responsible for industrial backwardness and least able to protect themselves—their worker. The fact that aggregate manufacturing employment in 1988 was at the same level as 1968 does not mean that the workers laid off in between simply returned to their old jobs. On the contrary, with mote Third Wave technologies in place, companies needed a radically different kind of work force as well. The Old Second Wave factories needed essentially interchangeable workers. By contrast, Third Wave operations require diverse and continually evolving skills—which means that workers become less and less interchangeable. And this turns the entire problem of unemployment upside down. In Second Wave or smokestack societies an injection of capital spending or consumer purchasing power could stimulate the economy and jobs. Given one million jobless, one could, in principle, prime the economy and create one million jobs. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Once consumers have the money, they will rush out and buy things. This in turn leads to manufacturers to expand their plants and hire more workers. Good-bye, unemployment. Monetarists urge manipulation of interest rates or money supply instead, to increase or decrease purchasing power as needed. In today’s global economy, pumping money into the consumer’s pocket may simply send it flowing overseas without doing anything to help the domestic economy. An American buying a new TV set or compact disc player merely sends dollars to Japan, Korea, Malaysia, or elsewhere. The purchase does not add jobs at home. However, there is a far more basic flaw in the old strategies: they still focus on the circulation of money rather than knowledge. Yet it is no longer possible to reduce joblessness simply by increasing the number of jobs because the problem is no longer merely numbers. Unemployment has gone from quantitative to qualitative. The jobless desperately need money if they and their families are to survive, and it is both necessary and morally right to provide them with decent levels of public assistance. However, any effective strategy for reducing joblessness in a super-symbolic economy must depend less on the allocation of wealth and more on the allocation of knowledge. Furthermore, as these new jobs are not likely to be found in what we think of as manufacture, we will need to prepare people through schooling, apprenticeships and on-the-job learning for work in such fields as the human services—helping to care, for example, for our fast-growing population of the elderly, providing child care, health services, personal security, training services, leisure and recreation services, tourism and the like. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
We will also have to begin according human-service jobs the same respect preciously reserved for manufacture rather than snidely denigrating the entire service sector. The service industry cannot stand as the sole symbol for range of activities that includes everything from teaching to working at a pet groomer or in a hospital radiology center. What is more, if, as is often charged, wages can be below what people need to survive on their own in the service sector, then the solution is to increase service productivity and to invent new forms of work-force organization and collective bargaining. Unions, primarily designed for the crafts or for mass manufacturing, need to be totally transformed or else replaced by new-style organizations more appropriate to the super-symbolic economy. To survive they will have to support rather than resist such things as work-at-home programs, flextime and job-sharing. The rise of the super-symbolic economy compels us to reconceptualize the entire problem of unemployment from the ground up. To challenge outworn assumptions, however, is also to challenge those who benefit from them. The Third Wave system of wealth creation thus threatens long-entrenched power relationships in corporations, unions and governments. China, already a major importer of fuels and many minerals, is getting equipped for such a competition especially fast: With its rapidly growing, highly energy- and resources-intensive economy, the consequences of resource supply irregularities may be fatal. In the days of the Iraq war Beijing already resorted to eventually a panic buying of petroleum, overstanding the global market. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
In today’s World, if you cannot obtain your own resources domestically, to avoid supply troubles, it is considered preferable to establish long-term relationships with particular resource-rich countries, getting a stake in their resource development and extraction. Perhaps more than any other country, China is making big steps to obtain direct access to fuel and mineral resource in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The United States of America and European countries are supplied a significant portion of the natural resources they consume by major multinational companies such as Exxon-Mobil, Royal-Dutch Shell, Rio-Tinto, or BHP Billiton. In Japan and South Korea, a key role is played by the resource supply channels of leading trading houses like Mitsubishi Corporation, Itochu, SK Corporation, or Hanwha Trading. State-owned resource companies play their part, too. In most other countries, China included, supplies are provided first of all by state-owned oil and mining corporations. Currently, with strong support from the state, China’s natural resources heavyweights—PetroChina, Sinopec, CNOOC, Chinalco, China Metallurgical Group and the like—are establishing themselves among the leading global players, not at all inferior to Western majors or Japanese and Korean trading houses. On its part, the Chinese government is coming out with an innovative model of tapping natural resources in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In broader terms, this model helps China to strengthen its overall presence and influence in the World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Economic and legal scholars who study business disputes (and other events such as accidents where some economic consequences are at issue) recognize that the initial allocation of legal entitlements, the expectation and uncertainty about a court’s decision in the matter, and the costs of using the legal system all affect the parties’ choice between going to the law and settling the dispute by private negotiation. Rolling back one more step along a game tree, the same considerations also affect individuals’ decisions about engaging in activities that can lead to accidents or disputes. Consider two parties involved in an economic dispute. One of them (plaintiff) could sue the other (defendant) in a court of law. Their expectation for the time being assumed to be commonly held and known, is that the court will aware AP to the plaintiff and AD to the defendant. (If the defendant is ordered to make restitution or pay a fine, his payoff Ad can be negative.) In addition, each side has to bear some cost for using the court; this can be monetary in the form of court costs and lawyers’ fees, or non-monetary in various forms, such as time, mental strain, or damage to reputation. The costs can depend on the legal system; for example, in the American system each side bears its own court and lawyer costs, whereas in the British system the loser bears both sides’ cost. Denote the overall monetary equivalent costs by CP for the plaintiff and Cd for the defendant. Thus the expected net payoffs from recourse to the court are (AP-CP) for the plaintiff and (AD-CD) for the defendant. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The two parties could negotiate a settlement, either before a suit is filled at all, or after a suit is filed but before trial. Doing so enables them to avoid some or all of the costs of using the law. If the court is expected to levy a fine in addition to mandating some transfer between the parties, and the proceeds of the fine go to the government, then the negotiation avoids the fine and leaves a larger sum of money available for dividing between them. Suppose S is the total available for them to bargain over, and S> (AP – CP) + (AD – CD). The excess of the left-hand side of this inequality over the right-hand side constitute the “surplus” that is available for them to negotiate over. Denote the sums they can get through bargaining by XP and XD, respectively, then XP + XD= S is the bargaining frontier. The bargaining frontier is a straight line of slope -1. If the negotiation fails and the plaintiff has to sue, their payoffs in the court will be (AP – CP, AD – CD). This point is therefore the threat point that lies behind their bargaining. The generalized Nash bargaining solution then says that each party will get its threat-point payoff, plus a share of the surplus equal to its bargaining power. This bargaining power can be explained in terms of the two parties’ relative impatience, but we will simply assume that the plaintiff’s bargaining powers is and that of the defendant (1 –
). Then the outcomes of the negotiation is (figure 2.1) XP = (AP – CP) +
[S – (AP – CP) – (AD – CD), (Figure 2.2) XD = (AD – CD) + (1 –
) [S – (SP – CP) – (AD – CD)] = (1 –
)(AP – CP) + (AD – CD). These expressions yield several simple implications. For example, they tell us how different rules about the allocation of legal costs affect the outcome of pretrial negotiation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Supposed the expectation is the plaintiff will win. Under the American system, each side would pay its own monetary legal costs. Under the British system, the monetary part of the plaintiff’s legal costs would be shifted to the defendant. Denote this by M. Then the British system, as compared with the American, CP is lower and CD higher by M. Therefore (2.1) shows that XP is higher by M, and (2.2) shows that XD is lower by M, in the British system than in the American. In turn, we can calculate how the expectation of this outcome affects the incentive of the parties to engage in activities that may lead to such disputes. This argument assumes that the expected payoffs AP and AD when the parties go to the court are the same in the two systems. If the courts adjusted the payoffs to offset the stipulated allocation of costs, then the threat points of the two systems would be the same, and therefore so would the Nash solution of the negotiation. However, this simple model has some flaws. Most obviously, in the model the negotiation succeed and the threat of going to court is never invoked. This is less egregious than it may appear at first sight, because only 10 percent of disputes go to trial. Simple extensions of the model explain why and which disputes are likely to go to trial. The main cause is the parties’ inconsistent expectations about the outcome in court. If the plaintiff expects AP to be high, and the defendant simultaneously expects AD to be high, then each may think that there is no surplus to bargain over. The simple figure and algebra I have developed here promising foundations for formal models of such extensions, but I will leave developments along these lines for future work. The model can readily be extended to apply another situation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
My discussion of the court that generates the threat-point payoff in this model treated it as a well-meaning but costly system. However, it could easier be a corrupt system, or a predatory or kleptocratic government. Economic activities and transactions in such a country would try to proceed in secrecy. However, the threat of disclosure, and the consequent exposure to extortion by the state’s agents, would underlie all negotiations. By interpreting CP and CD as the expected amounts the state would extort from the two parties, the model can cover this situation. Now, let us focus on how a Christian suburb is to be. Better is a dry morsel and quietness therewith, than a house feasting amidst strife. Yea, better to ear herbs where love is, than the choicest food and hatred therewith. Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Through wisdom is a house builded, and by understanding is it established. By knowledge is the home filled with all that is pleasant and precious. Make your house a meeting place for the learned, and give heed to their words. If three people have eaten at one table and have spoken the word of the Christian Bible or Book of Mormon, it is as though they had eaten at God’s table. Blessed is that home where the woman regards the ways of her household. Blessed is the man who has a good wife, for the number of his days shall be doubled. Blessed is he who loves his wife and honours her, and direct his children into paths of righteousness. When husband and wife are worthy of each other, the divine spirit rests upon them. A home where a man loves his wife as himself, and honours her beyond his own person, shall be blessed everlastingly. A home where children honour their parents is a home in which God dwells, and He Himself is honoured. How goodly are your homes, and your dwellings, O America. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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I’m a Pharmacist, I Know What I am Doing
Recreational drug use is often portrayed in popular culture and music. To further highlight this illustration, probably the best known musical cliché of recent decades was “sex, drugs, and rock’ n’ roll,” while the Billbooard charts have been filled with songs involving drugs, such as Eric Clapton’s Cocaine or the Rolling Stones’ Sister Morphine and Mother’s Little Helper. Popular culture portrays not just recreational drug use but tragedy associated with drugs, for example, the deaths of guitarist Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison and many others. Of course, not all common-use drugs are understood as dangerous or associated with tragedy. We found clear evidence of two very different modes of entry among the respondents, namely recreational abusers and therapeutic self-medicators. However, it is important to note tht these were not mutually exclusive categories of offenders. In other words, these two categories were not completely dichotomous. As is usually the case, real life seldom fits cleanly into nice, neat categories. In fact, we were able to identify a number of cognitive and behavioural themes that were common to almost all of the drug-using pharmacists interviewed. These themes were expressed by nearly all of the drug-abusing pharmacists that we interviewed, regardless of how the individual initially began their illicit drug abuse career. The existence of these common themes suggest that pharmacy-specific occupational contingencies play a center role in the onset and progression of illicit use of prescription medicines. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Intuitively, it should not be surprising that pharmacists would steal prescription medicines as a way of treating their own physical ailments. After all, they have been exposed to years of pharmacy training that emphasized the beneficial, therapeutic potential of these medicines. Each pharmacist has dispensed the medicines to hundreds of patients and then watched the drugs usually produce the predicted beneficial results. They have all read the literature and drug inserts detailing the chemical composition of drugs and studied the often dramatic curative effects of the chemical substances. Pharmacists, more so than any other member of society, are keenly aware of how and why drugs work. There was strong evidence to suggest that both the therapeutic self-medicators and the recreational abusers actively used the years of pharmacological knowledge that they had acquired. In their eyes, it made perfect sense that they should put their pharmacy knowledge to work on themselves. This application of knowledge can be seen in the comments of a 40-year-old female self-medicator: “So, in 1986 I was sent to the psychologist. That was when I was forced to recognize that I had an alcohol problem. And I recognized that I had to do something. And in my brilliant analysis, I made a decision that since alcohol was a central nervous system depressant, the solution for me was to use a central nervous system stimulant. That would solve my alcohol problem. So I chose the best stimulant that I had access to, and that was [pharmaceutical grade] cocaine. I started using cocaine in 1986. I never thought that it would progress. I never thought it was going to get worse. I thought, ‘I’m just going to use it occasionally.’” #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Similar trends were observed among the recreational abuser group, only here, the applied use of drugs was based upon more recreational motives. Almost all of the therapeutic self-medicators and recreational abusers described how they became masters of quickly diagnosing their own ailments or emotional needs and then identifying the appropriate pharmacological agent that would remedy the problem. Moreover, as professionals, they were confident that they would be able to self-regulate their drug intake so as to never become addicted. All of the respondents drew upon their social status as pharmacists to convince themselves that their drug use would not progress into dependency. They recall being adamant in their view that personally they were immune from such problems, believing that only stupid, naïve people became addicted to drugs. As a 40-year-old female self-medicator put it, “I’m a pharmacist, I know what I am doing.” A 39-year-old male self-medicator went so far as to say: “I mean, we know more [about the effect of drugs] than doctors. We have all the package inserts. We have the knowledge. We know a lot about the drugs, so what’s the big deal?” Elsewhere we refer to this denial mechanism as a “paradox of familiarity,” because familiarity can breed consent, not contempt toward prescription drug use. Members of both categories of pharmacists claimed that they had never been warned about the dangers of drugs, insisting instead that their training had only stressed the beneficial side of prescription medication. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
To further highlight this illustration, a 48-year-old male misuser stated: “I never had anybody come right out and tell me that [prescription drug abuse] was probably unethical and illegal because they assumed that we knew that. But nobody ever said this is something that is not done.” Let without guidance on the issues, some pharmacists assumed that self-medication was acceptable behaviour. To this end, a 39-year-old female self-medicator said: “It’s [self-medication] just part of it [the pharmacy job]. It’s just accepted because we know so much. I’m sure it’s the same way when the doctors do it. It wasn’t a big stretch to start going “You know, I got a headache here, maybe I should try one of these Percocets [narcotic analgesic]?” Many pharmacists spoke about their prescription drug theft/use as if it were an entitlement that went along with being a pharmacist. Much like a butcher always has fresh meat at home or a car dealer always drives a state-of-the-art automobile, pharmacists will always have the best drugs. This theme is illustrated in an exchange that occurred between the interviewer and a45-year-old-male pharmacist: “Why take plain Aspirin or plain Tylenol when you’ve got this [Percocet-narcotic analgesic]? It works better….[so] you don’t even have to struggle with it. I really believed that I had license to do that…as a pharmacist. I mean with all that stuff sitting there, you know. Oh, my back was just killing me during that period of time and this narcotic pain reliever is sitting right there. I thought, ‘why should [I] suffer through back pain when I have this bottle of narcotics sitting here?” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The above-mentioned themes involve cognitive dimensions of the pharmacists’ drug abuse in that they speak to common motivational and justification themes that were present in all of the interview. Perhaps more important is the fact that there was a common behavioural characteristic shared by all 50 pharmacists. In ever case, occasional prescription drug abuse eventually gave way to an advanced addictive state that was marked by an enormous intake of drugs, unmistakable habituation, and the constant threat of physical withdrawal. Members of the recreational abuser and therapeutic self-medicator groups alike routinely reported daily use levels exceeding 50-100 times the recommended daily dosage. One pharmacist reported that his drug use regimen progressed to 150 Percocets [strong narcotic analgesic] per day. Another individual reported injecting up to 200 mg of Morphine each day. Still another respondent described a daily use pattern that, among other things, included 5g of cocaine. Invariably, these advanced levels of drug use led to clear signs of habituation and the constant threat of physical withdrawal. At this point, the individual recalls growing increasingly desperate. Consider the following quote from a 44-year-ol male pharmacist who was in charge of ordering the narcotics at the independent retail pharmacy where he worked: “I was ordering excessive quantities and chasing down tracks. That’s what I used to do. I was really reaching my bottom. I would chase these delivery trucks down in the morning because I didn’t come to my store until mid-afternoon. I was in withdrawal in the morning and I was without drugs, so I had to have it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
“I was just going nuts. Many mornings I had gone to work sweating. It would be 30 degrees (Fahrenheit), it would be January, and the clerk would say, ‘you look sick,’ and I would say, ‘It’s the flu.’ So I would pay the delivery guys extra money to deliver my drugs first or I would chase the delivery trucks down in the morning. I knew the trucks delivered at 6 in the morning, they came by my area, and I would get up early and chase the trucks down the highway. I would go in excess of 100 miles an hour trying to catch up with this truck and flag it down.” The advanced stages of drug addiction invariably produced traumatic physical psychological outcomes. Eventually, “out-of-control” drug use patterns along with the realization of chemical dependency left the pharmacists in a problematic mental state. It was at this point that al of the pharmacists recalled coming to grips with their addiction. This personal realization was accompanied by a shift in the way they thought about their drug use. They no longer denied that situation by drawing upon recreational or therapeutic explanations. Instead, they finally admitted the dire nature of their situation and became more and more reclusive. In short, all of the respondents grew to realize that they had a drug problem, turning then to fear and ignorance to foster the final weeks or months of their drug addiction. Two identifiable criminal career trajectories were observed among the pharmacists who we interviewed: recreational abusers and therapeutic self-medicators. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Careful scrutiny of contemporary drug theory, policy, and practice in all areas, from prescription pharmaceuticals to illegal recreational drugs, reveals numerous apparent inconsistencies and pervasive incoherence. This results, in part, from a kind of silo thinking in which attention to drug theory and drug policy, however sophisticated in its own realm, is encapsulated within distinct professional, practical, and economic spheres or “silos.” Silos are descriptively and prescriptively dense but stand isolated from each other in an empty landscape. In other words, people in one arena of drug theory, policy, or practical programs have plenty to say to each other about the way things are and the way things should be with respect to drugs, but they don’t talk much across the open spaces between their areas of focus. Not only do they not talk much between their fields, for reasons to be explored, they cannot really do so. Clearly, our discussion of the therapeutic self-medicator category goes far beyond what is present in the existing literature. However, the first documentation of recreational drug use among health professionals, had minimal impact on the way that the various healthcare professions think about or address problem of substance abuse within their ranks. The pharmacy profession has been especially reluctant to address the reality of the prescription drug abuse situation. For instance, existing self-reports and interview research on drug using pharmacists largely ignores the recreational origins of drug use and, instead, describes the affected individuals as having misplaced therapeutic motivations. This assumption is reinforced by published biographical accounts of recovering drug using pharmacists. While principally intended to raise awareness among fellow pharmacists, these confessionals consistently emphasize the well-intentioned motives behind the individuals’ destructive drug use past. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Information is called observable when it is available symmetrically to both parties, and verifiable when it can be proved to third parties such as a court. In practice, this is a matter of cost, and the standard of proof required. Contracts that are intended to be enforced in a court of law can only stipulate actions that are conditioned on verifiable information; courts cannot judge whether a breach of the contractual terms has occurred if they cannot verify whether the circumstances that call for an action have actually transpired. However, observable information can be the basis for contracts that are enforced by extralegal or private methods, because the two parties can know fully well whether a breach has occurred. Such extralegal methods of enforcement come in to broad types. One is enforcement by insider third parties with specialized knowledge that enables them to verify information that outsider general courts of law cannot; arbitrators in industry associations are the most prominent enforcers of this kind. The second is based on a relationship or ongoing interaction between the parties; a breakup of this relationship constitutes the punishment that may deter one of the parties from breaching. This covers many possibilities. The same two parties may meet repeatedly; the two may not have a direct repeated interaction with each other, but each may interact with others in a group or network that transmits information about any breach to all members and collectively sanctions the miscreant, using ostracism in business interactions or social relationships or both. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The distinction between observable and verifiable information is standard in the economic theory of contracts. The New York Stock Exchange developed its internal rules and procedures for dispute resolution, and even Taiwanese shoe manufacturers and Western fashion houses performed dispute-resolution functions in addition to their primary matchmaking ones. One may think that these alternative methods of private ordering must suffer a crippling disadvantage relative to the government’s courts, namely their lack of coercive power to ensure that their decisions are obeyed. However, the difficulty is often nonexistent or easily overcome. First, the sanctions available for private ordering are often very effective. Breach of contract can be deterred in ongoing relationships by the threat that the miscreant will be barred from future business with this particular partner or the group; this can be buttressed by social ostracism if the group fosters social ties among its business members. Sometimes this threat may be even more severe than the fines that courts would impose in the matter. If the threat is credible, in the sense of being a part of the strategies in the subgame-perfect equilibrium of the repeated game that constitutes the ongoing relationship, then the contract is self-enforcing. Second, arbitrators may have similar sanctions at their disposal; if they can bar the miscreant from the industry association, they can instantly put one out of business, which can be a more effective sanction than the fines the courts will impose. Of course, the feasibility of such sanctions depends on the availability of the requisite information, and in the case of repeated interactions, on how highly the participants value the future relative to the present. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Finally, courts recognize the informational advantage of the alternative institutions. Therefore when a relational or implicit contract serves such an informational purpose, courts refuse to intervene to modify its terms, or to insert missing provisions, or to overrule the availability of discretion to one party. They also enforce the awards of industry arbitration tribunals, using the government’s power of coercion to obtain compliance if the loser in the arbitration attempts to defy the ruling. In the United States of America, this has been so since 1920; in the international context, over 100 countries now accede to the 1958 New York Convention of the Recognition and Enforcement of Arbitral Awards. By providing for the appointment of industry-expert arbitrators, who can make many factual determinations more accurately and less expensively than a judge or jury can, the rules greatly expand the “contractible” aspects of an exchange. The use of stream-lined procedures together with the appointment of expert adjudicators transforms considerations that in the public legal system would have been only observable to the parties…into considerations that are also verifiable…thereby encouraging transactors to enter into more complete contracts. The point is not that arbitrators have access to more information. Any relevant information can be elicited and brought before the court by either party to the dispute through the legal process of discovery. Conversely, many arbitration forms do not allow discovery, although the arbitrator can request additional information. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The key is how information is used; industry arbitrators can use their expertise to interpret it—make factual determinations—more accurately and at a lower cost than non-specialized courts can. This is the sense in which verifiability should be interpreted in this context. Arbitration is used in other contexts for other reasons. In international transactions, each party may suspect that the other country’s courts will be biased in favour of its own nationals; this can deter them from entering into contrast that may end up in national courts. Therefore both may agree ex ante to settle any disputes in an agreed international forum of arbitration. Several of these exist, based in London, Paris, Stockholm, et cetera. They differ in their procedures (degree of formality, time taken, fees charged, et cetera) and the range of legal traditions they cover (civil, common, Islamic, et cetera). These affect the choice of forum by the parties to each transaction. These forums usually lack the expertise that industry-specific forums can provide. Therefore they are not likely to lower costs or improve verifiability and permit more complete contracts; instead, removing the suspicion of bias may be their most important function. The different modes of private and official governance can interact in various ways. To further highlight the illustration, if an ongoing relationship based on the superior observability of information by the two parties breaks down, the best alternative available to the parties may be recourse to a contract based on verifiable information enforceable in a court of law, not total cessation of transactions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
And if an arbitrator’s award is not enforceable by direct sanctions such as fines, it may nonetheless form part of a relational arrangement where the arbitrator can terminate the miscreant’s access to future trades. Not only do modes like arbitration evolve and apply to provide governance for transactions where they have an informational advantage and can reduce transaction costs, but also transactions take forms that adapt to the available information and governance. As for the emergence and prevalence of barter and countertrade in post-Soviet Russia in this way: The advantage of paying with goods rather than money is that they can be earmarked s property of the creditor. Money is fungible and liquid; a buyer can hide money easily if he chooses to renege on his promised payment to the seller. Goods in a barter or countertrade contract are more difficult to hide, and therefore can act as deal-specific collateral that mitigates opportunism. When it comes to systems of integration, rising complexity in the economy calls for more sophisticated integration and management. In a not atypical case Nabisco, the food company, as to fill 500 orders a day for literally hundreds of thousands of different products that must be shipped from 49 factories and 13 distribution centers, and at the same time take into account 30,000 different sales promotional deals with its customers. Managing such complexity requires new forms of leadership and an extremely high order of systemic integration. That, in turn, requires greater and greater volumes of information to pulse through the organization. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
To hold everything together—to track all the components and products, to synchronize deliveries, to keep engineers and marketers appraised of each other’s plans, to alert the R&D people to the needs of the manufacturing side and, above all, to give management a coherent picture of what is going on—billions of dollars are being poured into electronic networks that link computers, data bases and other information technologies together. This vast electronic information structure, frequently satellite based, knits whole companies together, often linking them into the computers and networks of suppliers and customers as well. Other networks link networks. Japan has targeted $250 billion to develop better, faster network. All these changes further accelerate the pace of operations and transactions. Economies of speed replace economies of scale. Competition is so intense and the speeds required so high that the old “time is money” rule is increasingly updated to “every interval of time is worth more than the one before it.” Time becomes a critical variable as reflected in “just-in-time” deliveries and a pressure to reduce DIP or “decisions in process.” Slow, sequential, step-by-step engineering is replaced by “simultaneous engineering.” Companies wage “time-based competition.” Expressing the new, it is clear that money moves at the speed of light. Information has to move faster. Thus acceleration pushed Third Wave business closer and closer to real time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Taken together, these ten features of the Third Wave economy, among many others, add up to a monumental change in how wealth is created. The conversion of the United States of America, Japan and Europe to this new system, though not yet complete, represents the single most important change in the global economy since the spread of factories brought about by the industrial revolution. This historical transformation, picking up speed in the early-to mid-1970, was already fairly well advanced by the 1990s. Unfortunately, much of America’s economic thinking was left behind. Global markets of energy and mineral resources are undergoing far reaching irreversible changes, and so are perceptions about the policies needed to provide their stable supply. Global demand is surging due to a dramatic increase of consumption by the fast-growing large emerging economies. Experts project that, absent significant changes in policy or technology, global energy consumption will increase nearly 50 percent over the next 30 years. Energy consumption is growing faster than the GDP in many countries. On the supply side, uncertainties and destabilization risks are exacerbating due to rising political instability in exporting countries, periodical redirections of sales from external to domestic markets by leading suppliers, and, to a certain extent, a depletion, in some major producing countries, of existing deposits in the absence of new ones whose discovery and exploitation could make up for the loss. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Therefore, oil and some other natural resources are becoming more and mor attractive targets for speculators. In these circumstances, countries highly dependent on natural resources imports, especially those that do not have their own powerful resource multinationals, get increasingly concerned about supply destabilization risks. Predictions about an all-out resource war or bitter fights among buyers for limited amounts of oil or metallic ores look like an exaggeration. However, buyers’ competition for particular kinds of resources within particular periods of time due to particular circumstances is becoming a more frequent phenomenon. For instance, the Philippines and Vietnam protested to China against its patrol boats hindering their oil exploration activities near the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. China demanded that its neighbours stop exploration work in this area. Tensions rose as the United States of America declared that the South China Sea was in the sphere of its national interest and that it would stand by the Philippines as its ally. Now, when it comes to supernatural affairs, the angels are “sent forth to minister to the heirs of salvation,” reports Hebrews 1.14, but not to take the place of Christ or the Holy Spirit. The apocalypse seems to show that this ministration of angels to the saints on Earth is a ministration for war in the spiritual realm against the forces of Satan; but there is little indication given of ministry in any other way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
After the first Advent, when there was great angelic activity over the wondrous event of the Father brining the “Firstborn: of the new race (Romans 8.29) into the inhabited Earth (Hebrew 1.6), and again at the Advent of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost to begin His work of forming a Body like unto the Risen Head—and during the early years of the Church—the employment of an angel in direct and visible communication with believers seems to give way to the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit. The entire work of witnessing to Christ, and leading the Church into all truth, has been committed to the Holy Spirit. Therefore all intervention of “angels” or of audible voices from the spiritual realm purporting to be from God may be taken as counterfeits of psychopathological offenders, whose supreme object is to substitute the workings of their own wicked offenders in the place of God. In any case, it is best and safest in these days of peril to keep in the path of faith and reliance upon the Holy Spirit of God working through the Word of God. Man, the microcosm, the mirror of reality has structures of beings found in him, and are found analogously in the subhuman realm. Selfhood, inner awareness, freedom and destiny—all are verified analogously in subhuman beings. Furthermore, the concepts of courage, love, power, and justice are used to describe analogously the characteristics of all beings and of being-itself. The point we wish to make is that this use of analogy based on human experience seems to yield valid knowledge. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Moving up now to the relationship between man and God, one would expect that on the same principle, but with proper adjustments, man could get an analogous knowledge of God. Symbols are not a means of knowing God, but rather a way of speaking about Him. If one wishes to talk about God, finite material must be used, and this is justified by the fact that all finite beings participate in being-itself. Without such an analogy nothing could be said about God. However, the analogia entis is in no way able to create a natural theology. It is not a method of discovering truth about God; it is the form in which every knowledge of revelation must be expressed. In this sense anlogia entis, like “religious symbol,” points to the necessity of using material taken from finite reality in order to give content to the cognitive function in revelation. What is boils down to is that analogy or symbolism is the expression of an encounter with God. Through the revelatory experience is far more than an intellectual communication—it is primarily a reunion with the ground of being—it contains a cognitive element conveyed by symbols which are qualified as channels of communication by their participation in being-itself. Yet, it seems not, for every creature participates in being-itself, and yet not everything is a religious symbol, although it has the potentiality to become one. What is the decisive ingredient of symbolism beyond ontological participation? These symbols are not arbitrary interpretations of the concrete revelatory experiences. However, they appear within this experience itself. They are not created intentionally, but they are born in the same dimension in which the revelatory experience takes place. In and through its symbols the religious encounter with reality opens up the dimension of reality in which ultimacy appears. There is no other way of expressing our encounter with the holy than in symbols. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
From the standpoint of the counselor who finds one’s role ambiguous, it seems more than likely that exploration of a developmental perspective would help resolve the conflicts implicit in one’s professionalization. For the psychotherapist who thinks of oneself as a physician who cures sickness, or who avoids this and speaks only of the “difficulties of living,” there may appear to be no conflict in one’s role. One may be satisfied to reduce symptoms of disorder, to solve the problem presented and to think of oneself primarily as someone who relieves distress, without defining one’s goals beyond that. However, apparently more and more thoughtful counselors do not think they can stop there, or do any permanent good, unless they leave their patients better able to cope with later problems and future strains. Some even feel that their job to plan for the optimal development of their clients, or to organize clients to plan for their own. The ambiguous feelings of the professional who presumes to assist in the personal problems of family members may be all to the good if these are construed in a framework of family relations which includes oneself. The concept of transference goes only part way. The client in the course of the counselor-client interaction frequently construes the counselor as a figure representative of previous others, with whom relations have been unresolved but are thus worked out through the interviews. The difficulty, however, from the client’s standpoint, is that no matter how versatile one’s counselor may be, and no matter how facile or fantastic one’s own imagination, the range of persons with whom a person needs intimate discourse in order to achieve one’s optimal development of self far exceeds the resources of this single relationship. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Moreover, there is the fact that the client must pay in cold cash for the kind of communication which the best families afford on a basis of affectional reciprocity; thus the most sacred disclosures hover at times on the verge of something equivalent to prostitution. Regardless of ethics and their enforcement by professional insistence upon its eventual termination, and the limitation of reciprocity to monetary reward; in a word, the elaboration of this relationship lead nowhere. The best hope for fruition of any gains that accrue is tht they serve as a bridge to the regeneration of their client’s involvement in a quasi-family constellation which includes near-rivals and critics, models and admirers, other ages and other genders, in both work and play. Only through others can one obtain the continual characterizations of self essential to valid knowledge of self. Research and experience have already shown that the human being, from birth until death, almost to the degree that the fish requires water, thrives only in social interaction. Neglect, isolation, loneliness, solitary confinement, and deteriorative influences very hard to endure, even though every physical condition of survival is met. And among all kinds of interaction, the most potent of all for personal development are those characterized by the unconditional acceptance of family relations. Only here is the listener who always finds more in the person than one presents in one’s actual behaviour. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Only here is the audience that never grows tried. Only here is the person of similar background, for whom every aspect of the culture—of class and ethic experience—resonates with comparable meaning. That a counselor could ever aspire to duplicate these functions of the optimal family is beyond the hope of those who have thought and written about it. In a sense this analysis of the implicit or potential demands on the counselor’s role both justifies and specifies a therapeutic approach. It also shows that one’s role must be transcended by more adequate institutions for providing each client with a stable constellation of significant others, who can be the precisely appropriate self-definers at each critical stage in one’s personal development. For the person whose actual family has failed one the solution suggested by this analysis is the invention of effective quasi-families. The process by which each person contributes to the self-knowledge of others, and others contribute to one’s knowledge of oneself, it immanent in human society. Where self-knowledge and self-control are deficient relative either to norms or ideals, the best means for reversing these deficiencies is effective utilization of all available knowledge of how selves originate, operate, and co-operate. Recognition that some tasks are beyond the powers of the unassisted individual does not mean that society must be divided into two classes, therapists and their patients. It means, or at least can be made to mean, joint action to perform these tasks. Such an approach is as relevant and applicable to the tasks of counseling agencies as to the other types of family agencies. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Mystery Before Us Which We Have Raised
Drugs are everywhere, both figuratively and literally. At any given moment, a large percentage of people nearly everywhere in the World are using one or more drugs as a medical requirement, a lifestyle choice, or to satisfy a desire or addiction. The consequences of drug use, from prescription pharmaceuticals to illicit substances, are felt on a daily basis by the individual and society at large. The recreational abusers unanimously agreed that there was no shortage of socially acceptable experimental drug use while in pharmacy school. For those who were interested, this environment provided ample opportunity to refine and expand their usage. One 48-year-old male pharmacist described the makeup of his pharmacy school cohort as follows: “There was a third of the pharmacy students in school because Mom and Dad or Grandfather or Uncle Bill were pharmacists, and they looked up to them and wanted to be one. Good enough. They had never seen a pharmacy. A [second] third had been in the [Vietnam] war. They were a pharmacy tech in the war or had worked in a pharmacy. They had the experiential effect of what pharmacy is and found a love for it or a desire to want it…Then you had the other third over here, and we were just drug addicts…It had nothing to do with altruism. We didn’t know what the practice was all about, but we did know that we got letters after our names, guaranteed income if we didn’t lose our letters, and we had access to anything [drugs] we needed.” Many of the recreational abusers claimed that they specifically sought out fellow pharmacy students who were willing to use prescription drugs. The most common locus for these associations were in pharmacy-specific fraternities. The respondents said that there was usually ample drug use going on in these organization and that they allowed them the opportunity to cautiously scout out and identify with other drug users. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Once they were connected with other drug users, the prescription drug use of all involved parties increased. This type of small-group drug use allowed for access to an expanded variety of drugs, a broader pharmacological knowledge base, and even larger quantities of drugs. However, numerous respondents clearly stated that these drug-based associations were tenuous and temporary in nature. Over time, as the intensity of their drug use increased, the recreational abusers described how they became more reclusive and guarded and selective in their relationships, fearing that their heightened use of prescription drugs would come to be defined as a problem by their fellow pharmacy students. One 43-year-old male pharmacist said: “You get the sense pretty quickly that you are operating [using] on a different level. Those of us that were busily stealing [prescription drugs] from our internship sites began to tighten our social circle. We might party a little bit with the others but when it came to heavy use, we kept it hush, hush.” Unlike other pharmacy students who were genuinely experimenting with drugs on a short-term basis, these recreational abusers noticed an added intensity associated with their own prescription drug use. While most of these recreational abusers entered pharmacy school with some prior experiences in recreational street drug use, their pre-college prescription drug use was usually not extensive. As such, it was not until they got into pharmacy school that they began to develop more pronounced street an prescription drug use habits. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
A 38-year-old female pharmacist discusses this transition into increased usage in the following interview excerpt: “I went off to pharmacy school. That was a 3-year program. I had tried a few things [before that], but I would back off because it was shaming for me not to get straight A’s. The descent to hell started when I got to pharmacy school. There were just so many things [prescription drugs] available and to many things that I thought I jut had to try. It might be a different high; it might be a different feeling, anything to alter the way that I just felt. I was pretty much using on a daily basis by the time I got to my last year.” Once the recreational abusers got into a permanent practice setting, they quickly deduced that they had free reign over the pharmacy stock. At first, they referenced other pharmacists for normative or behavioural guidance in access or using the prescription drugs. However, they soon realized that their nearly unrestricted access meant that they could not try any drugs that they wanted without guidance, and most did. More importantly, increased access allowed the young pharmacists to habitually and secretly use the drugs that they liked most. Not surprisingly the levels and frequency of their drug use usually skyrocketed shortly after entering pharmacy practice and going more solo with their use. A 41-year-old male pharmacist explained: “By the time I got to pharmacy school in 1971, I was smoking dope probably every day or every other day, and drinking with the same frequency, but not to the point of passing out kind of stuff. Then in 1971, that was also the year that I discovered barbs [barbiturates]. I had never had barbs up until I got to pharmacy school. So it was like ’75 or ’76 [when I got out of pharmacy school], I was using heavy Secondals and Quaaludes and Ambutols [all barbiturates]. I withdrew and it [the heavy misuse] just took off.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
At the start, the recreational abusers’ drug use was openly displayed and took on an air of excitement, much like others’ experimentation with street or prescription drugs. However, as it intensified over time, the majority described how they slowly shielded their use from others. They thought it important to appear as though they still had the situation under control. As physical tolerance and psychological dependence increasingly progressed, these individuals began to lose control. Virtually all of the recreational abusers eventually developed serious prescription drug use habits. Using large quantities and sometimes even multiple drug types, their prescription drug use careers were usually marked by a steep downward spiral. This trend was clearly evidenced in the hand-sketched life history timeline that was drawn by each respondent. What started out as manageable social drug experimentation persistently progressed to increasingly more secretive drug abuse. In almost every case, it took several years for the drug use to reach its peak addictive state. The intense physical and psychological effects of the drug use meant that the recreational abuser’s criminal/deviant career was punctuated by a very “low bottom.” Commonly identified signs of “bottoming out” included life-threatening health problems, repeated dismissals from work, having action taken against their pharmacy licenses, habitual lying, extensive cover-ups, divorces, and suicide attempts. By all accounts, the personal and professional lives of these recreational abusers suffered heavily from their drug abuse. In the end, most were reclusive and paranoid—what started out as collective experimentation ended in a painful existence of solitary addiction. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The criminal/deviant career paths of the remaining 27 interviewees (54 percent) fit a different substantive theme. To differentiate these individuals from the recreational abusers, we call this latter group of pharmacists “therapeutic self-medicators.” One of the defining characteristics of this ground was that they had little or no experience with street or prescription drug use prior to entering pharmacy school. In fact, many of these individuals did not even use alcohol. What little drug involvement they did report was usually occasional experimentation with marijuana or other “soft” drugs. If they had ever used prescription drugs, it was done legitimately under the supervision of a physician. Members of this group did not begin their illicit prescription drug use until they were well into their formal pharmacy careers. The onset of the therapeutic self-medicators’ drug use was invariably attributed to a problematic life situation, accident, medical condition, or occupationally related pain. When faced with such problems, these pharmacists turned to familiar prescription medicines for immediate relief. Rather than reporting a recreational, hedonistic, or pleasure motivation, these pharmacists simply decided to use readily available prescription drugs to treat their own medical maladies. The therapeutic self-medicators unanimously insisted that their prescription drug use was never recreational—that they never used drugs solely for the euphoric effects. Instead, their drug use was focused on specific therapeutic goals. This trend is illustrated in the comments of a 33-year-old male pharmacist: “There was no recreation involved. I just wanted to press a button and be able to sleep during the day. I was really having a touch time with this sleeping during the day. I would say by the end of that week I was already on the road [to dependency]…the race had started.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Other pharmacists described how their drug use began as a way of treating insomnia, physical trauma (exempli gratia, a car accident, sports injury, or a broken bone), or some chronic occupationally induced health problem (exempli gratia, arthritis, migraine headaches, leg cramps, or back pain). It is important to point out that during their earliest stages of their drug use, these individuals appeared to be “model pharmacists.” Most claimed to have excelled in pharmacy school. Moreover, occupational and career success usually continued after they entered full-time pharmacy practice. Personal appraisals, as well as annual supervisory evaluations, routinely described these individuals as hard working and knowledgeable professionals. Since they were usually treating the physical pain that resulted from the rigors of pharmacy work, all of the therapeutic self-medicators described how their prescription drug use started and progressed under seemingly innocent, or even honorable, circumstances. In many cases, they were treating the physical pain that resulted from the rigors of work. Instead of taking time off from work to see a physician, they chose to simply self-medicate their own ailments. A 50-year-old male pharmacist described this situation as follows: “When I got to Walgreen’s the pace there was stressful. We were filling 300 to 400 scripts a day with minimal support staff and working 12, 13 hours days. The physical part bothered me a lot. My feet and my back hurt. So, I just kept medicating myself until it got to the point where I was up to 6 to 8 capsules of Fiorinol-3 [narcotic analgesic] a day. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Without exception, the therapeutic self-medicators described how they always engaged in solitary and secretive drug use. Although they usually kept their drug use to themselves, many claimed that their initial use was shaped by their interactions with co-workers. That is, they got the idea to begin self-medicating from watching a co-worker do so or merely followed the suggestion of a concerned senior pharmacist who was seeking to help them remedy a physical malady, such as a hangover, anxiety, physical pain. To further highlight this illustration, a 38-year-old male pharmacist described an incident that occurred soon after being introduced to his hospital supervisor: ‘I remember saying one time that I had a headache. [He said] “got take some Tylenol-with-Codeine elixir [narcotic analgesic].’ I would never have done that on my own. He was my supervisor at the time, and I said, ‘okay, if you think I should.’ He said, ‘that’s what we do.’ I guess that started the ball rolling a little bit mentally.” Members of the therapeutic self-medicator group took notice of the drug-related behaviours and suggestions of their peers but never acted upon them in the company of others. Instead, they maintained a public front condemning illicit prescription drug use but quietly followed through on the suggestive behaviours when in private. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Whereas the recreational abusers used drugs to get high, the therapeutic self-medicators saw drug use as a means to a different end. Even as their drug use intensified, they were able to convince themselves that the drugs were actually having a beneficial effect on their work performance. This was not all together inaccurate, since they began using the drugs to remedy some constraining health problem that was detracting from their work efficiency. Some therapeutic self-medicators looked to their notion of professional obligation to justify their drug use. To further highlight this illustration, in describing his daily use of Talwin, a Schedule II narcotic analgesic, a 43-year-old male pharmacist maintained: “I thought I could work better. I thought I could talk better with the nurses and patients. I thought I could socialize better with it.” This type of convenient, altruistic-based explanation was quite common among the therapeutic self-medicators. That is, they were adept at convincing themselves that their patients and employers needed them to produce at a certain level. When their performance fell below this level, they turned to prescription medicines as a way of neutralizing whatever inhibiting force that was deemed responsible. At first, the pharmacists’ therapeutic self-medication behaviours seemed to work well. They remedied the problematic situation (pain, insomnia, et cetera) which allowed them to return to normal functioning. However, over time, they began to develop a tolerance for the drugs and thus had to take larger quantities to achieve the same desired effects. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The following interview excerpt from a 50-year-old male pharmacist offers a good overview of the life history of a therapeutic self-medicator: “Well, I didn’t have a big problem with that [early occasional self-medication behaviour]. I wasn’t taking that much. It was very much medicinal use. It was not an everyday thing. It really was used at that point for physical pain. But that’s when I started tampering with other things and started trying other things. I would have trouble sleeping so I would think, ‘You know, let’s see what the Dalmane [benzodiazepine] is like?’ When I was having weight problems… ‘Let’s give this Tenuate [amphetamine] a try.’ And I just started going down the line treating the things that I wanted to treat. And none of it got out of hand. It wasn’t until I came down here [to Sacramento]…that things really started to go wild.” In generally took between 5 and 10 years for these pharmacists to progress into the later stages of drug abuse. That is, they were able to control their use for a long time without it interfering with their personal or professional life. A handful of therapeutic self-medicators were not so lucky. For them, there was less time between the onset of their use and their entry into drug treatment. Their progression was much faster. This trend is illustrated by the comments of a 49-year-old male pharmacist: “About two or three years after I had my store, I was working long, long hours. Like 8.00 to 8.00 Monday through Saturday and some hours on Sunday. And my back hurt one day. It was really killing me and I started out with two Empirin-3 [narcotic analgesic]. Just for the back pain. I mean I hurt, my back hurt, my head hurt. I don’t know why, but I just reached for that bottle and I knew it was against the law to do that, but I did it any way. Man I felt good. I was off and running. This was eureka. That was it. It progressed. I started taking more and more then I finally…” #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The key to self-medicator’s fast-paced progressive drug use seemed to lie in the given individual’s perceived need to treat a wider and growing array of physical ailments. It got to the point that many “drug thirsty” pharmacists recognize that they were actively seeking out or inventing ailments to treat in themselves. As a 40-year-old female put it, “I had a symptom for everything I took.” Several other quotes illustrate this tendency for therapeutic self-medicators to invent ailments. In all, there were 27 pharmacists who fit into the category of therapeutic self-medicators. These individuals were admittedly naïve about drug abuse when they entered their pharmacy careers. They were either counseled or convinced themselves that there was no harm in the occasional therapeutic use of prescription medicines. The normative and behavioral advanced in their deviance were gained largely by exploiting or manipulating their professional position and knowledge. The therapeutic self-medicators always used their drugs in private and kept their use from others around them. Over time, their false confidence and denial that allowed their drug use to significantly progress. Once their façade was broken, these pharmacists awoke to the reality that they were chemically dependent on one or more of the drugs that they so confidently had been dispensing to themselves. If you have a drug addiction, consider seeking help from the church or a trusted medical professional. Counseling of family members by persons and agencies outside their family is very old, probably as old as humanity. Nevertheless, the process of differentiation, specialization, and professionalization which had brough into being agencies staffed by full-time counseling personnel is decidedly recent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
And the application of the concepts and findings of social science to counseling is more recent still. Since counseling agencies were started a few decades ago their methods and philosophy have only become systematized in some areas of their work. The rapidity and unevenness of their growth—further consumed by conflicting schools of thought—makes generalization risky, but for any appraisal of their place in the institutions affecting American families some rough summery of their emergence is necessary. The development of family counseling agencies can be schematized in several ways. When their characteristic techniques in successive periods are considered, it may be said that they proceeded from moral exhortation and sanction, through individual guidance or therapy, to procedures adapted to work with groups. Some of these group methods are oriented to conventional individual psychology, others stress interactional conceptions. When the doctrines rather than the techniques of the agencies are considered, it appears that successive periods saw emphasis on religion and morals, then on individual psychology or psychiatry, and finally on social psychology or sociology. As mentioned before, these phases of development have overlapped and still do. Also, certain family agencies primarily devoted to activities like medical care or economic rehabilitation carry on family counseling, although it is not their main duty. Every family-serving professional, whether lawyer, clergyman, teacher, or even architect, can rarely avoid being asked to advise on matter for which the psychiatrist, social worker, and clinical psychologist are especially trained. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The quest for guidance goes far beyond a mere demand for information. Similarly, many agencies listed as primarily engaged in counseling do not always limit their work to guidance, advice, and insight, but may offer such services as recreation, participation in clubs, or education. From the standpoint of their personnel, it might be fairer to survey and evaluate counseling agencies according to their success in reaching goals they have set for themselves. The main focus of attention of counselors in the strict sense intended is the personalities of their clients. To be sure, questions of vocational guidance or family budgeting frequently involve personality questions, and cannot be avoided or isolated in a doctrinaire manner from economic concerns. It is only when personality problems are paramount in the concern and responsibility of the agency, however, that it will be called a counseling agency. Or all types of family agencies, the counseling agencies are most conspicuously bunched at the second or therapeutic phase. They show an especially lively interest and experimental attitude to group therapy. A number of mental hospitals are actively experimenting with various forms of milieu and play therapy as major tools for providing large numbers of patients not merely with custody but with psychiatric care. Crime prevention bureaus in certain cities are exploring the value of clubs for delinquent modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous, and some experiments in group rehabilitation are actually going on with correctional institutions. While much of the development through official and professional channels is still handicapped by an individualistic approach, some agencies in theory and procedure are adopting a much more interactional outlook. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Yet even where community organizers have set up community councils and conducted community self-surveys, the therapeutic motive had in the end predominated, and tended to lead to clinics and casework. Inevitably such observations appear disparaging, yet the intent is not to criticize or condemn but merely to note the direction these developments have taken. The feeling that progress is not as rapid as originally hoped, and that some sort of ceiling is soon reached by efforts aimed only at correction psychopathology, had pervaded several studies of social work. Various kinds of families in trouble had characteristic persons or groups to which they turned when in trouble. In the same way, each family counseling agency appears to attract a characteristic clientele. When an agency had recruited as its clientele all that segment of the community which habitually turns with its kind of problem to that kind of agency, its operations are likely to settle into a routine procedure. Its progress then becomes measured mainly in terms of technique, such as its interview methods or efficiency in spending its means. Only where it can set before citizens a creative succession of new and positive goals does it have a fair chance to avoid such a ceiling of routinization. There are still immense areas and many strata of communities in the United States of America which barely enjoy the philanthropic or charitable phase of development of counseling agencies; there are many more which have yet to reach professional standards at the therapeutic phase; and there are only a handful who have made the step from individual casework to group work. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
It may thus seem premature to suggest inadequacies in the therapeutic approach. Yet there is no apparent reason, other than the failure to conceive goals beyond adjustment, to prevent the adoption of a beneficial, planning approach to the functions of counseling agencies. Psychological offenders are able to counterfeit the voice of God because of the ignorance of believers that they can do so, and their ignorance also of the true principle of God’s way of communication with His children. The Lord said: “My sheep know My voice….,” id est, My way of speaking to My sheep. He did not say this voice was an audible voice, nor a voice giving directions which were to be obeyed apart from the intelligence of the believer; but, on the contrary, the word “know” indicates the use of the mind, for although there is knowledge in the spirit it must reach the intelligence of the man, so that spirit and mind become of one accord. The question whether God now speaks by His direct voice audibly to men needs consideration at this point. A careful study of the epistles of Paul—which contain an exhaustive summation of God’s will for the Church, the Body of Christ, even as the books of Moses contained God’s will and laws for Israel seems to make it clear that God, having “spoke to us in His Son,” no longer speaks by His own direct voice to His people. Nor does it appear that, since the coming of the Holy Spirit to guide the Church of Christ into all truth, He frequently employs angels to speak or to guide His children. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
God must be approached cognitively through the structural elements of being-itself because God is the ground and the structure of being. The structural elements serve as symbols which are rooted in and point toward their ground. However, before speaking symbolically of God, the theologian must make at least one nonsymbolic statement about Him. Otherwise there would be an infinite series of symbols pointing ever onward, for it is the nature of symbols not to rest in themselves, but to point. That statement that God is being-itself is a nonsymbolic statement. It means what it says directly and properly. After this, nothing else can be said about God as God which is not symbolic. Our ability to speak about God depends upon whether or not the finite can be used to asset something about the infinite. The infinite is being-itself, and everything finite participates in it. The analogia entis gives us our only justification of speaking at all about God. Thus, by its participation in the ground of being, them meaning of the symbol is affirmed. Yet, at the same tie, its proper meaning is negated, for the ground of being transcends its structural elements; the ground is also the abyss. Religious symbols operate in two directions. They bring the infinite down to the finite by concretizing it; and they elevate the finite by revealing its participation in the infinite. For example, if God is symbolized as “father” or “king,” He is brought down to the level of human relationships. Yet simultaneously fatherhood and kingship are consecrated, for their theonomous depth, their holy character is revealed. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
When it comes to resolving disputes, there are reasons for using private ordering when pertaining to information. In this context we have a threefold key distinction, between private, observable, and verifiable information. Consider a transaction between two parities. Information is private when it is available to one of the parties but not the other. Sometimes the informed party wants to convey the information truthfully to the other party, but must do so in a credible way because the uninformed party will be wary of strategic misrepresentation. Id the two parties’ interests are well aligned, mere declaration (cheap talk) may work. Otherwise the informed party has to look for a costly action (signal) that credibly conveys the truth of the matter, because that action would not have been optimal had the information been different. Sometimes the uninformed party can devise tests (screening or mechanism design), requiring the informed party to undertake actions that will reveal the truth. They theory of asymmetric information is now a standard part of economic theory. Signaling and screening can be parts of contracts between the two parties. For example, if the seller of a car knows its quality much better than the buyer can find our by inspection, then a warranty may serve as a signal of quality. However, the terms of such a contract cannot specify actions to be taken under circumstances that only one of the parties can observe, because that party would have every reason to misrepresent the circumstances so as to avoid taking a costly action. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Thus the warranty cannot specify the circumstances under which a part of the car has to be replaced in such a ways that only one party can observe them. If the buyer is the sole judge of whether the transmission operates satisfactorily, he may claim that it is unsatisfactory at the slightest excuse and obtain a new one. Contracts must implicitly or explicitly give each party the discretion to act on the basis of its private information. To address environmental challenges of our time, it is crucial to overcome existing global stereotypes and think of alternative approaches. The time is ripe to go far beyond the UNFCCC framework (though it does not mean a call to bury it altogether) and, first of all, to make it clear that today’s environmental issues should be looked upon from a much wider angle than the one of the climate change talks. We are facing a really big global problem of the deterioration of the natural environment on our Mother Earth, which includes deforestation, extinction of many species of plants and animals, air pollution, water contamination, more and more frequent extreme weather events, unbearable noise levels in the cities, and so on. Obviously, the problem is not limited to CO2 emissions or rising temperatures. Every country or groups of countries must do their utmost to find and implement the solutions taking into account their development stage, economic and social conditions, financial and technological capabilities, and so on. Comprehensive environmental solutions have to be well balanced with policies and measure aimed at achieving other key social and economic goals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Countries should actively exchange information and experience in this area, launch joint projects (both at the bilateral and multilateral level) where possible, and set binding or nonbinding environmental targets for themselves if they consider them useful. The UN should not be looked upon as the only coordinator of international efforts—furthermore, it is unlikely to be the most efficient coordinator. Definitely, the West should actively assist developing countries working to preserve and improve their natural environment—financially, technologically, and intellectually. However, it has to be made clear that, especially in the area of financing, limits exist as most Western economies themselves are facing touch fiscal constraints. Perhaps other countries should be willing to accept the role of one of the major sources of global environmental financing. With the economies of Japan and Europe recovering from World War II, American firms face heavy competitive fire. Constant innovation is needed to compete—new ideas for products, technologies, processes, marketing, finance. Something on the order of 1,000 new products are introduced into America’s supermarkets every month. Even before the model 486 computer replaced the model 386 computer, the new 586 chip was on its way. Thus smart firms encourage workers to take initiative, come up with new ideas and, even if necessary, to “throw away the rulebook.” Work units shrink. The scale of operations is miniaturized along with many of the products. Vast numbers of workers doing much the same muscle work are replaced by small, differentiate work teams. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Big businesses are getting smaller; small businesses are multiplying. In just 30 years, the number of IBM employees has gone from 370,000 to 288,300. As its employees are being pecked to death by small manufacturers around the World, to survive, it lays off many workers and splits itself into thirteen different—smaller—business units. In the Third Wave system, economies of scale are frequently outweighed by diseconomies of complexity. The more complicated the firm, the more the left hand cannot anticipate what the right hand will do next. Things fall through the cracks. Problems proliferate that may outweigh any of the presumed benefits of sheer mass. The old idea that bigger is necessarily better is increasingly outmoded. Struggling to adapt to high-speed changes, companies are racing to dismantle their bureaucratic Second Wave structures. Industrial-era complies typically had similar tables of organization—pyramidal, monolithic and bureaucratic. Today’s markets, technologies, and consumer needs change so rapidly and put such varied pressures on the firm, that bureaucratic uniformity is on its way out. The search is on for wholly new forms of organization. “Re-engineering,” for example, the current buzzword in management, seeks to restructure the firm around processes rather than market or compartmentalized specialties. Relatively standardized structures give way to matrix organizations, “ad hocratic” project teams, profit centers, as well as to a growing diversity of strategic alliances, joint ventures and consortia—many of these crossing national boundaries. Since markets change constantly, position is less important than flexibility and maneuverability. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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My Soul to Nothingness, but I Will Strive
Many persons accustomed to travelling the old country side were sure so fair a place was never seen. Of all that charmed the romantic eye, it seemed an emerald through the clouds of fleecy white, and cerulean sky. As the sun crowned its lawny crest, smiling upon the flowers and trees, bright eyes reflected the majesty of Llanada Villa. The lively and robust body of this remarkable house contrasts its physicality against the darkness, secrets, and void of the dense ancient elms. Tall ornamental hedges maintain the privacy of the dwelling. The fruit orchard much like an enchanted forest, in which the bluebirds returning to their nest, guard the fruit from pests, as the straggling deer who peep from beneath the branches, do not startle the natural and undisturbed dominion. Heightened by euphoria, delightful shapes of mystery and fear clear in youthful bloom of its immortal spirit. On stormy nights, as the guard described, one can hear the doors clapping inside, and the howl and sobbing of the wind through it ornate galleries. I carried with me some blessings and a good many curses. I was woken in the early morning, by hearing my name called softly. I rose and went to my door in my nightgown, but there was no one in the passage. The voice sounded like my niece Daisy’s, but when I came to her door, it was closed. All was silent; the bathroom door stood slightly open; there was the morning room beyond; then the landing and the staircase. I heard my name called again, only this time the voice boomed like a gong inside my head; the light failed, as if a candle had been snuffed, and something rushed at me out of the gloom. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
I screamed and struggled until the light came back with the sound of running feet and I realized that the demon who had seized me was, in fact, a Welsh priest. A fornight or so later—certainly, after the doctor had pronounced me well on the way to recovery—I was sitting up in bed reading when my grandmother came into the room and sat down in the chair beside me, looking exactly as he had when we first met: the same calf length frock coat, double-breasted vet, and wool trousers, with his hair parted on the left and neatly combed to the side, the same familiar scent of alone wood, orange flower, musk and spices. The chair creaked as he settled himself in it, smiled at me and took up his work, just as if he had only been gone for five minutes, rather than resting in the Evergreen Cemetery for nine years. I was vaguely aware that my husband was supposed to be dead, but somehow this did not matter; his presence at my bedside seemed entirely natural and comforting. And though my own tranquil acceptance of the visit would later seem, to me, as strange as the visit itself, we sat in companionable silence for an indefinite interval until my husband gathered up his work, smiled once more at me and went slowly from the room. Daisy came in so soon after that I thought they must have passed each other in the hall, so I asked, “Did you see your uncle William?” I saw from her look of consternation that I had best not pursue the subject, and agreed that I must have been dreaming. As with the strange radiance of William’s appearance was followed by one of the worst headaches I had ever endured. But I felt certain I had been wide awake. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
Even after the strangeness of the experience had become fully apparent to me, I found I could not think of my visitant as a ghost. My reading in sensational literature had enhanced an already vivid imagination of how ghosts ought to conduct themselves: a hint of transparency and one or two bloodcurdling groans was surely the least that could be expected, whereas William had been—well, just my husband. And though nothing like this had ever happened to me before, I had not felt in the slightest afraid. Dr. Wayland had declared me well enough to get up, and the memory of my husband’s visit had faded to the point where I could almost believe it had been a dream, when one evening after dinner I saw my father-in-law crossing the hall ahead of me. He was no more than ten paces away, I heard the floor creak under his tread. Looking neither right nor left, he entered his study and closed the door behind him, just as he would have done in life. Again I felt no fear; only an overwhelming impulse to go up to the door and knock. When there was no answer, I tried the handle. The door opened readily, but there was no one there, only the familiar cracked brown leather armchairs on the worn Persian rug, the elaborate desk with its feet carved into the fierce face carved into faces of angels, the bookshelves crammed with Blue Book and army lists and regimental histories and accounts of gun dealers, the lingering faint scent of timber, leather and bindings. I remained in the doorway for a long time, lost in a trance of recollection. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
I picked up one of Willian’s old letters and went out into the garden and sat down on a charming bench, under a group of magnificent lime trees. The sun was setting with all its melancholy splendour being the horizon, and the fountains wound through a group of noble trees, almost at my feet, reflecting in their current the fading crimson of the sky. His letter was extraordinary. So much so that I read it twice over—the second time to the spirits. It said, “I miss you my darling wife, for as such I love you. During these last days of my illness, I was too weak to write you. Before then I had no idea of the danger. I will soon no longer be with you. Thank you for the hospitality. Thank you for receiving me into your heart, gaiety, and for being a charming companion. Heaven! I devote my remaining days to the gleaming light that you cast upon my heart. I hope you may accomplish your merciful purpose. I curse my conceited incredulity for unduly leaving you to mourn my absence. If only I could live for eternity, I would remain by your side. Farewell. I love you, my beloved.” My eyes filled with tears at his passion and intelligence. The sun had now set, and it was twilight by the time gone back inside. It was a soft evening, and I loitered, speculating upon seeing him again. I could hear his voice in animated dialogue and recall how proud he was to be a father, and turned about to admire the beautiful scene. The glade which I had just walked lay before. At the left narrow of the path wound away under the clumps of lordly trees, and was lost to sight amid the thickening forest. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
At the right of the path stands the Observational Tower, which guarded the estate. Over the grounds, a thin film of mist was stealing, like smoke, marking the distances with a transparent veil; and here and there I could see the fountains flashing in the moonlight. No softer, sweeter scene could be imagined. I enjoyed the picturesque, and I, stood looking silence over the expanse beneath me. Standing a little way behind me, discoursed upon the scene, and were upon the eloquent moon. When the moon shone with a light so intense it is well known that it indicates a special spiritual activity. The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy is manifold. It acts on dreams, it acts on lunacy, it acts on nervous people; it has a marvellous physical influence connected with life. One of the carpenters, having taken a nap on the balcony on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light of the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side. The moon, this night, is full of odylic and magnetic influences—and when one looks behind at the front of the mansion, how all its windows flash and twinkle with that silvery splendour, as if unseen hands had lighted up the rooms to receive fairy guests. There are indolent states of the spirits in which, indisposed to talk ourselves, the talk of others is pleasant to our listless ears; and I gazed on, pleased with the tinkle of the stars. But I felt as is some great misfortune were hanging over me. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
O THOU great, powerful, and mighty KING AMAIMON, who bearest rule by the power of the SUPREME GOD EL over all spirits both superior and inferior of the Infernal Orders in the Dominion of the East; I do invocate and command thee by the especial and true name of God; and by they Thou Worshippest; and by the Seal of thy creation; and by the most mighty and powerful name of GOD, IEHOVAH TETEAGRAMMATON who cast thee out of Heaven with all other infernal spirits; and by all the most powerful and great names of God who created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all things in them contained; and by their power and virtue; and by the name PRIMEUMATON who commandeth the whole host of Heave; that thou mayest cause, enforce, and compel the Spirit Murmus—The Fifty-fourth Spirit and His 30 Legions of Spirits, Lord of darkness and liberation come forth! Murmus awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the God of limitation Ahura Mazda! Murmus, Zairich, and Tairich, unholy fever and thirst come forth! Murmus awaken! Tairich awaken! Zairich awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Amardad! Akiman, demon of evil mind come forth! Akoman awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Vohuman! Naikiyas, Div or rebellion and discontent come forth! Naikiyas awake! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Spandarmad! #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Andar, Div of antinomian fire come forth! Andar awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fllen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Arwahist! Taromat, beautiful Div of rebellion come forth! Taromat awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Spandarmad! Aeshma, wielder of the bloody mace! Demon of the wounding spear and bringer of wrath come forth! Aeshma awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Srosh! Sovar, merciless leader of Divs come forth! Sovar awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel shahrewar! I stand alone as the embodiment of the Adversary known as Ahriman, the Black Dragon of Chaos and becoming! I devour the natural order of stasis brought forth by Ahura Mazda and forge my destiny through the power of the Black Sun! By the figurative mystery of this holy mansion, I will clothe it with the armour of salvation in the strength of the Most High, ANCOR, AMICAR, AMIDES, THEDONIAS, ANITOR, that so the end which I desire may be effected, O ADONAI, through Thy strength, to whom be praise and glory for ever and ever. I adjure thee, Emperor Lucifer, as the agent of the strong living God, of His beloved Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and by the power of the Great ADONAY, ELOIM, ARIEL, and JEHOVAM, to appear instantly, or to send thy Messenger Astarot, forcing thee to forsake thy hiding-place, wheresoever it may be, an warning thee that it thou didst not manifest this moment, I still straightway smite thee and all thy race with the Blasting Rod of the great ADONAY, ELOIM, ARIEL, and JEHOVAM. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
In 2007, while closing up The Winchester Mystery House, Jeff kept catching sight of a shadow moving. He would turn quickly to see if it was a person, but nothing was there. It unnerved him, not knowing what was taking place. The activity picked up when they started to decorate for the Christmas season. Finally, he consulted one of the guests about the strange occurrences. He was very talkative, and would relate experiences about a ghost. During one conversation with the guest, Jeff related that he heard people upstairs laughing and thumping around in the Grand Ballroom, almost like they were dancing country-western style. When he investigated, he would find nothing out of place and no living person upstairs. When opening the mansion in the morning, they found linen that had been neatly arranged, laying on the floor, yet no one had been in the mansion since he had closed it the night before.
One morning he found an entire display sitting at the foot of the stairs. Everything had been moved during the night. His first thoughts were that someone had broken into the place, but there were no signs of an intruder. Early another morning, Jeff and a few other employees heard a music box playing. They went deep in the mansion to find the source. After searching for hours, they found nothing in the mansion, until they went up the dark stairs to the fourth floor. The stairs were steep, and when Jeff got to the top, he snapped a picture down the stairway. He took the picture at that moment because he had a strange feeling. After the investigated the fourth floor, Jeff said he felt a cold draft come by him, as though it was rushing past them down the stairs. The resulting picture was a tragic and forlorn figure dressed in nineteenth century clothes. People have reported seeing her figure walking toward doors that lead to parts of the mansion that are off limits to guest and that she passes unimpeded through locked doors. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Do Injustice and Evil Rule Over the Progress of Humanity?
Those who have never lost by death some one deeply loved have never sounded the depths of despair, have never bruised themselves against the closed door of the tomb. We seek, and an impenetrable wall rises inexorably before the terror that confronts us. If the existence of human beings leads to nothing, what is this comedy all about? It is hard not to desire an answer to the formidable question that presents itself when we think of our destiny, or when a cruel death has taken from us someone we love. How is it possible not to ask whether or not we shall find each other again, or if the separation is for eternity? Does a Deity or Goodness exist? Do injustice and evil rule over the progress of humanity, with no regard for the feelings that nature has placed in our hearts? And what is this nature itself? Has it a will, an end? Could there be more intelligence, more justice, more goodness, and more inspiration in our infinitesimally small minds than in the great Universe? How many questions are associated with the same enigma! We shall die; nothing is more certain. When the Earth on which we live shall have turned only a hundred times more around the sun, not one of us, dear readers, will still be on this World. Ought we to fear death for ourselves, or for those whom we love? From among the many symbols of the divine, we select that of “personal God” in order to illustrate in one stroke the theory and symbolism, the implications of God as being-itself, and one aspect of the living God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The religious encounter, the experience of the holy, demand an I-Thou relationship. God cannot be an “It.” Anything less than a personal God is incapable of arousing an ultimate concern in man. A sub-personal God is not God. That is the reason that the symbol of the Personal God is indispensable for living religion. However, there are difficulties. Is not God as being-itself an impersonal God? Nothing seems more incompatible than the warmth of a person and the bleakness of being-itself. Moreover, if God is a person, is He not reduced to the status of a being along side other beings? Due to these difficulties, particularly the latter, the personal God is a confusing symbol. The solution is the divine transcendence. Calling God a person does not necessarily pull Him down to the same level as other persons and beings, for the absolute individual is also the absolute participant. The other polar element of participation guarantees that God remains being-itself who participates in all beings as their ground. Furthermore, God as being-itself means that God is the ground of everything personal and the He carries within Himself the ontological power of personality. He is the Personal-Itself, the ground and abyss of every person. God is transpersonal in the sense the He includes the personal, but transcends it. Religiously speaking, man encounters the personal God. Theologically speaking, he encounters the ground of everything personal. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
However, in either case the symbol of the personal God indicates that our personal center is grasped by the manifestation of the inaccessible ground and abyss of being. God declares that are bodies are His temple, and we are to keep them pure. This also means abstaining from fornication and drugs. One-time drug abuse can be harmful, and in the few cases where people are sensitive to the drug, it can be lethal. Continued recreational use of drugs cause brain damage and increasingly compromises your ability to make decisions. Habit forming drugs not only affect your body, but as you surrender your body and will to them, they will also destroy the other command center of your body—your spirit. Choosing to disobey the Word of Wisdom will lead you away from the Lord. Trying drugs “just once” can physically harm you in some cases. However, “just once” will always harm you spiritually. Narcotic addiction serves the design of the psychopathological offender, for it disrupts the channel to the holy spirit of truth…Addiction has the capacity to disconnect the human will and nullify moral agency. It can rob one of the power to decide. Agency is too fundamental a doctrine to be left in such jeopardy. Stay away from illegal drugs. If the federal government forbids their use, that means they are illegal. Drugs will take away your powers of reason. They will enslave you in a vicious and terrible way. They will destroy your mind and your body. They will build within you such cravings that you will do anything to satisfy them. The same goes for abusing prescription drugs or any other addictive substance, including alcohol and tobacco. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The need for governance arises because, in its substance, individuals pursing their own interests would generate an inferior equilibrium outcome. American pharmacists fill over 4 billion controlled drug/mediation prescription orders annually. This is up from 1.4 billion in 1994. Every day, hundreds of thousands of Americans walk into their local drug stores and rely on pharmacist to accurately dispense their medications. What the public does not realize, however, is that some of themselves using the drugs that they are entrusted to dispense. Self-report studies reveal that somewhere between forty and sixty-five percent of all practicing pharmacists have engaged in illicit prescription drug use. Moreover, these inquiries tell us that roughly twenty percent of practicing pharmacist use drugs on a regular basis and that five to ten percent consider themselves to be drug abusers. Given our specific interest in the various career aspects of deviant behaviour, after examining the transcripts of the interview it became apparent that the initiation and subsequent progression of pharmacist’ illicit prescription drug use followed one of two criminal career trajectories: recreational abusers and therapeutic self-medicators. Of the 50 pharmacists interviewed, 23 (46 percent) could be classified as recreational abusers. One of the defining characteristics of recreational abusers is that they all began experimenting with street drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, and various psychedelics, while in high school or during their early college years. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
These pharmacists described their early drug use as exclusively recreational. The motivation behind this use was quite simple, they were adventurous and wanted to experience the euphoric, mind altering effects that the drug offered. Because of procurement problems, these individuals reported that they engaged in little, if any prescription drug use before entering pharmacy school. For the recreational abuser, the onset of the illicit prescription drug use career usually began shortly after entering pharmacy training. These respondents were quick to point to the recreational motivations behind their early prescription drug use. As one 42-year-old-male pharmacist stated, “I just wanted the effect, I really just wanted the effect. I know what alcohol is. But what is you take a Quaalude and drink with it? What happens then?” Similarly, a 36-year-old male pharmacist said: “It was very recreational at first, year. It was more curiosity…experimental. I had read about all these drugs. Then I discovered I had a lot of things going on with me at that time and that these [drugs] solved the problem for me instantly. I had a lot of self-exploration issues going on at that time.” Trends in the data indicate that pharmacy school provided these individuals with the requisite access to prescription drugs. They recalled how they exploited their newly found access to prescription drugs in an effort to expand or surpass the euphoric effects that they received from weaker street drugs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
To further highlight this illustration, a 27-year-old male pharmacist said: “It was a blast. It was fun…It was experimentation. We smoked a little pot. And then in the “model pharmacy” [a training facility in college], there was stuff [prescription drugs] all over the place. ‘Hey this is nice…that is pretty nice.’ If it was a controlled substance then I tried it. I had my favorites, but when that supply was exhausted, I’d move on to something else. I was a ‘garbage head!’ It was the euphoria…I used to watch Cheech and Chong [movies]. That’s what it was like. I wasn’t enslaved by them [or so I thought]. They made the World go round.” Over half of the recreational abusers claimed that they specifically chose a career in pharmacy because they expected that it would offer them an opportunity to expand their drug use behaviours. For example, a 37-year-old male pharmacists said: “That’s one of the main reasons I went to pharmacy school, because, I’d have access to medications if I needed them.” Further evidence of this trend can be seen in the comments of a 41-year-old male pharmacist: “I [had to] change my major. So I [based my choice] on nothing more than: ‘well, it looks like fun and…gee all the pharmacy majors had drugs.’ The guys [pharmacy students] that I knew…every weekend when they came back from home, they would unpack their bags and bags of pills would roll out. I thought, ‘Whoa, I got to figure out how to do this.’ [I would ask:] ‘How much did you pay for this?’ [They would respond:] ‘I haven’t paid a thing, I just stole them. Stealing is okay. I get sh*t wages so I got to make it up somehow. So we just steal the sh*t.’ Well, I thought, ‘this is it, I want to be a pharmacist.’ So I went to pharmacy school.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
While many of these recreational abusers entered pharmacy school with prior experiences in drug use, their pre-college drug use was usually not extensive. It was not until they got into pharmacy school that they began to develop more pronounced and progressive drug habits. A 41-year-old male pharmacist discusses this transition into increased usage, in the following interview excerpt: “It [pre-college use] had been recreational type use. It was pretty consistent. But I was still just experimenting. I hadn’t, at that point, become actively addicted. [I was] smoking pot and drinking beer, [doing] psychedelics and Quaaludes [depressant]. Just whatever [I] would come across, if [I] came across [it], great, if I didn’t, no big deal…That was before pharmacy school. By the time I got into pharmacy school, the recreational drug use turned into a fairly steady drug use. Certainly not more than a month to two months would go by without something…I really started drinking and drugging. A lot of my friends after high school said, ‘Oh great, you’re going into pharmacy school. You can wake up on uppers and go to bed on downers,” all that stuff. At first, [I said] no. The first time I ever [used prescription drugs] I thought, ‘no, that’s not why I’m doing it. No, I’m doing it [in pharmacy school] for the noble reasons.’ But then after a while I thought, well, maybe they had a point there after all. Once in pharmacy school, the recreational abusers consistently described how they adopted an applied approach to their studies. For example, if they read about particularly interesting drugs in pharmacy school, they wanted to try them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
If they were clerking or interning in a pharmacy setting which offered them access to prescription medicines, they wanted to steal drugs and use them. If a teacher or employer told them about the unusual effects of a new drug, they recalled how they wanted to experiment with it. This meant that these individuals usually began using prescription drugs soon after entering pharmacy school or while working in the pharmacy during school. This pattern of application-oriented learning is exemplified in the comments of a 44-year-old male pharmacist: “When we studied Valium [benzodiazepine], I had to find out what Valium was…If I studied a class of drugs, I had to say, ‘Well, I don’t know that. I don’t understand that. What did they mean by tranquilizer? What did they mean?’ I’d have to find out. Then, of course, I found the ones that I liked and the ones I didn’t…got worse when I got on the job. It was so fascinating to me, reading the prescriptions and going and finding the drug back there [on the shelf]…I would take inserts home and read about it. It was just so fascinating to me. That’s when I was learning about it and reading it as much as I could…That’s where it [the use] definitely…definitely started.” They explained that they wanted to experience the drug effects that they read about in pharmacy textbooks. These individuals adeptly incorporated their newly found scientific training and professional socialization in a way that allowed them to excuse and redefine their use. They began to see their own drug use as beneficial to their future patients. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
This adaptation strategy is illustrated in the comments of a 59-year-old male recreational abuser: “In a lot of ways, it [college drug use] was pretty scientific. [I was] seeing how these things affected me in certain situations….testing the waters…‘better living through chemistry.’ I thought, ‘I’ll be able to counsel my patients better the more I know about the side effects of these drugs. I’ll be my own rat. I’ll be my own lab rat. I can tell [patients] about the shakes and chills and the scratchy groin and your kin sloughing off. I can tell you all about that stuff.” We will continue this discussion on “socially acceptable drug use in pharmacy school” in the next few days. As one’s spiritual life develops, the believer knows to a great extent the true guidance of the Spirit of God. One knows true inward constraint to act, and restraint from action in like manner—such as when to speak to another about one’s soul, when to rise and testify in a meeting, et cetera. However, after a time one may cease to watch for this pure inward moving of the Spirit—often through ignorance of how to read the monitions of one’s spirit—and may begin to wait for some other incentive or manifestation to guide one in action. This is the time for which the psychopathological offenders have been watching. Since at this point the self-actualized has ceased, unknown to oneself, to cooperate with the inward spirit action—to use one’s volition, and to decide for oneself—one is not watching for some parallel, supernatural indication of the way to go, or the course to take. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Hence one must have “guidance” somehow—some “text,” some “indication,” some “providential circumstance,” et cetera, et cetera. This is the moment of opportunity for a deceiving spirit to gain one’s attention and confidence. And so some words are whispered softly—words that are exactly in accordance with the inward drawing that one has had, but which one does not recognize as from another source. The Holy Spirit, however, led via a deep inner constraining and restraining of one’s spirit. The soft whisper of the deceiving spirit is so delicate and gentle that the believer listens to and receives the words without question, and begins to obey this soft whisper, yielding more and more to it, without any thought of exercising mind, judgment, reason or volition. The “feelings” are now in the body, but the believer is unaware that one is ceasing to act from one’s spirit and by the pure unfettered actions of one’s will and one’s mind, which, under the illumination of the Spirit, are always in accord with one’s spirit. This is a time of great danger if the believer fails to discriminate the source of one’s “drawing” feelings and yields to them before finding out. One should examine one’s basic principle of decision, especially when it has to do with feeling, lest one should be led away by a feeling without being able to say where it comes from and whether it is safe for one to go by it. One should know there are physical feelings, soulish feelings, and feelings in the spirit—any of which can be divine or unholy in their source; therefore reliance on “feelings”—feeling drawn, et cetera—is a source of great mischief in the Christian life. From this point deceiving spirits can increase their control, for the believer had begun the listening attitude, which can be developed acutely until one is always watching for an “inner voice” or the voice of God in the spirit; and thus the believer moves and acts as a passive slave to “supernatural guidance.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Generally speaking, the development of social competence is a matter of learning by doing. If one family member has the opportunity to meet strangers, to plan and conduct parties, to speak before audiences, to obtain the co-operation of others in group activities which one leads, one develops social competence. One learns not only how to avoid giving offense to others, but how to elicit their approval, sympathy, and collaboration—“how to win friend and influence people.” If such experience is not available to one, one’s potentialities for social growth remain undeveloped. Moreover, one’s social ineptitude is not merely an embarrassing handicap or distressing lack to one; it is a serious impediment to the equal exercise of one’s right as a citizen to participate in group matters involving one’s welfare. Inequalities of this character are hazards to the genuine enjoyment of that political equality which is supposedly guaranteed by law. As long as individuals were relatively independent and government was minimal, the one-man-one-vote principle displayed on election day may well have been sufficient evidence of political and legal equality. However, now with the increasing requirement for individuals to participate daily in large organizations, something more than the mere opportunity to vote in periodic elections becomes more conspicuously necessary—namely, the power and ability to exercise one’s voice in governing the conduct from day to day of these enveloping organizations. Otherwise, as critics of Anglo-American political democracy contend, membership in the community for large numbers of presumed citizens becomes formal and empty, conveying no sense of sharing in its control. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
It has always been recognized that experience in forming and operating voluntary associations has been the best training ground for responsible citizenship outside the family itself. In this sense at least, all voluntary associations, whatever their concrete aims, might be termed family agencies for the development of the necessary competence. For this reason, it is impossible to list here as legal and political agencies all the countless voluntary associations which exist. Instead, when we come to consider potential changes in the operation of the various other types of family agencies, the function of equipping individuals for active citizenship will have to be considered as distributed among all of them. The emphasis of historians and other observers of American society upon our characteristic plethora of voluntary associations may well deserved. Nevertheless, numerous as the many forms of association are, membership in them is confined to a relatively small segment of each community (one-third is a generous estimate), and activity to an even smaller segment. Where members of one family may belong and hold office in half a dozen organizations, another half-dozen families belong to none at all. In almost every community, the cry goes up constantly that leadership, activity, and influence are concentrated in a few hands, and among the older rather than the young people. This cry goes up no more often as a complain from critics than as a plea from the leaders themselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
In public as well as in private forms of association, the complaint is chronic that far too few people exercise their rights to vote, to petition representatives, to keep informed on issues and to exert influence upon their outcome. Perhaps these persistent exhortations and condemnations are but the negative expression of our national ideal of full and equal citizenship; perhaps they point to a grievous deficiency which demands remedy; in either case there is a need for a considerable development of competence if there is to be successful working with others in accomplishing common ends. From this standpoint alone we can presume to suggest that ways are needed whereby family agencies can contribute a great deal more to universalizing such competence. From this standpoint also, it seems fair to point to legal and political agencies as the type of family agencies which have done the least to go beyond the mere redress of correction of grievances, into the therapeutic and positive planning stages of development. Even in modern advanced economies where the state promulgates and enforces laws bearing on economic conduct, these laws rarely govern all detailed aspects of transactions and contracts. Most business transactions between, as well as within, firms are conducted using various informal arrangements, such as handshakes and oral agreements, ongoing relationships, and custom and practice. If disputes arise, the parties first attempt to resolve them by direct negotiation. The law is available if these attempts at private settlement fail, but recourse to it is usually the last step, not the first, and often signifies the end of an ongoing relationship. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Evidence bearing on this goes back at least as far as the classic article of Macaulay (1963), and covers many countries with well and poorly functioning legal systems alike. Such private ordering in the shadow of the law arises for different reasons, and takes different forms that attempt to respond appropriately to each reason. Perhaps the simplest of these reasons is the cost of using the formal legal system. The cost can arise in many ways. Firs, even in countries with well-functioning state civil law, obtaining and enforcing a judgement in the court system takes a long time; three years is not uncommon. The court may include interest when calculating damages, but for most traders who are somewhat constrained in access to capital markets, the interest rate used in this calculation is likely to be an underestimate of the rate at which they discount the future. Next, in its calculation of damages, the court may underestimate or even leave out items like lost profit that are speculative and can be overstated by the plaintiff. Third, judges in state courts have to cover all conceivable matters that could arise under civil law, and therefore lack the expertise that insiders would be able to acquire about a specific industry. Therefore their verdicts in commercial disputes can be less predictable than those available in alternative specialized forums. Both parties to a dispute dislike this unpredictability. Finally, courts may require public both parities to the dispute would prefer to keep secret. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Sometimes the parties wish to avoid public knowledge of the mere fact that they were involved in litigation, because potential future transactors may think of them as inflexible and unwilling to renegotiate deals in response to changed circumstances. When the operation of the law is costly, both parities can benefit by resolving their dispute through bargaining or renegotiation, in which the expected outcome of recourse to legal systems constitutes the fallback, or the best alternative to negotiated agreement (BATNA) in Harvard Business School jargon. In turn, their initial contract and economic choices will be affected by this prospect of future renegotiation. This view of bargaining in the shadow of the law is well developed in the Law and Economics literature. Mass production, the defining characteristic of the Second Wave economy, becomes increasingly obsolete as firms install information intensive, often robotized manufacturing systems capable of endless inexpensive variation, even customization. The revolutionary result is, in effect, the demassification of mass production. The shift toward smart flex-techs promotes diversity and feeds consumer choice to the point that a Wal-Mart store can offer the buyer nearly 110,000 products in various types, sizes, models and colours to choose among. However, Wal-Mart is a mass merchandiser. Increasingly, the mass market itself is breaking up into differentiate niches as customers need diverge and better information makes it possible for businesses to identify and serve micro-markets. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Specialty stores, boutiques, superstores, TV home-shopping systems, computer-based buying, direct mail and other systems provide a growing diversity of channels through which producers can distribute their wares to customers in increasingly de-massified marketplace. Visionary marketers no longer focus on “market segmentation.” They now focus on “particles”—family units and even single individuals. Meanwhile, advertising is targeted at smaller and smaller market segments reached through increasingly de-massified media. The dramatic breakup of mass audiences is underscored by the crisis of the once great TV networks, ABS, CBS, and NBC, at a time when digital streaming offers virtually an infinite number of TV programs that can be ported into your home via WiFi and play on your television. And you select the times when you want to watch a program and what program you want to watch. Such systems means that sellers will use stealth advertising to target buyer with even great precision. The simultaneous de-massification of production, distribution and communication revolutionizes the economy and shifts it from homogeneity to ward extreme heterogeneity. Work itself is transformed. Essentially interchangeable muscle work drove the Second Wave. Mass, factory-style education prepared workers for routine, repetitive labour. By contrast, the Third Wave is accompanied by a growing non-interchangeability of labour as skill requirements skyrocket. Muscle power is essentially also hard to find because over time the body breaks down and some people are not as strong or skilled as others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Thus a worker who quits or is fired cannot always be replaced quickly, and training is also expensive. Organizations sped an average of $3,678 per employee on training and development initiatives, and it also takes time. Therefore, the rising level of skill in white-collar jobs and blue-collar jobs makes finding the right person with skills harder and more costly. Although one may face competition from many other jobless muscle worker, it still takes time to learn the systems and procedures. The electronics engineer who has spent years building satellites does not necessarily have the skills needed by a firm doing environmental engineering. A gynecologist cannot do brain surgery. Rising specialization and rapid changes in skill requirements reduce the interchangeability of labour. Now, when it comes to climate change and the green energy scheme, it definitely looks better not to hurry too much with the launch. Along with more research on CO2, and other pollutants’ contribution to global warming and, maybe, on the danger of global warming as such, it is vital to have a deeper look at and put a stronger emphasis on the relationship between emission cuts on the one hand and economic growth and people’s lives on the other. A few think tanks, especially in Europe, have published very optimistic estimates about the effects these cuts will have on economic growth and employment, emphasizing the role of investment in an array of environment-friendly industries. The tough reality, however, is that, though opening a range of new business opportunities, emission cuts will also force both households and industries to make sacrifices. And it looks very strange that the UN-sponsored talks are based just on the calculations of the CO2 emissions cuts necessary to keep the temperature rise within two degrees, while detailed estimates of the effects those cuts will have on the other countries’ economic growth and development, employment, consumption, and living standards are on the table. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Absolute emissions cuts may cause a really serious slowdown in the global economy, possibly causing a social explosion—a revolt of hundreds of millions of people deprived of any real chance they had to overcome poverty and rise from primitive to modern lifestyles. The poor and the middle class are totally suffering and being ignored, but they are often times our essential workers, both with their labour and technical skills. Keep in mind that the United States of America is only responsible for 25 percent of the total emissions, while most of the rest comes from transportation, commercial, and residential use. However, on per capita basis, China emits 78 percent less than the United States of America, and emissions by an average urban Chinese household are estimated to still be around one-third those by an average household in the West. Therefore, it seems our technology is not really the problem. We are having a people problem. The World is, perhaps, overpopulated. Also, surprisingly, Western negotiators are not much concerned about the fact that imposition of too harsh emission constraints on China, the main engine of today’s global growth, may have negative consequences for the West itself, as China’s slowdown will squeeze the most dynamically expanding market, crucially important sources of many products’ supply, and, after all, one of the major channels of financing of Western governments and businesses. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes are so beautiful that I could spend all day looking at them. Marvelling about the space, and how I would use it; enjoying the rolling green lawns and picturing myself relaxing in my backyard, and of course, enjoying the architecture.
Many of these homes are so large that they even come with walk-in closets in the secondary bedrooms. I always say, even if you do not need it, but can afford it, considering getting the largest home. That way, you could turn the closets into home offices or a library, and if they get messy, just close the door and still enjoy your model home.
However, the single story homes are very spacious, and sometimes buying a smaller home is a good idea if you want to add a lot of custom features.
People often wonder, “What would I do with a 4,000 square foot house?” well, they do come with a few extra spaces, like next generation suits, which are like apartments with in your home, where your grown kids or parents can live, and many of them have their own kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom and laundry room so they are self-contained, but still part of the house, and has its own separate entrance.
Also, in these homes, you will notice the spaces are larger, so that is why they are so big. It is still like a traditional home, but with all the space you wish you had. You could even add Murphy Doors and have hidden rooms that only you know about. There are so many options and so many things you can do with your house. Some of the single-story homes are nearly 3,000 square feet. https://cresleigh.com/magnolia-station/
Everyone deserves to own a home. Let Cresleigh Homes create your dream home.
Randolph Harris II International Institute 