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Why Art Thou So Foolish and Fearful!
I was spending the first week of January alone in Llanada villa. A combination of circumstances had driven me to this drastic course: my nearest relations were enjoying winter sports abroad, and the friends who had been kindly anxious to replace them had an infectious complaint in the house. Doubtless I might have found someone else to keep company with me. “However,” I reflected, “most of them have made up their parties, and, after all, it is only for three or four days at most that I have to fend for myself, and it will be just as well if I can get a move on with my blueprints. I might she the time by going down to the garden and listening to my estate about plans to incorporate in the architecture.” The first day alone in Llanada Villa, it was so stormy that I got no father the designing stained-glass windows. As I sat in the Hall of Fires, I felt uncomfortable, and this feeling persisted. I felt like I was being watched by some unseen force, and my nerves began to tense under the strain. I reflected on how some of my staff had left not because they wanted to but because they were driven, driven by forces greater than themselves that they could not resist. On this very night, I had seen vivid apparition of my butler, then miles away, in San Francisco. He was a plump, amicable man who I distinctly saw walking down the hall in a bathrobe, with blooding running down his leg. A small pool of blood was forming on the floor. The frightened me terribly. My hair stood up on my head and chills shook my body. The apparition looked so stern that my heart failed me, and I wished myself anywhere but there, though I had before been summoning up my courage. “Good Heaven,” said I to myself, “give me the courage to stand before this spirit. O soften him, or harden me!” I knew this was a glimpse into eternity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
The following day, I received news that my butler, Chaleb Heroldsbach, had died after being attacked by a dog. My home is built in what some have called a “trinity triangle,” it has forged a mystical link with other pilgrimage sites and is supposed to help bring the Devil’s power on Earth to an end. This is being prevented by Satan, however, with the help of The Curse of the Winchester Fortune. That evening, I was awakened at three o’clock in the morning, seemingly for no reason with the same uncanny feeling that something was wrong. Being a sensible person, I put all my energies into polishing furniture and getting newly added rooms into proper condition. However, somewhere not so far away, a baby was crying: a mournful wail of a sound that—though it was surely human—reminded me of the noises the coyotes would make some nights. After a few moments of listening, the baby’s cry seemed to falter for a moment, and I feared it would fade completely before I could find the little darling. Then, the infant seemed to find a new seam of grief to mine, and the wail rose up again, more plaintive than ever. I was alone, but trying to figure out which direction the sound was coming from. I mused for a moment, and realized a lifetime of suffering had caught up with me. I knew in my heart that I deserved to know everything, after all I have been through. I have earned the truth. Maybe the dead are close to the threshold of reality in this house. I only know it is real. I have seen them. Others have seen them. They are hybrids. Sometimes there is a kind of beauty in them. However, sometime all I see is ugly sin. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
The sky was dark and cloudy, and by the time I woke up, I could hear a steady soaking rain pounding on the roof. I was preparing breakfast in one of the kitchens. As I was buttering a piece of toast, I happened to glance up toward the doorway. There, immaculately dressed, stood a man. The stranger, I noticed, wore shiny black shoes, black pants, and a white shirt. I could see him so clearly that I could make out the way the man’s jet-black hair was parted. Immediately, I was shocked that he had somehow entered my house, and I was about to greet him, when it occurred to me that I had not heard the door opening or any other sound—no footsteps, nothing. I turned around to grab my revolver, but by the time I turned around, the man was gone like a mist. I was not too frightened by what I had witnessed, I was growing accustomed to apparitions. I had often wondered what had taken place a century and a half on the land this eighteen-room farmhouse I purchased was on, and what the former owner really had been. However, it is fortunate that they carpenters were all strong men of action and simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle introspectiveness and mental complexity they would have fared ill indeed. Herford Hulsmann was the most disturbed; but even he outgrew the darkest shadow, and smothered memories in prayer. While I was alone, I did my best in the blotting out of unwholesome images, and was thankful that the carpenters, Daisy, and other caretakers would be returning to Llanada Villa soon. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
My house was not altogether liked by sensitive people because of the sounds heard here at night. It was said that I entertained strange visitors, and the lights seen from my windows were not always the same colours. The knowledge I displayed concerning long-dead persons and long-forgotten events was considered distinctly unwholesome. Frau Maassen swore that on 13 June 1889, in the fruit orchard, that “forty Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete in the Woodes behind Mrs. Winchester’s house.” Then several people claimed to have found William’s unfinished manuscript in his handwriting, couched in a cipher none could read. After a year of possessed this manuscript, Mr. Maassen had intensely and feverishly tried to decipher, he never stated whether or not he had succeeded. I confronted Mr. Maassen, “Why are you so foolish and fearful! You have done no harm! What, if you fear an unjust judge, when you are innocent, would you do before a just one, if you were guilty? Have courage, Mr. Maassen; you know the worst! And how easy a choice poverty and honesty is, rather than plenty and wickedness.” “Mrs. Winchester, do not let your heart ake for me?—I am sure mined flutters about like a new-caught bird in a cage,” said Mr. Maassen. “O how can wicked men seem so steady and untouched with such black hearts, while poor innocents stand, like malefactors, before them!” Mr. Maassen cheered himself up; but yet I could tell his poor heart sunk, and his spirits were quite broken. Everything that stirred, he thought was to call her to her account. Shortly after, he restored to a sojourn abroad, and did not return to claim his lands. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Mr. Maassen had apparently been careful to destroy most of his correspondence, but the citizens who took action in 1892 found and preserved a few letters and papers which excited their wonder. There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other hands which Mr. Maassen either copied with care or had photographed, and one extremely mysterious letter was written in blood. I had to learn to live with my ghosts, especially considering some of these had ben here before me. Perhaps some of these ghosts could even become friendly. One night at dinner, Daisy, myself and Zip were enjoying stuffed pheasant, when an enormous crash shook the house. It felt as if a boulder had fallen on the parlour floor. When we rushed to the parlour, everything was in order, nothing misplaced. We said a silent prayer for the souls of the disturbed. However, moments later, things got worse. The lights started going off and on by themselves. When we tried to return to the dining room and finish supper, the atmosphere was so thick that we could not get near the table. Enveloped by the strong vibrations, I felt myself levitating, and when I came to my senses, I was lying on the floor. I had given Daisy such a scare. Daisy clearly senses the presences of the spirits and she started to cry. “Oh, God, it can’t be true, Aunt Sarah,” she said. With a piercing scream, she ran up the stairs, weeping out of control. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
“I have great trouble, and some comfort, to acquaint you with. The trouble is, that my good lady began to have her bad nights, and complained to me and other persons, in particular what discomfort she suffered from her pillow and bedclothes. She said she must buy some to suit her, and should do her own marketing. And accordingly brought home a parcel which she said was of the right quality, but where she bought it we had then no knowledge, only they were marked in thread with a coronet and a bird. The merchant said they were of a sort not commonly met with and very fine, and Mrs. Winchester said they were the comfortablest she ever used, and she slept now both soft and deep. Also the feather pillows were the best sorted and her head would sink into them as if they were a cloud: which I have myself remarked several times when I came to wake her of a morning, her face being almost hid by the pillow closing over it. I had never any communication with Dr. Wayland after I came back to Llanada Villa, but one day when he passed me in the garden and asked me whether I was not looking for another service, to which I answered I was very well suited where I was, but he said I was a tickleminded maidan and he doubted not he should soon hear I was on the World again, which indeed proved true.”
Dr. Wayland is next taken up where she left off.
“On the 5th I was called up out of my bed soon after it was light—that is about five—with a message that Mrs. Winchester was dead or dying. Making my way to her house, I found there was no doubt which was the truth. All the persons in the house expect the one that let me in were already in her chamber and standing about her bed, but none touching her. She was stretched in the midst of the bed, on her back, without any disorder, and indeed had the appearance of one ready laid out for burial. Her hands, I think, were even crossed on her breast. The only thing not usual was that nothing was to be see of her face, the two ends of the pillow or bolster appearing to be closed quite over it. These I immediately pulled apart, at the same time rebuking those present for not at once coming to the assistance of their master. However, I was informed that only one person had stayed with her until her dying moment and most had fallen asleep. She looked at me and shook her head, having no more hope than myself that there was anything but a corpse before us. Indeed it was plain to anyone possessed of the least experience that Mrs. Winchester was not only dead, but had died of suffocation. Nor could it be conceived that her death was accidentally caused by the mere folding of the pillow over her face. How should she not, feeling the oppression, have lifted her hands to put it away? whereas not a fold of the sheet which was closely gathered about her, as I now observed, was disordered.
“I could tell no more, at least without opening the body, then we already knew. As to any person entering the room with evil purpose (which was the next point to be cleared), it was visible that the bolts of the door were burst from their stanchions, and the stanchions broken away from the door-post by main forced; and there was a sufficient body of witness, the smith among them, to testify that this had been done but a few minutes before I came. The chamber being, moreover, at the top of the house, the window was neither easy of access nor did it show any sign of an exist made that way, either by marks upon the sill or footprints below upon soft mould. My evidence forms of course part of the report of the inquest, the large organs were in a healthy state and there was coagulation of blood in various parts of the body. My verdict was ‘Death by visitation of spirits.’ Upon further consideration, I think I can divine a reason for Mrs. Winchester’s death. It related to the rifling of her mansion. This is the property of a noble family. The outrage was not that of a natural death. The object, it seemed likely, was theft. The account is blunt and terrible. I shall not quote it here. A dealer in San Francisco suffered heavy penalties as a receiver of stolen goods in connexion with the affair.
“Mrs. Winchester has left us all much grieved for the loss of her; for she was a good lady, and kind to all her caretakers. Much I feared, that as I was taken by her ladyship to wait upon her person, I should be quite destitute again. Mrs. Winchester has given mourning and a year’s wages to all her caretakers; and she game me with her own hand four golden guineas, and some silver, which were in her pocket when she died. And I sent Daisy those four guineas for her comfort; for Providence will not let me want: and so you may pay some old debt with part, and keep the other part to comfort yourself.” Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
What if I Do Not Believe in Ghosts?
Once when I was little, my dad took me to this placed called Sodom Hill. It must be some kind of gateway because the curious thing is, you feel like you are driving down a hill along this road. This was the first time that I believe I saw a ghost. As our carriage passed by Saint Mary Parish, a woman was standing near the church, starring at us. However, she was really looking at my father. Though the weather was warm, she was wearing a long black dress beneath a hooded cloak. She was hugging herself, and she looked cold. Beneath the hood, her face was pale, and even from a distance I could tell that she was distresses. And she was very beautiful. The hood slipped down to her shoulders. I saw her hair was red. Her dark eyes were trusting and innocent. And suddenly I knew where I had seen her before. Onn the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury Ferry. She had been weeping on deck. The beautiful maiden with the red hair kept staring at my father. He did not notice. I was curious to know if my father could see the woman. I said, “Father, what is that pretty tree over there? By the tower of the church?” I pointed toward the woman. The woman saw me point. She looked at me, questioningly, but only for a moment. Then she looked back at my father. The woman did not care if I was being immodest. She just looked through me, just as she had on the deck of the ferry. How had she gotten here, and what did she want from me and my father? All this seemed to take forever. However, I do not think more than a minute passed before my father said to me, “What tree? I don’t see any trees near the tower of the church.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
“Father, what do you see?” I asked. “The lawn,” he said. I watched him for a sign. I could not believe that he could not see the lady with crimson hair near the tower of the church. “Nothing else? I said. “No one?” “Nothing,” he replied. “No one? Who would be there?” When I looked again there was no one there. The woman had vanished. I felt as if I had lost something. “What’s wrong?” said my father. “Nothing,” I said. “I think I must have been having a daydream.” “Poor Sarah,” said my father. “It must be the sun. Let’s get you inside and get you something to drink.” We made our way back home. My mother was in the garden, kneeling down among the tall plants and rut niblicks. My father poured me some milk and gave me a cracknel, baked by my mother. “Eat this,” he said. “It’ll help you get your strength back.” My father nibbled on one himself. I told myself: No man sees a ghost and starts nibbling a cookie like nothing happened. If he said there was no woman near the tower of the church, it meant he had not seen her. It meant something was seriously wrong with me. I had not been feeling all that well lately. I felt as if the colours of everything had gotten a little brighter, and sounds a little louder, and when people speak to me, their voices have a tiny echo, like I am hearing them from the far end of a tunnel. It does not happen all of the time. I have these little spells, and then they pass, and I am normal again. Spirits whispered in the rustling leaves, ghost lurked in the murky nooks, the deep baying of a hound floated up out of the distance, an owl answered with his sepulchral note. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. What place do these spirit beings hold in the scheme of creation which by some are thought neither to have stood fast when the rebel angels fell, nor to have joined with them to the full pitch of their transgression? It was the middle of the moonlight in October night with heavy rain underfoot, I was sitting by the fire—it was a cold evening—and I stretched out my hand towards the warmth, and just then the fire-irons, or at least the poker, fell over towards me with a great clatter. There resourced over the estate and the surrounding land a series of cries which brought sleepy heads to every window; we all saw a ghost ship. It was a 26-gun frigate. There were distant gunshots, and I could feel the throb of titanic and thunderous words resounding in the upper air. Muskets flashed and cracked, and the flaming ship fell to the ground. A second flaming thing appeared, and a shriek of human origin was plainly distinguished. Then just before dawn when a howling darkness descended upon the ships and they vanished. As I ran up the stairs, I hit what felt like an ice wall and was momentarily stopped in my tracks. The air around me became instantly chilled, and although every fireplace was lit, I was cold and could see my breathe. I was then able to get up the last six steps, but when I turned around, I saw an opalescent fog crystalize into the form of a woman. She wore a long dress, and a hat, and when she turned towards me, I realized in was the woman with red hair that I had seen at the tower of the church with my father when I was a child. In her face, I could see uncountable horrors and sorrows written in the depth of her dark eyes. She then vanished, and the air around me returned to its warm state. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
There was certainly a time when I was so much harassed by my dreams that I could not keep them to myself, but would tell them to my friends. There was a dream which had come to me several times of late, and even more than once in a night. It was to this effect, that I seemed to myself to wake under an extreme compulsion to rise and go outdoors. So I would dress myself and go down to the garden door. By the door there stood a spade which I must take, and go out into the garden, and at a particular place in the boxwood hedges, somewhat clear, and upon which the moon shone (for there was always in my dream a crescent moon), I would feel myself forced to dig. And after some time, the spade would uncover something light-coloured, which I would perceive to be a stiff, linen or woolen, and this I must clear with my hands. It was always the same: of the size of a man and shaped like the chrysalis of a moth, with the folds showing a promise of an opening at one end. I could not describe how gladly I would have left all at this stage and run to the house, but I mist not escape so easily. So with many groans, and knowingly only too well what to expect, I parted these folds of stuff, or, as it sometimes seemed to be, membrane, and disclosed a head covered with a smooth pink skin, which breaking as the creature stirred, show me my own face in a state of death. Upon ever recurrence of this dream, I woke and found myself, as it were, fighting for my breath. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Moments later a chill wind blew up. It produced a kind of clutching, amorphous fear beyond that of the tomb or the charnel-house. Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows rattled as its echoes dies away. It was deep and musical; powerful as a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books in the secret library. What it said, no one can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue. Objects were being hurled about the room. Puddles of water appeared on the floor. The sheet and blankets were torn off the bed. Then I was alarmed when I heard a very loud vibration as if a hole were being drilled through the all. I went into the chamber next to mind and saw that a Victorian fireplace had been ripped from its casing and hurled upon the floor. A wailing distinctly burst out. It was almost articulate, though no one could trace the exact words; and at one point it seemed to verge toward the confines of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark madness wrenched from scores of demon throats—a yell which came strong and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst; after which a darkness and silence ruled all things. Spirals of acrid smoke ascended, though no flames appeared. This must have been the witches’ Sabbath. Death does not mean that your loved one’s have left your mind, and your mind sends messages to your eyes that sometimes have nothing to do with what you actually see. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
The Winchester Mystery House
Santa Clare Valley was in an uproar after the death of Mrs. Winchester. On Wednesday (October 3, 1923) consequently on the circulation of a report that the household goods of Sarah Winchester were being smashed and removed by some unknown agency. All day long crowds of excited people wended their way towards the Winchester Mansion, drawn thither by the accounts of the mysterious occurrences said to have been witnessed by the inmates and others. “As I enter the door I myself saw an eleven-foot-tall 18th century George I burl walnut longcase clock by James Marwick levitate several feet into the air before relocating itself to the other side of the room. After hearing what the folks had to say, I was joining in the conversation, when a late 18th century crystal chandelier began to raise in a slanting direction over my head and then fell as my feet, smashing into bits. I had not the slightest belief in the supernatural. I cannot account for what I saw. No one was nearer to the chandelier than myself and, as far as I saw, there was no cause for the phenomenon. The room was dimly lighted by a lamp. We were talking about things, and the caretaker were saying, “It is a very mysterious thing,” with his back turned Neoclassical Italian Crystal vase suddenly flew up slantingly over his head, and fell down and smashed at his feet. The caretaker looked at the mess on the floor, and thinking the devil was in the place, he left and went home. About half-a-dozen people were in the parlour whilst these things happened.
Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Today We Begin the Harrowing Story
I have many beautiful art glass windows in my house, but the most expensive in the house was specially designed for me by Tiffany’s of New York. I originally installed it in an outside wall, but later added a series of rooms that blocked off all direct sunlight. There is a peculiar apparition that is seen in the window itself. The form seen is that of a figure dressed in white walking across the window. At first there was only one figure, and then thirteen appeared. The figures began to move across the window long before the carpenters noticed them. They did so as many as twenty or thirty times a day, and would stop shortly after noon. Of the three figures, one was a man, stone was a woman, and one was a child. the man was an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray shepherd’s-check trousers, not over-clean black frock coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head and the expression of extreme chagrin and discontent upon his features. The woman was very distinct in appearance. She was tall and very graceful. The two-year-old boy showed signs of disturbed behaviour, laughed hysterically and talked of “funny drinks.” The order of the apparitions in the window had a slight variation: the mother came alone from the northside of the window, and having gone about halfway across, she would stop, turn around, and wave her arms towards the quarter whence she had come. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
This gesture was answered by the entry of the father with the child. Both parents then bent over the child, and seemed to bemoan his fate; but the mother was always the most endearing in her gestures. The father then moved towards the other side of the window, taking the child with him, leaving the mother in the center of the window, from which she gradually retired to the north corner, whence she had come, waving her hand, as though making signs of farewell, as she retreated. After some little time she again appeared, bending forward, and evidently anticipating the return of the father and son, who never failed to reappear from the south side of the window where they had disappeared. The same gestures of distress and despair were repeated, and then all three retired together to the north side of the window. One evening, about nine o’clock, I was at the south-west door with Mr. Hansen. As I was unlocking it, I said, “Did you ever find anybody locked in here by accident?” “Mrs. Winchester, twice I saw shadows moving in that beautiful window. What a noise they did make!” Mr. Hasen then waited, leaning against the pillar, and watched the light wavering along the length of the landing. Mr. Hansen said they were well worthy seeing. “I suppose,” he said, as we walked toward the steps to the third floor, “that you’re too much used to going about here at night to feel nervous—but you must get a start every now and then, don’t you, when a book falls down or a door swings to?” “No, Mr. Hansen, I can’t say I think much about noises, not nowadays: I’m much more afraid of finding an escape of gas or a burst in the stove pipes than anything else. Still there have been times, years ago. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
“If you have an have half an hour to spare, sir, when we get back down to the second floor, Mr. Hansen, I could tell you about a tomb that was unearthed. I will not begin now; it strikes cold here, and we do not want to be dawdling about all night.” “Of course, Mrs. Winchester, I should like to hear it immensely.” “Very well, sir, you shall. Now if I might put a question to you,” I went on, as we passed down the hallway of the third floor, “in my little local guide—and not only there, but in the little book on Llanada Villa in the series—you will find it stared that this portion of the mansion was erected previous to the twelfth century. Now of course I should be glad enough to take that view, but—mind your step, sir—but, I put it to you—doe the lay of the stone here in this portion of the wall (which I tapped with my key), does it to your eye carry the flavour of what you might call Saxon masonry? No, I thought not; no more it does to me: now, if you will believe me, I have said as much to the other carpenters. However, there it is, I suppose every one’s got their opinions.” The discussion of this peculiar trait of human nature occupied Mr. Hansen almost up to the moment when we returned to the second floor. Usually the apparitions appeared during musical performances in the Grand Ballroom, and especially during one long eight-line hymn, when—for the only occasion without the child—the two parents rushed on (in stage phrase) and remained during the whole hymn, making the most frantic gestures of despair. Indeed the louder the music in that hymn, the more carried away with their grief did they seem to be. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Nothing could be more emphatic than the individuality of the several figures; the manner of each had its own peculiarity. If the stained glass were removed, I do not doubt that a much plainer view would be obtained. I think so, because the nearer the center of the window, where the stained glass was thickest, there the less distinct were the forms. It was like catching glimpses of them through leaves. However, nearer the edge of the window, where the colours were less bright, they were perfectly distinct; and still more so on the pane of unstained glass at the edge. There they seemed most clear, and gave one the impression of being real persons, not shadows. Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of Mr. Hasen since working on this project had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquired. While standing on the landing looking at the window, I noticed his respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible. His skin had a morbid chill and dryness. Of course, we were witnessing the most remarkable and perplexing incident in the whole spectacle. When the father and the child had taken their departure, the mother waved her hands, and after walking slowly to the very edge of the window, turned round whilst on the pane of unstained glass and waved her arm towards the other two with what one would call a stage gesture, and then I most distinctly saw, and emphatically declare I did see, the arm bare nearly to the shoulder, with beautiful folds of drapery hanging from it like a picture of a Greek vase. Nothing could be plainer than the drag of the robes on the ground after the figures as they retired at the edge of the window, where the clear glass was, previous to going out. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
The impression produced was that one saw real persons in the air, for though the figures were seen on the window, yet they gave one the impression of walking past the window outside, and not moving upon the glass. I am not inclined to think that the trees outside the mansion at the east end can originate the appearance by any optical illusion produced by waving branches. I could see their leaves rustling in the air, and their movement was evidently unconnected with the appearance and movement of the figures. So I began making enquires on my estate. I discovered that several people had indeed seen the shapes upon the glass. One spoke of a female figure with a slightly skipping step. Another servant said he saw an ancient gravestone from the window. The belief that the tree beside the Tiffany window were somehow responsible for the optical illusion was soon dashed; the trees were cut down, but the figures appeared still. One correspondent wrote to me in the winter of 1889, explain that “as I have no faith in ghost, I have been most wishful to have the matter cleared up. On 25 March 1687, the land you now own was involved in a remarkable satanic horror story. A young girl came to the farmhouse for help, saying that she wanted to get away from a group of satanists who had threatened to kill her. She confessed to the owner that she had murdered her own baby in ‘frenzied ritual.” He befriended the girl, twenty-three-year-old Caludia, and allowed her to stay in his home. She kept telling him that she couldn’t stand hearing the screams of her children inside of her head. And on April 20th, 1687, she died from an overdose of Laudanum and postmortem examination revealed thirteen scars and burns on her body which he tended to and which supported her claims of having been involved in satanic ritual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
“Further, Claudia left a 13-page diary in which she said he had been involved with a satanic group since she was hired to work on a nearby farm at age thirteen and her writings went on to make incredible claims. She described how she went to coven meetings with a boy named Dorian whom she had met while living on the farm. The boy’s mother was a High Priestess and his father was The Master—a known satanic term for the leading member of the group. She described other practice which are known to be common in satanic altar initiations—that of having her armed pricked and blood drained into a chalice from which it was drunk. ‘Much sexual perversion went on that night…later I learned more of Satan and practiced my arts calling on my power of darkness. Satan had become my Lord and Master.’ Later she described how she aborted a baby she was expecting by Dorian then made the claim that Dorian himself was sacrificed by his own father in retribution, and how she was forced to watch as he was hung upside down. She claimed to have seen other sacrifices of many new born babies, stabbing them at orgies in which Laudanum was taken heavily. She also appeared to have had another child of her own which was also offered up for sacrifice. At her inquest of 13 May, the midwife recorded an open verdict after the she noted that Claudia’s body had signs which confirmed she had given birth at least once, and had been subject to sexual abuse. The constables took up the case, but no charges were brought and the investigation was closed without further action.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
I was shocked of these allegations which seemed to be more than enough to inspire the most lurid of headline writers, more than to testify to the credibility of all who were proffering these dramatic and barely believable accounts of satanic abuse. Everything these people said was being taken as gospel in the village because the allegations were coming from the mouths of so-called experts. However, there were claims of rampant satanic worship in Nova Albion at this time, which was documented by English charters led by Sir Francis Drake for England. There were horrifying claims that fifty women were suffering from the after-effects of cannibalism and an average of ten occult survivors a week were being sacrificed. Dr. Harley said he read of several cases recorded by Theodorous de Bry where children had been killed. There were, of course, also several stories concocted around these three figures in my home. Some said that they issued from the grave beside the east window. Other said that they were victims of the plague, and were burned outside where this window now stands. It may or may not be relevant that the figures seemed to appear when the sound of the organ and of voices raised in song. The case was thoroughly investigated in 1889 by Dr. Robert Radakovic of The Ghost Club, where it was revealed that Llanda Villa had been “haunted” for two or three hundred years by the same figure or figures. Optical tests on the possible patterns of light and reflection had come to no results. It was remarked that “the ghost has been seen from the inside while outside nothing was visible.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
The interior of Lalanda Villa was much altered in the late nineteenth century, and a complex of rooms was built behind this haunted window. However, no satisfactory explanation has ever been given for the strange phenomena reported here. While designing Lalanda Villa, I was gaining my tastes from the venerable town around me, and from the relics of the past which filled every corner of my mansion. With the years, my devotion to ancient things increased; so that history, genealogy, and the study of gothic architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length crowded everything else from my sphere of interests. These tastes are important to remember for they outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters so that one would have fancied the they are literally transferred to a former age through some obscure short of autohypnosis. However, the true madness, I am certain, came with a later change; after the portrait and ancient papers of Saint Adalrich the Duke of Alsacre had been unearthed. Some terrible invocations being chanted under strange and secret circumstances; after certain answers to these invocations had been plainly indicated, and a frantic letter penned under agonizing and inexplicable conditions; after the wave of vampirism and the ominous legends of Neustria; and after the farmer’s memory commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst his voice failed and his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many subsequently noticed. He was later diagnosed with porphyria. And a final investigation resulted which virtually proved the authenticity of the papers and of their monstrous implications at the same time that those papers were borne forever from human knowledge. Loving antiquities so keenly, the papers and portrait were secretly concealed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Bedroom fashions changed dramatically over the Victorian years due to several factors. Early in the period, homes were heated by fireplaces and therefore could be uncomfortable in the colder mothers, although a heated bedroom was considered an indulgence and windows were left open during the winter. In reality, only the rich had fireplaces in their bedrooms. Still, one had to keep warm while asleep and bed drapery, consisting variously of canopies, tents, and other enclosures used to shut out drafts, was essential, as was heavy draper on windows. Even doors had decorative, but also functional, drapes called portieres that served to keep out drafts when covering the door.
Mrs. Winchester was wealthy and her wealth and prosperity were even envied among the elite. She had no less than 47 fireplaces in her home. By the end of the century, two things had changed that affected bedroom styles. First, coal and woodburning parlour stoves came into use, were more efficient at heating a house, and could be installed in any room. (Central heating, though available after the Civil War, was really only for the very rich.). Secondly, and more importantly, was an increased knowledge of diseases, germs, and bacteria and how to combat them. Plenty of fresh air with good circulation, and the elimination of materials such as bed draper that not only impeded air circulation but provided a place for dust and bacteria to collect were deemed essential. Since the bedroom served as the place where daily and weekly ablutions were performed (until bathrooms became separate entities), and as a birthing and maternity room, it was important that it have a healthy environment.
Styles of bedroom furniture were affected by this new found interest in and concern for prevention of illness and diseases. The classic English styles of Sheraton, Chippendale, and Hepplewhite migrated from the eighteenth century into the Victorian period. Tall, four-poster canopied beds enclosed the sleeper in heavy drapes of wool or lined damask of velvet, a carryover from the time when houses were built without corridors, and enclosures around the bed were needed for privacy, as well as warmth. By the time mid-century had arrived, the full enclosure had receded to the half-tester, or half-canopy, from which hung draperies that covered only the head and shoulders. Fully enclosed beds were now considered unhygienic, as they limited air circulation and the yards of fabric attracted dust. Dust ruffles and window valances were also discarded in the same house cleaning. In the southern climates, netting was still necessary to protect against insects, and its slightness did not impede air movement.
Gothic Revival furniture was the style into the 1840s and its massiveness was particularly suited to bedrooms. Closets were not an architectural feature at this time; clothing was stored in large cabinets called armories or wardrobes, usually with double, mirrored, and washstand, topped with marble or wood, were manufactured for middle-class homes in the cottage style. “Spool” beds were popular, nicknamed “Jenny Lind beds” because the Swedish Nightingale was rumoured to have slept in when she toured the United States of America. Made of less costly woods like maple or pine, the simple furniture could be elaborately painted with floral or foliage patterns. The well-to-do preferred the more opulent style of Rococo Revival or Renaissance Revival in woods or walnut, mahogany, or rosewood with carvings and applied moldings. As with other furniture in the house, golden oak, promoted by the Arts and Crafts Movement, was popular at the end of the century. Additional pieces of furniture found in the bedroom were writing desks, chaises, or other upholstered furniture.
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Happy is One Who Wisely Considers the Poor
Once upon a time, the police knew the community and community members so well that if your interior lights were on later than usual, they would knock on your door and check to see if everything was well. Times have changed. Economic good fortune smiles, if not on everyone, then on more people than in the past, and glossy magazines offer readers images of well-stocked refrigerators and other scenes from a good life of consumer plenty. It is the era of Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber, and Beyonce. The American youth rebels are clad in leather and denim, wilding out of rap concerts. Replacing an old, destroyed World burdened with memory with a shimmy new and complacently forgetful one has become its own type of redemption. In the face of so much good fortune, maybe people feel less need for cosmic solace, less fear of cosmic retribution. No wonder we associate the post 911 years more with economic miracles than religious ones. However, some fear that various evils such as atomic weapons, genetic experimentation, chemical food additives, a massive overreliance on pharmaceuticals, and the fact that large portions of the Earth will soon become uninhabitable is an indication that people are becoming blind to godly powers. It is believed that people need to relearn it, to use spiritual powers to recover and maintain the divine order. Even Communist ideology is losing its influence on the minds of people in general, and of the young generation in particular, and it becomes apparent in a number of reports from Russia. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A very vivid description of this development was to be found in an article by Marvin L. Kalb, “Russian Youth Asks Some Questions.” The author reports from Moscow about a new questionnaire of the “Public Opinion Institute” of Komsomol Pravada, organ of the Communist youth organization. The paper found it necessary to ask questions like “Do you personally have a goal in life?”, “What is it?”, et cetera, not so much for the purpose of a statistical inquiry, but in order to combat the widespread phenomena of apathy and materialism, which are found in the young generation. This is the text of one letter, which is characteristic of others: “‘Are you satisfied with your generation?’ the questionnaire asked. ‘No!’ the nihilist answered. ‘Why’ the questionnaire asked. ‘I’m 19 years old,’ she explained, ‘ and I am filled with apathy and indifference to everything around me—so much so that grown-ups are surprised and wonder, “So young, and yet so bored; what will happen to her when she is 30?” However, this should not be surprising, for it is a simple fact: life is just not very interesting. And this view is not only my own, but all those people with whom I am friendly.’ ’Have you a goal in life?’ the questionnaire asked. ‘Earlier, when I still poorly understood life,’ she wrote, ‘I had a goal—to study. I finished high school; and now I am in an institute part time. But now all my pure dreams lead to only one thing money. Money is everything. Luxury, prosperity, love and happiness—if you have money, you can have all of these things, and more…I still do not know how I am going to get these things; but every girl dreams about a successful marriage with lots of money. Naturally, not everyone succeeds, for there are more people who want money than who have it…But I assure you I shall succeed. My conviction is based on the fact that I always do what I want; and what I want I normally get.’” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
I do not mean to imply, of course, that his letter is representative of all the young generation in the Soviet Union. However, the survey and the publication of letters like this show how serious the leaders take the problem. We in the West, of course, should not be surprised. We are dealing with the same problems of juvenile delinquency and juvenile immortality, and for the same reasons. The materialism, prevalent in our system as well as in the Soviet Union, corrodes the sense of meaning of life in the young generation and leads to cynicism. Neither religion, humanist teaching, nor Marxist ideology is a sufficiently strong antidote—unless fundamental changes occur in the whole society. Just because ideology is not synonymous with lies, just because they—and we—are not aware of the reality behind the conscious ideology, we can not expect that they will—or could—tell us in an aside “we really do not mean what we say; all this is for public consumption, for keeping control over the minds of the people.” Maybe there is an occasional cynic who thinks this; but it is the very nature of ideology that it deceives not only others, but also those who use it. Hence the only way of recognizing what is real and what is ideology is through the analysis of actions and not in accepting words for facts. If I watch a father treating his boy harshly because he considers it his duty to teach him virtue, I shall not be so foolish as to ask the father for his motivations; instead I shall examine his whole personality, many other acts of his nonverbal manifestations, and I shall arrive at an evaluation of the weight of his conscious intention in comparison with his real motivation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
To return to the Soviet Union, what is its ideology? It is Marxism in its crudest form; the development of man is bound up with the development of productive forces. With the development of productive forces, techniques, modes of production, man develops his own faculties, but he also develops classes which become increasingly antagonistic to each other. The development of new productive forces is hampered by the older social organization and class structure. When this contradiction becomes sufficiently drastic the older social organization is changed to accommodate the full development of the productive forces. The evolution of mankind is a progressive one; both man and his domination of nature develop increasingly. Capitalism is the most highly developed system of economic and social organization, but the private ownership of the means of production throttles the full development of the productive forces and thus hinders the full satisfaction of the needs of all men. Socialism, the nationalization of the means of production plus planning, frees the economy from its shackles; it frees man, it abolishes classes and eventually the state. At present a strong state is still needed to defend socialism against attack from abroad, but the Soviet Union is already a classless, socialist society. Capitalism, still beset with its inherent contradictions, must one day adopt the socialist system, partly because of its incapacity to cope with its own contradictions, partly because the example of the socialist countries will be so compelling that all countries will want to emulate it. Eventually, then, the whole World will be socialist, and this will be the basis for peace and the full realization of man. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
This, in short, the Soviet catechism. It contains a mixture of ideology and theory. There is one difficulty the Western observer must overcome. We are not surprised that medieval thinking was structured in the frame of reference of theology. History was seen in terms of God’s creation, man’s fall, Christ’s death and resurrection, and the final drama of the second coming of Christ. Controversies, and even purely political disputes, were expressed in terms of this central frame of refence. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a secular political-philosophical frame of reference. Monarchy versus republic, liberty versus submission, environmental influence versus innate human traits, et cetera, were the battlefields. We in the West still think in a frame of reference that is partly religious, partly political-philosophical. The Russians, on the other hand, have adopted a new frame of reference, that of a socio-economic theory of history, which, according to them, is Marxism. The whole World is looked upon from this perspective, and argument and attacks are expressed in terms of it. For the Western observer for whom such theories are at best the business of a few professors, it is difficult to understand that the Russians constantly talk in terms of class struggle, conflicts with capitalism, victory of communism. The Westerner assumes that this talk must express an aggressive and active attempt to proselytize the World. It may be useful to remember that our religious ideology, in which, for instance, Christians believe that all men will eventually believe in the true God, et cetera, does not imply that we are all set to convert the pagans. It is simply that, considering our central frame of reference, we have to express our ideas in certain term; the Russians, have their frame of reference, do so in other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Soviet thinking is evolutionary and sees as the central factor in human evolution the development of the productive forces, the transformation of one social system to the next higher one. This view is not ideological in the sense in which I have used the term, but is the way the Soviet leaders really look at history, following a crude form Mr. Marx’s historical theory. It is ideological only in the negative sense that the soviet leaders do not employ this theory to analyze their own system. (Such a Marxist analysis of the Soviet system would immediately show the fictitious character of Soviet ideology.) For most Western observers, however, the theory lends itself to serious misunderstanding. When the Communist catechism says, “Communism will be victorious all over the World,” or when Mr. Khrushchev said “We will bury you,” these statements should be understood in terms of their historical theory that the next stage of evolution will be that of communism, but that does not imply that the Soviet Union sees it as its task to bring about this change by force, subversion, et cetera. It is important to understand the ambiguity of the Marxian theory. It is a theory that claims that historical changes occur when the economic development permits and necessitates the change. This aspect of the theory is one that was the basis of socialist reformist thinking in Europe, as represented by Mr. Bernstein and others. These socialists believe in the “final victory” of socialism, but they postulated that the working class need not—and could not—push events. They held that capitalism had to go through all the necessary stages, and eventually, at some unspecified time in the future, it would transform itself into socialism. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Mr. Marx’s view was not as deterministic and passive as that. Although he too thought that socialism could be ushered in only when the economic conditions were ripe for it, he believed that at this point the working class and the socialist parties, who by then would be in the majority, would have to take an active part in defending the new system against all hostile attacks from the former ruling groups. Mr. Lenin’s position deviated from Mr. Marx’s in that he substituted the avant-garde for the working class, and that he had more faith in the efficacy of force, especially in a Russia which had not yet gone through its bourgeois revolution. The Marxist goal of the final victory of socialism was common both to the nonactivist reformists and to Mr. Lenin. The formula itself—“Final victory of communism”—is a historical prediction and perfectly applicable to an evolutionary, nonaggressive policy as represented by Mr. Khrushchev. In judging whether Mr. Khrushchev aimed at a “World revolution” it is useful to ask oneself what one means by “revolution.” Of course, the word can be used in many different meanings, the most general one being that of any kind of complete and violent change of an existing government. In this case, Mr. Hitler, Mr. Mussolini, and Mr. Franko were revolutionaries. However, if one uses the concept in a more specific sense, namely the overthrow of an existing, oppressive government by popular forces, then none of these three men could be called “revolutionaries.” In fact, this usage is generally accepted in the West. When we speak of the English, the French, the America revolutions, we refer to revolutions from below, and not from above; to the popular attack against authoritarian systems not to the seizure of power by an authoritarian system. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
It was in this sense that Mr. Marx and Mr. Engels used the term revolution, and it was in this sense that Mr. Lenin believed he had started his revolution. He was convinced that the avant-grade expressed the will and the interests of the vast majority of the population, even though the system he created ceased to be the expression of popular will. However, the Communist “victories” in Poland, Hungary, et cetera, were not “revolutions” they were Russian military take-overs. Neither Stalin nor Mr. Khrushchev are revolutionaries; they are leaders of conservative, bureaucratic systems, the very existence of which is based on unquestioning respect for authority. It is naïve not to see the connection between the authoritarian-hierarchical character of a system and the fact that the leaders of such a system can not be “revolutionaries.” Neither Mr. Disraeli nor Mr. Bismarck were revolutionaries although they brought about considerable changes in Europe, and remarkable advantages for their respective countries; nor was Napoleon a revolutionary, even though he used the ideology of the French Revolution. However, even though Mr. Khrushchev is not a revolutionary, his belief in the superiority of communism is perfectly sincere. For him, and probably also for the average Russian, communism and socialism are not, as for Mr. Marx, a humanist system which transcends capitalism, but an economic system that produces more effectively, that avoids economic crises, unemployment, et cetera, and hence is more capable, in long run, of satisfying the needs of a mass and machine society. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
This is exactly why the Russian Communists believe that peaceful competition between the two systems will eventually lead to the acceptance of the Communist system throughout the World. Their concepts, here as in so many other respects, are those of capitalism—competition in the sphere of economic efficiency. Yet we hesitate to accept Mr. Khruschev’s challenge to compete with his system, and we preferred to believe that he wants to conquer us by force of subversions. While the basis general aims of humanistic socialism are the same for all countries, each country must formulate its own specific aims in terms of its own traditional and present situation, and devise it own methods to achieve this aim. The mutual solidarity of socialist countries must exclude any attempt on the part of one country to impose its methods on another. In the same spirit, the writings of the fathers of socialist ideas must not be transformed into sacred scriptures which are used by some to wield authority over others; the spirit common to them, however, must remain alive in the hearts of socialists and guide their thinking. Humanistic socialism is the voluntary, logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions. It is the realization of democracy, which has its roots in the humanistic tradition of mankind, under the conditions of an industrial society. It is a social system which operates without force, neither physical force nor that of hypnoid suggestions by which humans are forced without being aware of it. It can be achieved only by appealing to man’s reason, and to his longing for a more human, meaningful, and rich life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Humanistic socialism is based on faith in man’s ability to build a World which is truly human, in which the enrichment of life and the unfolding of the individual are the prime objects of society, while economics is reduced to its proper role as the means to humanly richer life. In discussing the goals of humanistic socialism we must differentiate between the final socialist goal of a society based on the free cooperation of its citizens and the reduction of centralized State activity to a minimum, and the intermediate socialist goals before this final aim is reached. The transition from the present centralized State to a completely decentralized form of society cannot be made without a transitory period in which a certain amount of central planning and State intervention will be indispensable. However, in order to avoid the dangers that central planning and State intervention may lead to, such as increased bureaucratization and weakening of individual integrity and initiative, it is necessary: a) that the State is brought under the efficient control of its citizens; b) that the social and political power of the big corporations is broken; c) that from the very beginning all forms of decentralized, voluntary associations in production, trade, and local social and cultural activities are promoted. While it is not possible today to make concrete detailed plans for the final socialist goals, it is possible to formulate in a tentative fashion the intermediate foals for the socialist society. However, even as far as these intermediate goals are concerned, it will take many years of study and experimentation to arrive at more definite and specific formulations, studies to which the best brains and hearts of the nation must be devoted. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Following the principle that social control and not legal ownership is the essential principle of socialism, its first goal is the transformation of all big enterprises in such a way that their administrators are appointed and fully controlled by all participants—workers, clerks, engineers—with the participation of trade union and consumer representatives. These groups constitute the highest authority for every big enterprise. They decide all basic questions of production, price, utilization of profits, et cetera. The stockholders continue to receive an appropriate compensation for the use of their capital, but have no right of control and administration. The autonomy of an enterprise is restricted by central planning to the extent to which it is necessary to make production serve it social ends. Small enterprises should work on a cooperative basis, and they are to be encouraged by taxation and other means. Inasmuch as they do not work on a cooperative basis, the participants must share in the profits and control the administration on an equal basis with the owner. Certain industries which are of basic importance for the whole of society, such as oil, banking, television, radio, medical drugs, and transportation, must be nationalized; but the administration of thee nationalized industries must follow the same principles of effective control by participants, unions and consumers. In all fields in which there is a social need but not an adequate existing production, society must finance enterprise which serve these needs. The individual must be protected from fear and the need to submit to anyone’s coercion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
In order to accomplish this aim, society must provide, free for everyone, the minimum necessities of material existence in food, housing, and clothing. Anyone who has higher aspirations for material comforts will have to work for them, but the minimal necessities of life being guaranteed, no person can have power over anyone of the basis of direct or indirect material coercion. Socialism does not do away with individual property for use. Neither does it require the complete leveling of income; income should be related to effort and skill. However, differences in income should not create such different forms of material life that the life experience of one cannot be shared by, and this remains alien to, another. The principle of political democracy must be implemented in terms of the twenty-first century reality. Considering our technical instrumentalities of communication and tabulation, it is possible to reintroduce the principle of the town meeting into contemporary mass society. The forms in which this can be accomplished need study and experimentation. They may consist of the formation of hundreds of thousands of small face-to-face groups (organized along the principle of place of work or place of residence) which would constitute a new type of Lower House, sharing decision-making with a centrally elected parliament. Decentralization must strive at putting important decisions into the hands of the inhabitants of small, local areas which are still subject to the fundamental principles which govern the life of the whole society. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
However, whichever forms are to be found, the essential principle is that the democratic process is transformed into one in which well-informed and responsible citizen—not automatized mass-men, controlled by the methods of hypnoid mass suggestion—express their will. Not only in the sphere of political decisions, but with regard to all decisions and arrangements, the grip of the bureaucracy must be broken in order to restore freedom. Aside from decisions which filter down from above, activity in all sphere of life on the grass-roots level must be developed which can “filter up” from below to the top. Workers organized in unions, consumers organized in consumers’ organizations, citizens organized in the above-mentioned face-to-face political units, must be in constant interchange with central authorities. This interchange must be such that new measures, laws, and provisions can be suggested and, after voting, decided from the grass roots, and that all elected representatives are subject to continuous critical appraisal and, if necessary, recall. Origin of knowledge. –Over vast stretches of time, the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them turned out to be useful and species-preserving: whoever hit upon or inherited them waged the battle for themselves and their offspring with better luck. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were further passed on and finally became almost the basic endowment of the human species, are, for example: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, materials, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in and for itself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Only very late did the deniers and doubter of such propositions come on the scene—only very late did truth come on the scene as the weakest form of cognition. It seemed as if one could not live with it; our organism was geared to the opposite: all its higher functions, sense perception and every kind of sensation generally, worked with those fundamental errors, incorporated from archaic times. Moreover, even in the realm of knowledge those propositions became norms according to which one measured “true” and “untrue”—down to the mot remote regions of pure logic. Thus, the strength of knowledge lies not in its degree of truth but in its age, its being incorporated, its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to come into conflict, there was never any serios contest; denial and doubt were considered madness. Those exceptional thinkers, such as the Eleatics, who, in spite of everything, fixed and held fast to the opposite of the natural error, thought it possible also to live this opposite; they invented the sage as the man of immutability, impersonality, universality of intuition, as at once one and all, with a special capacity for that inverted knowledge; they were of the belief that their knowledge was also the principle of life. However, in order to assert all this, they had to deceive themselves about their own condition: they had to credit themselves with impersonality and duration without change to misconceive essence of knowledge, to deny the force of impulses in knowledge, and to conceive of reason in general as a wholly free, self-originating activity; they closed their eyes to the fact that they, too, had arrived at their propositions in opposition to what was considered valid, or from a desire for tranquility, or disinterestedness, or domination. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The more refined development of honesty and skepticism in the end rendered even these men impossible; their life and judgment, too, turned out to be parasitic on the age-old drives and fundamental errors of all sentient existence. That more refined honesty and skepticism arose where two antithetical propositions both seemed to apply to life, both being compatible with the fundamental errors, hence where it was possible to argue about greater and lesser degrees of utility for life; likewise, where new propositions showed themselves to be, if not especially useful to life, then at least not harmful either—expressions of an intellectual play impulse, innocent and happy like all play. Gradually the human brain filled itself with such judgments and convictions, and a ferment, a struggle, a craving for power emerged in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took part in the fight over “truths”; the intellectual fight became occupation, attraction, profession, duty, dignity; knowledge and striving for the true in the end took their place as a need among other needs. From then on, not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all “evil” instincts were subordinated to knowledge, put in its service, and acquired the luster of the permissible, the honored, the useful, and finally the eye and the innocence of the good. Knowledge thus became part and parcel of life itself and as such an ever-increasing power—until finally knowledge and those age-old fundamental errors collided, both as life, both as power, both in the same man. The thinker: this is now the creature in whom the drive to truth and all those life-preserving errors wage their first battle, once the drive to truth has proved that it, too, is a life-preserving power. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Compared to the significance of this battle, all else is a matter of indifference: here, the ultimate question concerning the condition of life is posed, and here, the first attempt is made to answer the question with an experiment. To what extent can truth be incorporated?—that is the question, that is the experiment. Victory over the ultimate negative as a tempter, and all its temptations—whether direct or indirect—must be learned by the believer from personal experience. One must remember that not all “temptations” are recognizable as temptations, nor are they always visible—for half their power lies in their being hidden. A believer often thinks that one will be as conscious of the approach of temptations as one is of a person coming into the room. Hence the children of God are only fighting a small proportion of the ultimate negative’s workings: that is, only what they are conscious of as supernatural workings of evil. Because of their knowledge of the ultimate negative’s character and methods of working is limited and circumscribed, many true children of God only recognize “temptation” when the nature of the thing presented is visible evil, and accords with their limited knowledge of evil. So they do not recognize the temper and one’s temptations when they come under the guise of lawful and apparent “good.” When the ultimate negative and one’s emissaries come as angles of light clothe themselves in light, which, in their case, stands for evil. It is a “light” which is really darkness. They come in the guise of good—for darkness is opposed to light, ignorance is opposed to knowledge, falsehood is opposed to truth. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Darkness is a term we ordinarily apply to evil morality and moral darkness. Hence the believer may need to discern evil spirits in the realm of the supposed good. That which comes to them as “light” actually may be darkness. The apparent “good” may be really evil. And so the apparent “help” which the believer clings to may be really a hindrance. There needs to be a choice between good and evil made perpetually by every man. The Hebrew priests of old were specially called to discern and tech the people the difference between “the holy and the common,” “the unclean and the clean,” reports Ezekiel 44.23. Yet is the Church of Christ today able thus to discern what is good and what is evil? Does she not continually fall into the snare of calling good “evil,” and evil “good”? Because the thoughts of God’s people are so often governed by ignorance and limited knowledge, they can call the works of God “diabolic” and the works of the ultimate negative “divine.” For they are not taught the necessity of learning to discern the difference between “the unclean and the clean,” nor how to decide for themselves what is of God and what is of the ultimate negative—although they are unknowingly compelled to make a choice every moment of the day. Neither do all believers know that they have a choice between good and good, id est, between the lesser and the greater good—and the ultimate negative often entangles them here. The place of the church is in a purely vertical relationship to God, the distinction between the latent and manifest church is challenged, and, the Spirit which constitutes the churches is not the Spirit of Jesus. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The Gestalt of grace and the sacramental principle are vehicles for the holiness of the “is,” the actual presence of the divine which, in turn, provides the positive base for the prophetic demand for the holiness of the “ought.” Furthermore, the church portrays an image which it presents to the non-believer who is incapable of seeing its theological side. On the one hand, the latent church under the vivifying power of the Spiritual Presence is in preparation for the reception of the New Being in Jesus the Christ. However, the latent church is not simply an infant awaiting baptism; it is already a mature, adult member of the Spiritual Community, ad under the drive of the Spirit it voices criticism of the manifest church through non-sectarian, secular, or even anti-religious movements. Its protest appears as a cultural phenomenon, but the underlying inspiration is religious. On the other hand, the manifest church openly and consciously acknowledges the New Being in Jesus the Christ, and, united by the bonds of a common faith, it proclaims the Word of the Gospel and the sacraments of the New Law. However, these acts of religion must be expressed in relevant cultural form. The latent church joins the Spiritual Community by participation in the New Being, but it does not know Jesus crucified. The manifest church’s explicit acknowledgement of Jesus as the bearer of the New Being gains for it the symbol of the Cross, the Protestant principle of self-reformation which is the only antidote to demonization. Possession and non-possession of the Cross seems a clear-cut distinction. How can the secular World voice truly prophetic criticism unless it too has the Cross, the symbol of the struggle against the demonic, at least implicitly? #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
What does the explicit reception of the New Being in Jesus the Christ add to the manifest church? In the manifest church, one finds that the Christian Bible, the document of the reception of final revelation, the sacraments which deepen the experience of the New Being, and the corporate organization rallies and sustains Christians in their effort to live the Gospel. Here is certainly a concrete difference between the latent and manifest churches. However, what immediately springs to mind, the demonization and profanization into which these two churches inevitably fall makes one wonder if the transition from the latent to the manifest church is worth the price. It seems that most of the latter’s energy is expended in applying the Cross to correct its own ambiguities. The impression is that the latent church is dynamic, exciting, productive, and pregnant with hope, while the manifest church is tired, dull, weighed down with ambiguities, and moribund—despite the fact that it has received the New Being in Jesus the Christ. One is tempted to conclude almost blasphemously—because it has received the New Being in Jesus the Christ. All Americans are brothers, responsible for one another. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for al. If there be among you a need may, do not harden your heart. The generous heart shall be enriched, and one that satisfies others hall be satisfied oneself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
It is safe to say that the second most important room in the Victorian home was the dining room, where not only the family gathered, but where social interaction took place among family and visitors. In the family it should be observed as a rule to meet together at all meals of the day around one common table where the same rules of etiquette should be as rigidly observed as the table of a stranger.
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The Most Delicious Morsel of Our Self Love?
Colleges such a University of Southern California—Los Angeles, Cornell, Duke and Chapman are now offering courses on how to be a social media influencer as part of their business and communications department. A social media is someone who has a platform on the Internet and vast amounts of fans. Some of these influencers have hundreds of thousands to millions of fans. A lot of them are even more popular than well-known celebrities. When these influencers get popular enough and gain the attention of a brand, the brand will usually sponsor them to market their goods and/or services for a profit. The goal is for the brand to gain more popularity and increase their revenue. Some popular social media influencers are people like Taylor Swift, who by just advocating voting or mentioning that she is attending a football game, can get millions of fans to vote and attend football games. There are of course other social media influencers who may or may not be major celebrities, but became famous by marketing their talents on the Internet and/or other forms of media. A great example is Jillian Harris, who starred on Love it or List it, Too, which is a HGTV program, which comes on television and focuses on renovating and decorating homes. Now Jillian Harris uses her social media platform to help support charities and market items that her followers love. She has over 1 million fans on social media. Austin Harris Mahone, who sang Justin Bieber songs, is also a social media influence. He was discovered and currently an American singer. Micro-influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 fans may earn anywhere between $40,000 and $100,000 per year. However, Cristiano Ronaldo, with over 570 million fans on social media charges around $2.4 million for a social media post. People are now seeing becoming a social media influencer as the great equalizer that education once used to be. With the desire of so many to become famous, it leaves many wondering if fame really just the most delicious morsel of our self-love? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Fame has, after all, attached itself to the most uncommon men and women, as an ambition, and in turn to their most uncommon moments. These are moments of sudden illumination in which a human stretches out a commanding arm, as if creating a World, light shining forth and spreading out around one. One is then filled with the deeply gratifying certainty that what enraptured and exalted one into the farthest regions, the height of this one sensation, can never be denied to posterity; in the eternal necessity of this rare illumination for all those to come humans see the necessity of their fame. Far into the future, human kind need man, and just as that moment of illumination is the embodiment and epitome of his innermost essence, so, too, he believes himself, as the man of this moment, to be immortal, dismissing all others as dross, rot, vanity, brutishness, or pleonasm, leaving them to perish. We view all disappearance and demise with discontent, often with astonishment, as if we experienced in it something at bottom impossible. We are disturbed when a Victorian mansion is torn down, and a crumbling tower aggrieves us. Every New Year’s Eve, we feel the mystery of the contradiction of being and becoming. What offends moral man above all, though, is that an instant of supreme universal perfection should vanish without a trace, like the Mansion of the Gilded Age, leaving nothing to posterity. Humans’ imperative reads instead: whatever once served more beautifully to propagate the concept “man” must continue to exist forever. That all the great moments form a chain; that, like mountain peaks, they unite humankind across the millennia; that the greatest things from a bygone age are also great for me; and that the prescient faith of the lust for fame will be fulfilled—that is the idea at the very foundation of culture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The terrible struggle of culture is ignited by the demand that what is great should be eternal; for everything else that continues to live cries out, No! The customary, the small, the common fills every nook and cranny of the World like an oppressive atmosphere we are all condemned to breathe, smoldering around what is great; hindering, choking, suffocating, deadening, smothering, dimming, deluding, it throws itself onto the road the great must travel on the way to immortality. The road goes through human brains! Through the brains of pitiful, short-lived creatures who, given over to their cramped needs, rise again and again to the same afflictions and, with great effort, manage to fend off ruin for a short time. They want to live, to live a bit—at any price. Who would discern among them that arduous torch race that only the great survive? And yet time and again some awaken who, seeing what is great, feel inspired, as if human life were a glorious thing, and as if the most beautiful fruit of this bitter plant were the assurance that someone once walked proudly and stoically through this existence, another with deep thoughts, a third with mercy, but all of them leaving behind a single lesson: that one who lives life most beautifully is one who does not hold it in great esteem. However, while the common man regards this bit of existence with such morbid seriousness, those on their journey to immortality knew how to respond to it with an Olympian laugh, or at least with sublime disdain; often they went to their graves with irony—for what did they have to bury? #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The boldest knights among those addicted to glory, those who believe they will find their coat of arms hanging on a constellation, must be sought among the philosophers. They address their efforts not to a “public,” to the agitation of the masses and the cheering applause of their contemporaries; it is in their nature to travel the road alone. Their talent is the rarest, and in a certain respect, the most unnatural in nature, shutting itself off from and hostile even to kindred talents. The wall of their self-sufficiency must be hard as diamond not to be shattered and destroyed, for everything is on the move against them, humans and nature. Their journey to immortality is more arduous and impeded than any other, and yet no one can be as sure as the philosopher about reaching one’s goal, since one knows not where to stand, if not on the wings of all ages; for a disregard of the present and the momentary is of the nature of philosophical contemplation. One has the truth; let the wheel of time roll where it will, it can never escape the truth. It is important to realize that such humans did indeed once live. One could never imagine as a mere idle possibility the pride of the wise Heraclitus, who may serve as our example. For all striving for knowledge seems in itself unsatisfied and unsatisfying, which is why, without having learned it from history, one could hardly believe in such regal self-esteem, such boundless confidence in being the one lucky suitor of truth. Such humans live in their own solar system; that is where one must look for them. Even a Pythagoras, an Empedocles treated himself with a superhuman esteem, indeed with an almost religious awe, though the bond of compassion, together with grand faith in the transmigration of souls and the unity of all living things, led them back again to other humans, and to their salvation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The World is not the way they tell you it is. Unconsciously we know this because we have al been immunized by growing up in the United States of America. The little girl watching television asks will she really get the part in the spring play if she uses Listerine, and her good mother says no, darling, that is just the commercial. It is not long before the moppets figure out that parents have commercials of their own—commercials to keep one quiet, commercials to get one to eat, and so on. However, parents—indeed all of us—are in turn being given a whole variety of commercials that do not seem to be commercials. Silver is in short supply, and the Treasury is running out and begins to fear a run. So the Treasury tells the New York Times that, what with one thing and another, there is enough silver for twenty years. Those who listened to the commercial sat quietly, expecting to get the part in the spring play, and the cynics went and ran all the silver out of the Treasury and the price went through the roof. Image and reality an identity and anxiety and money are all major concerns to us. If that does not scare you, nothing will. It is not really that serious and there is a message in here from Lord Keynes to that effect. You already know about image and reality, and you probably already know all about identity and anxiety, and everybody knows about money, so all we are doing is stirring them up together. Many are wondering, as Mr. Adam Smith did, the famous economist and moral philosopher, “To what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this World?” What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and preheminence?” he asked in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
We are taught—at least those of us who grew up without a great deal of it—that money is A Very Serious Business, that the stewardship of capital is holy, and that the handler of money must conduct oneself as a Prudent Human. It is all part of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of Capitalism and I suppose it all helped to make this country what it is. Penny saved, penny earned, waste not, want not, Summer Sale Save 10 Percent, and so on. The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and overexacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst one who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate told. Drs. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern developed, some years ago, a Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. This game theory has had a tremendous impact on our national life; it influences how our defense decisions are made and how the marketing strategies of great corporations are worked out. What is the game theory? You could say it is an attempt to quantify and work through the actions of players in a game, to measure their options continuously. Or, to be more formal, game theory is a branch of mathematics that aims to analyze problems of conflict by abstracting common strategic features for study in theoretical models. By stressing strategic aspects, id est, those controlled by the participants, it goes beyond the classic theory of probability, in which the treatment of games is limited to pure chance. Drs. Von Neumann and Morgenstern worked through systems that incorporated conflicting interests, incomplete information, and the interplay of free rational decisions and choice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
They started with dual games, zero sum two-person games, id est, those in which one player wins what the other loses. At the other end you have something like the stock market, an infinite, n-person game. (N is one of the letters economists use when they do not know something.) The stock market is probably temporarily too complex even for the Game Theoreticians, but I suppose some day even it will become a serious candidate for quantification and equations. The market is both a game and a Game, id est, both sport, frolic, fun, and play, and a subject for continuously measurable options. If it is a game, then we can relieve ourselves of some of the heavy and possibly crippling emotions that individuals carry into investing, because in a game the winning of the stake is clearly defined. Anything else becomes irrelevant. Is this so startling? “Eighty percent of investors are not really out to make money,” says one leading Wall Streeter. Investors not out to make money? It seems almost like a contradiction in terms. What are they doing then? That can be a subject for a whole discussion, and will be, a bit later. Let us go back to the illumine, that the investment game is intolerably boring save to those with a gambling instinct, while those with the instinct must pay to it “the appropriate toll.” This really does say it all. Active investors do not pursue bonds (except convertibles) and preferreds (except convertibles). It is not that one cannot make money with these instruments, it is that they lack romance enough to be part of the game; they are boring. It is very hard to get excited over a bond basis book, where your index finger traces along a column until it gets to the proper degree of safety and yield. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Sometime illusions are more comfortable than reality, but there is no reason to be discomfited by facing the gambling instinct that saves the stock market from being a bore. Once it is acknowledged, rather than buried, we can “pay to this propensity the appropriate toll” and proceed with reality. There is really no more than recognizing an instinct. Dr. Thomas Schelling, a Harvard economist and the author of a number of works on miliary strategy, foes a lot further. Writing on “Economics and Criminal Enterprise,” Dr. Schelling says: “The greatest gambling enterprise in the United States has not been significantly touched by organized crime. That is the stock market…The reason is that the market works too well, Federal control over the stock market, designed mainly to keep it honest and informative…makes it a hard market to tamper with.” Sentences like the first one in that excerpt must make the public-relations people at the New York Stock Exchange wake up screaming. For years the New York Stock Exchange and the securities industry have campaigned to correct the idea that buying stocks was gambling, and while there may be some dark corners of this country that persist in a Populist suspicion of Wall Street, by and large they have succeeded. Dr. Schelling’s phrasing has to be counted as unfortunate, and in no sense is the stock market a great gambling enterprise like a lottery. However, it is an exercise in mass psychology, in trying to guess better than the crowd how the masses will behave. Sometimes the literature which was produced in order to dispel the pre-1929 suspicions can get in the way of seeing things the way they are. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
If you are a player in the Game, or are thinking of becoming one, there is one irony of which you should be aware. The object of the game is to make money, hopefully a lot of it. All the players in the Game are getting rapidly more professional; the amount of sheer information poured out on what is going on has become almost too much to absorb. The true professionals in the Game—the professional portfolio managers—grow more skilled all the time. They are human and they make mistakes, but if you have your money managed by a truly alert mutual fund or even by one of the better banks, you will have a better job done for you than probably at any time in the past. However, if you have your money managed for you, then you are not really interested, or at least the Game element—with that propensity to be paid for—does not attract you. There are a lot of investors who came to the market to make money, and they told themselves that what they wanted was the money: security, a trip around the World, a new sloop, a country estate, an art collection, a Caribbean house for cold winters. And they succeeded. So they sat on the dock of the Caribbean home, chatting with their art dealers and gazing fondly at the new sloop, and after a while it was a bit flat. Something was missing. If you are a successful Game player, it can be a fascinating, consuming, totally absorbing experience, in fact it has to be. If it is not totally absorbing, you are not likely to be among the most successful, because you are competing with those who do find it so absorbing. The lads with the Caribbean houses and the new sloops did not, upon the discovery that something was missing, sell those trophies and acquire sackcloth and ashes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The sloops and the houses and the art are still there, but the players have gone back to the Game, and they do not have a great deal of time for their toys. The Game is more fun. It probably does not make you a better person, and I am not sure it does any good for humanity; the best you can say is what Samuel Johnson said, that no man is so harmlessly occupied when he is making money. The irony is that this is a money game and money is the way we keep score. However, the real object of the Game is not money, it is the playing of the Game itself. For the true players, you could take all the trophies away and substitute plastic beads or whale’s teeth; as long as there is a way to keep score, they will play. There are cases of a predatory government just as they are in cases of firms and agencies of a benevolent government. Modeling of dynamics seems essential for a more satisfactory treatment of the distinction between roving and stationary bandits than the simple ad hoc procedures. Hierarchical agencies are important in practice because a government has to use middle-level administrators to implement its policies, and these can have their own objectives and information advantages. Thus a top-level government may be more or less benevolent while its middle-level agents are predatory, or both may be predatory and the middle-level agents may be trying to keep some of the extorted sums for themselves. Agricultural reforms in China in the late 1970s eventually won the approval of the top-level government, overcoming initial resistance by local bureaucrats. There are especially harmful consequences when a citizen needs permission from several officials of a predatory government to conduct one’s productive activities, and each of them demand a bribe. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
If we continue in our present direction, the Soviet Union serves as a warning to Western industrialism of where we will arrive. In the West we have developed a managerial industrialism, with the concomitant “organization man”; Russia, having jumped over the intermediate stage in which we in the West still find ourselves, has carried this development to its logical end—under the names of Marxism and socialism. Nationalization (the abolition of private property in the means of production) is not an essential distinction between “socialism” and “capitalism.” It is merely a technical device for more efficient production and planning. The Soviet system is an efficient, completely centralized system, ruled by an industrial, political and military bureaucracy; it is the completed “managerial revolution,” rather than a socialist revolution. The Soviet system is not the opposite of the capitalist system, but rather the image into which capitalism will develop unless we return to the principles of the Western tradition of humanism and individualism. If concentrated ownership of property, bureaucratic management of the process of production, and manipulated consumption are essential elements of twenty-first century capitalism, the difference from Soviet communism seems to be one of degree rather than of quality. If capitalism, as Mr. Keynes said, can survive only with a considerable degree of socialization, it may be said with equal justification that Soviet communism has survived by incorporating a considerable amount of capitalism. In fact, the Soviet system and the Western system are both confronted with the same problems of industrialization and economic growth in a highly developed, centralized managerial society. They both use the methods of a managerial, bureaucratically ruled mass society characterized by an increasing degree of human alienation, adaptation to the group, and a prevalence of material over spiritual interests; they both produce the organization man who is ruled by the bureaucracies and the machines and yet believes himself to be following the lofty aim of humanistic ideals. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The similarities between the Soviet system and “capitalism” were strikingly demonstrated in the presentation of the class stratification and the educational goals of the Soviet Union, a comparison which shows that in many respects the Soviet system resembles the capitalist system of the nineteenth century while in some other it is more modern and “advanced” than that of the West. These similarities become even clearer if we consider one factors that, In Western opinion, is the cornerstone of capitalism: monetary incentives. What are the facts about incentives in Soviet Russia? As far as the workers in Russian are concerned the incentive is cash. The cash incentive operates in two ways. First, is the fact that wages are for the most part based on the piece-work principle. Wages “are fixed for the required output planned for the specific job. As the worker exceeds one’s quota, the incentive system sets up a rising scale to compensate one for increased production. For the labourer who raises one’s output from 1 to 10 percent, the commensurate increases in the piece rate is 100 percent.” If one consistently doubles one’s quota, one’s monthly pay will be almost double one’s regular wage. The second cash incentive for the worker is bonuses, which are paid out of the profit of the enterprise. “In many cases the bonus will make up the larger amount of a Russian worker’s annual wages.” As far as Soviet managers are concerned, the chief incentives is that of the bonus paid for the overfulfillment of targets. “The amount of income earned in the form of bonuses is substantial. The managerial personnel of the iron and steel industry earned bonuses averaging 51.4 percent of their basic income. In the food industry at the low end, the percentage was 21 percent. Since these are averages, many individual managers earned considerably more than this. Bonuses of this magnitude must be a potent incentive indeed.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Also the status symbol and the expense account have become, according to Javits, an important incentive for the Soviet manager. Summing up, Berliner states that “private gain has for the last 25 years been the keystone of the management incentive system” and “we are safe in saying that for the next several decades at least, private gain will be the central economic incentive in both [the America and the Russian] systems.” For the peasants too, cash is one of the main economic incentives. There is one incentive that is paradoxical insofar as it shows a relaxation of state incentive on the one had by the Soviet, and a continued experimentation on the other hand by the United States of America. It refers to the highly publicized incentive to agriculture offered by the United States of America at its expense for the private gain of the farmer. In the Soviet Union…after having sold the required crop to the government, the members of the collectives are permitted to market the excess to the public on a supply-and-demand basis. This area of Soviet economy is about the only one in which a free marker can be found. In the period before the German Revolution of 1918, the authority of the monarchy was undisputed, and by leaning on it and identifying with it the member of the lower middle class acquired a feeling of security and narcissistic pride. Also, the authority of religion and traditional morality was still firmly rooted. The family was still unshaken and a safe refuge in a hostile World. The individual felt that one belonged to a stable social and cultural system in which one had one’s definite place. One’s submission and loyalty to existing authorities were a satisfactory solution of one’s masochistic strivings; yet one did not go to the extreme of self-surrender and one retained a sense of the importance of one’s own personality. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
What one was lacking in security and aggressiveness as an individual, one was compensated for by the strength of the authorities to whom one submitted oneself. In brief one’s economic position was still solid enough to give one a feeling of self-pride and of relative security, and the authorities on whom one learned were strong enough to give one the additional security which one’s own individual position could not provide. The postwar period changed this situation considerably. In the first place, the economic decline of the old middle class went at a faster pace; this decline was accelerated by the inflation, culminating in 1923, which wiped out almost completely the savings of many years’ work. While the years between 1924 and 1928 brought economic improvement and new hopes to the lower middle class, squeezed in between the workers and the upper classes, was the most defenseless group and therefore the hardest hit. However, besides these economic factors there were psychological considerations that aggravated the situation. The defeat in the war and the downfall of the monarchy was one. While the monarchy and the state had been the solid rock on which, psychologically speaking, the petty bourgeois had built his existence, their failure and defeat shattered the basis of one’s own life. If the Kaiser could be publicly ridiculed, if officers could be attacked, if the state had to change its form and to accept “red agitators” as cabinet ministers and saddle-maker as president, what could the little human put one’s trust in? One had identified oneself in one’s subaltern manner with all these institutions; now, since they had gone, where was one to go? The inflation, too, played both an economic and a psychological role. It was a deadly blow against the principle of thrift as well as against the authority of the state. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
If the savings of many years, for which one had sacrificed so many little pleasures, could be lost through no fault of one’s own, what was the point in saving anyway? If the state could break its promises printed on its bank noted and loans, whose promises could one trust any longer? It was not only the economic position of the lower middle class that declined more rapidly after the war, but its social prestige as well. Before the war one could feel oneself as something better than a worker. After the revolution the social prestige of the working class rose considerably and in consequence the prestige of the lower middle class fell in relative terms. There was nobody to look down upon any more, a privilege that had always been one of the strongest assets in the life of small shopkeepers and their like. In addition to these factors the last stronghold of middle-class security had been shattered too: the family. The postwar development, in Germany perhaps more than in other countries, had shaken the authority of the father and the old middle-class morality. The younger generation acted as they pleased and cared no longer whether their actions were approved by their parents or not. The decline of the old social symbols of authority like monarchy and state affected the role of the individual authorities, the parents. If these authorities, which the younger generation has been taught by the parents to respect, proved to be weak, then the parents lost prestige and authority too. Another factor was that, under the changed conditions, especially the inflation, the older generation was bewildered and puzzled and much less adapted to the new conditions than the smarter, younger generation. Thus the younger generation felt superior to their elders and could not take them, and their teachings, quite seriously any more. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Furthermore, the economic decline of the middle class deprived the parents of their economic roles as backers of the economic future of their children. The older generation of the lower middle class grew more bitter and resentful, but in a passive way; the younger generation was driving for action. Children, after being limbs of Satan in traditional theology and mystically illuminated angels in the minds of educational reformers, have reverted to being little devils—not theological demons inspired by the Evil One, but scientific Freudian abominations inspired by the Unconscious. They are, it must be said, far more wicked than they were in the diatribes of the monks; they displayed, an ingenuity and persistence in sinful imaginings to which in the past there was nothing comparable except St. Anthony. Is all this the objective truth at least? Or is it merely an adult imaginative compensation for being no longer allowed to wallop the little pests? Germany’s economic position was aggravated by the fact that the basis for an independent economic existence, such as their parents had had, was lost; the professional market was saturated, and the chances of making a living as a physician or lawyer were slight. Those who had fought in the war felt that they had a claim for a better deal than they were actually getting. Especially the many young officers, who for years had been accustomed to command and exercise power quite naturally, could not reconcile themselves to becoming clerks or traveling salesmen. The increasing social frustration led to a projection which became an important source for National Socialism: instead of being aware of the economic and social fate of the old middle class, its members consciously thought of their fate in term of the nation. The nation defeat and the Treaty of Versailles became the symbols to which the actual frustration—the social one—was shifted. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Instead of denying or seeking to minimize the effects of social investigation on the behaviour of the people investigated, it is probable that social science has much to gain by making them the focus of greater attention. For if the reflexive consequences of social inquiry can be isolated and studied, it is possible that the precise condition under which they occur can be predicted, and ultimately utilized. This outcome is far form certain; it may be that with every cycle of self-examination new conditions are generated, so that prediction is always one move behind self-knowledge, and the concrete outcomes will always remain indeterminate. Abstractly, on the other hand, each increment of self-knowledge is likely to produce at least an enhanced sense of self-determination. If in all social research, furthermore, the subjects were systematically made party to the research, as well as to the findings—as the subjects’ curiosity and co-operation have always seemed in fairness to warrant—the result promises new techniques of self-expression and social planning. Suppose that a survey of all parents in a certain community reveals that 75 percent of those parents beat their children for defying commands and 25 percent do not. The mere interviewing of parents to find this out may have caused large numbers of them to reflect upon beating as a debatable practice, and to discuss it with other. Suppose that the figure found are then published for the information of the whole community. Some parent who beat their children may be encouraged by realizing how many other do likewise; other may be influenced by the fat that many parents et along without beating. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Some parents who do not go in for beating may be encouraged to learn that there are many others who do not; others may be discouraged to realize they are in a minority. However, since many parents do not fall neatly into one category or the other, and may resort to beating only under extreme circumstances, it is likely that the interviewing process will force them to clarify their conception of themselves as beaters or nonbeaters. Also, when the results are published, knowledge of how many endorse or condemn each practice is likely to send further waverers in one direction or the other. Human beings quickly lose patience with being studied—unless they are studying themselves. As people become more aware of what is taking place in their community, discussion will occur and opinion form. Instead of the findings remaining mere factual records objectively gathered by disinterested observers, they become indices of progress and achievement; the community commences to measure itself against itself, to accentuate a direction of change guided by a preferred self-characterization; goals of the “Let’s do better next year!” type are informally or formally set up for each period. The adoption of these goals releases the energy for their achievements; new values and motives are created. Human beings change their behaviour as a consequence of studying it. Planning becomes not a procedure for reducing freedom but for increasing the scope of self-determination. Social science becomes not a technique for manipulation but a means for everyone to explore new possibilities of self-development. Family life becomes a lifelong series of experiments in personality reorganization conducted by the persons involved, and family agencies become their sources of leadership. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
If the goal of family research and family agencies is to be the development of competent personalities, then this implies a good deal more than the acquisition and application of matter-of-fact knowledge. It requires above all the will to carry out these theoretical and practical programs. Not the least of the threats confronting western communities is a dangerous paralysis of the general will. There is compelling evidence in the volume of sales of religious books and self-help books for the existence of an almost universal desire for greater competence. As humans achieve a competence with respect to the social World comparable to their mastery over the material World, some old values may make way for new, but other are realized in higher degree. As some means become an ends in themselves, so some formers ends are reduced to the function of means. Perhaps the substitution of the pursuit of competence for the pursuit of wealth will be such instance. In the contemporary world, a parent is far better advised to endow one’s child with competence in the new sense than to leave one with “a competence” in the old sense. Democracies do not know what kind of citizen the want to create. It is likely, however, that a later generation will look back and observe that we were not trying to create a fixed type of person, as other ages and place have done. Instead, we were groping toward the creation of a person who, not conforming to a predetermine image, is unprecedently capable of determining oneself. The members of a family change and develop, and it is other family members who are the principal determinants of such development. If this is assumed to be true, then the reflexivity quotient of any participant experiment is maximized, the more the behaviour of the subjects resembles that of the members of the family. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The more each means to the others, and they do one, the greater the consequence of their interactions. Conversely, the influence of others upon the self sharply declines as they move outside one’s constellation of significant others. Family patterns are normally transferred to interpersonal relations in other institutions. It is the possibility of progressively reconstituting the family through experimentally establishing its preferred relations in the quasi-families which offers hope of raising the quality of family life and of making accessible to experimental research a subject previously almost inviolate to observation. It is clear that incompetence in marriage and parenthood are very common, and its consequences are difficult for millions to bear. The usual references to rates of divorce only crudely suggests how far families fall short of hopes they inspire when formed, since even families that last often fail to achieve the optimal development of their members, so much so that many writers incline to assume that marital and parental misfeasance are the normal human condition. A basic finding is that changes in certain components of competence can be produced through series of meetings of quasi-family groups of young adults, who role-play and discuss problematic family life situations. By over performance a member learns to exhibit greater competence within the sheltered forum of a small group of comparable others, before whom one is willing to expose oneself in challenging tasks of learning. They carry-over to actual life—in one’s real family and interpersonal relations—is a problem not only of competence but of identity-change. It can be accomplished by a process of identification and progressive involvement in one’s practice group from week to week. How stable such gains are is yet to be determine, but as other investigators have frequently found, the only permanent change is structural change. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Thus it is assumed that only as increments in competence are stabilized through changed conceptions of identity, and fortified through the actual growth of friendship, commitment, and obligation to other members of the practice group, is there reasonable chance of achieving the substantial results envisaged. And if the family as the cellular component of society can be reconstituted through participant experimentation—if the gap from quasi-family to real life situations can be steadily bridged through wider development of interpersonal competence in the next generation—then the family itself will gain in value and public honour. Because of the domination of the physical pat of the human, and the emphasis placed upon the supernatural experiences in the body, the body is made to do the work of the spirit and is forced into a prominence which hides the true spirit life. It feels the pressure, feels the conflict, and thus becomes the locus of the sense instead of it being the spirit. These believers do not perceive where they feel. If they are question as to where they “feel,” they cannot answer. They should learn to discriminate, and know how to discern the feelings of the spirit, which are neither emotional (soulish) nor physical. The spirit may be likened to an electric light. If the humans’ spirit is in contact with the Spirit of God, it is full of light; apart from Him it is in darkness. Indwelt by Him, “the spirit of the human is a lamp of the Lord,” reports Proverbs 20.27. The possibilities and potentialities of the human spirit are only known when the spirit is joined to Christ and, united to Him, is made strong to stand against the powers of darkness. The Lord will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the land; He will make the people lie down in safety. Violence shall no more be heard in your land, neither desolation nor destruction within your borders. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All. The Sacramento Fire Department has been serving the community since 1851, they are not receiving all their resources, please make donations to them. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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The New World Under Construction
Nazism is an economic and political issue, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds. The psychological aspect of Nazism, its human basis suggests two problems: the character structure of those people to whom it appealed, and the psychological characteristics of the ideology that made it such an effective instrument with regard to those people. In considering the psychological basis for the success of Nazism this differentiation has to be made at the outset: one part of the population bowed to the Nazi regime without any strong resistance, but also without becoming admirers of the Nazi ideology and political practice. Another part was deeply attracted to the new ideology and fanatically attached to the new ideology and fanatically attached to those who proclaimed it. The first group consisted mainly of the working class and the liberal and Catholic bourgeoisie. In spite of an excellent organization, especially among the working class, these groups, although continuously hostile to Nazism from its beginning up to 1933, did not show the inner resistance one might have expected as the outcome of their political convictions. Their will to resist collapsed quickly and since then they have caused little difficulty for the regime (excepting, of course, the small minority which has fought heroically against Nazism during all these years). Being a member of the SS in a society like Nazi Germany was a matter of considerable significance. In the Soviet Union, another revolutionary society, people who rose into the elite were called “new people.” They were people of the future, liberated from old norms, and distinct from the nobility of the old regime, who had attained their rank and privileges through birth or wealth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The SS were the new people of Nazi Germany. However, their distinction was based less on class (as in the USSR) than on the perception that they had especially good blood. This was their entrée into the elite of the new World under construction. Early in the war, Otto Meckelburg serves as an adjutant in the Death’s Head regiment, which oversaw the administration of Germany’s concentration camps. No “task was ever too much” for Mr. Mechelburg, his boss wrote in 1940; he was always “fresh and eager to work.” Mr. Meckelburg participated in the Germans’ early campaigns in Poland and the west, and later at the Eastern Front and in Yugoslavia. He was decorated a number of times during the war and moved up the ranks. In September 1942, he was made company commander in the notorious Prince Eugen Division, whose counterinsurgency operations involved numerous war crimes, many against civilians. Whatever the precise nature of his wartime deeds, Mr. Meckelburg would be repeatedly lauded by his superiors for “particularly successful leadership” and promoted. The officer urging his promotion to Sturmbannfuhrer in 1943 described him as “open, direct, and straight-as-an-arrow,” with an “impeccably SS attitude.” He had, another assessor observed in 1944, an “instinct for the possibilities of a given situation.” Psychologically, this readiness to submit to the Nazi regime seems to be due mainly to a state of inner tiredness and resignation, which, is characteristic of the individual in the present era even in democratic countries. In Germany one additional condition was present as far as the working class was concerned: the defeat it suffered after the first victories in the revolution of 1918. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The working class had entered the postwar period with strong hopes for the realization of socialism or last least for a definite rise in its political, economic, and social position; but, whatever the reasons, it had witnessed an unbroken succession of defeats, which brought about the complete disappointments of all its hopes. By the beginning of 1930 the fruits of its initial victories were almost completely destroyed and the result was a deep feeling of resignation, of disbelief in their leaders, of doubt about the value of any kind of political organization and political activity. They still remained members of their respective parties and, consciously, continued to believe in their political doctrines; but deep within themselves many had given up any hope in the effectiveness of political actions. An additional incentive for the loyalty of the majority of the population to the Nazi government because effect after Mr. Hitler came into power. For millions of people Mr. Hitler’s government then became identical with “Germany.” Once he held the power of the government, fighting him implied shutting oneself out of the community of Germans; when other political parties were abolished and the Nazi party “was” Germany, opposition to it meant opposition to Germany. It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group. However much a German citizen may be opposed to the principles of Nazim, if he has to choose between being alone and feeling that he belongs to Germany, most persons will choose the latter. It can be observed in many instances that persons who are not Nazis nevertheless defend Nazism against criticism of foreigners because they feel that an attack on Nazis is an attack on Germany. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The fear of isolation and the relative weakness of moral principles help any party to win the loyalty of a large sector of the population once that part has captured the power of the state. This consideration results in an axiom which is important for the problems of political propaganda: any attack on Germany as such, any defamatory propaganda concerning “the Germans” (such as the “Hun” symbol of the last war), only increases the loyalty to those who are not wholly identified with the Nazi system. This problem, however, cannot be solved basically by skillful propaganda but only by the victory in all countries of one fundamental truth: that ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief. In contrast to the negative or resigned attitude of the working class and of the liberal and Catholic bourgeoisie, the Nazi ideology was ardently greeted by the lower strata of the middle class, composed of small shopkeepers, artisans, and white-collar workers. In fact, 90 percents of doctors were connected to the Nazi Party. Members of the older generation among this class formed the more passive mass basis; their sons and daughters were the more active fighters. For them the Nazi ideology—its spirit of blind obedience to a leader and of hatred against racial and political minorities, its craving for conquest and domination, its exaltation of the German people and the “Nordic Race”—had a tremendous emotional appeal, and it was this appeal which won them over and made them into ardent believers in and fighters for the Nazi cause. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The answer to the question why the Nazi ideology was so appealing to the lower middle class has to be sought for in the social character of the lower middle class. Their social character was markedly different from that of the working class, of the higher strata of the middle class, and of the nobility and the upper classes. As a matter of fact, certain features were characteristic for this part of the middle class throughout its history: their love of the strong, hatred of the weak, their pettiness, hostility, thriftiness with feelings as well as with money, and essentially their asceticism. Their outlook on life was narrow, they suspected and hated the stranger, and they were curious and envious of their acquaintances, rationalizing their envy as moral indignation; their whole life was based on the principle of scarcity—economically as well as psychologically. To say that the social character of the lower middle class differed from that of the working class does not imply that this character structure was not present in the working class also. However, it was typical for the lower middle class, while only a minority of the working class exhibited the same character structure in a similarly clear-cut fashion; the one or the other trait, however, in a less intense form, like enhanced respect of authority or thrift, was to be found in most members of the working class too. On the other hand it seems that a great part of the white-collar workers—probably the majority—more closely resembled the character structure of the manual workers (especially those in big factories) than that of the “old middle class,” which did not participate in the rise of monopolistic capitalism but was essentially threatened by it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Although it is true that the social character of the lower middle class had been the same long before the war of 1914, it is also true that the events after the war intensified the very traits to which the Nazi ideology had its strong appeal: its craving for submission and its lust for power. There were, after all, times of spiritual malaise, of mistrust and heightened suspicion. In an atmosphere of determined, willful refusal to acknowledge basic facts, who could be blamed for imagining that evil was lurking about. It is precisely because reason is universal and transcends all nation borders, that the philosopher who follows reason is a citizen of the World; humans are their objects—not this or that person, or this or that nation. The World is one’s country, not the place where one was born. Humans fear thought more than they fear anything else on Earth—more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees a human being, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the Universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the World, and the chief glory of humans. However, if thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds humans back—fear lest their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear least they themselves should prove less worthy of respect than they have supposed themselves to be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
“Should the working human think freely about property? Then what will become of us, the rich? Should young men and women think freely about sex? Then what will become of morality? Should soldiers think freely about war? Then what will become of military discipline? Away with thought! Back into the shades of prejudice, lest property, morals, and war should be endangered! Better men should be stupid, slothful, and oppressive than that their thoughts should be free. For if their thoughts were free, they might not think as we do. And at all costs this disaster must be averted.” So the opponents of thought argue in the unconscious depths of their souls. And so they act in their churches, their schools, and their universities. For some philosophers, the capacity to disobey is rooted, not in some abstract principle, but in the most real experience there is—in the love of life. This love of life shines through their writings as well as through the persons. It is a rare quality today, and especially rare in the very countries where humans live in the midst of plenty. Many confuse thrill with joy, excitement with interest, consuming with being. The necrophilous slogan “Long live death,” while consciously used only by the fascists, fills the heats of many people living in the lands of plenty, although they are not aware of it in themselves. It seems that in this fact lies of one the reasons in which explain why the majority of people are resigned to accept nuclear war and the ensuing destruction of civilization and to take so few steps to prevent this catastrophe. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Some philosophers, on the contrary, fight against the threatening slaughter, not because they are pacifist or because some abstract principle is involved, but precisely because they are humans who love live. For the very same reason many have no use for those voices which love to harp on the evilness of humanity, in fact thus saying more about themselves and their only gloomy moods than about humans. While these steadfast individuals may not be sentimental romantics, they tend to be hard-headed, critical, caustic realist; they are aware of the depth of evil and stupidity to be found in the heart of humans, but they do not confuse this fact with an alleged innate corruption which serves to rationalize the outlook of those who are too gloomy to believe in man’s gift to create a World in those which they can feel themselves to be at home. Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. The Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. However, out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart. However, those who feel that life on this planet would be a life in prison if it were not for the windows onto a greater World beyond; for those to whom a belief in human’s omnipotence seems arrogant, who desire rather the Stoic freedom that comes of mastery over the passions than the Napoleonic domination that sees the kingdoms of this World at its feet—in a word, to humans who do not find Man an adequate object of their worship, the pragmatist’s World will seem narrow and petty, robbing life of all that gives it value, and making Man himself smaller by depriving the Universe which he contemplates of all its splendour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
With the increasing development of capitalism, not only economically but psychologically, the spiritual, humanistic aims of socialism were replaced by those of the victorious capitalist system—the aims of maximal economic efficiency, maximal production and consumption. This misinterpretation of socialism as a purely economic movement, along with an acceptance of the nationalization of the means of production as an aim in itself, occurred both in the right and left wings of the socialist movement. The primary aim of the reformist leaders of the socialist movement in Europe was the elevation of the economic status of the worker within the capitalist system. Their most radical measure in this effort was the nationalization of certain big industries. Only recently has it been realized that the nationalization of an enterprise is in itself not the realization of socialism, and that to be managed by a publicly appointed bureaucracy. The leaders of the Soviet Union evaluated socialism also by the standards of capitalism and their principal claim for the Soviet system is that “socialism” can produce more effectively and abundantly than “capitalism.” Both wings of socialism forget that Mr. Marx aimed at a humanly different society, not only at a more prosperous one. His concept of socialism, despite changes in the development of his own thinking, was principally that of an unalienated society in which every citizen would be an active and responsible member of the community, participating in the control of all social and economic arrangements and not, as the Soviet practice, a “number,” fed with ideologies and controlled by a small bureaucratic minority. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
For Mr. Marx, socialism was the control of society from below, by its members; not from above, by a bureaucracy. The Soviet Union may be called state capitalism, or anything else; one claim this managerial, bureaucratic system can not make is that of being “socialism” in Marx’s sense. No better answer can be given to this claim than Mr. Schumpeter’s statement that there is “between the true meaning of Marx’s message and Bolshevist practice and ideology at least as great a gulf as there was between the religion of humble Gallileans and the practice and ideology of the princes of the Church or the warlords of the Middle Ages.” While the Soviet system has borrowed the concept of the nationalization of the means of production and of over-all planning from Marxist socialism, it nonetheless shares many features with contemporary capitalism. The development of twentieth-century capitalism has led to an ever-growing centralization in industrial production. The big corporations are becoming increasingly the center of production in the steel, automobile, and chemical industries, in oil, food, banking, movies, and television. Only in certain branches of production, like the clothing industry, do we still find the nineteenth-century picture of a great number of small and highly competitive enterprises. Today’s big enterprises are directed by vast and hierarchically structured bureaucracies, which administer the enterprise according to the principles of profit maximization, yet are relatively independent of the millions of stockholders who are the legal owners. The same centralization has taken place in government, in the armed forces, and even in scientific research. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
While “private enterprises” decries ideologically all socialist tendencies, it is eager to accept large direct and indirect grants by the state. The same development has led to important changes with regard to free competition and free market. The free market and free competition in the nineteenth-century sense are phenomena of the past. Even though the Western system retain some measure of competition, overt and hidden price agreements between the big corporations, state grants, et cetera, have (in spite of anti-monopoly laws in the United States of America) greatly restricted competition and the function of the free market. Assuming, for a moment, that the tendency toward centralization develops further, and that there will eventually be only one big corporation producing, respectively, automobiles, steel, films, et cetera, the picture of “capitalist” economy would not be so drastically different from the Russian socialist economy. There is of course an increasing element in state planning in Western capitalism, not only through massive state intervention, but also in the sense that the Atomic Energy Commission is the largest industrial enterprise in the United States of America, and that the armament industry, although in private hands, produces a great mass of weapons according to plans made by the state. This, however, does not imply that there is over-all planning in the United States of America beyond arms production, or even a plan for the transition from an armament to a peace economy. The mode of production in contemporary capitalism is that of large conglomerations of workers and clerks who work under the orders of the managerial bureaucracies. They are part of a vast production machine which, in order to run at all, must run smoothly, without friction, without interruption. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The individual worker or clerk becomes a cog in this machine; one’s functions and activities are determined by the whole structure of the organization in which one works. In the large enterprises, legal ownership of the means of production has become separated from its management, and has lost importance. The managers do not have the qualities of the old owners—individual initiative, daring, risk-taking—but the qualities of the bureaucrat—lack of individuality and imagination, impersonality, caution. They administer things and persons, and relate to persons as to things. The giant corporations, which control the economic—and to a large degree the political—destiny of the country, constitute the very opposite of the democratic process; they represent power without control by those whom they rule. Aside from the industrial bureaucracy, the bast majority of the population is administered by still other bureaucracies. First, there is the governmental bureaucracy, (including that of the armed forces) which influences and direct the lives of many millions in one form or another. More and more, the industrial, military and governmental bureaucracies are becoming intertwined, both in their activities and, increasingly, in their personnel. With the development of ever greater enterprises, unions also have developed into big bureaucratic machines in which the individual member has very little to say. Many union chiefs are managerial bureaucrats, just as the industrial chiefs are. All these bureaucracies have little authentic vision; and, due to the very nature of bureaucratic administration, this has to be so. They function rather like electronic computers, into which all the data have been fed and which—according to certain principles—make the “decisions.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
When humans are transformed into things and managed like things, their managers themselves become things; and things have no will, no vision, no plan. With the bureaucratic management of people, the democratic process becomes transformed into a ritual. Whether it is a stockholders meeting, or a political election, or a union meeting, the individual has lost almost all power to participate actively in the making of decision. Especially in the political sphere, elections become more and more reduced to plebiscites in which the voter can express preference for one of two slates of professional politicians. The best that can be said for that is that he is governed with his consent. However, the means used to bring about this consent are those of suggestion and manipulation and, with all that, the most fundamental decisions—those of foreign policy which involve peace and war—are made by small groups, which the average citizen hardly even knows of. Not only is the individual managed and manipulated in the sphere of production, but also in the sphere of consumption, which allegedly is the one in which one can express one’s free choice. Whether it is the consumption of food, clothing, liquor, cigarettes, or of films and television programs, a powerful suggestion apparatus is employed for two purposes: first, to increase constantly the appetite for new commodities, and second, to direct these appetites into the channels most profitable for industry. The very size of the capital investment in the consumer goods industry and the competition between a few giant enterprises makes it necessary not to leave consumption to chance, nor to leave the consumer a free choice of whether one want to be more and what one wants to buy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
One’s appetites have to be constantly whetted; one’s tastes have to be manipulated, managed, and made predictable. Humans are transformed into the “consumer,” the eternal suckling whose one wish is to consumer more and “better” things. To maximize its own take, the kleptocratic government would ideally to drive everyone down to the subsistence or quiescence utility level. However, such a government, provided it is rational, will recognize the need to give the higher-skilled people sufficient marginal incentives to reveal their skills, because this increases its net extraction from the economy. Therefore, it will keep only the least-skilled person at the lowest utility level, and allow the successively higher-skilled people to enjoy successively higher utility levels. Casual observation confirms that predatory governments do indeed treat the poor harshly. (A benevolent government will also have to tolerate some inequality in the interests of revelation of high skills, but it will keep even the worst-off person above the subsistence level. In fact a government with an extremely egalitarian—so-called Rawlsian—objective function wants to maximize the utility of the least-well-off person, to the extent permitted by the information and resource constraints.) Lowering the marginal tax rate on any one person reduces the revenue that the government can get from all those with higher skills. This is costly to the government: directly so for the kleptocratic government, and indirectly for the benevolent government because that tightens its revenue constraint and makes it harder to deliver utilities to citizens. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The calculation of the optimal tax schedule balances, at each skill level, the incentive effect of lowering the marginal tax rate for people at that skill level and the revenue loss from the people with skill levels higher than that. However, the trade-off disappears at the highest skill level that exists in the population, because then there is no higher skill level and therefore no revenue loss. Therefore the incentive effect dominates at the top skill level, and the optimal marginal tax rate is zero there. Benevolent governments usually have regard for equality and fairness. Therefore they are reluctant to lower the marginal tax rates on the most well-off people. They will let the marginal rate go to zero only at the very end, or may even choose to disregard this aspect of optimality in the interests of fairness. However, a kleptocratic government does not care about equality or fairness. Therefore we should expect such a government to treat the richest people in society especially well. They will have to contribute to the government’s coffers, to be sure, but at the margin they will be allowed to earn more income and keep it. Again causal observation supports the result that predatory dictators are often best buddies with their richest citizens. In view of the fact that all human beings organize their experience and actions through the medium of verbal categories, and that social science concepts are usually as accessible to the ordinary citizen as to the social scientist, it probably should be expected that descriptive and analytical concepts would lead to revisions of self-conception and social distinction among the human beings to whom applied. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Account must be taken of the common implication of citizens and scientists alike, not only in the methods, findings, and concepts of social science, but also in the interests which motivate social studies. It is not as if a special class of beings called scientists withdrew from the rest of humanity, and became mere spectators of life, knowledge of which they gathered and stored for its own sake. Moreover, the extent of resources made available for social science in general tends to vary with importance accorded to social science in a community, as against the alternative uses to which the same resources might be put. The economics of research and teaching quite clearly reveal the relative values placed upon particular problems. The sociologists of knowledge have for some time been exploring the interests which have animated the work of certain scholars in various periods, places, and settings. Thus far, however, they have only begun to explore the implications which general adoption by their own community of a scientific interest toward itself would have for their own specialty. To recognize that social facts are the creation of the persons observed, that neither persons nor institutions are permanently given but are in constant process of reconstruction, and that the verbal categories by which self and others are construed are the materials of which social organization is constructed, leads to a conception of human nature and the social order which is less a substantive description than a methodology. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
This is the ultimate outcome of the interactional approach of social psychology, which was first developed in studies of personality in the family. The evolution of social science is not in the direction of permanently definitive statements about human nature and society, but toward the specification of the methods whereby human nature and society come to be what they are. Social theory thus becomes only suspended social action. The famous mot of Poincare, that natural scientists talk about their results while social scientists talk about their methods, is rendered pointless when it becomes evident that the methods of social science are, in this sense, its most valuable findings. Psychopathological offenders seek to create a counterfeit of the truth. If the self-actualized Christian is ignorant of the tactics of the enemy in this way, one lets go the true spirit-action (or allows it to sink into disuse) and follows the counterfeit spiritual feelings, thinking one is walking after the spirit of God all the time. When this true spirit-action ceases, the psychopathological offenders suggest that God now guides through the “renewed mind,” which is an attempt to hide their workings and the human’s disuse of one’s spirit. Upon the cessation of the spirit’s cooperation with the Holy Spirit, with counterfeit “spirit” feelings taking place in the body, what follows is counterfeit light to the mind, reasoning, judging, et cetera—the human thus walking after mind and body, and not after the spirit, with the true illumination of the mind which comes from the full operation of the Holy Spirit. To further interfere with the true spirit of life, the deceiving spirits seek to counterfeit the action of the spirit in burden and aguish. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The start is by giving a fictitious “divine love” to the person, the faculty receiving it being the affections. When these affections are grasped fully by the deceivers, the sense of love passes away, and the human thinks that one has lost God and all communion with God. Then follow feelings of constraint and restraint, which will develop into acute suffering—which the believer thinks is in the spirit, and of God. Now one goes by these feelings, calling them “anguish in the spirit,” “groaning in the spirit,” et cetera, while the deceiving spirits, through these sufferings given by them in the affections, compel the human to do their will. The sacramental element in Protestantism is important. For this element is the one essential element of every religion, namely, the presence of the divine before our acting and striving, in a “structure of grace” and in the symbols expressing it. The experience of the holy must be mediated in a concrete and, therefore, sacramental fashion, for the sacramental is nothing else than some reality becoming the bearer of the holy in a special way and under special circumstances. The largest sense of the term “sacramental” denotes everything in which the Spiritual Presence has been experience; in a narrower sense, it denotes particular objects and acts in which a Spiritual community experiences the Spiritual Presence; and in the narrowest sense, it merely refers to some “great” sacraments in the performance of which the Spiritual Community actualizes itself. Two factors are discernible in every sacrament: a relationship to nature, and a participation in salvation history. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Although, in principle, anything from the World of nature may covey the Spiritual Presence, certain elements are specially qualified to act as sacramental symbols. Symbols must participate in that which they symbolize, not merely by an arbitrary connection, but by their very nature. For instance, water has a special power which peculiarly fits it to become a sacramental material. Water, in one hand, is a symbol for the origin of life in the womb of the mother, which is a symbol for the creative source of all things, and on the other hand, it is a symbol of death—the return to the origin of things. Thus, by its very character, water has a necessary relation to baptism. Whatever the explanation of individual elements such as water, the sacramental principle asserts that nature is open to and, in fact, participates in the holy. All physical consciousness of supernatural things, and even undue consciousness of natural things, should be refused, as this diverts the mind from walking after the spirit and sets it upon the bodily sensations. Physical consciousness is also an obstacle to the continuous concentration of the mind, and in a spiritual believer an “attack” of physical “consciousness” made use of by the enemy make break concentration of the mind and bring a cloud upon the spirit. The body should be kept calm, and under full control; excessive laughter should be avoided, and all “rushing” which rouses the physical life to the extent of dominating mind and spirit. Believers who desire to be “spiritual” and “full age” in the life in God should avoid excess, extravagance, and extremes in all things. “Natural sacraments” swiftly fall prey to the demonic, and the only way they can escape demonization is by union with the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Nature has no true sacramental power apart from the history of salvation. Hence, sacraments cannot be manufactured; they “originate when the intrinsic power of a natural object becomes for faith the bearer of sacramental power.” Their origin is linked to the source of all faith, to the Spiritual Presence manifest in Jesus the Christ whose Cross offers the only sure guarantee against the forces of demonization. Since the sacramental principle embraces the whole World of nature and since faith is not restricted by time and places, the question arises: Is the Spiritual Presence bound to any definite sacramental media? Every sacramental act must be subject to the criterion of the New Being in Jesus as the Christ, or demonization would result. Furthermore, sacraments must somehow refer to the central historical and doctrinal symbols of Christianity which have emerged within the history of salvation. However, in the sense that the Spiritual Community may adopt new sacramental symbols, for its entirely possible that a symbol may gradually fade and die, that is, lost its sacramental power. It shall come to pass at the end of days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the top of the mountains; it shall be exalted above the hills; all the nations shall flow into it. And many peoples shall go and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.” God will teach us His ways, and we will walk in His paths; God shall judge between the nations; He shall decide for many peoples. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning forks. Nation shall not life up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. Please be sure to donate to the Sacramento Fire Department. They are not receiving all of their resources and have been proudly serving the community since 1851. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Humans Have an Innate Drive for Progress
The pseudo character which thinking can assume is better known than the same phenomenon in the sphere of willing and feeling. There is a difference between genuine thinking and pseudo thinking. Let u suppose we are on an island where there are fishermen and summer guest from the city. We want to know what kind of weather we are to expect and ask a fisherman and two of the city people, who we know have all listened to the weather forecast on the radio. The fisherman, with his long experience and concern with this problem of weather, will start thinking, assuming that he had not as yet made up his mind before we asked him. Knowing what the direction of the wind, temperature, humidity, and so on mean as a basis for weather forecast, he will weigh the different factors according to their respective significance and come to a more or less definite judgment. He will probably remember the radio forecast and quote it as supporting or contradicting his own opinion; if it is contradictory, he may be particularly careful in weighting the reasons for his opinion; but, and this is the essential point, it is his opinion, the result of his thinking, which he tells us. The first of the two city summer guests is a man who, when we ask him his opinion, knows that he does not understand much about the weather nor does he feel any compulsion to understand anything about it. He merely replies, “I cannot judge. All I know is that the radio forecast is thus and thus.” The other man who we ask is of a different type. He believes that he knows a great deal about the weather, although actually he knows little about it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
This man is the kind of person who feels that he must be able to answer every. He thinks for a minute and then tells us “his” opinion, which in fact is identical with the radio forecast. We ask him for his reasons and he tells us that on account of wind direction, temperature, and so on, he had some to his conclusion. This man’s behaviour as seen from the outside is the same as the fisherman’s. Yet, if we analyze it more closely, it becomes evident that he had heard the radio forecast and has accepted it. Feeling compelled, however, to have his own opinion about it, he forgets that he is simply repeating somebody else’s authoritative opinion, and he believes that this opinion is one that he arrived at through his own thinking. He imagines that the reasons he gives us preceded his opinion, but if we examine these reasons we see that they could not possibly have led him to any conclusion about the weather if her had not formed an opinion beforehand. They are actually only pseudo reasons which have the function of making his opinion appear to be the result of his own thinking. He has the illusion of having arrived at an opinion of his own, but in reality he has merely adopted an authority’s opinion without being aware of this process. It could very well be that he is right about the weather and the fisherman wrong, but in the event it would not be “his” opinion which would be right, although the fisherman would be really mistaken in “his own” opinion. If we study people’s opinions about certain subjects, for instance, politics, the same phenomenon can be observed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
To test this theory, as an average newspaper reader what he or she thinks about a certain political question. One will give you as “his” or “her” opinion a more or less exact account of what one has read, and yet—and this is the essential point—one believes that what he or she is saying is the result of one’s own thinking. If one lives in a small community where political opinions are handed down from father to son, “his own” opinion may be governed far more than he would for a moment believe by the lingering authority of a strict parent. Another reader’s opinion may be the outcome of a moment’s embarrassment, the fear of being thought uniformed, and hence the “thought” is essentially a front and not the result of a natural combination of experience, desire, and knowledge. The same phenomenon is to be found in aesthetic judgment. The average person who goes to a museum and looks at a picture by a famous painter, say Rembrandt, judges it to be a beautiful and impressive picture. If we analyze his or her judgement, we find that one does not have any particular inner response to the picture but thinks it is beautiful because one knows that one is supposed to think it is beautiful. The same phenomenon is evident with regard to the act of perception itself. Many persons looking at a famous bit of scenery actually reproduce the pictures they have seen of it numerous times, say on postal cards, and while believing “they” see the scenery, they have these pictures before their eyes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Or, in experiencing an accident which occurs in their presence, witnesses see or hear the situation in terms of the newspaper report they anticipate. As a matter of fact, for many people an experience which they have had, an artistic performance or a political meeting they have attended, becomes real to them only after they have read about it in the newspaper. The suppression of critical thinking usually starts early. A five-year-old girl, for instance, may recognize the insincerity of her mother, either by subtly realizing that, while the mother is always talking of love and friendliness, she is actually cold and egotistical, or in a cruder way by noticing that her mother is having an affair with another man while constantly emphasizing her high moral standards. The child feels the discrepancy. Her sense of justice and truth is hurt, and yet, being dependent on the mother who would not allow any kind of criticism and, let us say, having a weak father on whom she cannot rely, the child is forced to suppress her critical insight. Very soon she will no longer notice the mother’s insincerity or unfaithfulness. She will lose the ability to think critically since it seems to be both hopeless and dangerous to keep it alive. On the other hand, the child is impressed by the pattern of having to believe that her mother is sincere and decent and that the marriage of the parents is a happy one, and she will be ready to accept this idea as if it were he own. In all of these illustrations of pseudo thinking, the problem is whether the thought is the result of one’s own thinking, that is, of one’s own activity; the problem is not whether of not the contents of the thought are right. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
As has been already suggested in the case of the fisherman making a weather forecast, “his” thought may even be wrong, and that of the man who only repeats the thought put into him may be right. The pseudo thinking may also be perfectly logical and rational. Its pseudo character does not necessarily appear in illogical elements. This can be studied in rationalizations which tend to explain an action or a feeling on rational and realistic grounds, although it I actually determined by irrational and subjective factors. The rationalization may be in contradiction to facts or to the rules of logical thinking. However, frequently it will be logical and rational in itself; then its irrationality lies only in the fact that it is not the real motive of the action which it pretends to have caused. An example of irrational rationalization is brought forward in a well-known joke. A person who had borrowed a glass jar from a neighbour had broken it, and on being asked to return it, answered, “In the first place, I have already returned it to you; in the second place, I never borrowed it from you; and in the third place, it was already broken when you have it to me.” We have an example of “rational” rationalization when person, A, who finds himself in a situation of economic distress, asks a relative of his, B, to lend him a sum of money. B declines and says that he does so because by lending money he could only support A’s inclinations to be irresponsible and to lean on others for support. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Now this reasoning may be perfectly sound, but it would nevertheless be a rationalization because B had not wanted to let A have the money in any event, and although he believes himself to be motivated by concern for A’s welfare he is actually motivated by his own stinginess. We cannot learn, therefore, whether we are dealing with a rationalization merely by determining the logicality of a person’s statement as such, but we must also take into account the psychological motivations operating in a person. The decisive point is not what is thought but how it is thought. The thought that is the result of active thinking is always new and original; original, not necessarily in the sense that others have not thought it before, but always in the sense that the person who thinks has used thinking as a tool to discover something new in the World outside or inside of himself or herself. Rationalizations are essentially lacking this quality of discovering and uncovering; they only confirm the emotional prejudice existing in oneself. Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempts to harmonize one’s own wishes with existing reality. With feeling as with thinking, one must distinguish between a genuine feeling, which originates in ourselves, and a pseudo feeling, which is really not our own although we believe it to be. Let us choose an example from everyday life which is typical of the pseudo character of our feelings in contact with other. We observe a man who is attending a party. He is gay, he laughs, makes friendly conversation, and all in all seems to be quite happy and contented. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
On taking his leave, he has a friendly smile while saying how much he enjoyed the evening. The door closes behind him—and this is the moment when we watch him carefully. A sudden change is noticed in his face. The smile has disappeared; of course, that is to be expected since he is now alone and has nothing or nobody with him to evoke a smile. However, the change is more than just a disappearance of the smile. There appears on his face an expression of deep sadness, almost of desperation. This expression probably stays only for a few seconds, and then the face assumes the usual masklike expression; the man gets into his car, thinks about the evening, wonders whether or not he made a good impression, and feels that he did. However, was “he” happy and gay during the party? Was the brief expression of sadness and desperation we observed on his face only a momentary of no great significance? It is almost impossible to decide the question without knowing more of this man. There is no incident, however, which may provide the clue for understanding what his gaiety meant. Human beings have many ascertainable ways to find unity. Humans can find unity by trying to regress to the animal stage, by doing away with what is specifically human (reason and love), by being a slave or a slave driver, by transforming oneself into a thing, or else by developing one’s specific human powers to such an extent that one finds a new unity with one’s fellow humans and with nature by becoming a free human—free not only from chains but free to make the development of all one’s existence to one’s own productive effort. #RandolphHarris 7of 20
Humans have an innate “drive for progress,” but one is driven by the need to solve one’s existential contradiction, which arises again at every new level of development. This contradiction—or, in other words, humans’ different and contradictory possibilities—constitutes one’s essence. It can be said without exaggeration that never was the knowledge of the great ideas produced by the human race as widespread in the World as it is today, and never were these ideas less effective than they are today. The ideas of Mr. Plato and Mr. Aristotle, of the prophets of Mr. Christ, of Mr. Spinoza, and Mr. Kant, are known to millions among the educated classes in Europe and America. They are taught at thousands of institutions of higher learning, and some of them are preached in the churches of all denominations everywhere. And all this in a World which follows the principles of unrestricted egotism, which breeds hysterical nationalism, and which is preparing for an insane mass slaughter. How can one explain this discrepancy? Ideas do not influence humans deeply when they are only taught as ideas and thoughts. Usually, when presented in such a way, they change other ideas; new thoughts take the place of old thoughts; new words take the place of old words. However, all that has happened is a change in concepts and words. Why should it be different? It is exceedingly difficult for a human to be moved by ideas, and to gras a truth. In order to do that, one needs to overcome deep-seated resistances of inertia, fear of being wrong, or of straying away from the heard. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Just to become acquainted with other ideas is not enough, even though these ideas is not enough, even though these ideas in themselves are right and potent. However, ideas do have an effect on humans if it is personified by the teacher, if the idea appears in the flesh. If a human expresses the idea of humanity and is humble, then those who listen to one will understand what humility is. They will not only understand, but they will believe that one is talking about a reality, and not just voicing words. The same holds true for all ideas which a human, a philosopher, or a religious teacher may try to convey. Those who announce ideas—and not necessarily new ones—and at the same time live them we may call prophets. The Old Testament prophets did precisely that: they announced the idea that humans had to find an answer to one’s existence, and that this answer was the development of one’s reason, of one’s love; and they taught that humility and justice were inseparably connected with love and reason. They lived what they preached. They did not seek power, but avoided it. Not even the power of being a prophet. They were not impressed by might, and they spoke the truth even if this led them to imprisonment, ostracism or death. They were not humans who set themselves apart and waited to see what would happen. They responded to their fellow human because they felt responsible. What happened to others happened to them. Humanity was not outside, but within them. Precisely because they saw the truth they felt the responsibility to tell it; they did not threaten, but they showed the alternatives with which humans were confronted. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
It is not that a prophet wishes to be a prophet; in fact, only the false ones have the ambition to become prophets. One’s becoming a prophet is simple enough, because the alternatives which one sees are simple enough. The prophet Amos expressed this idea very succinctly: “The lion has roared, who will not be afraid. God has spoken, who will not be a prophet.” The phrase “God has spoken” here means simply that the choice has become unmistakably clear. There can be no more doubt. There can be no more evasion. Hence the human who feels responsible has no choice but to become a prophet, whether one has been herding sheep, tending one’s vineyards, or developing and teaching ideas. It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is one’s function to call loudly, to awake humans from their customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some humans to be prophets. Any nations have had their prophets. The Buddha lived his teachings; Mr. Christ appeared in the flesh; Mr. Socrates dies according to his ideas; Mr. Spinoza lived them. And they made a deep imprint on the human race precisely because their idea was manifested in the flesh in each one of them. According to the leaders of the Soviet Union, the “Union of Socialist Soviet Republics” is socialist not only in name but in fact. Already in 1936 Mr. Stalin proclaimed “the complete victor of the socialist system in all sphere of the national economy,” and at the present time Russian ideology claims that Russia is realizing communism. (Characterized by Mr. Marx’s famous statement: “From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs.”) #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The question of the socialist character of Russia can be decided only by making a comparison between Mr. Marx’s vision of socialism and the reality of the Soviet system. What rationale did the Soviet leaders from Mr. Stalin to Mr. Khruschev have for calling their system socialism? They make this claim essentially on the basis of their definition of Marxist socialism, in which two factors are considered decisive for a socialist society: the “socialization of the means of production” and a planned economy. However, Socialism is in the sense of Mr. Marx or, for that matter, in the sense of Mr. Owen, Mr. Hess, Mr. Fourier, Mr. Proudhon, et cetera, can not be defined in this way. What was the essence of Mr. Marx’s thought and of Marxist socialism? It is bewildering how Mr. Marx’s theory is falsified and vilified not only by the ignorant, but also by many who should and could know better. A Robert L. Heilbroner has put it so well: our public newspapers and books “obscure the fact that the literature of socialist protest is one of the most moving and morally searching of all chronicles of human hope and despair. To dismiss the literature unread, to vilify it without the faintest conception of what it represents, is not only shocking but dangerously stupid.” The very beginning of an understanding of Mr. Marx is blocked by one of the most widespread and completely erroneous cliches, that of Mr. Marx’s “materialism.” This materialism is supposed to mean that the main motivation in man is his wish for material gain, as against spiritual, moral or religious values. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
While it is rather paradoxical that those who attack Mr. Marx for this alleged materialism defend capitalism against socialism with the claim that only a monetary incentive can be a sufficiently strong motivation for humans to give their bet, the fact is that Mr. Marx’s theory is precisely the opposite of this alleged materialism. One’s main criticism of capitalism was that it is a system that put a premium on selfish and materialistic motivations, and his concept of socialism was that of a society that favours humans who are much instead of having much. Mr. Marx’s historical materialism never speaks of the economic factor as a psychological motivation, but as a socio-economic condition that leads to a certain practice of life and this shapes the character of humans. His difference with Mr. Hegel’s idealism (idealism and materialism are philosophical terms and have nothing to do with ideal versus materialistic motivation, as any high school student should know), lies in the fact that “…we do not set out from what men imagine, conceive, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of the life process.” Or, as he put it elsewhere: “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production. Both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Mr. Marx’s discovery was that the practice of life, as it is determined by the economic systems, determines the feeling and thinking of the people involved. According to this view, a certain system may be conducive to the development of materialistic strivings; another system may lead to the preponderance of ascetic tendencies. The word “anarchy” is often used in the sense of complete chaos or disorganization, but M. Hirshleifer argues for a more subtle distinction. He used the word “amorphy” for the chaotic scramble for resources that are not owned or protected by anyone, or in other words, for cases of failure to solve common resource-pool problems. By contrast, anarchy is interference competition; people attempt to sequester resources (assets property rights) and to defend these resources (provide private protection) from others’ attempts at predation or theft. The equilibrium of an anarchic game of aggression and defense can exhibit spontaneous order. For the administrators of an agency, the appraisal of the planning process offers the opportunity for self-conscious accumulation of skill and know-how, of tried and tested techniques of action. If appropriately publicized, annual reports offer one of the most reliable means of communicating information to a clientele and quickening its involvement and support of the agency. Through unflinching reports, an agency can get the confidence of the public. The perspective derived from its annual appraisals gives balance and wisdom to day-by-day decisions on policy and personnel. Periodicity itself is a security-giving organization of work, and reports contribute to periodicity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Like interim reporting, and supplementing it, annual reporting helps a worker in an organization to visualize one’s place in the whole, to assist in co-ordinating one’s work with that of others with less requirement of supervision. It strengthens discipline of members of a group by each other, instead of by supervision, and thereby can accentuate the morale of personnel. By facilitating adoption by working groups of quotas and schedules as personal commitments, annual reporting like interim reporting adds appreciably to the motivation and sense of responsibility among personnel. By causing reflection upon the method employed by an agency in achieving its results, the systematic backward look at how far they have come encourages personnel to ingenuity in devising new methods to economize effort and resources. Since the annual report, unlike interim types of reporting, goes out to the public of the agency, the mere existence of annual reports tends to increase the consciousness by personnel of their responsibilities toward clientele, and invites a sense of identification with clientele. Least these claims for the virtues of annual reporting seem too unrealistic, let note be made of the nuisance and imposition that report-writing becomes to administrators when conceived as mere record-keeping. Interim reporting especially can easily register as a pro forma duty, whose principal function is to interrupt and distract ongoing activity. Interim reporting, however should principally apply intramurally to agency personnel, and be for them not only a report to other but a means of exhibiting to themselves, in a graphic and economical way, jut how they are doing in the execution of their interlocking quotas and schedules. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Annual reporting, on the other hand, suffers more from under- than from overdoing—not so much in the sense of quantity as in the sense of profundity of retrospection. Unless it achieves the degree of detachment, of withdrawal from action, which permits basic and imaginative reconsideration of what the activity is all about, its result is undoubtedly stultification instead of simulation. However, reporting itself, like agency programs, benefits from inclusion within the scope of regular review; if it is working poorly, it deserves improvement, not rejection. With regard to clientele, annual reports, when properly exploited, also function to bring about identification. Thorough reporting provides the factions among the clientele at once with non-hearsay material for criticism and appreciation of an agency’s operation, and for defending it against its opponents. The public is going on to evaluate an agency anyway, but when the clientele feels itself a party to the formulation and revision of agency programs, their judgments are more likely to be responsible, sound, and fair; their own overt participation in execution, more vigorous and effective. The reporting of success enhances the appetite for more success, especially when the reaching of goals is not only matter-of-factly reported but given ceremonial recognition in meetings of personnel and clientele, exempli gratis, awards made to leaders and outstanding performers by the voluntary associations among the clientele. Finally, there is another group for whom annual reports perform an extremely valuable function. That is the planners in similar agencies elsewhere, the professionals and technical specialist who, in fashioning proposals, must draw upon as much relevant prior experiences as possible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Each instance of planning is in a sense a pilot projector for similar ventures by others confronted with matching problems. And if the experience of planning is to be made available to others, the ideal form for its communication is adequate annual reports. Like the journals of scientific societies, the annual reports of planning agencies, as they come to be prepared by professional standards, develop as the media for the more repaid evolution of planning technology through its sharing. Very much like the duty of the scientist to publish one’s findings, it has become the obligation of planners to make known the assessments of their own experience in return for sharing the findings of others. Planning of the piecemeal, democratic character which we have outlined above is not a dream of the future. It is a fait accompli on the American scene, and our model is already descriptive of the operation of hundreds if not thousands of family agencies. Yet though many agencies perform these phases without explicit formulation of what they are doing, they may find it helpful to unify and clarify their activities as they examine themselves from this point of view. That is, the model of the planning process which we have sketched offers itself as a standard for the evaluation of the practice of any action agency, whether it already conceives of itself as practicing planning or not. And to evaluate is already to commence to plan, for one cannot assign a value to anything, including past experience itself, save by reference to its potential role in future action. It is, however, the task and prerogative of each family agency itself to judge its own proper degree and quality of planning. To attempt to usurp such functions would be futile as well as inconsistent with what has already been said about outside experts. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The notion of planning is comparable to embarking upon an endless journey. Any existing ways can be improved. Development is cumulative, one cycle of change leads to another. Planning therefore implies a sociology, a psychology, a philosophy. It is at once a theory of social organization and of social change, of motivation and personality formation, or valuation and metaphysics. Some of these implications, though not explorable further here, become visible in part as we note how another phase of one cycle of planning merges into the first phase of the next. By considering in a matter-of-fact way each previous cycle, as well as its current situation, a group can voluntarily and advisedly alter its existing procedures. Culture and social organization then become cumulatively the self-conscious product of rational intent. The group is freed from those bounds of necessity which were only necessary because they were thought to be so. This does not mean that the lessons of the past are discarded or ignored. It means that according to circumstances, what is worthy is conserved, and what is not is changed. No church can be founded on a protest, yet Protestantism became a church…The inner dilemma of Protestantism lies in this, that it must protest against every religious or cultural realization which seeks to be intrinsically valid, but that it needs such realization if it is to be able to make its protest in any meaningful way. By the power of what reality does the Protestant principle exercise its criticism? There must be such a reality, since the Protestant principle is not mere negation. The ultimate answer is the New Being manifest in Jesus as the Christ. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The basis of the solution is rooted in the axiom that the negative can live only from the positive, that negation must build upon affirmation. Thus, protest can exist only within a Gestalt to which it belongs, Gestalt being understood as the total structure of living reality, a structure which includes both form and negation of form, a Yes and a No. This union of protest and creation we call “the Gestalt of grace.” Grace as a reality grace as embodied in a structure, goes against the Protestant grain, for it sounds perilously similar to the Roman Catholic teaching which supposedly objectifies grace. And the objectification of grace opens the door to a whole legion of Catholic doctrines such as a sacred hierarchy, an infallible ecclesiastical authority, and the system of automatic sacraments. Many Protestants would consider a Gestalt of grace a betrayal of the essence of Protestantism. However, the jargon of Reformation controversy should not be allowed to obscure the theological facts, that the choice is not simply between the Roman Catholic objectification of grace and a completely structureless Protestant grace. There is a third possibility which is clearly seen in the Protestant notion of faith. Faith is in man, but not from man. Consequently, Protestantism can assert that grace appears through a living Gestalt which remains in itself what it is, while the Protestant protest prohibits the appearance of grace through finite forms from becoming an identification of grace with finite forms. Granted that the Gestalt of grace embraces both the positive and the negative, where is the protest voiced. In the secular World, of course. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
For according to the Protestant principle, grace cannot be tied down to any particular form, not even to a religious form. History shows that nonreligious, even anti-religious, movements can express a religious protest more effectively than religion itself. Consequently, Protestantism stands in a special relationship to secularism, a relationship which by its very nature, demands a secular reality. It demands a concrete protest against the sacred sphere and against ecclesiastical pride, a protest that is incorporated in secularism. Protestant secularism is a necessary element of Protestant realization. The formative power of Protestantism is always tested by its relation to the secular World. If Protestantism surrenders to secularism, it ceases to be a Gestalt of grace. If it retires from secularism, it ceases to be Protestant, namely, a Gestalt that includes within it the protest against itself. As guidance, the believer should understand that when there is no action in one’s spirit, there is no use for the brain at all, but the spirit does not always speak. There are times when it should be left in abeyance. In all guidance the mind decides the course of action—not only from the feeling in the spirit but by the light in the mind. In coming to a decision, the deciding is an act of mind and will, based upon either the mental process of reasoning or the sense of the spirit, or both, id est: Decision by mental process, reasoning, or decision by sense of the spirit, id est, moment impelling; drawing or restraint; spirit as if “dead”—no response; contraction of spirit; openness of spirit; fullness of spirit; compression of spirit; burden on spirit; wrestling in spirit; resisting in spirit. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
God have three ways of communicating His will to humans. By vision to the mind, which is very rare; understanding by the mind; and consciousness to the spirit, that is, by light to the mind and consciousness in spirit. In true guidance, spirit and mind are of one accord, and the intelligence is not in rebellion against the leading in the spirit—as it is so often in counterfeit guidance by evil spirits, when the human is compelled to act in obedience to what one thinks is of God, supernaturally given, and fears to disobey. This all refers to guidance from the subjective standpoint, but it must be emphasized in addition that all true guidance from God is in harmony with the Scriptures. The “understanding” of the will of God by the mind depends upon the mind being saturated with the knowledge of the written Word: and true “consciousness in the spirit” depends upon its union with Mr. Christ through the indwelling Spirit of God. The mind should never be dropped into abeyance. The human spirit can be influences by the mind, therefore the believer should keep one’s mind in purity, and unbiased, as well as having an unbiased will. I pledge allegiance to Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All. Woe until them that call evil “good,” and good “evil,” that turn darkness into light, and light into darkness. Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, protect the fatherless, defend the case of the widow. The Sacramento Fire Department has been proudly serving the community since 1851. Currently, they are not receiving all of their resources, and it would be greatly appreciated if you could donate to the Sacramento Fire Department, so they can help keep the community safe. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Do You Believe in Ghosts?
The garden was thickening and closing up in the darkness. There was thunder in the air, and lurking fear, half hidden, rearing up before me. Llanada Villa, with its dark wings, cupolas, towers and façade oddly resembled a colossal dragon, crouched and ready to spring. My estate bore an aspect more than usually sinister as viewed it by night. It was not a wholesome landscape after dark. Even if they were ignorant of the terror that stalked here, I believe anyone would notice its morbidity. The ancient lightning-scarred trees seemed surreal, large, and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish. Fear had lurked on the estate for as long as I could remember. The psychic power which had been leading me had now become a reality. The surroundings under the moonlight blended harmoniously with my mood. I felt a shiver run through me. It was with a suddenness that brought me electrified to my feet. For over a century, the curse of the Winchester Fortune had been the subject of stories incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories of apparitions that come back from the dead of their own accord. Silent, colossal, creeping death which stalked inside of Llanada Villa where it welled up a consciousness of terror. With whimpering insistence, the people told tales of demons which sized lone servants after dark, either carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment; while others whispered of blood-trails toward my mansion. It was also said that Llanada Villa was ghoulishly haunted and it had a voice—its voice was thunder. Thunder that could even creep up on a clear summer’s day. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Through the haze of exhaustion, it occurred to me that I felt lost and knew only that I was wandering away from the utter unknown. I went for a midnight stroll through the miles of hallways within my home to relieve myself of the terrible events of the past. A strange nervousness had slowly seized me. An impression stole upon me that there was something prowling about. Thin shadows were moving across the rooms and had attracted my gaze. These must be the souls, not of the good, but of the evil, which are compelled to wander about my home in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life. For a moment, I thought I saw a curious cloud formation racing low and directly above me, a cloud black and impenetrable with two wing-like ends strangely in the shape of a monstrous flying bat. There were no lights lit in the house. And in the unremitting rain outside, there was no moonlight. There was a noise from some remote floor above, a dry chuckle like the scrape of lazy chains. The voice above tightened and broke with a roar. These ghosts were the players of a diabolical game. Serving a playful master. I descended stairs. A corridor followed. The bellowing fury above me faded slightly. However, that was no comfort. The corridor was catacomb-like. I felt more deeply entombed with every step. The pitiful throughs of the ghosts of natives shrieked and whined of the unnamable horror which had descended upon them. Death was indeed there. The disordered corridor was covered with blood and human debris bespeaking too vividly the ravages of demon teeth and talons; yet no visible trail led away from the carnage. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
Haunted by these apocalyptic visions of such cryptic deaths, horribly mangled bodies, chewed, and clawed in the catacombs of my home, it was certainly clearly that something demonic had been unleashed, for I have never heard of any rifle capable of creating carnage in such a hideous fashion. This curse was vastly different than the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and mystery; and of the silence that brood in its still depths. The death that had come had left no trace save destruction itself. However, a phantasmal chaos had suddenly caused my nerves to jump on edge, as I heard hideous shrieks beyond anything in my former experience or imagination. In the shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the veil of the living. Then came the devastating stoke of lightning which shook the whole mansion, lit the darkest corridors, and reverberated throughout my soul. There was something preternaturally about this experience. While the glare from beyond the window caught my eyes, a shadowy figure appeared before me. He had old sunken skin around the eyes and coarsely textured about his complexion. His shoulders were bunched under the black vanity of the silk embroidered robe he wore. His neck was a wattle of flesh. The eyes themselves were only partially focused, as though mostly lost to some wild and sly avenue of speculation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
As I passed by the apparition, his eyes followed me. This man was smugly and completely given over to evil. I had become lost in the forgotten turns of my mansion’s maze. Grief shuddered through me. I felt the grip of comforting fingers on my shoulder. I stared at the stain on the table. I sighed and my breath faltered. From far above, I heard the beast’s cavorting laughter. Tears blurred my eyes. There was blood everywhere. “Marvellous!” said a voice. There were two figures by the parlor. They were attired in evening wear and white silk mufflers and top hats. The glass of a monocle glittered above the spoiled grin of one of them. Even from forty feet distant, they smelled of cigars and brilliantine. And they stank of dead meat, sour wine, and feral rot. The figures began to fade. They had receded from sight almost entirely when one of the apparitions said, “You’ve angered Chief Little Fawn. And Chief Little Fawn will settle with you shortly.” I looked at my own soft, unaccustomed hands. And a voice that caused the skin on my head to crawl icily called down all the way from the top of the stairs to reach me where I stood. “My name is Chief Little Fawn.” There was a pause. “Are you coming up to fight? Or am I coming down for you?” My house was warming with the baleful threat of the thing above. In was becoming harder to breath. Demonic mutterings of thunder, and shadows thwarted me. As I shivered and contemplated my next move, I knew that I had pried out one of Earth’s supreme horrors. A fall of rain was drumming the mansion, and the heavy blanket of clouds glowed with a soft radiance where the moon was trying to break through. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
Then the blue moonlight returned, illuminating the mansion. A large white hound leaped from the wall and ran towards me, before it slinked across the room and disappeared. Startled, I had no idea which direction to turn. A click, and a dazzling white light enveloped the entire floor. For a brief second, I saw a woman outlined there against the wall. “Fool!” she cried hoarsely. “Blundering fool! What have you done?” Her eyes were glaring at me, smouldering with hatred. I gazed at her curiously as she stood erect, head thrown back, body apparently taut as wire, and a slow shudder crept down my spine. Then without warning, she gathered up her dress and floated down the path towards the door to nowhere. A moment later she disappeared somewhere in the shadows. I stood there, staring after her in a daze. Suddenly, there rose a low animal snarl. And before I could move, a huge gray shape came hurtling through the hallway, bounding in great leaps toward me. Its face was contorted in diabolic fury, and its jaws were dripping slaver. Even in that moment of terror as I stood frozen before it, the sight of those black nostrils and those black hyalescent eyes emblazoned itself on my mind, never to be forgotten. Then with a lunge it was upon me. I had only time to run. I could feel those teeth trying to clamp down on my heels. The beast coughed and faded into a black mist and vanished. Endless hours I spent confined to my room suffering the tortures of the damned. When twilight came, I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul. That I am still alive and sane, is a marvel I cannot fathom. I cannot fathom it, for these ghouls were a blasphemous abnormality from hell’s nethermost craters; abominations which no mind could fully grasp. There I lay, alone, in my accursed mansion, shivering, and terrified. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
The Winchester Mystery House seems to be drenched with the powerful emotions of spiritual energy. Of all the anomalous phenomenon which is reported, ghosts and ghostly sightings are by far the most common. One need not venture off to a distant loch, travel deep into a jungle wilderness, spend the night in a graveyard staring at the stars to have an extraordinary, life-changing, mind-blowing encounter. In The Winchester Mystery House, a ghost can appear to anyone, at anytime, for any reason. People from all walks of life have had a ghostly encounter in this beautiful but bizarre mansion. Be it an apparition that appears in a hallway or upon the step, mindless and unaware of your presence; or the giggles of children who once played nearby many, many years ago. Ghost, of course, have walked by our side since time immemorial. Ghosts arrived on stage by the Upper Paleolithic, perhaps around 50,000 BC. The simple conception that something recognizable of a dead person might at some time return to human society is neither fanciful nor surprising. Its roots originate at that developmental horizon where burial with goods became the norm for the first time. Ghost have waited in the winds from the beginning and have fluttered persistently as part of human cultural, religious, or philosophical baggage ever since. Practically speaking, as a result, they are inexpungible. Dying without a grave, accidently or otherwise, was a terrible fate. It was a weapon in warfare and judgement, for no quietus was attainable. Hammurapi of Babylon, in the eighteenth-century BC, threatens that the soldiers of any other king who does not follow his laws should be thrown on the plain in heaps and his troops denied burial. Other laws show that executed criminals were similarly treated. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Crucially, burial is not compelling of itself in our search for ghosts, for there were always many reasons for rapid burial of the dead; it was understood before thought it self what happened to corpses, diseased or otherwise, and there was the question of say, respect for the dead, or predators. Archaeologically speaking, burial as such carries no implication necessarily different from waste disposal. The gradual establishing of deliberate burial in early ancestor communities, however, must have led to significant consequences. Shared ritual tied with mourning would come to teach that individual life itself was finite. With the development of abstract thought and the sharing of language and experience, the great lesson would come to be explicitly, rather than instinctively, understood: all that lives must die, passing though nature to eternity. For Babylonian men and women, accordingly, ghosts were an unpredictable reality. Everyone knew that ghosts must be unhappy: those responsible could list all the reasons. Omens, spells and rituals were available that could help the experienced diviner or exorcist in assessing his or her case as well as dealing with it. It is easy to imagine that deceased members of extended or extending families who had long inhabited the same place would not only feel close to their descendants but also tied to the rooms and passages where they had spent so much of their lives. Most ghosts, probably, were of the local and family type, but what must have been especially frightening was the idea that a dangerous ghost might be unconnected with anyone at in in one’s personal World—a killer bent on random street murder—or a ghost fastened on his or her victim through mistaken identity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
The ancient Egyptians were so preoccupied with the prospect of an afterlife that their entire civilization was founded on the cult of the dead. Many believe that the pyramids may have been built not only as tombs for their pharaohs, who were venerated as living descendants of the Gods, but also as the means of initiation into the mysteries of life and death. As with the pyramids, the structural shape of The Winchester Mystery House is believed to have both a mystical significance and a practical purpose, focusing the Earth’s magnetic energies to a specific point and to such effect that the initiate would be unable to resist the force drawing their etheric body out of its physical home. According to some sources, a Boston medium consulted by Mrs. Winchester explained that her family and her fortune were being haunted by spirits. Supposedly their untimely deaths of her daughter and husband were caused by these spirits, and it was implied that Mrs. Winchester might be the next victim. However, the medium also claimed that there was an alternative. Mrs. Winchester was instructed to move west and appease the spirits by building a great house for them. As long as construction of the house never ceased, Mrs. Winchester could rest assured that her life was not in danger. Building such a house was even supposed to bring her eternal life. Earth energies are stronger near the water which suggests one explanation of why Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester chose the Santa Clara Valley to build her beautiful estate and vibrant gardens.
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May America Previl?
One of the most important things to do is to live in the moment. This does not mean that you forget where you come from or do not plan for the future, it simply means living righteously and enjoying the present, without focusing on past atrocities. No one can right the past, but we can create a better future. The best way to capture the moment is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake and enjoy the life we are having. However. Lapses in awareness are frequently caused by an eddy of dissatisfaction with what we are seeing our felling in that moment, out of which springs a desire for something to be different, for things to change. Fear is as nonsubstaintal as your shadow, but it is. The shadow also exists—nonsubstantial, negative, but not nonexistential—and sometimes the shadow can have a great impact on you. People are more afraid of fear than of anything else, because the very existence of fear shakes your foundations. The infant still feeling one with mother, cannot yet say “I,” nor has he any need for it. Only after he has conceived of the outer World as being separate and different from himself does he come to the awareness of himself as a distinct being, and one of the last words he learns to use is “I,” in reference to himself. In the development of the human race the degree to which man is aware of himself as a separate self depends on the extent to which he has emerged from the clan and the extent to which the process of individuation has developed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The member of a primitive clan might express his sense of identity in the in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an “individual,” existing apart from his group. It should always be kept in mind that, in addition to sorrow and mourning, part of the psychological response to separation is great anger at the mother-figure for leaving. Thus mourning, along with his attachment and love become subjects of anxiety. In the medieval World, the individual was identified with his social role in the feudal hierarchy. The peasant was not a man who happened to be a peasant, the feudal lord not a man who happened to be a feudal lord. He was a peasant or a lord, and this sense of his unalterable station was an essential part of his sense of identity. When the feudal system broke down, this sense of identity was shaken and the acute questions “Who am I”—or, more precisely, “How do I know what I am?”—arose. This was the question that was raised, in a philosophical form, by Rene Descartes. He answered the quest for identity by saying, “I doubt, hence I think; I think, hence I am.” This answer put all the emphasis on the experience of “I” as the subject of my thinking activity, and failed to see that the “I” is experienced also in the process of feeling and creative action. The development of Western culture went in the direction of creating the basis for the full experience of individuality. By making the individual free politically and economically, by teaching him to think for himself and freeing him from an authoritarian pressure, one hoped to enable him to feel “I” in the sense that he was the center and active subject of his powers and experienced himself as such. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
However, only a minority achieved the new experience of “I.” For the majority, individualism was not much more than a façade behind which was hidden the failure to acquire an individual sense of identity. Many substitutes for a truly individual sense of identity were sought for and found. Nation, religion, class, and occupation serve to furnish a sense of identity. “I am an American.” “I am a Protestant.” “I am a businessman.” These are the formulae that help a man experience a sense of identity after the original clan identity has been acquired. These different identifications are, in contemporary society, usually employed together. If blended with older feudal remnants, they are in a broad sense status identifications, and they are more efficient, as in European countries. In the United States of America, where so little is left of feudal relics and where there is so much social mobility, these status identifications are naturally less efficient, and the sense of identity is shifted more and more to the experience of conformity. Inasmuch as I am not different, inasmuch as I am like the others and recognized by them as “a regular fellow,” I can sense myself as “I.” I am “as you desire me”—as Mr. Pirandello put it in the title of one of his plays. Instead of the preindividualistic clan identity, a new herd identity develops in which the sense of identity rests on the sense of an unquestionable belonging to the crowd. That is uniformity and conformity are often not recognized as such, and are covered by the illusion of individuality, does not alter the facts. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The problem of the sense of identity is not, as it usually understood, merely a philosophical problem, or a problem concerning only our mind and thought. The need to feel a sense of identity stems from the very condition of human existence, and it is the source of the most intense strivings. Since I cannot remain sane without the sense of “I,” I am driven to do almost anything to acquire this sense. Behind the intense passion for status and conformity is this very need, and it is sometimes even stronger than the need for physical survival. What could be more obvious than the fact that people are willing to risk their lives, to give up their love, to surrender their freedom, to sacrifice their own thoughts for the sake of being one of the herd, of conforming, and thus of acquiring a sense of identity, event though it is an illusory one. The fact that man has reason and imagination leads to the necessity not only for having a sense of his own identity but also for orienting himself in the World intellectually. This need can be compared with the process of physical orientation that develops in the first years of life and that is completed when the child can walk by himself, touch and handle things, knowing what they are. However, when the ability to talk and to speak has been acquired, only the first step in the direction of orientation has been taken. Man finds himself surrounded by many puzzling phenomena and, having reason, he has to make sense of them, has to put them in some context which he can understand and which permit him to deal with them in his thoughts. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The further his reason develops, the more adequate becomes his system of orientation, that is, the more it approximates reality. However, even if man’s frame of orientation is utterly illusory, it satisfies his need for some picture which is meaningful to him. Whether he believes in the power of a totem animal, in a rain god, or in the superiority and destiny of his race, his need for some frame of orientation is satisfied. Quite obviously, the picture of the World that he has depends on the development of his reason and of his knowledge. Although biologically the brain capacity of the human race has remained the same for thousands of generations, it takes a long evolutionary process to arrive at objectivity, that is, to acquire the faculty to see the World, nature, other persons, and oneself as they are and not distorted by desires and fears. The more man develops this objectivity, the more he is in touch with reality, the more he matures, the better can he create a human World in which he is at home. Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the World by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the World with the help of thought. Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the World more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs also to the animal part of man. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
There is a dialectical sense in which the existence of opinion necessarily presupposes difference of opinion. Without dissent, there would be nothing to discuss. There might be facts to ascertain, or indoctrination to preform upon recruits, but if all concerned are quite contented with current ways, and no one sees a better alternative, there is no problem of what is to be done. Dissent is possible only when the public has come to feel that there is a problem, and that something should be done, and when one or more definite proposals are then put forward. Even discussion over whether there is a problem or something should be done is academic until some plan of action is suggested. Those who are against action must have something to be against, just as those who want action must have at least one notion which they favour. Moreover, dissent over alternative lines of action (inaction being usually a synonym for traditional procedure) must be supposed by clashes of interest least it be merely academic and lead to no resolution. It is only an apparent contradiction to insist that discussion is conditional both on values held in common and on clashes of interest. Because of the values held in common each party can advance his proposal not as a mere assertion of interest but as a right which out to be binding upon the other. It is the justification of interests as rights which makes a discussion. Enemies of government by discussion exaggerate the ideological nature of a group’s moral justification of its position, but the wisest friends of government by discussion do not altogether deny the basis of group interest for each partisan’s view. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
To insist, however, that justifications set forth in advocacy or defense of an action program are derived in some direct way from the interest of a group is to reduce discussion to a mere war of words, which it is not. Moreover, it willfully and knowingly overlooks the variety of justifications which may be asserted for any one group of interest, the often incoherent and contradictory diversity among the interests of a group, and, above all, the unformed, inchoate nature of any group’s interests. Often it assumes that a group’s interest is either an objective fact visible to all, or at least visible to some observers with special access to truth. This is never the case. A group, or even an individual, is often as divided within itself as to what it wants as the community of which it is a part. It may wish to justify its formulation of what it wants as much to itself as to the public. The integration of personality and the integration of the community are aspects of the same unceasing process. Some professed friends of government by discussion, however, presume that there is an objective public interest, usually implicitly represented and defined by themselves. There is no pre-existing public interest, any more than there is a pre-existing group interest. It is the public interest which is to be determined by discussion; the definition of the public interest is the product of discussion; it is the determinant only in the sense of being the end sought. Those who insist that they represent the public good in any sense except in demanding that agreement be reached are like the prophets whom make discussion impossible through dogmatically proclaiming “God says…” #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
When it comes to good and services, one consists of keeping track of any history of individual traders’ deviation and selling this information for a fee. This person (or organization) providing this service is called an information intermediary, or Info for shot. Another service is to deter cheating by the trader with whom a customer is currently matched, by threatening to inflict some dire punishment in response to such behaviour. This person providing this service is called an enforcement intermediary, or Enfo for short. If a customer of Info gets cheated, Info finds this out without incurrent any further cost. This may be because he provides his service by accompanying his customer (physically or metaphorically) to the trade. If a buyer or borrower defaults, credit-rating agencies, too, are likely to be told by their customer firms or lenders. A customer who has been cheated probably actually gets a little satisfaction from complaining, but even if he incurs a small cost by complaining, a contract like that in Milgrom, North, and Weingast will enable Infor to induce the customer to report the other party’s current cheating. In addition, Info can detect at a further cost any occurrences where someone who is not his customer gets cheated. At the start of each period, Info chooses his fee F and invites traders to become his customers. More precisely, the contact that Inform offers to each trader has the following form. Pay me F now. When your match is revealed, I will tell you what I know of that player’s history. If he has a history of cheating, of if he is not my customer, you should play Deviate; this will not count against you in the future. Otherwise you should play Comply. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Each trader decides whether to accept this offer. Then the pairings are revealed. Info tells his customers their partner’s history of behaviour, but Info’s truthfulness is not automatically guaranteed. Each trader can also observe whether his current partner is Info’s customer. Based on this information, each decides whether to play this period’s game; in the case I am considering the answer is yes. Info may double cross a customer by conspiring, for a separate fee, with the person on the other side of the deal and mislead the customer into choosing Comply while the other plays Deviate. And Infor may extort money from a trader with a clean history by threatening to asset that he has cheated in the past. After all the pairwise games for this period are played, Info keeps a record of any cheating of his customers, and decides whether to carry out an extra cost any additional detection activities. Infor merely tells a customer either “I know your match has cheated in the past” or “As far as I know, your match has not cheated in the past.” If Info says the latter and the other trader cheats this time, the customer has no recourse and Info will not inflict any punishment on the cheater. If Info lies about the other party’s history (and extracts an additional fee from the other party for allowing him to cheat in this way, the customer equally has no recourse; we have to find conditions under which the equilibrium is proof against such double crossing by Info. Similarly, we have to check whether Info has any incentive to extract extortion payments by threatening falsely to assert a history of cheating by someone who in reality has a clean record. Since customers’ contracts with Info cannot be externally enforced, Info cannot credibly enter into long-run contracts with large up-front fees to control customers’ cheating. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
The phenomena which we observe in the neurotic person are in principle not different from those we find in the normal. They are only more accentuated, clear-cut, and frequently more accessible to the awareness of the neurotic person than they are in the normal who is not aware of any problem which warrants study. The term normal or health can be defined in two ways. Firstly, if he is able to fulfill the social role he is to take in that given society, from the standpoint of a functioning society, one can call a person normal or healthy. More concretely, this means that he is able to work in the fashion which is required in that particular society, and furthermore that he is able to participate in the reproduction of society, that is, that he can raise a family. Secondly, from the standpoint of the individual, we look upon health or normalcy as the optimum of growth and happiness of the individual. If the structure of a given society were such that it offered the optimum possibility for individual happiness, both viewpoints would coincide. However, this is not the case in most societies we know, including our own. Although they differ in the degree to which they promote the aims of individual growth, there is a discrepancy between the aims of the smooth functioning of society and of the full development of the individual. This fact makes it imperative to differentiate sharply between the two concepts of health. The one is governed by social necessities, the other by values and norms concerning the aim of individual existence. Unfortunately, this differentiation is often neglected. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Most psychiatrist take the structure of their own society so much for granted that to them the person who is not well adapted assumes the stigmas of being less valuable. On the other hand, the well-adapted person is supposed to be the more valuable person in terms of a scale of human values. If we differentiate the two concepts of normal and neurotic, we come to the following conclusion: the person who is normal in terms of being well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be. All genuine individuality and spontaneity may have been lost. On the other hand, the neurotic person can be characterized as somebody who was not ready to surrender completely in the battle for his self. To be sure, his attempt to save his individual self was not successful, and instead of expressing his self productively he sought salvation through neurotic symptoms and by withdrawing into a phantasy life. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of human values, he is less crippled than the kind of normal person who has lost his individuality altogether. Needless to say there are persons who are not neurotic and yet have not drowned their individuality in the process of adaptation. However, if we think of neurotic in terms of social efficiency, the stigma attached to the neurotic person seems to us to be unfounded and justified. As for a whole society, if its members did not function socially, the term neurotic cannot be applied in this latter sense, since a society could not exist. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
From a standpoint of human values, however, a society could be called neurotic in the sense that its members are crippled in the growth of their personality. Since the term neurotic is so often used to denote lack of social functioning, we would prefer not to speak of society in terms of its being neurotic, but rather in terms of its being adverse to human happiness and self-realization. Once the primary bond which gave security to the individual are served, once the individual faces the World outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; he can relate himself spontaneously to the World in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the World. This second course never reunites him with the World in the way he was related to it before he merged as an “individual,” for the fact of his separateness cannot be reversed; if it were prolonged, it is an escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by its compulsive character, like every escape from threatless complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self. This it is not a solution which leads to happiness and positive freedom; it is, in principle, a solution which is to be found in all neurotic phenomena. It assuages an unbearable anxiety and makes life possible by avoiding panic; yet it does not solve the underlying problem and is paid for by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities. Some of these mechanisms of escape are of relatively small social import; they are to be found in any marked degree only in individuals with severe mental and emotional disturbances. It may be said that the Holy Spirit dwelling in the regenerate human spirit energizes and works through the faculties of the soul and the members of the body only in and with the active cooperation of the WILL of the believer. In other words, God, though in the spirit of man, does not use the man’s hand apart from the “I will use my hand” of the man himself. Life is a mixture of essence and existence, of actualized potentiality and existential distortions, of being and estrangement. Since the process of actualization is ontological, life is a universal concept applicable to all real beings, organic and inorganic, stars and rocks, animals and men. Life can be considered from the viewpoints of its two constitutive factors, essence and existence. Essentially, life exhibits a unity amid diversity described as the multidimensional unity of life. Existentially, life is ambiguous. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
The metaphor “dimension” should replace “level” in depicting the diversity of life, for levels so divide life into watertight compartments that its essential unity is destroyed. A plurality of dimensions reflects the difference in life, but, because dimensions can meet in a point without excluding one another, they accurately express the essential unity of life. Since life is the gradual actualization of potentialities, some dimensions are called “realms.” In this sense one speaks of the vegetable realm or the animal realm or the historical realm. In all of them, all dimensions are potentially present, and some of them are actualized. However, in man all dimensions, especially the spiritual and historical, are actual; in him is found the fullness of the essential multidimensional unity of life. Life as the actualization of potential being is a process, a movement out and away from a center and then back toward it. Thus, the life-process is made up of three basic functions. The circular movement of self-integration I the actualization of the ontological polarity of individualization and participation. Secondly, the horizontal direction of life is self-creativity, which is the actualization of the dynamics-form polarity. Thirdly, the vertical movement toward the ultimate and infinite is self-transcendence which actualizes the polarity of freedom-destiny. Although these functions of life in themselves are unified and harmonized, they are subject to the disruptions that follow upon existential estrangement. When separation becomes actual, their negative effects come into play, and ambiguity sets in. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
To the degree in which this disruption is real, self-integration is countered by disintegration, self-creation is countered by destruction, self-transcendence is countered by profanization. In the life process these positive and negative elements are inseparably entwined, for life is neither essential nor existential but ambiguous. China, borrowing Communist ideology and economic and social methods from Soviet Russia, has become the first colonial country to make spectacular economic gains, beginning to transform herself into one of the great World powers and trying by example, persuasion, and economic help to become the leader of the colonial revolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While after 1923 the Soviet Union had definitely given up the hope for a workers’ revolution in the West and, in fact, sought to contain all Western revolutionary movements since then, she had hoped for support from the nationalist revolutions in the East. Now, however, having herself become one of the “have” states, she feels threated by the growing onslaught of the underdeveloped countries under China’s leadership, and seeks an understanding with the United States of America, without, however, turning this understanding into an alliance against China. Any description of the basic trends of Western history in the last four hundred and eighty years would be lacking in an essential element unless it took account of a profound spiritual chance. While the influence of Christian theological thinking was waning from the seventeenth century onward, the same spiritual reality which was expressed earlier in the concepts of this theology found now a new expression in philosophical, historical, and political formulations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The philosophers of the eighteenth century were, as Carl Becker has pointed out, no less men of faith than were the theologian of the thirteenth century. They just expressed their experience in a different conceptual framework. With the explosive growth of wealth and technical capacities in the nineteenth century, there occurred a fundamental change in man’s attitude. Not only, as Mr. Nietzsche put it, “God was dead,” but the humanism that was common to the theologians of the thirteenth, and to the philosophers of the eighteenth centuries, slowly died too; the formulae and ideologies, both of religion and of humanism, continued to be used, but the authentic experience became increasingly thinner, to the point of unreality. It was as if man had become drunk with his own power, and had transformed material production, once a means to the end of a more dignified life, into an end in itself. Large-scale enterprise, state intervention, emphasis on control of—rather than ownership of—property in the means of production, are characteristic of all industrial systems today. The Wester capitalist system, while it has many features of nineteenth-century capitalism, has incorporated enough of the new features to constitute a very different system from the former. The three forms of socialism current today, have broken much more drastically with the continuity of the former economic stage, show the new trends in different degrees and emphasis: a) Khrushchevism, a system of complete centralized planning and state ownership of industry and agriculture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
B ) Chinese communism, especially since 1958, a system of total mobilization of its most important capital asset, 1.4 billion people, and the complete manipulation of their currency, physical and emotional energy and thoughts without regard to their individuality; c ) humanistic socialism, which aims at the blending of a necessary minimum of centralization, state intervention, and bureaucracy with the possible maximum of decentralization, individualism, and freedom. This third type of socialism is represented by various forms from Scandinavia to Yugoslavia, Burma, and India. It makes sense because without some form of communism, the people hold all the natural resources which they can sell as they please, while the government only takes in tax revenue. However, as LCDs (less developed countries) are now rising, the American government needs to take some control of production of goods and services to ensure it does not lose its role as World power. If the corporations and the people in the United States of America can no longer afford to own farms, make cars, and produce, poultry, dairy, wood, steel, and other raw materials, they will have to important everything, which send wealth out of the United States of America to other nations. Therefore, the government has two choices. They can make laws that allow them to compete with private firms, or subsidize American farms, automakers, and other companies that produce goods and services so they remain affordable and are purchased by Americans as well as other nations. It would also be wise to offer huge tax incentives to people who purchase American cars. If a person, for example, could get a $5,000 tax credit on any American car, they would not only be popular because of style, but also because there is more incentive to purchase one. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Russian under control of President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, is a conservative, state-controlled, industrial managerialism, not a revolutionary system; she is interested in law and order and anxious to defend herself against the onslaught of the revolution of the “have-not” nations. For the reason Mr. Putin seeks an understanding with the United States of America, the ending of USA involvement with Ukraine. He neither needs nor wants another war. Mr. Putin cannot, however, give up his Communist-revolutionary ideology, nor can he turn against China, without undermining his own system. Hence he has to maneuver carefully to preserve his ideological hold on the Russian people and to defend himself against both his opponents within Russian and against China and her potential allies outside. If he fails in his attempt to end the United States of America’s involvement with Ukraine, he (or his successor) will be forced into a close alliance with China and into a policy which would leave little hope for peace. The development of the former colonial peoples will not follow the capitalist development, because for psychological, social, and economic reasons this system is neither feasible nor attractive to them. The question is not whether they will join the communist or the capitalist systems. The real alternative is whether they will accept the Chinese or Russian form of communism, thus becoming closely allied with either of these two countries, or whether they will adopt one of the various forms of democratic, decentralized socialism and become allied with the neutral bloc. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The United States of America is, therefore, confronted with the following alternative: either a continued fight against communism together with the continuation of the arms race—hence the probability of nuclear war—or a political understanding on the basis of the status quo with Russia, and the support of neutral democratic-socialist regimes in the colonial World. It is a fact that two systems represented By Russia-China and by the United States of America—Western Europe are competing with each other in the World today and the race is only heating up and getting more intense. Any attempt of either one to defeat the other system through the use of military power will not only fail, but will lead to the destruction of both—or the World. There is only one way in which the United States of America can compete with communism: that is by demonstrating that it is possible to raise the standard of living in America and influence LCDs to follow this method, without using forces of coercive regimentation. However, many people are not convinced that America is heading in the right direction because their leaders are displaying a lack of competence, a lack of law and order, a loss of family values, and it even seems to some that hardworking Americans, who believe in the capitalist dream, are given less consideration than people who enter America illegally. While there are over 5 million homeless people (many are not counted as homeless because they are subletting, living with family, or not on a rental lease where they are being housed) in America, people entering the country without passing background checks and without documents are put up in hotel rooms and given cash assistance. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
You will hear critics say that there are so many people homeless in America because they are mentally ill and that there is a shortage of houses. However, let us be real, many of you know people who are mentally ill and should have been fired who are gainfully employed. It is so bad that several of their coworkers display the same level of dysfunction. Furthermore, there are currently sixteen million homes currently sitting vacant across the United States of America. In fact, in every state across the country, any homes remain empty while hundreds of thousands of Americans face homelessness. The existence of a multicentered World depends on the acceptance of the present status quo by all powers and on effective universal disarmament. The tension and suspicious of the nuclear arms race do not permit a political understanding; the unsettled political situation does not permit disarmament. If peace is to be preserved, both disarmament and political understanding are necessary. If and when the economy improves and the arms race ends, only then will massive economic assistance—food, capital and technical assistance—to the LCDs be possible. Also, efforts to education LCDs about family planning and birth control should also be a goal. Because when there is food on the table, and people do not have to work for it, they usually continue to have babies. Some babies are even born starving because people have no idea about birth control and family planning nor access to it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Also, in conquering poverty and achieving wealth, the United States of America, like the rest of the West (and Russia), has accepted a spiritual of materialism under which production and consumption have become ends in themselves, rather than means to a more human, creative life. These and other institutional, secondary goals and values have become indistinguishable to most people from the primary aims of life. Quite aside from all dangers from without, our inner emptiness and deep-rooted lack of hope will eventually lead to the fall of Western civilization, unless a genuine renaissance of the Western spirit takes the place of the present complacency, resignation, and confusion. This renaissance must be precisely what the Renaissance of the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries was—an invigorating re-establishment of contact with the humanistic principles and aspirations of Western culture. What we are witnessing today is truly a World revolution in rapid advance, a revolution which began in the West four hundred and eighty years ago. It has led to a new system of production which at first made Europe and America the leaders of the World. It made the working masses in Europe beneficiaries of the system; and hence the revolution of the masses in Europe (with the exception of Russia) and in North America was peaceful. Now a new stage of the World revolution is developing, the revolution of the LCDs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If the great industrial powers accept the historical trend and take the adequate anticipatory steps, will this revolution occur peacefully? Many think World War III is on the verge of breaking out, and that leaves little hope for peace and the survival of democracy. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
I pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one Nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. The American, even though they are being driven from the land, will never surrender their love for it. The American literally transplanted Heaven into his very consciousness. He imagines that he continues to live in the land of his dreams. He might be living in the cold north or in the sunny south, yet he prays for rain or for dew when it is the season in America. He celebrated Thanksgiving, the blending of two cultures and sharing of food and traditions. He celebrated Columbus Day, the founding of America. He celebrated Christmas, the birth of the Saviour. He celebrated Earth Day, when the trees were beginning to blossom. And he proudly celebrated Independence Day. In whatever clime he lived, he and she were always believed that they were in their ancient home. We must not forget the many sacrifices and contributions that woman have made for America also. Without women, we would not be able to continue the human race. The Americans mourned for their ancient land as they have for the dead, and they believe it will rise again and experience the resurrection of the dead. If I forget thee, O America, let my right hand forget its cunning; let my tongue cleave to my mouth, if I remember thee not, if I set not America above my chiefest joy. Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for unto thee I will give it. And be sure to donate to the Sacramento Fire Department, they are not receiving all of their resources. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Randolph Harris II International 