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The Time of the World Disappears Before Eternity
Revolutionary wealth is not just about money. Civilization is one of those big, stuffy words that may intrigue philosophers and historians but puts most people to sleep. Unless it is used in a sentence like “Our Civilization is threatened”—at which point large numbers of people prepare to defend themselves. Today many people do, in fact, believe that their civilization is threatened—and that the United States of America may be doing the threatening. And it is. However, not in the way most of us think. Around the World, critics of the United States of America point to its military and its economy as the main sources of its predominance. It is, however, knowledge in the broadcast sense and new technologies based on it that integrate America’s military and financial power and propel both forward. It is true that America’s technological lead is threatened. According to the National Science Board, foreign students earn nearly 50 percent of all U.S. doctorates in mathematics, computer sciences and engineering. And American youth are showing less and less interests in these fields. NASA officials complain that there are three times as many scientists over sixty as there are under thirty in the space agency. Shirley Ann Jackson, then president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has cautioned that “centers of technology-based activity, training, and entrepreneurialism are rapidly spreading throughout the globe. Thus even the status quo for the U.S. represents a declining share of the global marketplace for innovation and ideas.” Nevertheless, America still leads in most fields of digital technology, in microbiology and in science generally. It spends 44 percent of the World budget for research and development. By most criteria, the United States of America is still the undisputed leader in the performance of basic and applied research. In addition, many international comparisons put the United States of America as a leader in applying research and innovation to improve economic performance.
In the latest IMD International World Competitiveness Yearbook, the United States of America ranks first in economic competitiveness, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore. The survey compares economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency, and infrastructure. Larger economies are further behind, with Zhejiang (China’s wealthiest province), Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany ranked 20 though 23, respectively. An extensive review by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concludes that since World War II, US leadership in science and engineering has driven its dominant strategic position, economic advantage, and quality of life. And at least for now, the United States of America remains the Word’s scientific powerhouse. Perhaps even more important is the speed with which scientific and technical findings from everywhere are converted into marketable applications or products and widely dispersed into manufacturing, finance, agriculture, defense, biotech and other sectors. All of which boosts economic productivity, further accelerates change, and increasing the U.S. ability to compete at the global level. However, knowledge is not only a matter of bits and bytes or science and technology. Part of the knowledge economy is the production of art and entertainment, and America is the World’s biggest exporter of popular culture. That culture include fashion, music, TV programming, books, movies and computer games. Americans have always been told that their most important message to the World is one of democracy, individual freedom, tolerance, concern for “the rights of man” and—more recently—the rights of women. In the last three decades, however, a U.S. media spread into formerly closed or nonexistent foreign markets, a very different set of messages has been communicated. Much of it targeted at young people.
Certainly not all, but a considerable amount of this material has disgustingly glorified pimps, gangster, drug lords, drug pushers, and hollow-eyed drug users. It has celebrated extremes of violence marked by unending car chases, over-the-top special effects and songs dripping with sexist venom. The impact of all this has been further intensified in the hard-sell, over-the-edge advertising used to promote these products. Hollywood, for example, has painted a fantasy America in which adolescent hedonism reigns supreme and authority figures—police, teachers, politicians, business leaders—are routinely satirized. Film after film, and TV shows one after another, tell young viewers what many of them hunger to hear: that adults are bumbling fools; that being “dumb and dumber” is okay; that “we do not need education”; that to be “bad” is really good; and that pleasures of the flesh, in infinite variety, is or should be nonstop. In this fantasy World, women are readily available, but they can also leap over giant buildings in a single bound (like Superman), shoot and kill (like James Bond) and practice martial arts (Like Jet Li). Extremes, we are repeatedly told, are good and restraint is bad; and, by the way, America is so rich that event its secretaries, police, clerks, and other ordinary working people live in high-rise penthouse apartments or Malibu mansions—images that set adolescent glands tingling from Taipei to Timbuktu. What few foreign critics of American’s pop culture seem to know is that ironically enough, many of the ostensibly American firms producing and disseminating the interesting and unusual of these programs either are, or were financed not by America, but by European and Japanese capital. Nor is it widely understood that shows are often made by, say, a European director with an Australian stary, a Chinese martial-arts consultant, an anime cartoonist from Japan or other foreign contributors.
In the meantime, however, the influence of these intriguing programs is so powerful that other societies fear for the survival of their own culture. Only if art threatens action, then terrorism can be advanced through art. For such a phenomenon as Aesthetic Terrorism to occur, aesthetic pursuit must become symbolic not of its own decadently solipsistic pleasures (exemplified in madness of des Esseintes in Huysmans’ Against Nature), but of action taken beyond the pale of art World confines. Terrorism is art is called the avant-garde. However, if this was once the case, it is no longer. Most avant-garde art is viewed and created today as simply an enfolding reaction to its own history. This disingenuous game-playing guarantees that the avant-garde art is viewed and created today as simply an enfolding reaction to its own history. This disingenuous game-playing guarantees that the avant-garde can no longer stimulate or even provoke. Dada and Futurist actions, which attempted to lead art out of the classroom and museum and into the streets, are simply appropriated by postmodernist facsimiles which capture the letter but little of the original essence. It hardly matters anyway. Avant-garde art has evolved into nothing more than a cultural benchwarmer, corporate tax write-off and public relations smokescreen. Art which openly espouses anti-corporate ideology is embraced as long as it hews to arbitrary standards invented by those taste-making and fortune-telling hirelings, the art critics. What could be wrong, after all, with a business World that allows people to say what they want (because it does not matter)? Aesthetic Terrorism is a term more realistically applied to the faceless regime of consumer culture than the avant-garde. The onslaught of Muzak, ad jingles, billboards, top 40 tunes, commercials, corporate logos, etcetera, all fit the terrorist dynamic of intrusion and coercion.
One almost forgets that aesthetics once implied a consensual relationship between the creators and appreciators of art. How often is it that one hears someone admitting a fondness for a media product “in spite” of oneself? How many times have you heard a slogan or rancid tune ring in your ears like a brain-eating mantra? When consumer terror’s avant-garde correlative, Pop Art, became indistinguishable from the object of its supposed social satire, it erased from big business its pejorative taint. Many of today’s avant-garde stars have emerged from or entered the business World, some enormously successful in the arcane number-juggling or speculation and commodities scams. Even freeloading on the state and private foundations is fair game only for those whose bureaucratic aptitude is matched by their shameless butt-kissing. It is not surprising that most grant recipients excel in little more than lawyerristic logorrhea and ingrained artistic timidity. Critic-centered postmodernism spawned the phrase-art hybrid of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer in which an advertising-style slogan is combined with an implied message or visual cue (usually swiped from some old magazine). Their posture is a hip cynicism which is supposed to subvert the “thrall” of the advertising command. Kruger and Holzer play the market like skillful double-agents, boosting themselves into the public eye through clever steals from Madison Avenue behaviorist techniques yet simultaneously troweling on crypto-Marxist jive to secure the perks of critical and academic currency. Their self-promotions worked when they were at the sidelines of the establishment. However, not the social commentary grows increasingly hollow. Currently being groomed for jet-setting prominence by Soho millionairess Mary Boone, Kruger’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial in 1987, for which she is paid a handsome sum, featured nothing more than a socialite princess joke, “I Shop Therefore I Am.” Winking at and wagging the tail of establishment hierarchy is part of that I-rib-you-gently-you-pay-me-off confidence game artists have been playing the Renaissance courts.
These contemporary court artists, like many of the past centuries, smugly pretend t spit in the eye of the exploiters while allowing themselves to be pampered de-loused—and when they are not looking—de-clawed. There are, of course, those artists, usually fresh out of university, who are unaccomplished at filling out grant forms, and therefore consider themselves “subversives.” The majority of these art and rock magazines-styled rebels are playing out rebellion psychodramas to package and merchandize to consumerist sycophants. This strategy is (forgive them term) the simulacra of terrorism: the content seizes in the frozen attitudinizing of pose and goes no further. We must look to the true outsiders and not the would-be insiders for an artist truly capable of effective counter-terror against the insidious mantras of consumerist brainwash. Terror means a threat, and the outsider’s version of Aesthetic Terrorism belongs to those performances or arrangements of words and pictures that unleash the reactionary impulses of police and bourgeois artist/critic alike. The kind of art that evokes this wrath, fear and condemnation rejoices in its pagan spirit of schadenfreude which controverts the humanist piety of “enlightened victim.” Anti-social sadism rarely receives patronage, however. Outside the corrupting realm of societal handouts, the Aesthetic Terrorist—much as this definition may grate on him—is the last bastion of aesthetic purity. Operation Sun Devil is the name for a government action against computer wizards and assorted sharpies and super-smarts who were resourceful enough to figure out how to hack into the electronic files of Ma Bell. Those who know, claim the Sun Devil gambit as a terrified overreaction against intelligence by the plodding and stupid bureaucracy.
John Perry Barlow (Whole Earth Review, Fall 1990) describes a typical Sun Devil action against a teenage hacker: [A] father in New York […] opened the door at 6.00 a.m. and found a shotgun at his nose. A dozen agents entered. While one of the kept the man’s wife in a choke-hold, the rest made ready to shoot and entered the bedroom for their sleeping 14-year-old. Before leaving, they confiscated every piece of electronic equipment, including all the telephones. Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure are unheeded by the government agents who claim nerd computer hackers are terrorists and have “the ability to access and review the files of hospital patients. Furthermore, they could have added, deleted, or altered vital patient information, possibly causing life-threatening situations.” Meacorporate interests have staked claim to the entirety of cyberspace, and they are not about to tolerate the presence of digital interlopers. This may scare off some, but other pirates like the mysterious Legion of Doom and NuPrometheus league (who illegally circulated highly protected Macintosh computer source code) will rise to the challenge now that they have been provided a clearly delineated enemy to innovation, the individual, and personal freedom. It may come as a surprise to learn that a few artists are now producing work which finds itself classified as a thought crime, punishable by expulsion into a Siberia of non-distribution, and in some cases by litigation and imprisonment. Pure magazine, from Chicago, a xeroxed vehicle which extols child torture, murder, and extreme misogyny, tweaked too many civic-minded noses, and its editor, Peter Sotos, was tailed for nine months and underwent a lengthy trial process in which he was finally convicted for possession of some very illegal magazine. Soto’s case was the first successfully prosecuted new Illinois state law, enacted under the influence of the Meese Commission Report on pornography, an example of First Amendment revisionism par excellence.
Soto’s case is particularly disquieting because it proves that prison is in the offing for simple possession of controversial material. No doubt this legal precedent was established to open the doors for future roundups of other thought criminals. The expertly managed Gulf War (massacre), in which networks censored war casualty footage that might provoke a “Vietnam War syndrome,” provides a small window into the dynamics of mass control to come. Any thoughtful individual is undeniably malnourished by the current information diet. Whether this is due to a direct conspiracy of State or by design of the oligarchic marketplace matters little. However, it has upped the ante for a new American Samizdat in which “disreputable,” “crazy,” “hateful,” or “dangerous” topics are broached by individuals or small, autonomous groups that are not compromised or swayed by institutional priorities. Can “offensive interests become the political crime of future? Apparently so. When looking at the previous sentences one can compare and see that musicians have been arrested for obscene lyrics, anarchist individuals have been collared for burning the flag; parents have been arrested for photographing their toddlers in their birthday suits; painter and performer Joe Coleman was arrested in Boston for operating an “infernal machine” and in New York for killing a rat: museum curators were threatened with arrest for hanging homoerotic photos; G.G. Allian was jailed for some consensual sadomasochism with a girlfriend; the FBI have been “monitoring” certain groups who practice unorthodox pleasures of the flesh; and on and on. Even many of the books you read have come under widely publicized attack by authors such as Carl A. Raschke who advocated the revocation of First Amendment rights from those who spread “cultural terrorism.” Even globalization could be considered cultural terrorism.
It has become increasingly obvious that the aesthetic terrorist hobgoblins are nothing more than symbolic scapegoats to divert attention away from the real issues. For Americans, fear is not another form of awareness, it is just another form of gossip. As Charles Manson has stated, true subversive terror can only be actualized by turning off the TV sets. Until then, aesthetic terrorism will be orchestrated by those already in command against insubstantial or non-existent villains. And in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorism will be orchestrated by those already in command against insubstantial or non-existent villains. And in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity. The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in a chameleon-like stye master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime. We will not know them by name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet. Until then, there is a lot of work to be done. Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a World of egoists without central authority? This question has intrigued people for a long time. And for good reason. We all know that people are not angels, and that they tend to look after themselves and their own first. Yet we also know that cooperation does occur and that our civilization is based upon it. However, in situations where each individual has an incentive to be selfish, how can cooperation ever develop? The answer each of us gives to this question has a fundamental effect on how we think and act in our social, political, and economic relations with others. And the answers that others give have a great effect on how ready they will be to cooperate with us.
The most famous answer was given over three hundred years ago by Thomas Hobbes. It was pessimistic. He argued that before governments existed, the state of nature was dominated by the problem of selfish individuals who competed on such ruthless terms that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 1651/1962, p. 100). In his view, cooperation could not develop without a central authority, and consequently a strong government was necessary. Ever since, arguments about the proper scope of government have often focused on whether one could, or could not, expect cooperation to emerge in a particular domain if there were not an authority to police situation. Today nations interact without central authority. Therefore the requirements for the emergence of cooperation have relevance to many of the central issues of international politics. The most important problem is the security dilemma: nations often seek their own security through means which challenge the security of others. This problem arises in such areas as escalation of local conflicts and arms races. Related problems occur in international relations in the form of competition with alliances, tariff negotiations, and communal conflict places like Cyprus. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has presented the United States of American with a typical dilemma of choice. If the United States of American continued business as usual, Russian might be encouraged to try other forms of noncooperative behavior later one. On the other hand, any substantial lessening of United States of America’s cooperation risks some form of retaliation, which could then set off counter-retaliation, setting up a pattern of mutual hostility that could be difficult to end. Much of the domestic debate about international policy is concerned with problems of just this type. And properly so, since these are hard choices.
In everyday life, if they never invite us over in return, we may ask ourselves how many times we will invite acquaintances for dinner. An executive in an organization does favors for another executive in order to get favors in exchange. A journalist who has received a leaked news story gives favorable coverage to the source in the hope that further leaks will be forthcoming. A business firm in an industry with only one other major company charges high prices with expectation that the other firm will also maintain high prices—to their mutual advantage and at the expense of the consumer. For me, a typical case of the emergence of cooperation is the development of patterns of behavior in a legislative body of the United States Senate. Each senator has an incentive to appear effective to his or her constituents, even at the expense of conflicting with other senators who are trying to appear effective to their constituents. However, this is hardly a situation of completely opposing interests, a zero-sum game. On the contrary, there are many opportunities for mutually rewarding activities by two senators. These mutually rewarding actions have led to the creation of an elaborate set of norms, or folkways, in the Senate. Among the most important of these is the norm of reciprocity—a folkway which involves helping out a colleague and getting repaid in kind. It includes vote trading but extends to so many types of mutually rewarding behavior that “it is not an exaggeration to say that reciprocity is a way of life in the Senate” (Matthews 1960, p. 100; see also Mayhew 1975). Washington was not always like this. Early observers saw the members of the Washington community as quite unscrupulous, unreliable, and characterized by “falsehood, deceit, treachery” (Smith 1906, p. 190). In the 1980s the practice of reciprocity is well established. Even the significant changes in the Senate over the last two decades, tending toward more decentralization, more openness, and more equal distribution of power, have come without abating the folkway of reciprocity.
As will be seen, it is not necessary to assume that senators are more honest, more generous, or more public-spirited than in earlier years to explain how cooperation based on reciprocity has emerged or proved stable. The emergence of cooperation can be explained as a consequence of individual senators pursuing their own interest. We are investigating how individual pursuing their own interests will act, followed by an analysis of what effects this will have for the system as a whole. Put another way, the approach is to make some assumptions about individual motives and then deduce consequences for the behavior of the entire system. The case of the U.S. Senate is a good example, but the same style of reasoning can be applied to other settings. The object of this enterprise is to develop a theory of cooperation that can be used to discover what is necessary for cooperation to emerge. By understanding the conditions that allow it to emerge, appropriate actions can be taken to foster the development of cooperation in a specific setting. The Cooperation Theory that is presented here is based upon an investigation of individuals who pursue their own self-interest without the assistance of a central authority to force them to cooperate with each other. The reason for assuming self-interest is that it allows an examination of the difficult case in which cooperation is not completely based upon a concern for other or upon the welfare of the group as a whole. It must, however, be stressed that this assumption is actually much less restrictive than it appears. If a sister is concerned for the welfare of her brother, the sister’s self-interest can be thought of as including (among many other things) this concern for the welfare of her brother. However, this does not necessarily eliminate all potential for conflict between sister and brother.
Likewise a nation may act in part out of regard for the interests of its friends, but this regard does not mean that even friendly countries are always able to cooperate for their mutual benefit. So the assumption of self-interest is really just an assumption that concern for others does not completely solve the problem of when to cooperate with them and when not to. A good example of the fundamental problem of cooperation is the case where two industrial nations have erected trade barriers to each other’s exports. If barriers were eliminated, because of the mutual advantages of free trade, both countries would be better off. However, if either country were to unilaterally eliminate its barriers, it would find itself facing terms of trade that hurt its own economy. In fact, whatever one country does, the other country is better off retaining its own trade barriers. Therefore, the problem is that each country has an incentive to retain trade barriers, leading to a worse outcome than would have been possible had both countries cooperated with each other. This basic problem occurs when the pursuit of self-interest by each leads to a poor outcome for all. To make headway in understanding the vast array of specific situations which have this property, a way is needed to represent what is common to these situations without becoming bogged down in the details unique to each. Fortunately, there is such a representation available: the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, there are two players. Each has two choices, namely cooperate of defect. Each must make the choice without knowing what the other will do. No matter what the other does, defection yield a higher payoff than cooperation. If both defect, the dilemma is that both do worse than if both had cooperated. Cases typically result in one of four possible outcomes in the matrix. If both players cooperate, both do fairly well. Both get a reward for mutual cooperation.
However, if one player cooperates but the other defects, the defecting play get the temptation to defect, while the cooperating players gets the sucker’s payoff. If both defect, both get the punishment for mutual defection. What would you do in such a situation? That is basically the gamble of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is simply an abstract formulation of some very common and very interesting situations in which what is best for each person individually leads to mutual defection, whereas everyone would have been better off with mutual cooperation. The definition of Prisoner’s Dilemma requires that several relationships hold among the four different potential outcomes. The second part of the definition of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that the players cannot get out of their dilemma by taking turns exploiting each other. This assumption means that an even chance of exploitation and being exploited is not as good an outcome for a player as mutual cooperation. It is therefore assumed that the reward for mutual cooperation is greater than the average temptation and the sucker’s payoff. This assumption, together with the rank ordering of the four payoffs, defines the Prisoner’s Dilemma. We have come back to the point where we began, where values take the place of good and evil. However, now we have made at least a hasty tour of the intellectual experiences connected with modern politics that made such a response compelling. How it looked to thoughtful Germans is most revealingly expressed in a famous passage by Max Weber, about God science and the irrational: Finally, although a naïve optimism may have celebrated science—that is, the technique of the mastery of life founded on science—as the path which would lead to happiness, I believe I can leave this entire question aside in light of the annihilating critique which Nietzsche has made of “the last men” who “have discovered happiness.” Who, then, still believes in this with the exception of a few big babies in university chairs or in editorial offices?
So penetrating and well informed an observer as Weber could say in 1919 that the scientific spirit at the heart of Western democracy was dead for all serious men and that Nietzsche had killed it, or had at least given it the coup de grace. The presentation of “the last man” in Thus Spake Zarathusta was so decisive that the old-style Enlightenment rationalism need not even be discussed anymore; and, Weber implies, all future discussion or study must proceed with the certainty that the perspective was a “naïve” failure. Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion. This means, simply, that almost all Americans at that time, thinking American in particular, were “big babies” and remained so, long after the Continent had grown up. One need only think of John Dewey to recognize that he fits Weber’s description to a T, and then remember what his influence here once was. And not only Dewey, but everyone from the beginning of our regime, especially those who said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” shared the rationalist dream. Weber’s statement is so important because he made as much as more than anyone brought us into contact with the most advanced Continental criticisms of liberal democracy, and was the intermediary between Nietzsche and us Americans who were the most recalcitrant to one’s insight, perhaps because according to it we represent the worst or most hopeless and are therefore loath to see ourselves in that mirror. A very dark view of the future has been superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys. They have proved too much for us to handle. However, in our defense, we are probably not the only ones for whom they are too much. Perhaps you have caught yourself kissing another person as you first saw kissing in the movies or on television. My children have a phrase to describe this: “television kiss.”
It is fortunate for them that they have noted that there are television kisses and other kinds, because it will help protect them from absorbing it, taking it into themselves where it will come back out ten years, like a replay. Most of us did not make that distinction as we sat in darkened rooms or theaters as children. Since we did not see all that much real kissing, the media kiss became our image of kissing. We found ourselves producing that model of kiss later in life. I was fourteen-year-old when I tried to kiss for the first time. I imitated Brad Pitt’s kiss, but I did not feel it. Only later did I realize that perhaps Brad Pitt did not feel it either; he was merely kissing the way the director said he should. So there I was imitating a kiss that was never real in the first place, worried that there might be something wrong with me for lacking the appropriate feeling and failing to obtain the appropriate response. The journalist Jane Margold was driving home one night in Berkeley with her brother, Harlan. Suddenly a man crawled into the street right in front of them. They screeched to a stop and then, stunned, just sat there for a moment. They finally got out and cautiously went up to the man to find out that he had been stabbed several times in his upper body, was bleeding profusely and was in danger of dying right there. The man’s assailant was nowhere to be seen. In describing the event to me, Jane said that she instantly flipped into a media version of herself. She had never faced anything like it before and had no direct feelings. Instead, playing through her mind were images of similar events she had seen on television or in films. The media superseded her own responses, even to the point of removing her from the event. She was there, but sue did not experience herself as being there. She was seeing the event, but between her and it, floating in her mind, was an image of an implanted reality which would not get out of the way. Jane thought such thoughts as: “This is real; there is a wounded man lying here in from of me, bleeding to death, yet I have no feeling. It seems like a movie.”
In fact, it was they very movielike quality that eventually got her into action. Without feeling, she performed mechanical acts. She and her brother comforted the man, directed traffic, dispatched people to summon the police and an ambulance. She became extremely efficient, but throughout, she had the sense of performing a script. Apart from their economic implications, technologies create the ways in which people perceive reality, and such ways are the key to understanding diverse forms of social and mental life. As individual express their life, so they are. There are three stages in the development of technology: the age of technology of chance, the age of technology of the artisan, the age of technology of the technician. Cultures may be classified into three types: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. At the present time, each type may be found somewhere on the planet, although the first is rapidly disappearing: we must travel to exotic places to find a tool-using culture. If we do, it is well to go armed with the knowledge that, until the seventeenth century, all cultures were tool-users. There was, of course, considerable variation from one culture to another in the tools that were available. Some had only spears and cooking utensils. Some had water mills and coal- and horsepower. However, the main characteristic of all tool-using cultures is that their tools were largely invented to do two things: to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life, such as in the use of waterpower, windmills, and the heavy-wheeled plow; or to serve the symbolic World of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion, as in the construction of castles and cathedrals and the development of the mechanical clock. In either case, tools did not attack (or, more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced.
With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization. These beliefs, in fact, directed the invention of tools and limited the uses to which they were put. Even in the case of military technology, spiritual ideas and social customs acted as controlling forces. It is well known, for example, that the uses of the sword by samurai warriors were meticulously governed by a set of ideals known as Bushido, or the Way of the warrior. The rules and rituals specificizing when, where, and how the warrior must use either his two swords (the katana, or long sword, and the wakizashi, or short sword) were precise, tied closely to the concept of honor, and included the requirement that the warrior commit seppuku or hara-kiri should his honor be compromised. This sort of governance of military technology was not unknow in the Western World. The use of the lethal crossbow was prohibited, under threat of anathema, by Pope Innocent II in the early twelfth century. The weapon was judged to be “hateful to God” and therefore could not be used against Christians. That it could be used against Muslims and other infidels does not invalidate the point that in a tool-using culture technology is not seen as autonomous, and is subject to the jurisdiction of some binding social or religious system. This is why power, which to a large extent defines us as individuals and as nations, is itself being redefined. A clue to this redefinition emerges when we look more closely at some of the unrelated changes. For we discover that they are not as random as they seem. Whether it is Japan’s meteoric rise, GM’s impressive rebound, or the American doctor’s fall from grace, a single common thread unites them.
Take the punctured power of the god-in-a-white coat. Throughout the heyday of doctor-dominance in America, physicians kept a tight choke-hold on medical knowledge. Prescriptions were written in Latin, providing the profession with a semi-secret code, as it were, which kept most patients in ignorance. Medical journals and texts were restricted to professional readers. Medical conferences were closed to the laity. Doctors controlled medical-school curricula and enrollments. Contrast this with the situation today, when patients have astonishing access to medical knowledge. With a personal computer and a WiFi, anyone from home can access data bases like Index Medicus, and obtain scientific papers on everything from Addison’s disease to zygomycosis, and, in fact, collect more information about a specific aliment or treatment than the ordinary doctor has time to read. Copies of the 2,354-page book knows as the PDR or Physicians’ Desk Reference are also readily available to anyone. Once a week on the Lifetime cable network, any televiewer can watch twelve uninterrupted hours of highly technical television programming designed specifically to educate doctors. Many of these programs carry a disclaimer to the effect that “some of this material may not be suited toa general audience.” However, that is for the viewer to decide. The rest of the week, hardly a single newscast is aired in America without a medical story or segment. A video version of the material from the Journal of the American Medical Association is now broadcast by three hundred stations on Thursday nights. The press reports on medical malpractice cases. Inexpensive paperbacks tell ordinary readers what drug side effect to watch for, what drugs not to mix, how to raise or lower cholesterol levels through diet. In addition, major medical breakthroughs, even if television news almost before the M.S. has even taken his subscription copy of journal out of the in-box. In short, the knowledge monopoly of the medical profession has been thoroughly smashed. And the doctor is no longer a god.
This case of the dethroned doctor is, however, only one small example of a more general process changing the entire relationship of knowledge to power in the high-tech nations. In many other fields, too, closely held specialists’ knowledge is slipping out of control and reaching ordinary citizens. Similarly, inside major corporations, employees are winning access to knowledge once monopolized by management. And as knowledge is redistributed, so, too, is the power based on it. A human is a “beast” and purifies one’s heart, and behold, God holds one by the hand. That is not a kind of humans. Purity of heart is a state of being. A man is not pure in kind, but one is able to be or become pure, rather one is only essentially pure when one has become pure, and even than one does not thereby belong to a kind of humans. The “wicked,” that is, the bad, are not contrasted with good humans. The good is to draw near Hod. One does not say that those near to God are good. However, one does call the bas those who are far from God. In the language of modern thought that means that there are humans who have no share in existence, but there are no humans who possess existence. Existence cannot be possessed, but only shared in. One does not rest in the lap of existence, but one draws near to it. Nearness is nothing but such a drawing and coming near continually and as long as the human person lives. The dynamic of fairness and nearness is broken by death when it breaks the life of the person. With death there vanished the heart, that inwardness of humanity, out of which arises the pictures of the imagination, and which rises up in defiance, but which can also be purified. Separate souls vanish, separation vanished. Time which has been lived by the soul vanished with the soul, we know of no duration in time. Only the rock in which the heart is concealed, only the rock of human hearts does not vanish. For it does not stand in time. The time of the World disappears before eternity, but existing humans die into eternity as into the perfect existence.
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Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes.
Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearby Sacramento and Yuba City.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Go. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
The Cathedral of the Fallen Angel
During a Connecticut thunderstorm, Mrs. Winchester’s husband and baby lost their lives in a tragic fire. The distracted widow turned to spiritualism and was advised to take a trip around the World. This she did, visiting mediums, spiritualists and wizards in Europe and India. Foretelling her future, one seer warned her of all the countless thousands of departed souls slain by her husband’s rifles; she was told to plan a castle and continue its building indefinitely because as long as it was under construction she would live; cessation would prove immediately fatal. In the afternoon of Tuesday, July 10, 1888, the inhabitants of Santa Clara Valley, were greatly excited by the sudden appearance, far out in the fields, of a mansion where none was known to exist. The people of the town were farmers and knew the area well. The day before, they had been out on their horses and rode over the spot where the unusual mansion appeared, and where certain that the locality was the best farmland in the valley. And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, for the day was clear and the mansion could be seen as plainly as they saw the hills to the south. It was massive. The estate was surrounded by a six-foot hedge, densely wooded; here and there were deep shadows in its sides indicating glens heavily covered with undergrowth and grasses. At one end the mansion rose almost precipitously from the from the land; at the other, the declivity was gradual; the thick forest of the estate gave way to smaller trees, these to shrubs; these to green meadows that finally melted into the valley. It was patrolled by a pack of ferocious hellhounds, plus, of course, Mrs. Winchester’s staff of armed bodyguards. Hundreds of people from all over California came to investigate; when, as they neared the spot, the beautiful but bizarre mansion became dim in outline, less vivid in color, and at last vanished entirely, leaving the wonder-stricken farmers to return, fully convinced that for the first time in their lives they had really seen this enchanted mansion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
For once there was a topic of conversation that would outlast the day, and the enchanted Winchester mansion passed from lip to lip, both story and the mansion grew in size till the latter was little less than a continent, contain a labyrinth mansion with towers and steeples, stupendous mountain range views, fertile valleys, and wide spreading plains; while the former was limited only be the patience of the listener, and embraced the personal experience, conclusions, reflections, and observations of every woman, man, and child in the valley who had been fortunate enough to see the mansion, hear of it, or tell where it had been seen elsewhere. This is the invariable history of its appearance. No one had ever been able to come close to its grounds, but it had been so often seen on the west coast, that a doubt of its existence, if expressed in the company of farmers, will at once establish for the sceptic a reputation for balderdash of the common affairs of every-day life. In Santa Clara, for instance, the Winchester mansion had been seen by hundreds of people, while many more could testify to its appearance near San Francisco. In San Jose, all the population saw it a few years ago, and shortly before, the villagers of Oakland, saw it, if not by themselves, at least by some of their friends. The Enchanted Winchester mansion, it should be stated that its resemblance to a Victorian/Gothic castle is sometimes very close, and shows that the “enchanter” who has it under a spell knows her business, and is determined to keep her mansion for herself changes its appearance as well as its location in order that her property may not be recognized nor appropriated. At night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. Mrs. Winchester’s arrival was a sensational event. They talked about Mrs. Winchester! Gossiped would be a more fitting word, gossip no one claimed to like-but everyone enjoyed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Talk begat rumor and as the years passed and new towers and gables rose behind the six-foot hedge of Llanada Villa, the rumors grew to established legend. Populations said it just appeared out of nowhere two years ago. Sure two twins could not be like her, and when it appeared in Santa Clara, the mansion would move around to different locations. It had also appeared in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, but it went no further than the Bay Area. Concerning Mrs. Winchester’s mansion, legendary authorities differ on many material points. Some believed that its architecture was due to geometry or some other enchantment, while opponents of this materialistic view were inclined to the opinion that the mansion was not what it seemed to be, that was to say, not Earth, wood, and stones, like as those most people see, but only an illusion that evil spirits or the devil created to deceive the town. Public opinion on the west coast was therefore was strongly divided on the subject, unity of sentiment existing on two points only; that the island had been seen, and that there was something quite out of the ordinary in its appearance. People believe that it would come and go in the night like a light in a bog, and when you do see it, you can see through it. An old fisherman of San Francisco called Ebenezer Thornton knew all about the enchanted Winchester mansion, having not only seen it himself, but, when a boy, learned its history from a “fairy man,” who obtained his information from “the good people” themselves, the facts stated being therefore, of course, of indisputable authority, what the fairies did not know concerning the doings of supernatural and enchanted circles, being not worth knowing. He said that the Winchester mansion was full of temples and round towers all covered with gold and silver till they shone so one could not see it for the brightness. There was a great enchantress in the mansion, and she had all kinds of secrets, and knew where to dig for a pot of gold. She built the castle in one night, and could make herself disappeared when she wanted and could take any shape she pleased. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Ebenezer when on to say that Mrs. Winchester’s husband gave her a charm before he died to use when she was in mortal danger, he also left her a ton of diamonds and millions of dollars. She was a pretty smart woman. One night, Mrs. Winchester was awakened by a noise in one of the kitchens. She tole down, and found her old housekeeper, Madge, with half a dozen of her kidney, sitting by the fire drinking whisky. When the bottle was finished, one of them cried, “It’s time to be off,” and at the same moment she put on a peculiar red cap, and added:–“By yarrow and rue, and my red cap, too, hie over to England!” and seizing a twig she soared up the chimney. As the latter was making her preparations Mrs. Winchester rushed into the kitchen, snatched the cap from her, and placing herself astride of her twig uttered the magic formula. She speedily found herself high in the air over the Irish Sea, and swooping though the empyrean at a rate unequalled by the fastest airplane. They rapidly neared the Welsh coast, and espied a castle afar off, towards the door of which they rushed with a frightful velocity; Mrs. Winchester closed her eyes and awaited the shock, but found to her delight that she had slipped through the keyhole without hurt. The party made their way to the cellar, where they caroused heartily, but the spirits proved too heady, and somehow Mrs. Winchester was captured and dragged before the lord of the castle, who sentenced her to be hanged. On her way to the gallows an old woman in the crowd called out in Irish, “Ah, the enchantress herself, Sarah Winchester alanna! Is it going to die you are in a strange place without your magical charm?” She reached into her pocket and held it in her hand. On reaching the place of execution she was allowed to address the spectators, and did so in the usual ready-made speech, beginning, “Good people all, a warning take by me.” But when she reached the last line, “My parents reared me tenderly” instead of stopped she unexpected added, “By yarrow and rue, good-bye I love you,” with the result that she shot up through the air, to the great dismay of all beholders. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Magic persecution. Genuine magic is the art of bringing about results beyond human powers through the enlistment of supernatural agencies. Black magic deliberately involves the devil and demons, and the resulting enchantment is used for persecution and revenge. A spiritistic circle of twenty members furnishes a good example. Working with black magic, these spiritis experimented to see if they could cause psychic harm or even illness in people they disliked. A strong medium of this occult group chose a minister as a target and vowed to afflict and eliminate her. The minister suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to work for several months. Some phenomena must be eliminated from the spiritistic magic field. In the psychiatric realm, for example, many schizophrenics claim to be magically persecuted. In reality this is only a symptom in the course of psychotic disease. Eliminating all such cases, there are still large-scale, genuine phenomena, especially in areas where occultism has flourished for many years. One common form of magic persecution is beatings by an invisible attacker. Parapsychology also sees magical persecution as a mediumistic problem in the sphere of materializations. Strong mediums (when under demon control) send out energy with which to build up human phantasms and are also able to transform this energy into animal forms, including dogs, cats, frogs, snakes, or human bodies with animal heads, etcetera. This explains the bizarre spiritistic persecution through phantoms in the form of various animals of human bodies with nonhuman heads. These animals bite, scratch, or otherwise torment their victims. Examples, of these occult phenomena abound in areas where the black arts are practiced. However, such occurrences are denied by many intellectuals. Often peasants and country people, especially in Europe, know more about magic than university graduates, who claim to swindle or hocus-pocus trickery are used instead of occult powers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Magic defense. Magic defense enlists supernatural agencies to counteract or unto the mischief wrought by magic persecution. Various kinds of spells, charms, or incantations are employed. In spiritistic séances it is an established fact that injuries inflicted upon a phantasm are sustained by the medium, even in the case of animal phantasm. Many defensive customs develop to combat this threat since magical persecution involves materialization. If a victim can injure an aggressive phantasm one has won the struggle. Many in the West wanted to remove Satan from the equation of black magic and demonic aspects of life. However, more serious discontent came from Satanists whose concerns were completely the opposite. Anton LaVey did not believe in Satan as a literal entity—He was a name for the dark, brutal aspects of humans and nature, as well as a symbol for the potency of humans’ untrammeled will. The Church of Satan was not a religion, and did not worship deities. For many, however, this was not enough. They wanted a real Devil to worship—belonging to a dark, mysterious coven, in the traditional gothic style, seemed much more appealing than being part of some cultural and social elite. Some believed that Satan, although thrown out of Heaven, was reinstated as the son of God and is directly in contact with him. If any coven members offends, they are a bit evil now and again, given corporal punishment, or is expelled from one’s coven and cursed. However, this is said to be for the members own good. They really believe in love, the sanctity of woman as the child bearer and procreator of life, and in worshipping Satan their master. Aleister Crowley was grooming Kenneth as his successor. Mr. Grant’s work examined lost gods, strange spiritual traditions and forbidden symbols, often leading him to some disreputable spiritual neighborhood where devils and demons might be expected to reside, like the Winchester Mystery House. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
If you have a lot of magic in you, you can be a Satanist and have no idea. As if they are the mafia or something, sometimes those who are suspected of being Satanists have their offices broken into like they are the Mafia or something. The Church of Satan, however, has saved lives because it has given them power, power to come out and be themselves when traditional churches would not accept these people. The Dark Lord, was said to be an anthropoid but faceless. Looking at the concept as a diamond, much like the ones left to Mrs. Winchester by her husband William Wirt Winchester, Satan or Lucifer was just other facets of that diamond, purely ways of achieving workings which encompassed the whole. So, if you are particularly drawn to the gothic Satanist current, fine, use rituals based around that. In the Temple of Darkness one could equally have Satanists, Setians, or followers of other paths, the principle being that the whole thing is a psychodrama anyway. Magic is basically the Western version of yoga. Everything that happens in magic happens first in your head. Set, the Egyptian god of evil, was an older deity than Satan. Satan derives from Set. Set, who is defined as the Prince of Darkness, is a force about which you could say, “As we are now, he once was.” When you die your force can survive. Magic is mind enhancing. When one perishes or passes, instead of going into the cosmic whole—becoming one with the goddess or whatever—by sheer force of the will the existence of that magician’s mind can be sustained. This is the whole idea of the Temple of Set, and they use the word “xeper,” meaning “to become,” to define this. Spiritistic cults. If you did not know, Mrs. Winchester was a spiritists. Spiritism is considered a form of Christianity, practically in all civilized countries. A typical meeting consists of hymns, prayer, and a sermon as in a Christian service. The sermon, however, is allegedly given by a spirit from the other World, through a medium. These cults are said to be affected by the “doctrines of demons” and press into the supernatural World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
However, even born-again Christians often cannot differentiate between the spiritual and the psychic-demonic when under the spell of doctrinal errors, particularly those concerning the work of the Holy Spirit. The result can sometimes be confusion, division, and promotion of certain spiritual gifts accredited to demons. We have sometimes seen people end up suffering from mediumistic psychosis. Quite a number of patients who have suffered serious psychic disturbances through the misuse of such practices have become split personalities. The spirits which they called, confused them. One who tries to discover the promises of the other side through superstition endangers oneself to fall a prey to the dark side of one’s psyche. However, many Christians say that spirits of loved ones cannot be brought back from the dead, and the it is just a demon impersonating them. Yet, consider the case of Saul’s visit to the spiritistic medium at Endor (1 Samuel 28.3-25). Samuel’s spirit was actually brought back from the spirit World when the medium Endor tried to contact him. Yet, God brought the spirit back. The Lord stepped. Still one must be careful because many become enslaved and oppressed by occult powers and become victims of various manifestations of spiritistic phenomena. While overwhelming evidence from Christian counseling confirms the fact that spiritistic complicity serious damages the believer’s spiritual life, adherents of Buddhism, Island, or even false cults of Christianity sense no ill effects. Spiritists claim that spiritism has strengthened their belief in life after death and deepened their religious devotion. Psychiatry, psychology, and medical treatment are not sufficient for the healing of the whole human. The gospel of Christ and the liberating power of the Word of God can fully heal body, soul, and spirit. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Mrs. Winchester had a pain in her right forearm. At first the pain was treated as rheumatism but one day the Mrs. Winchester made the interesting discovery that the pain would suddenly subside if she wrote a letter. Having discovered this, whenever the pain became unbearable, she would always take a pencil and begin to write in order to alleviate the pain. However, after a period of time the Mrs. Winchester when go into her Blue Séance Room, where she developed a writing compulsion. She would write things down that she could normally speaking never have written. Often times, this is where the blueprints from her mansion came from. Added to this the written material on each occasion turned out to be some form of religious treatise. Mrs. Winchester took the articles to her minister to let him examine them. He was surprised at their intellectual content. Mrs. Winchester had become a spiritistic writing medium. The parapsychologist would merely see in this example a psychic automation involving the expression of subconscious thoughts. It is true that we need not consider the Mrs. Winchester to be in direct contact with the dead, or putting it another way we need not assume that this is a case of direct demonization, but God could be speaking to her. This is why some believe Mrs. Winchester to be a prophetess. During one of her spiritistic seances, as it happened, a phantasm did in fact appear during a séance. However, it is still not necessary to believe that a spirit really did appear in this instance. Depth psychology suggest that a phantasm can be produced in the following way. The medium through emitting energy causes matter to form as a result of this. In nuclear physics we have the idea that matter is nothing more than concentrated energy. Einstein’s formula E=M.c^2 illustrates this relationship. A comparison can also be drawn from another branch of physics. It is found that both particles and anti-particles are formed at the cathode of an X-ray tube when a current is passed through it at a very high voltage. Energy in the form of electro-magnetic waves is in this way transformed into matter. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
The next step in the mediumistic process involves the unconscious tapping of the information from some source or other, and then the newly formed matter is physically shaped according to this information. The final step is made when the phantasm is brought under the control of the medium. Looking at it from this point of view there is no necessity to believe that the dead person has in any way been disturbed. An animistic explanation based on the powers of the subconscious is thus sufficient to explain the phenomenon of materialization. Yet this is not to say that the rationalistic explanation does justice to the facts of the case. The problem is not as simple as that. However, we do not have the time to delve further into the scientific side of the issues. We have, on many occasions witnessed a disintegration of the personalities of both mediums and participants where materializations have taken place. In addition to this in every case where a person has frequently taken part in spiritistic séances, there is some kind of reaction, even if it is not immediately notice or if there is no manifestation—something happens. There are also people who are able to practise the excursion of the soul. Spiritists affirm that people can send out an astral body from their material body, and commission it to do whatever they ask. Perhaps that was the case when Mrs. Winchester appeared in another country? Spiritism haunts the dark jungle of human aberration. During a séance as the Winchester mansion, Mrs. Winchester noticed that time was passing somewhat wearily. She could hear an occasional thud, thud. Some time must have elapsed before she became, dimly at first, and then distinctly, aware of a bluish phosphorescent emanation from a skeleton. This seemed to rise above it like a faint smoke, which gradually gained consistency, took form, and became distinct; and she saw before her the misty, luminous form on an unclothed man, with wolfish countenance, prognathous jaws, glaring at her out of eyes deeply sunk under projecting brows. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Although she thus descried what she saw, it gave her no idea of substance; it was vaporous, and yet it was articulate. Indeed, she could not say for sure if she saw this apparition with her eyes, or whether it was a dream-like vision of the brain. Though luminous, it cast no light on the wall of the Blue Séance Room; if she raised her hand, it did not obscure any portion of the form presented to her. Then she heard: “I will tear you with the nails of my fingers and toes, and rip you with my teeth.” “What have I done to injure and incense you?” she asked. No word was uttered by either of them; no word could have been uttered by this vaporous form. It had no material lungs, nor throat, nor mouth to form vocal sounds. It had but the semblance of a man. It was a spook, not a human being. However, it proceeded through the walls, odylic force which smote on the tympanum of her mind or soul, and thereon registered the ideas formed by it. So in a like manner Mrs. Winchester thought her replies, and they were communicated back in the same manner. If vocal words had passed between them neither would have been intelligible to the other. No dictionary was ever compiled, or would be compiled, of the tongue or prehistoric man; moreover, the grammar of the speech of that race would be absolutely incomprehensible to humans now. However, thoughts can be interchanged without words. When we think we do not think in any language. It is only when we desire to communicate our thoughts to other humans that we shape them into words and express them vocally in structural grammatical sentences. The beasts have never attained to this, yet they can communicate with one another, not by language, but by thought vibrations. Mrs. Winchester knew as she conversed with him that she was not speaking to him in English, nor in French, nor in Latin, nor in any tongue whatever. Moreover, when she used the words “said” or “spoke,” she meant no more than that the impression was formed by her brain-pan or the receptive drum of her soul, was produced by the rhythmic, orderly sequence of thought-waves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
When, however, she expressed the words “screamed” or “shrieked,” she signified that those vibrations came sharp and swift; and when she said “laughed,” tht they came in a choppy, irregular fashion, conveying the idea, not the sound of laughter. “I will tear you! I will rend you to bits and throw you in pieces about this mansion!” shrieked this demon man. Mrs. Winchester remonstrated, and inquired how she had incensed him. However, yelling with rage, he threw himself upon her. In a moment she was enveloped in a luminous haze, strips of phosphorescent vapour laid themselves about her, but she received no injury whatever, only her spiritual nature was subjected to something like a magnetic storm. After a few moments the spook disengaged itself from Mrs. Winchester, and drew back to where it was before, screaming broken exclamations of meaningless rage, and jabbering savagely. It rapidly cooled down. “Why do you wish to ill me?” She asked again. “I cannot hurt you. I am spirit, you are matter, and spirit cannot injure matter; my nails are psychic phenomena. Your soul you can lacerate yourself, but I can effect nothing, nothing.” “Then why have you attacked me? What is the cause of your impotent recement?” “Because you are the heiress to the Winchester Rifle, and I lived eight thousand years ago. Why are you nursed in the lap of luxury? Why you enjoy your comforts, a civilization that we new nothing of? It is not just. It is cruel on us. We have nothing, nothing, literally nothing, not even lucifer matches!” Again he feel to screaming, as might a caged monkey rendered furious by failure to obtain an apple which he could not reach. “I am very sorry, but it is no fault of mine.” “Whether it be your fault or not does not matter to me. You have these things—we had not. Why, I saw you just now strike a light on the sole of your boot. It was done in a moment. We had only flint and ironstone, and it took half a day with us to kindle a fire, and then it flayed our knuckles with continuous knocking. No! we have nothing, nothing—no lucifer matches, no commercial travellers, no Benedictine, no pottery, no metal, no education, no elections, no chocolat menier.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
“How do you know about these products of the present age, here, buried one hundred feet of soil for eight thousand years?” “It is my spirit which speaks with your spirit. My spook does not always remain with my bones. I can go up; rocks and stones and earth and your labyrinth mansion heaped over me do not hold me down. I am often above. I am in the gasolier overhead. I have seen your servants plough the fields. I have seen a bottle of Benedictine. I have applied my physical lips to it, but I could taste, absorb nothing. I have seen commercial travellers there, cajoling the patron into buying things he did not want. They are mysterious, marvellous beings, their powers of persuasion are little short of miraculous. Why do you think of doing with me?” “Well, I propose first of all photographing you, then soaking you in gum Arabic, and finally transferring you to a museum.” He screamed as though with pain, and grasped: “Do not! do not do it. It will be torture insufferable.” “But why so? You will be under glass, in a polished oak or mahogany box.” “Do not! You cannot understand what it will be to me—a spirit more or less attached to my body, to spend ages upon ages in a museum with fibulae, triskelli, palstaves, celts, torques, scarabs. We cannot travel very far from our bones—our range is limited. And conceive of my feelings for centuries condemned to wander among glass cases containing prehistoric antiquities, and to hear the talk of scientific men alone. Now here, it is otherwise. Here I can pass up when I like into your mansion, and can see the maid and butlers cleaning, the roses and trees growing, the farmers working the field and the magnificent glow of your fine estate. Give me life. There is a sort of filmy attachment that connects our psychic nature with our mortal remains. It is like a spider and its web. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
“Suppose the soul to be the spider and the skeleton to be the web. If you break the thread the spider will never find its way back to its home. So it is with us; there is an attachment, a faint thread of luminous spiritual matter that unites us to our Earthly husk. It is liable to accidents. It sometimes gets broken, sometimes dissolved by water. If a black beetle crawls across it it suffers a sort of paralysis. I have never been to the other side of the of your mansion, I feared to do so, though very anxious to see your architecture and furniture.” “This is news to me,” replied Mrs. Winchester. “Do you know of any case of rupture of connection?” Yes,” he replied. “My old father, after he was dead some years, got his link of attachment broke, and he wandered about disconsolate. He could not find his own body, but he lighted on that of a young female of seventeen, and he got into that. It happened most singularly that her spook, being frolicsome and inconsiderate, had got its bond also broken, and she, that is her spirit, straying about in quest of her body, lighted on that of my venerable parent, and for want of a better took possession of it. It so chanced that after a while they met and became chummy. In the World of spirits there is no marriage, but there grow up spiritual attachments, and these two got rather fond of each other, but never could puzzle it out which was which and what each was; for a female soul had entered into an old male body, and a male soul had taken up its residence in a female body. Neither could riddle out of which each gender was. You see they had no education. However, I know that my father’s soul became quite sportive in that young woman’s skeleton. Each generation makes some discovery that advances civilization a stage, the next enters on the discoveries of the preceding generations, and so culture advances stage by stage. Man is infinitely progressive; even the brute beast is.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
At that moment, Mrs. Winchester heard a shout—saw a flash of light. The construction workers had pierced the barrier. A rush of fresh air entered. She staggered to her feet. She felt dizzy. Kind hands grasped her. She was dragged forth. Brandy was poured down her throat. When she came to herself, she said, “Thank you. Talking with spirits can be terrible dreadful. When you are trying to summon one, souls get crossed and the one you are seeking may not cross through. They are so desperate to find a medium to communicate with.” As an ingredient of idol worship, magic goes back to antiquity. By virtue of their multiplicity and limited knowledge and power, the gods (demons) of paganism are incapable of establishing stability and security in society. This deficiency forced both gods and men to make use of magic—an inactive power independent of gods and men, but which could be activized by the assistance of incantations and rituals in order to accomplish supernatural deeds. Because of widespread denial of the reality of supernatural power—both divine and demonic, confusion abounds concerning the nature of magic. The history of magic is replete with extraordinary extrasensory phenomena that involve the spirit realm and every phase of the natural World as well, including human beings, animals, plants, and inorganic matter. Spirit-rapping, apparitions, ghosts, moving of furniture, and playing of musical instruments by invisible hands, stones falling from a ceiling, magical killing of cattle and blighting of crops, etcetera, are just a few of the weird occurrences that have happened at the Winchester Mystery House in its 134 years. However, there have also been beautiful supernatural events such as apparitions getting married, giant spirits of light in the shape of a man peering out guests, and on occasion, even rainbows and angels have appeared. Not all spirits or evil or angry, some or loving and welcoming. Few of thousands of annual transient guests are disappointed for here one finds visible truth even stranger than all the weird Mystery House features. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Winchester Mystery House
Beautiful weather calls for a walk around Sarah’s iconic gardens ⛲️🪴Open 10AM – 5PM this weekend!
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle , or who were jealous of its wealth 👻
And a Hair of His Head Shall Not Fall to the Ground Unnoticed
We cannot go to others with what we have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what needs to be done. We can only go and put to the proof in actions. And even this is not what we “ought to” do: rather we can—we cannot do otherwise. This is the eternal revelation which is present in the here and now. I neither know of nor believe in any revelation that is not the same in its primal phenomenon. Joseph Smith returned to Independence in April, 1832, to help the Saints in their conflict with the pioneer Missourians, who did not like the people from the East. The day after his arrival, Joseph called a conference of the Saints in America. One of the first items of business was to vote to acknowledge Joseph Smith as “president of the high priesthood,” or president of the church. Provision was later made for two counselors to the president, making three in the Presidency. A revelation was received at this time in which the Lord said: “I give unto you directions how you may act before me, that it may turn to you for your salvation. I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say, but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise. American must increase in beauty, and in holiness…America must arise and put on her beautiful garments. Therefore, I give unto you this commandment, that ye bind yourselves by this covenant. And you are to be equal, or in other words, you are to have equal claims on the properties, for the benefit of managing the concerns of your stewardships, every man according to his wants and his needs, inasmuch as his wants are just. And all this for the benefit of the church of the living God, that every man may improve upon his talent, that every man may gain other talents; yea, even an hundredfold, to be cast into the Lord’s storehouse, to become the common property of the whole church, every man seeking the interest of his neighbor, and doing all things with an eye single to the glory of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
“Make unto yourselves friends with the mammon of unrighteousness, and they will not destroy you. Leave judgment alone with me, for it is mine and I will repay. Peace be with you; my blessings continue with you, for even yet the kingdom is yours, and shall be for ever if you fall not from your steadfastness.” After preaching several powerful sermons and visiting and encouraging the Saints, Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and Newell K. Whitney left Independence for Kirtland, where they arrived in June. During this same month the first issues of the paper, the Evening and Morning Star, was published at Independence. It was a joyous treat for the Saints in Kirtland to receive a copy of this paper. Joseph and Sidney Rigdon spent much of their time on the work of correcting the Scriptures during the summer and fall of 1832. Two revelations were given during this period giving instruction on the priesthood in the church and containing many glorious promises. The Lord praised the Saints for their hard work which had been done by much sacrifice and under unfavorable conditions. The Lord explained the purposes of the two priesthoods, the Aaronic and the Melchisedec. The people were instructed to accept the ministry of men who are called to the priesthood. Jesus Christ, the Lord said: “All they who receive this priesthood receiveth me, saith the Lord, for he that receiveth my servants receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth my Father, and he that reciveth my Father receiveth my Father’s kingdom.” Helpful instruction was given in this revelation: “You shall live by every word that proceedeth forth from the mouth of God. For the word of the Lord is truth, and whatsoever is truth is light, and whatsoever is light in Spirit, even the Spirit of Jesus Christ. And the Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the World; and the Spirit enlightenth every man through the World, that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
“And everyone that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit, cometh unto God, even the Father. Whoso cometh not unto me is under the bondage of sin; and whoso recieveth not my voice is not acquainted with my voice, and is not of me; and by this you may know the righteous from the wicked.” The elders were told they should travel without money or provisions—“pure or scrip” were the exact words used—and Jesus promised: “And any man that shall go and preach this gospel of the kingdom, and fail not to continue faithful in all things, shall not be weary in mind, neither darkened, neither in body, limb or joint; and an hair of his head shall not fall to the ground unnoticed. And they shall not go hungry, neither athirst. Therefore take no thought for the morrow, for what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. For consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin; and the kingdoms of this World, in all their glory, are not arrayed like one of these; for your Father who art in Heaven, knoweth that you have need of all these things. Therefore, let the morrow take thought for the things of itself. Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say, but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every man. Whoso receiveth you receiveth me, and the same will feed you, and clothe you, and give you money. And he who feeds you, or clothes you, and gives you money, shall in no wise lose his reward.” A little son, whom they named Joseph Smith III, was born to Emma and Joseph on November 6, 1832. This baby was to have an important part in the work of the Lord later. An important revelation was given on December 27, 1832. The Saints were commanded to keep the laws of God. The Lord said: “He who is not able to abide the law of a celestial kingdom, can not abide a celestial glory; and he who can not abide the law of terrestrial kingdom, can not abide a terrestrial glory; he who can not abide the law of a telestial kingdom, can not abide a telestial glory; therefore, he is not meet for a kingdom of glory. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
“And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you, and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things. Therefore, sanctify yourselves that your minds become single to God, and the days will come that you shall see him. Continue in prayer and fasting from this time forth. And I give unto you a commandment, that you shall teach one another the doctrines of the kingdom. Call your solemn assembly, as I have commanded you; and as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning even by study, and also by faith. See that ye love one another; cease to be covetous; learn to impart one to another as the gospel requires; cease to be idle; cease to be unclean; cease to find fault one with another. Cease to sleep longer than is needful; retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated. Pray always, that you may not faint until I come.” Provision was made in this revelation for establishing a “school of the prophets,” in the “house of the Lord.” This school was for all members of the priesthood, from the high priests to the deacons, and it was to be taught by the Presidency of the church. To be humble is to recognize gratefully our dependence on the Lord—to understand that we have constant need for His support. Humility is an acknowledgment that our talents and abilities are gifts from God. It is not a sign of weakness, timidity, or fear; it is an indication that we know where our true strength lies. We can be both humble and fearless. We can be both humble and courageous. The Lord will strengthen us as we humble ourselves before Him. “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble…Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall life you up,” reports James 4.6 and 10. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
When the storms in life come, one can be steady because one is standing on the rock of one’s faith in Jesus Christ. May everyone face the storms with a peaceful heart. The place to begin is to remember that we are each a beloved child of God and that He has inspired servants. Those servants of God have foreseen the times in which we live. Know also that in the last days, perilous times shall come. Anyone with eyes to see the signs of the times and ears to hear the words of prophets knows that is true. The perils of greatest danger come to us from the forces of wickedness. Those forces are increasing. And so it will become more difficult, not easier, to honor the covenants we must make and keep to live the gospel of Jesus Christ. For those of us who are concerned for ourselves and for those we love, there is hope in the promise God has made of a place of safety in the storms ahead. It has never been more important than it is now to understand how to build a strong foundation. “Then Solomon said, The Lord has said that He would dwell in the thick darkness,” reports II Chronicles 6.1. Therefore, do not fear because God is everywhere. The human wish, we are saying, is not merely a push from the past, not merely a call from primitive needs demanding satisfaction. It also has in it some selectivity. It is a forming of the future, a molding by a symbolic process which includes both memory and fantasy, of what we hope the future will be. The wish is the beginning of orienting ourselves to the future, an admission that we want the future to be such and such; it is a capacity to reach down deep into ourselves and preoccupy ourselves with a longing to change the future. However, there is no will without a prior wish. The wish, like all symbolic processes, has a progressive element, a reaching ahead, as well as a regressive pole, a propulsion from behind. The wish thus carries its meaning as well as its force. Its motive power lies in the conjunction of this meaning and force. We can now understand why William Lynch should hold that “to wish is the most human act.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The past is drifting away at a faster and faster rate. When we look back at, say, the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we realize that many of its defining episodes no longer grip us as strongly as they one did. For the generation now coming into power, events like the 911, the civil rights protests of the 2020s, the Ukrainian War, the Cultural Revolution, homelessness, demands for affordable housing and spread of graffiti in small towns seems increasingly more significant and relevant. Therefore much of what will happen in our lifetimes will consist of adaptation to and further development of a process that began three quarters of a century ago—the most revolutionary wave of change in wealth creation since at least the eighteenth century. Let us pause briefly, then, to summarize and draw together some key things. First, this revolution is a matter not just of technology, stock-market swings, inflation or deflation but of profound social, cultural, political and geopolitical changes as well. Failure to recognize the connections between these and economics leads us to seriously underestimate the oncoming challenges we face. Second, while headlines and business chatter continually refer to improving or declining “fundamentals,” we suggest that that these ups and downs are largely superficial responses to far more important shifts in what we have termed “deep fundamentals”—those factors and forces that have governed all economic activity sine our days as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Economists have long studied some of these essentials—things like work, the division of labor, exchange and the sharing of rewards. They have also filled libraries with studies on technology, energy and the environment. Business gurus drawing on these studies pour out advice about everything from human-resource management to network organization, insourcing and outsourcing, leadership and strategy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Yet, if they ignore three key forces driving today’s wealth revolution—dramatic changes in our relations to time, space and, above all, knowledge, how good can advice and proposed strategies be? It is, we have contended, only by recognizing the centrality of these wealth drivers that we can prepare for tomorrow. For this reason, we have looked closely at each of these deep fundamentals and their impacts on wealth. Take, for instance, the de-synchronization effect. As we saw earlier, companies are compelled to shift and re-shirt their products and relationships incessantly. Customer demands, financial imperatives and market forces all change at accelerating, but very different, rates. In doing so, they impose destabilizing cross-pressures on firms whose managers struggle to come to terms with time. In response, a big synchronization industry has grown up to help firms cope with clashing speeds. At the same time, a backward, tortoise-paced public sector—itself badly de-synchronized—imposes a huge “time-tax” on companies by slowing them down with delays in court decisions, procurements process, regulatory rulings, permit procedures and in a thousand other ways. In short, one part of the system is flooring the gas pedal while the other is slamming on the brakes. Nowhere, as we have noted, is this more frustratingly evident than in the contradiction between the fast-changing skill requirements of an advanced, accelerative economy and the glacial immobility of its schools. We have seen also that some degree of de-synchronization is essential to keep competition and innovation going on. However, it is equally clear that excessive de-synchronization can throw companies, industries and entire economies into chaos. Indeed, one can look at the great stock market shakeouts as desperate attempts by the wealthy system to re-synchronize itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
However, time is only part of the story. To understand tomorrow’s oncoming changes, the cumulative effects of time conflicts need to be seen against the equally powerful transformations in the spatial landscape. Thus the World today holds its breath while watching the massive relocation of wealth and wealth creation toward formerly “developing” countries led by China and India—surely one of the biggest and fastest such transfers in history and possibly the completion of a great circle of wealth movement that began some five hundred years ago. Moreover, we have suggested that, instead of asking whether globalization will continue, we recognize a coming split—possible de-globalization on the economic level and re-globalization of campaigns against such problems as pollution, terrorism, drugs, sexual slavery and genocide. Here, too, gas pedal and brake are applied at the same time. Out of this collision will come the accelerated relocation of the globe’s wealth creation to new high-value-added hot spots—leaving behind new pockets of poverty. However, the most dramatic spatial shifts of all has little to do with these terrestrial concerns. Though millions brush it aside, we actually stand at the historical edge of humanity’s serious thrust into outer space. For historians of tomorrow looking back at the twenty-first century, one of most important economic events of all may prove to be the colonization of space and wealth creation beyond our home planet. None of these changes would occur without even more potent transformations in the deep fundamental of knowledge and our relations with it. While shifts in the use of time and space will be easy to recognize, today’s revolution in knowledge—the defining deep fundamental of our time—is far harder to grasp. These changes are, by their very nature, intangible, invisible, abstract, epistemological and seemingly remote from daily life. Yet no attempt to forecast the future of wealth can succeed without a thorough appreciation of the new role of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
We have provided an admittedly simplified primer on the scope, nature and role of knowledge as the central resource of advanced economies. However, here again we do not just need to analyze, but to synthesize—to see these deeply fundamental changes in interaction with one another. When we alter our relationship to time, for example, by speeding things up, we inevitably make some knowledge obsolete. We thereby increase the backlog of obsoledge that we lug around with us. Let us proceed to economic and social changes. New Deal. The Keynesian economics of the New Deal has cushioned the business cycle and maintained nearly full employment. It has not achieved its ideal of social balance between public and private works. The result is an expanding production increasingly consisting of corporation boondoggling. Syndicalism. Industrial workers have won their unions, obtained better wages and working conditions, and affirmed the dignity of labor. However, they gave up their ideal of workers’ management, technical education, and concern for the utility of their labor. The result is that a vast majority could not care less about what they make, and the “labor movement” is losing force. Class struggle. The working class has achieved a striking repeal of the iron law of wages; it has won a minimum wage and social security (although future funding is uncertain). However, the goal of an equalitarian or freely mobile society has been given up, as has the solidarity of the underprivileged. The actual result is an increasing rigidity of statuses; some of the underprivileged tending to drop out of society altogether. On the other hand, the cultural equality that has been achieved has been the degradation of the one popular culture to the lowest common denominator. Production for Use. This socialist goal has been missed, resulting in many of the other failures here listed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Sociology. During the past century, the sociologist have achieved their aim of dealing with humankind in its natural groups or groups with common problems, rather than as isolated individuals or a faceless mass. Social science has replaced many prejudices and ideologies of vested interests. However, on the whole, social scientists have given up their aim of fundamental social change and an open-experimental method determining its goals as it went along: the pragmatist ideal of society as a laboratory for freedom and self-correcting humanity. The actual result is an emphasis on “socializing” and “belonging,” with the loss of nature, culture, group solidarity and group variety, and individual excellence. There are 773,000,000 illiterates in the World. There are approximately 43 million illiterates in the United States of America, and according to a report from our Librarian of Congress, there may be an equal number of alliterates. In any case, a general impatience with books will develop, especially with books in which language is used with subtlety to express complex ideas. Most likely there will be a decline in readers’ analytical and critical skills. According to the results of standardized tests given in schools, this has been happening in the United States of America for the past fifty-five years. I suspect concern for history will also decline, to be replaced by a consuming interest in the present. The effect on political life will be devastating. There will be less emphasis on issues, substance, and ideology, an increase in the importance of image and style. Politicians will have greater concern for moment-to-moment shifts in public opinion, less concern for long-range policies. Unless the use of television for political campaigns is strictly prohibited, elections may be decided by which party spends more on televisions and media consultants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Even if political commercials are prohibited, politicians will appear on entertainment programs and will almost certainly be asked to give testimonials for non-political products such as cars, beer, and breakfast foods. The line between political life and entertainment will blur, and movies stars may be taken seriously as political candidates. Once the population becomes accustomed to spending much of its time watching television—in the United States of America, the average household has television on about eight hours a day—there will be a decrease in activities outside the home: fewer and smaller gatherings in parks, beer halls, concert halls, and other public places. As street life decreases, there may well be an increase in street crime. Young and some older people will, of course, become disaffected from school and reading. Children’s games are likely to disappear. In fact, it will become important to keep children watching television because they will be a major consumer group. In the United States of America, children watch 5,000 hours of television before they enter kindergarten and 16,000 hours by high school’s end. Commercial television does not dislike children; it simply cannot afford the idea of childhood. Consumerhood takes precedence. Naturally, family life will be significantly changed. There will be less interaction among family members, certainly less talk between parents and children. Such talk as there is will be noticeably different from what you are now accustomed to. The young will speak of matters that once were confined to adults. Commercial television is a medium that does not segregate its audience, and therefore all segments of the population share the same symbolic World. You may find that in the end the line between adulthood and childhood has been erased entirely. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Television is itself a commodity, and an expensive one too. Therefore it is physically consistent with the prevalent reality. Its purchase gives the commodity system a boost. Television changes the nature of the artificial environment from passive to active. Unlike buildings and machines, television literally enters inside human beings; inside our homes, our minds, our bodies, making possible the reordering of human processes from the inside. Television is an experience that can be had by virtually everyone at the same time. By substituting for a greater diversity of experiences and unifying everyone with it, it assists commercial efficiency. With all people confined to the same mental and physical condition, a single advertising or political voice appropriate to the common mood can influence everyone. Once diversity of experience is reduced to television, a relative handful of people can control everyone’s awareness. Luckily for advertisers, in a capitalist system, whoever is in a position to pay for the technology has primary access to it. Television is unique in that it smooths out any furrows in the commodity system. Dormant anxieties can be dulled by the television experience. Beyond being a delivery system for commodity life, it is the solder to hold that life together, the drug to ease the pain of confined and channeled existence. Though television passes for experience, it is really more like “time out,” as we shall see later. It is anti-experience. Its interaction with the human body and mind fixes people to itself, dulls human sensibility and dims awareness of the World. This enhances the commodity life by reducing knowledge of any other. By focusing people on events well outside their lives, television encourages passivity and inaction, discourages self-awareness and the ability to cope personally, both of which are dangerous for advertising. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
By speaking in images, television adds a dimension to the mirror-image process. Unlike radio or print media, advertising can now implant internal movies, forever available for self-comparison. Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: itself. It becomes everyone’s intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power. You have seen how commercial stress the values of youth, how they stress consumption, the immediate gratification of desires, the love of the new, a contempt for old technology. Television screens are saturated with commercials promote the Utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naïve but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales. Which is to say, they are not. They are about values and myths and fantasies. One might even say they form a body of religious literature, a montage of voluminous, visualized sacred texts that provide people with images and stories around which to organize their lives. To give you some idea of exactly how voluminous, I should tell you that the average America will have seen approximately 1 million television commercials, at the rate of a thousand per week, by the age of twenty. By the age of sixty-five, the average American will have seen more than 2 million television commercials. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Commercial television adds to the Decalogue several impious commandments, among them that thou shalt have no others gods than consumption, thou shalt despise what is old, thou shalt seek to amuse thyself continuously, and thou shalt avoid complexity like the ten plagues of that the underworld. Perhaps you are thinking that I exaggerate the social and psychic results of the commercialization of television and that, in any case, what has happened in the United States of America could not happen anywhere else. If you are, you overestimate the power of tradition and underestimate the power of technology. To enliven your senses of the forces unleashed by technological change, you need only remind yourself of what the automobile has brought to Austria. Has it not changed the nature of your cities, created the suburbs, made roads through your forest and homes, restructured your economy? You must not mislead yourselves by what you know about World culture as of 2022. May regions around the World are still living in the age of Gutenberg. Commercial television attacks such backwardness with astonishing ferocity. For example, at the present time, less than 20 percent of population in Tuvalu watches television in the evening. A commercial television system will fund this situation intolerable. In the United States of America, approximately 90 percent of people watch television during evening hours, and broadcasters find even those number unsatisfactory. In nations like Korea, television commercials are bunched together so that they do not interfere with the continuity of the programs. Such a situation makes no sense to American commercial systems. The whole idea is precisely to interrupt the continuity of programs so that one’s thoughts cannot stray too far from consideration of consumership. Indeed, the aim is to obliterate the distinction between a program and a commercial. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
In some countries, you do not have many advertising agencies, and those you have are small and without great influence. In America, our advertising agencies are among the largest and most powerful corporations in the World. DDB Needham Worldwide has gross billings of $6.7 billion each year, 6,726 employees and SICs 7311 advertising agencies, and possibly receives $700 million per year for American network television alone. This is serious money and these are serious radicals. They cannot afford to permit a culture to retain old ideas about work or religion or politics or childhood. And it will not be long before they and their kind show up in the most primitive communities. If, like me, you claim allegiance to an authentic conservative philosophy, one that seeks to preserve that which nourishes the spirit, you would be wise to approach all proposals for a free-market television system with extreme caution. Indeed, I will go further than that: it is either hypocrisy or balderdash to argue that the transformation of the World from a print-based culture to a television-based culture can leave that country’s traditions intact. Conservatives know this is nonsense, and so they worry. Radicals also know this is nonsense. However, they do not care. In 1879, a French ophthalmologist named Luis Emile Javal discovered that when people read, their eyes do not sweep across the words in a perfectly fluid way. Their visual focus advances in little jumps, called saccades, pausing briefly at different points along each line. One of the Javal’s colleagues at the University of Paris soon made another discovery: that the pattern of pauses, or “eye fixations,” can vary greatly depending on what is being read and who is doing the reading. In the wake of these discoveries, brain researchers began to use eye-tracking experiments to learn more about how we read and how our minds work. Suck studies have also proven valuable in providing further insights into the Internet’s effects on attention and cognition. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In 2006, Jakob Nielsen, a longtime consultant on the design of Web pages who has been studying online reading since the 1990s, conducted an eye-tracking study of Web users. He has 232 people wear a small camera that tracked their eye movements as they read pages of text and browsed other content. Nielsen found that hardly any of the participants read online text in a methodical, line-by-line way, as they would typically read a page of text in a book. The vast majority skimmed the text quickly, their eyes skipping down the pages in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F. They would start by glancing all the way across the first two or three lines of text. Then their eyes would drop down a bit, and they would scan about halfway across a few more lines. Finally, they would let their eyes cursorily drift a little father down the left-hand side of the page. This pattern of online reading was confirmed by subsequent eye-tacking study carried out at the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University. “F,” wrote Mr. Nielsen, in summing up the findings for his clients, is “for fast. That is how users read your precious content. In a few second, their eyes move at amazing speed across your website’s words in a pattern that is very different from what you learned in school.” As a complement to his eye-tracking study, Mr. Nielsen analyzed an extensive database on the behavior of Web users that had been compiled by a term of German researchers. They had monitored the computers of twenty-five people for an average of about a hundred days each, tracking the time the subjects spent looking at some fifty thousand Web pages. Parsing the data, Mr. Nielsen found that as the number of words on a pace increases, the time a visitor spends looking at the page goes up, but only slightly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
For every hundred additional words, the average viewer will spend just 4.4 more seconds perusing the page. Since even the most accomplished reader can read only about eighteen words in 4.4 seconds, Mr. Nielsen told his clients, “when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18 percent of it.” And that, he cautioned, is almost certainly an overstatement. It is unlikely that the people in the study were spending all their time reading; they were also probably glancing at pictures, videos, advertisements, and other types of content. Mr. Nielsen’s analysis backed up the conclusions of the German researchers themselves. They had reported that most Web pages are viewed for ten seconds or less. Fewer than one in tend page views extend beyond two minutes, and a significant portion of those seem to involve “unattended browser windows…left open in the background of the desktop.” The researchers observed that “even new pages with plentiful information and many links are regularly viewed for a brief period.” However, with many people still have 4GLTE mobile phones, advertisers can get several seconds more of free advertisement from certain formats because the phones freeze up and leave their content on the phone for longer than they have paid for, so it is like with the older technology, firms get more for their dollar. Overall, however, results seem to “confirm that browsing is a rapidly interactive activity.” The results also reinforce something that Mr. Nielsen wrote in 1997 after his first study of online reading. “How do users read on the web?” he asked then. His succinct answer is: “They do not.” Many types of reading are important. The most visible sign of our increasing separateness and, in its turn, the cause of ever greater separateness is divorce. It has a deep influence on our universities because more and more of the students are products of it, and they do not only have problems themselves but also affect other students and the general atmosphere. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Divorce in America is the most palpable indication that people are not made to live together, and that, although they want and need to create a general will out of the particular wills, those particular wills constantly reassert themselves. There is a quest, but ever more hopeless, for arrangements and ways of putting the broken pieces back together. The task is equivalent to squaring the circle, because everyone loves oneself most but wants others to love one more than one loves themselves. Such is particularly the demand of children, against which parents are now rebelling. In the absence of a common good or common object, as Mr. Rousseau puts it, the disintegration of society into particular wills is inevitable. Selfishness in this case is not a moral vice or a sin but a natural necessity. The “Me generation” and “narcissism” are merely descriptions, not causes. The solitary savage in the state of nature cannot be blamed for thinking primarily of oneself, nor can a person who lives in a World where the primacy of oneself, nor can a person who lives in a World where the primacy of self-concern is only too evident in the most fundamental institutions, where the original selfishness of the state of nature remains, where concern for the common good is hypocritical, and where morality seems to be squarely on the side of selfishness. Or, to put it otherwise, the concern with self-development, self-expression, or growth, which flourished as a result of the optimistic faith in a preestablished harmony between such a concern and society or community, has gradually revealed itself to be inimical to community. A young person’s qualified or conditional attachment to divorced parents merely reciprocates what one necessarily sees as their conditional attachment to one, and is entirely different from the classic problem of loyalty to families, or other institutions, which were clearly dedicated to their members. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
In the past, such breaking away was sometimes necessary but always morally problematic. Today it is normal, and this is another reason why the classical literature is alien to so many of our young, for it is largely concerned with liberation from real claims—like family, faith, or country—whereas now the movement is in the opposite direction, a search for claims on oneself that have some validity. Children who have gone to the school of conditional relationships should be expected to view the World in the light of what they learned there. Children may be told over and over again that their parents have a right to their own lives, that they will enjoy quality time instead of quantity time, that they are really loved by their parents even after divorce, but children do not believe any of this. They think they have a right to total attention and believe their parents must live for them. There is no explaining otherwise to them, and anything less inevitably produces indignation and an inextirpable sense of injustice. To children, the voluntary separation of parents seems worse than their death precisely because it is voluntary. The capriciousness of wills, their lack of directedness to the common good, the fact that they could be otherwise but are not—these are the real source of the war of all against all. Children learn a fear of enslavement to the wills of others, along with a need to dominate those wills, in the context of the family, the one place where they are supposed to learn the opposite. Of course, many families are unhappy. However, that is irrelevant. The important lesson that the family taught was the existence of the only unbreakable bond, for better or for worse, between human beings. The decomposition of this bond is surely America’s most urgent social problem. However, nobody even tries to do anything about it. The tide seems to be irresistible. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Among the many items on the agenda of those promoting America’s moral regeneration, I never find marriage and divorce. The last time anyone in public office took a crack at anything like this issue was when President Trump urged Federal civil servants living together out of wedlock to get married. He said, “Marriage is a very beautiful and wonderful experience, something that everyone should enjoy. When I married, it was courtly love, and was one of the happiest moments in my parents’ lives.” Courtly love, the literary invention of medieval troubadours, is one thing and, unlike the proverbial and unchanging wheel, has been constantly reinvented. Courtly love is a manifestation that acknowledges the tenderness of romance, but incorporates it into a great passion guided not by carnality but rather by the highest moral and aesthetic values. Courtly love is an exalted state between a man and a superior woman he both respects and adores with quasi-religious fervor. Her love tests his resolve, firmness, and loyalty, for it is difficult to obtain. It is also immensely ennobling, so that his very suffering strengths every aspect of his being: his military prowess, social standards, even his moral and religious perspectives. Sometimes, the mere thought of his beloved triggers these holistic improvements. The rules of courtly love are the inherently painful ceaseless meditation on the beauty of one’s beloved, whom one glimpses from time to time but cannot possess. The ideal, seldom fulfilled, is total union with the beloved, to whom one is almost never married. O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,–Nature’s observatory—whence the dell, its flowery slops, its river’s crystal swell, may seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ‘mongst boughs pavillion’s, where the deer’s swift leap startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
But though I will gladly trace these scenes with thee, yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be almost the highest bless of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. The moon is full the spring nights grow longer, in the north forests startled crows cry out. Past loves are a thousand miles farther each day, still the season’s changes can stir the heart. As one who with pain and suffering has cut a path through a trackless wilderness, and then looks back to observe joyfully other humans travelling easily the roadway one has chartered, so did out forefathers bless their lot as the bearers of salvation, saying: “How goodly is our portion, how blessed our lot, how beautiful our heritage!” Verily our ancestors regarded their role in history as a sign of God’s grace, a token of the love of the Almighty for America, and through America for all human. (Oh, by the way, America is seen as a brand and live styles in many countries, so there are people in China, Japan, and Korea, for example, who believe they are the real Americans. This shows you how manifest destiny and the America Dream is real.) For this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples. May we, the latter day children of America continue our people’s historic quest for God and His law of righteousness, and together with our fellowmen, may we establish His kingdom of truth, justice and peace. And the Lord shall be King over all the Earth, on that day, the Lord shall be One, and His name one. The history of America is the great living proof of the working of divine Providence in the affairs of the World. Alone among the nations America has shared all great movements since humankind became conscious of their destinies. If there is no divine purpose in the long travail of America, it is vain to seek for any such purpose in humans’ life. In the reflected light of that purpose each American should lead one’s life with an added dignity. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Love Can be a Cover for Violence
Everybody poppin’ pain pills is everybody hurt? Victorian men used to push down and suppress what he called “lower” bodily desires. However, one surely cannot be a man of decision without taking bodily desires into consideration. Particularly if the disease or treatment is mutilating, celibacy from impotence as a consequence of various genital cancers, is presumed and understood. The same is true of paraplegia or quadriplegia. Diabetes is another condition that may provoke impotence in men. So are some psychiatric disorders that include symptoms of shame and despair. Another common one is anorexia, which in severe form effectively neuters the victim, who becomes too weak to contemplate, desire, or partake in pleasures of the flesh. Other conditions that may induce celibacy are less well known. One of these is vaginismus, in which muscle spasms around the female private area are so severe that a male organ cannot enter it or causes extreme pain when it does. It is difficult to know how many women are affected by it. In the 1970s and 1980s, Masters and Johnson found it in about 5 percent of research volunteers at their institute. They suspected it was generally underestimated in medical diagnoses of the general population because many women sufferers opt for celibacy to avoid the pain and embarrassment of dealing with it. Because these women do not seek help for what might be perceived as a dysfunction, they are medical research’s unknowns. Vaginismus is uncomfortable sensation for women and can be so severe that pleasures of the flesh is impossible. Masters and Johnson have been consulted by desperate couples unable to consummate their marriages after ten years. Often they are driven to seek help because a longing for children overpowers their embarrassment or their refusal to acknowledge they have a problems. Sometimes vaginismus develops after years of normal functioning. Traumatic events such as nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh may provoke it. If an episiotomy has not properly healed, for example, so may experience pain during pleasures of the flesh. Other painful conditions may also provoke vaginismus as a defensive response. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Negative pleasures of the flesh psychological condition can also produce vaginismus, as a reaction to feelings of extreme guilt. Many women reported to Masters and Johnson that their mothers were intensely puritanical about pleasures of the flesh and refused to allow their daughters to do anything they labeled harlotry, including wearing makeup before age eighteen, dressing in typical teenage style, or having boyfriends. One woman’s mother had zealously clipped newspaper articles describing nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh and, throughout her daughter’s four years at university, sent them to her weekly. In the sphere of pleasures of the flesh, though some women avoid intimate passions altogether, others “service” their husbands through fellatio or manual manipulation. They are distraught that they cannot offer traditional pleasures of the flesh and worry that their spouses will find a more titillating partners. Some do, engaging in extramarital affairs for a release through pleasures of the flesh and also to verify that they themselves are still capable of intimate passions. Couples forced into celibacy that is the direct consequence of a medical condition, as opposed to a religious, ascetic, or idealistic principle, see their abstinence as an unfortunate, even tragic condition that requires professional intervention. It subtly alters the form of a relationship and is extremely stressful. In rare instances, this unwelcome celibacy is seen for what it is: a bearable way of life precipitated by a regrettable medical condition. The body consists of the muscular, neurological, and glandular correlates of intentionality, such as increased adrenalin secretion when we are enraged and want to strike something, increased speed of heart beat when we are anxious and want to run, engorgement of the private organs when we are excited by intimate passions. Therefore, it is important for one to become aware of one’s bodily feelings and bodily state in the moment. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Civilization has seemingly led us around full circle, back to the state of nature taught to us by the founding fathers of modern thought. However, now it is present not in rhetoric but in reality. Those who first taught the state of nature proposed it as a hypothesis. Liberated from all the conventional attachments to religion, country, and family that men actually did have, how would they live and how would they feel reconstruct those attachments? It was an experiment designed to make people recognize what they really care about and engage their loyalties on the basis of this caring. However, a young person today, to exaggerate only a little, actually begins de novo, without the givens or imperatives that one would have had only yesterday. His country demands little of one and provides well for one, one’s religion is a matter of absolutely free choice and—that is what is really fresh—so are his involvements in pleasures of the flesh. He can now choose, but he finds he no longer has a sufficient motive for choice that is more than whim, that is binding. Reconstruction is proving impossible. The state of nature should culminate in a contract, which constitutes a society out of individuals. A contract requires not only a common interest between the contracting parties but also an authority to enforce its fulfillment by them. In the absence of the former, there is no relationship; in the absence of the latter, there can be no trust, only diffidence. In the state of nature concerning friendships and love today, there is doubt about both, and the result is a longing for the vanished common group, called roots, without the means to recover it, and timidity and self-protectiveness in associations guaranteed by neither nature nor convention. The pervasive feeling that love and friendship are groundless, perhaps the most notable aspect of the current feeling of groundless, perhaps the most notable aspect of the current feeling of groundlessness, has caused them to give way to the much vaguer and more personal idea of commitment, that choice in the void whose cause resides only in the will of the self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The young want to make commitments, which constitute the meaning of life, because love and nature do not suffice. That is what they talk about, but they are haunted by the awareness that the talk does not mean very much and that commitments are lighter than air. At the origins of modern natural rights teachings, freedom and equality were politically principles intended to bring both justice and effectiveness to the relationships of ruling and being ruled, which in the conventional order were constituted by pretended rights of strength, wealth, tradition, age and birth. The relationships of king and subject, master and slaver, lord and vassal, patrician and pleb, rich and poor, were revealed to be purely manmade and hence not morally binding, apart from the consent of the parties to them, which became the only source of political legitimacy. Civil society was to be reconstructed on the natural ground of man’s common humanity. Then it would appear that all relationships or relatedness within civil society would also depend on the free consent of individuals. Yet the relationships between man and woman, parent and child, are less doubtfully natural and less arguably conventional than the relations between rulers and ruled, especially as they are understood by modern natural rights teaching. They cannot be understood simply as contractual relationships, as resulting from acts of human freedom, since they would thereby lose their character and dissolve. Instead they seem to constrain that freedom, to argue against the free arrangements of consent dominant in the political order. However, it is difficult to argue that nature both does and does not prescribe certain relations in civil society. The radical transformation of the relations between men and women and parents and children was the inevitable consequence of the success of the new politics of consent. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
It might be said, with some exaggeration, that the first state-of-nature teachers paid little attention to the natural teleology of gender because they were primarily concerned with analyzing away the false appearances of teleology in the existing political arrangements. (I mean by teleology nothing but the evident, everyday observation and sense of purposiveness, which may be only illusory, but which ordinarily guides human life, the kind everyone sees in the reproductive process.) Each individual is the judge of one’s own best interests and they have the right to choose rulers who are bound to protect them, while abstracting from the habits of thought and feeling that permitted patricians under the colors of the common good to make use of plebs for their own greedy purposes. The plebs have equal rights to selfishness. The ruled are not directed by nature to the rulers any more than the rulers naturally care only for the good of the ruled. Rulers and ruled can consciously craft a compact by which the separate interests of each are protected. However, they are never one, sharing the same highest end, like the organs in Menenius’ body. There is no body politic, only individuals who have come together voluntarily and can separate voluntarily without maiming themselves. Although the political order is constituted out of individuals, the subpolitical units remain largely unaffected. Indeed, they counted on the family, as an intermediate between individual and the state, partially to replace what was being lost in passionate attachment to the polity. The immediate and reliable love of one’s own property, wife and children can more effectively counterpoise purely individual selfishness than does the distant and abstract love of country. Moreover, concern for the safety of one’s family is a powerful reason for loyalty to the state, which protects them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The nation as a community of families is a formula that until recently worked very well in the United States of America. However, it is very questionable whether this solution is viable over the very long run, because there are two contrary views of nature present here. And, as the political philosophers have always taught, that one that is authoritative in the political regime will ultimately inform its parts. In the social contract view, nature has nothing to say about relationships and rank order; in the older view, which is part and parcel of ancient political philosophy, nature is prescriptive. Are the relations between men and women and parents and children determined by natural impulse or are they the product of choice and consent? In Aristotle’s Politics, the subpolitical or prepolitical family relations point to the necessity of political rule and are perfected by it, whereas in the state-of-nature teachings, political rule is derived entirely from the need for protection of individuals, bypassing their social relations completely. Are we dealing with political actors or with men and women? In the former case, persons are free to construct whatever relations they please with one another; in the latter, prior to any choice, a preexisting frame largely determines the relations of men and women. There are three classic images of the polity that clarify this issue. The first is the ship of state, which is one thing if it is to be forever at sea, and quite another if it is to reach port and the passengers go their separate ways. They think about one another and their relationships on the ship very differently in the two cases. The former case is the ancient city; the latter, the modern state. The other two images are the herd and the hive, which oppose each other. The herd may need a shepherd, but each of the animals is grazing for itself and can easily be separated from the herd. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the hive, by contrast, there are workers, drones and a queen; there is a division of labor ad a product toward which they all work in common; separation from the hive is extinction. The herd is modern, the hive ancient. Of course, neither image is an accurate description of human society. Men are neither atoms nor parts of a body. However, this is why there have to be such images, since for the brutes these things are not a matter for discussion or deliberation. Man is ambiguous. In the tightest communities, at least since the days of Odysseus, there is something in man that wants out and sense that his development is stunted by being just part of a whole, rather than a whole itself. And in the freest and most independent situations men long for unconditional attachments. The tension between freedom and attachment, and attempts to achieve the impossible union of the two, are the permanent condition of man. However, in modern political regimes, where rights precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over community, family and even nature. The spirit of this choice must inevitably penetrate into all the details of life. The ambiguity of man is well illustrated in the passion of pleasures of the flesh, and the sentiments that accompany it. Pleasures of the flesh may be treated as a pleasure out of which men and women may make what they will, its promptings followed or rejected, its forms matters of taste, its importance or unimportance in life decided freely by individuals. As such, it would have to give precedence to objective natural necessity, to the imperatives of self-love or self-preservation. Or pleasures of the flesh can be immediately constitutive of a whole law of life, to which self-preservation is subordinated and in which love, marriage and the rearing of infants is the most important business. It cannot be both. The direction in which we have been going is obvious. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Now, it is not entirely correct to say that humankind at large is able to treat pleasures of the flesh as a matter of free choice, one which initially does not obligate us to others. In a World where the natural basis of sexual differentiation has crumbled, this choice is readily available to men, but less so to women. Man in the state of nature, either in the first one or the one we have now, can walk away from an encounter involving pleasures of the flesh and never give it another thought. However, a woman may have a child, and in fact, as becomes ever clearer, may want to have a child. Pleasures of the flesh can be an indifferent thing for men, but it really cannot quite be so for women. This is what might be called the female drama. Modernity promised that all human beings would be treated equally. Women took that promise seriously and rebelled against the old order. However, as they succeeded, men have also been liberated from their old constraints. And women, now liberated and with equal careers, nevertheless find they still desire to have children, but have no basis for claiming that men should share their desire for children or assume a responsibility for them. So nature weighs more heavily on women. In the old order they were subordinated and dependent on men; in the new order they are isolated, needing men, but not able to count on them, and hampered in the free development of their individuality. The promise of modernity is not really fulfilled for women. Love had been assumed to be a motivating force, a power which could be relied upon to push us onward in life. However, the great shift in our day indicates that the motivating force itself is now called into question. Love has become a problem to itself. So self-contradictory, indeed, has love become that some of those studying family life have concluded that “love” is simply the name for the way more powerful members of the family control other members. Love can be a cover for violence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The same can be said about will. We inherited from our Victorian forefathers the belief that the only real problem in life was to decide rationally what to do—and then will would stand ready as the “faculty” for making us do it. Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide. The very basis of will itself is thrown into question. Is will an illusion? Many psychologists and psychotherapists, from Dr. Freud down, have argued that it is. The term “will power” and “free will,” so necessary in the vocabulary of our fathers, have all but dropped completely out of any contemporary, sophisticated discussion; or the words are used in derision. People go to therapist to find substitutes for their lost will: to learn how to get the “unconscious” to direct their lives, or to learn how to get the “unconscious” to direct their lives, or to learn the latest conditioning technique to enable them to behave, or to use new medications to release some motive for living. Also to learn the latest method of “releasing affect,” unaware that affect is not something you strive for in itself but a by-product of the way you give yourself to a life situation. Every age has its own special forms of imperialism. And so does each conqueror. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the British mastered the art, their method of invasion was to send their navy, then their army, then their administrators, and finally their educational system. The Americans now do it differently. They send their television shows and fake news media. The method has much to recommend it. Neither armies nor navies clash by night; the invasion occurs without loss of life and without much resistance. It is also both pleasurable and quick. In a few years, we shall be able to boast that the sun never sets on an American television show. Political consciousness is born through the winds of technology. Electromagnetic waves penetrate more deeply than armies. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
If nations keep relying on nineteenth-century forms of imperialism while continuing to make terrible television shows, they may find themselves turning into a Third World country. Advertising exists only to purvey what people do not need. If it is available, whatever people do need they will find without advertising. This is so obvious and simple that it continues to stagger my mind that the ad industry has succeeded in muddying the point. No single issue gets advertisers screaming louder than this one. They speak about how they are only fulfilling the needs of people by providing an information service about where and how people can achieve satisfaction for their nee. Advertising is only a public service, they insist. Speaking privately, however, and to corporate clients, advertisers sell their services on the basis of how well they are able to create needs where there were none before. I have never met an advertising person who sincerely believes that there is a need connected to, say, 99 percent of the commodities which fill the airwaves and the print media. Nor can I recall a single street demonstration demanding one single product in all of American history. If there were such a demonstration for, let us say, nonreturnable bottles, which were launched through tens of millions of dollars of ads, or chemically processed foods, similarly dependent upon ads, there would surely have been no need to advertise these products. The only need that is expressed by advertising is of raw materials with no intrinsic value into commodities that people will buy. If we take the word “need” to mean something basic to human survival—food, shelter, clothing—or basic to human contentment—peace, love, safety, companionship, intimacy, a sense of fulfillment—these will be sought and found by people whether or not there is advertising. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
In fact, advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges them to believe that satisfaction can be obtained only through commodities. It is through this intervention and separation that advertising can create value, thereby justifying its existence. Consider the list of the top twenty-five advertisers in the United States of America. They sell the following products: soap, detergents, cosmetics, cars and sodas, all of which exist in a realm beyond need. If they were needed, they would not be advertised. People do need to eat, but the food which is advertised is processed food: processed meats, sodas, sugary cereals, candies. A food in its natural state, unprocessed, does not need to be advertised. If it is available to them, hungry people will find the food. To persuade people to buy the processed version is another matter because it is more expensive, less naturally appealing, less nourishing, and often harmful. The need must be created. Perhaps there is a need for cleanliness. However, that is not what advertisers sell. Cleanliness can be obtained with water and a little bit of natural fiber, or solidified natural fat. Major World civilizations kept clean that way for millennia. What is advertised is Americanism, a value beyond cleanliness; sterility, the avoidance of all germs; sudsiness, a cosmetic factor; and brand, a surrogate community loyalty. There is need for tranquility and a sense of contentment. However, these are the last qualities drug advertisers would like you to obtain; not on your own anyway. A drug ad denies your ability to cope with internal processes: feelings, moods, anxieties. It encourages the belief that personal or traditional ways of dealing with these matters—friends, family, community, or patiently awaiting the next turn in life’s cycle—will not succeed in your case. It suggests that a chemical solution is better so that you will choose the chemical rather than your own resources. The result is that you become further separated from yourself and less able to cope. Your ability dies for lack of practice and faith in its efficacy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
A deodorant ad never speaks about the inherent values of applying imitation-lemon fragrances to your body; it has no inherent value. Mainly the ad wishes to intervene in any notion you may have that there is something pleasant or beneficial in your own human odor. Once the intervention takes place, and self-doubt and anxiety are created, the situation can be satisfied with artificial smells. Only through this process of intervention and substitution is there the prospect of value added and commercial profit. The goal of all advertising is discontent or, to put it another way, an internal scarcity of contentment. This must be continually created, even at the moment when one has finally bought something. In that event, advertising has the task of creating discontent with what has just been bought, since once that act is completed, the purchase has no further benefit to the market system. The newly purchased commodity must be gotten rid of and replaced by the “need” for a new commodity as soon as possible. The ideal World for advertisers would be one in which whatever is bought is used only once and then tossed aside. Many new products have been designed to fit such a World. As a visitor in your country—indeed, as one who does not even know your language well enough to use it in these circumstances—I feel obliged to add something to the culture. You are entitled to know at the start from what cultural and political perspectives I see the World, since everything I will have to say here reflects a point of view quite likely different from your own. I am what may be called a conservative. This word, of course, is ambiguous, and you may have a different meaning for it from my own. Perhaps it will help us to understand each other if I say from my point of view many political are radical. It is true enough that many of them no longer speak of the importance of preserving such traditional instructions and beliefs as the family, childhood, the work ethic, self-denial, and religious piety. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
In fact, it seems like most politicians do not care one way or another whether any of this is preserved. No one, beside President Trump, wants to put America and Americans first anymore. Kids have to sell their bikes to buy food for dinner. People have to work two and three jobs to pay the mortgage. And other companies turn to increasing fees to make due in these challenging times. That is why I am for preserving tradition; that is not where most politicians’ interests lie. You cannot fail to notice that many are no longer mostly concerned to preserve a free-market economy, to encourage what is new, and to keep America technologically progressive. Many of our political leaders are not devoted to capitalism anymore. No people have been more entranced by newness—and particularly technological newness—than Americans. That is why our most important radicals have always been capitalists, especially capitalist who have exploited the possibilities of new technologies. The names that come to mind are Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Willian Winchester, Sarah Winchester, Samuel Goldwyn, Henry Luce, Alan Dumont, and Walt Disney, among many others. These capitalist-radicals, inflamed by their fascination for new technologies, created the twentieth century. If you are happy about the twentieth century, you have them to thank for it. However, as we all know, in every virtue there lurks a contrapuntal vice. We must praise our ambition and vitality but at the same time to condemn our naivete and rashness. A culture that exalts the new for its own sake, that encourages the radical inclination to exploit what is new and is therefore indifferent to the destruction of the old, that such a culture runs a serious risk of becoming trivial and dangerous, especially dangerous to itself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
This is exactly what is happening in the United State of America in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In today’s America, the idea of newness not only is linked to the idea of improvement but is the definition of improvement. If anyone should raise the question, What improves the human spirit?, or even the more mundane question, What improves the quality of life?, Americans are apt to offer a simple formulation: That which is new is better, that which is newest is best. The cure for such balderdash is a philosophy of conservatism. My version of a President is one who puts America and Americans first and stays out of the business and affairs of other nations. A true conservative, like myself, knows that technology always fosters radical social change. A true conservative also knows that it is useless to pretend that technology will not have its way with a culture. However, a conservative recognizes a difference between nonconsensual and seduction. The former cares nothing for the victim. The seducers must accommodate oneself to the will and temperament of the object of one’s desires. Indeed, one does not want a victim so much as an accomplice. What I am saying is that technology can attack a nonconsensual culture or be forced to seduce it. The aim of a genuine conservative in a technological age is to control the fury of technology, to make it behave itself, to insist that it accommodate itself to the will and temperament of a people. It is one’s best hope that through one’s efforts a modicum of charm may accompany the union of technology and culture. When it comes to technocracy–in our own history, philosophers of the new technology, like Veblen, Geddes, or Fuller, succeeded in making efficiency and know-how the chief ethical values of the folk, creating a mystique of “production,” and a kind of streamlined esthetics. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
However, they did not succeed in wresting management from the businessmen and creating their own World of a neat and transparent physical plant and a practical economics of production and distribution. The actual results have been slums of works of engineering, confused and useless overproduction, gadgetry, and new tribes of middlemen, promoters, and advertisers. With urbanism, as Le Corbuiser and Gropius urged, we have increasingly the plan and style of functional architecture; biological standards of housing; scientific study of traffic and city services; some zoning; and the construction of large-scale projects. However, nowhere is realized the ideal of over-all community planning, the open green city, or the organic relation of work, living, and play. The actual results have been increasing commutation and traffic, segregated HRNs (high risk neighborhoods), a “functional” style little different from packaging and the tendency to squeeze out some basic urban functions, such as recreation or schooling, to be squeezed out altogether. Garden City—in the opposite numbers, the Garden City planners after Ebenezer Howard, have achieved some planned communities protected by greenbelts. However, they did not get their integrated towns, planned for industry, local commerce, and living. The result is that actual suburbs and garden cities are dormitories with a culture centering around small children, and absence of the wage earner; and such “plan” as the so-called shopping center makes such communities fell like small towns without disrupting the village committees too much. The movement to conserve the wilds cannot withstand the cars, so that all areas are invaded and regulated. If you did not know, in Sacramento, California there are still wild jack rabbits, cotton tail rabbits, bevers, duck, swans, geese, turkeys and some people claim that we still have deer, but I have not seen any since I was a kid. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Kansas State University scholars conducted a realistic study. They had a group of college students watch a typical CNN broadcast in which an anchor reported four news stories while various info-graphics flashed on the screen and a textual news crawl ran along the bottom. They had a second group watch the same programing but with the graphics and the news crawl stripped out. Subsequent tests found that the students who had watched the multimedia version remembered significantly fewer facts from the stories than those who had watched the simpler version. “It appears,” wrote the researchers, “that this multimessage format exceeded viewers’ attentional capacity.” Supplying information in more than one form does not always take a toll on understanding. As we all know from reading illustrated textbooks and manuals, pictures can help clarify and reinforce written explanations. Education researcher have also found that carefully designed presentations that combine audio and visual explanations or instructions can enhance students’ learning. The reason, current theories suggest, is that our brains use different channels for processing what we see and what we hear. Auditory and visual working memory are separate, at least to some extent, and because they are separate, effective working memory may be increased by using both processors rather than one. As a result, in some cases the negative effects of split attention might be ameliorated by using both auditory and visual modalities—sound and pictures, in other words. The Internet, however, was not built by educators to optimize learning. It presents information not in a carefully balanced way but as a concentration-fragmenting mishmash. The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. That is not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It is also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Most e-mail applications, to take an obvious example, are set up to check automatically for news messages every few seconds, and people routinely click the “check for new mail” button even more frequently than that. Studies of office workers who use computers reveal that they constantly stop what they are doing to read and respond to incoming e-mails. It is not unusual for them to glance at their in-box thirty or forty times an hour (though when asked how frequently they look, they will often give a much lower figure). Since each glance represents a small interruption of thought, a momentary redeployment of mental resources, the cognitive costs can be high. Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of though we are involved in, the greater the impairment the distraction causes. Now, there is a threatening attack brewing that could give powerful ammunition to every science-hater in society. Again, this attack is aimed not at the scientific method as such but on two elements of the ethic associated with it—the ideas that knowledge produced by science should be freely circulated and that scientists should be free to explore everything. The free circulation of scientific findings is under withering fire from both business and government. More and more scientific research is either funded or conducted by corporations that, for high-stakes commercial reasons, are racing to patent their findings or cloak them in secrecy. Simultaneously, governments, reacting to the genuine threat of terrorism, are demanding that more and more scientific findings be kept secret for security reason. The age of the “Super-Empowered Individual”—the terrorist, criminal or psychotic armed with weapons of mass and individual destruction—is fast approaching. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
While it is clear that the media and the Internet cannot continue to offer instruction manuals for bomb building and the manipulation of toxic materials, disquieting debates are under way about how much of science needs to be withheld from public view. On the one hand, in the light of terrorism, registration of laboratories and surveillance of research activity may now be necessary. The most dangerous thing is secrecy. Biological weaponry itself was developed behind walls of secrecy. This is why so many are pushing to fortify all borders. You see how bad COVID-19 was, there could be something worse coming. Making the distinction about which knowledge is dangerous and out to be censored is very hard. The distinction between offensive and defensive uses of biological agents is really a matter of how information is utilized rather than the information itself. You have to know how to defend against bioterrorism, but in knowing that you should also know how to inflict bioterrorism. Preventing disclosure of new findings is one thing. However, even more disturbing are proposals to make whole broad categories of knowledge off-limits to research. Some are even coming from scientists themselves, who conjure up apocalyptic scenarios to support their theses. Some people believe that science needs to “relinquish” research that might lead to the domination of the human species by the runaway destructive self-replication of technologies now made possible by advances in genetics, robotics and nanotechnology. By 2030, computers might be smarter than humans—smart enough to reproduce themselves and essentially take over. Various physicists have discussed, if something went wrong— they could wipe out not only the human race but Earth and the cosmos as well. Other scientists regard this as nonsensical. Arguing that we do not know enough even to assess the levels of risk, critics propose various steps that should precede the undertaking of dangerous experiments in any field, not just physics. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
It has been debated if two teams of scientists against each other—a “red team” to offer reasons why such experiments would not be safe and a “blue team” that would make the cause for going forward would be reasonable. Wow. I never considered how powerful man is or can be. This is something worth taking into consideration. However, the attempt to avoid risk carries risks of its own—thus the most extreme precautionary policy would utterly paralyze science. And with it, one might add, the knowledge of the economy of the future. Self-criticism is at the very heart of science. And science and scientists should never be above criticism from the public. Science is itself a social activity, dependent, to a degree many scientists underestimate, on the ideas, epistemologies and built-in assumptions of the surrounding culture. Nor should scientists alone police science, since, like everyone else, they have their own self-interests. What we are seeing, however, is not just a series of unrelated, disparate attacks on science but a convergent conviction that science needs to be reduced in influence, stripped of the respect it has earned—in short, devalued as a key test of truth. However, the battle over truth is not confined to science. Different groups in society are, for different reason, actively trying to manage our minds by shifting the truth filters through which we, in our turn, see the World—the tests we use to separate true from false. This battle has no name. However, it will have a profound effect on the revolutionary wealth system now superseding that of the industrial age. Many people think there is nothing left to revolt over and that is why they are now attacking others in an increased fashion. Well, there is obviously one thing left to revolt against and that is pleasures of the flesh. The frontier, the establishing of identity, the validation of the self can be, and not infrequently does become for some people, a revolt against sexuality entirely. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
God loves all of His children and He wants them to respect their body because it is a temple that the Father made especially for you. It is precious and should be treated with respect and dignity. God created the many diverse races and ethnicities and esteems them all equally. As the Book of Mormon puts it, “all are alike unto God.” Life did not begin at birth, as is commonly believed. Prior to coming to Earth, individuals existed as spirits, therefore our bodies are only loaners, we do not own them. God has allowed us to use them so we can come to Earth and learn somethings and teach others how to love. Mortal life is crucial to the plan of happiness God would provide for His children: “We will prove them herewith,” God stated, “to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them,” adding a promise to increase glory forever upon the faithful. Faith is a principle of action and power. Whenever you work toward a worthy goal, you exercise faith. You show your hope for something that you cannot yet see. Having faith in Jesus Christ means relying completely on Him—trusting in His infinite power, intelligence, and love. It includes believing His teachings. It means believing that even though you do not understand all things, He does. Remember that because He has experienced all your pains, afflictions, and infirmities, He knows how to help you rise about your daily difficulties. Jesus has overcome the World and prepared the way for you to receive eternal life. He is always ready to help you as you remember His plea: “Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 6.36. Faith is much more than a passive belief. You express your faith through action—by the way you live. The Savior promised, “If ye will have faith in Me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me,” Moroni 7.33. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Faith in Jesus Christ can help you overcome temptation. The Lord will work mighty miracles in your life accord to your faith. Faith in Jesus Christ helps you receive spiritual and physical healing through His Atonement. When times of trial come, faith can give you strength to press forward and face your hardships with courage. Even when the future seems uncertain, your faith in the Savior can give you peace. Faith is a gift from God, but you must nurture your faith to keep it strong. Faith is like the muscle of your arm. If you exercise it, it grows stronger. It you put it in a sling and leave it there, it becomes weak. You can nurture the gift of faith by praying to Heavenly Father in the name of Jesus Christ. As you express your gratitude to your Father and as you plead with Him for blessings that you and other need, you will draw near to Him. You will draw near to the Savior, whose Atonement makes it possible for you to plead for mercy. This will create a cycle of growth in your life and allow you to seek happiness through more and more possessions. Striving can cease in the abundance of God’s grace. My you know the contentment that allows the totality of your energies to come to full flower. May you know Jesus Christ and be rich beyond measure. May God take pleasures in your great bounty. But remember to cherish the abundance of the simple things in life which are the true source of joy. With the golden glow of peaceful contentment, may your truly appreciate this day. To humankind contemptful of humans, America’s prophets and sages taught the sanctity of each human being. In an age of cruelty and violence they proclaimed justice, compassion and peace. One law shall be among you, for the native and stranger alike. Through the parables of actualized Christians, the songs of poets, the visions of prophets, a new conception of the good life was born. Embodied in America’s Scripture, it became the precious possession of all humans, giving them strength in weariness and hope in despair. The Law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
When we show off our #Havenwood homes, we love emphasizing the customizable nature of the thoughtfully designed floor plans.
In Residence 4, the bedroom and en suite bathroom allow easy multi-generational living – or just transitional living as your needs change!
Upstairs, the great room and loft can function as a man cave, a playroom, or a rec room – whatever suits your family best!
The spacious living area allows you to designate multiple uses that fit you to a “t” – and that’s just the way it should be!
Where the Wind Blew and the Stars Sone Down
Haunting, eerie, mystical even at times a little frightening to those outside the shadowy half-World of the occult but compelling and demanding out attention. In 1884, Mrs. Winchester left New Haven, Connecticut, and the graves of her husband and only child, moved to San Jose, California, and began the obsession that was to last for the rest of her life. She purchased an unfinished farmhouse outside the small agricultural town, and for the next 38 years, the sound of construction on Mrs. Winchester’s house never stopped. She used to maintain, I remember, that there was no apparition or supernatural manifestation, or series of circumstances pointing to such a manifestation, however strongly substantiated they appeared to be, that could not be explained on purely natural grounds. However, there was a notable instance of what was by many supposed to be a supernatural manifestation that occurred in the water tower on the estate. It was a horrible sight. Barney Ackers and his wife Everly had evidently been waylaid and killed by a blow of an axe just as he was entering the yard gate, and then the door of the water tower had been broken open and his wife had been killed, after which Barney’s body had been dragged into the water tower, and it had been fired with the intention of making it appear that the water tower had burned by accident. However, by one of those inscrutable fatalities, the fire, after burning half of two walls, had gone out. Still, it was a horrible sight and the room looked like shambles. Barney had plainly been caught unawares while leaning over his gate. The back of his head had been crushed in with the eye of an axe, and he had died instantly. The pleasant thought which was in his mind at the instant—perhaps, of the greeting that always awaited him on the click of his latch; perhaps, of his success that day; perhaps, of Mrs. Winchester’s kindness to him for the work he did—was yet on his face, stamped there indelibly by the blow that killed him. There he lay, face upwards, as the murderer had thrown him after bringing him in, stretched out his full length on the floor, with his quiet face upturned, looking in that throng of excited, awestricken men, just what he had said he was: a man of peace. His wife, on the other hand, wore a terrified look on her face. There has been a terrible struggle. She had lived to taste the bitterness of death, before it took her. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Satan’s presence was haunting. It haunted Mrs. Winchester for years, and for many nights she could not sleep. No one ever found out who did it, and she found herself unable to forget it, or to have peace as she used to. On the night of the 3rd of January 1888, some thieves attempted to commit a robbery on the estate of Mrs. Winchester. They entered the mansion, armed with a dead man’s hand with a lighted candle in it, believing in the superstitious notion that is such a hand be procured, and a candle placed within its grasp, the latter cannot be seen by anyone except him by whom it is used; also that if the candle and hand be introduced into a house it will prevent those who may be asleep from awaking. The inhabitants, however, were alarmed, and the robbers fled, leaving the hand behind them. No doubt the absolute failure of this gruesome dark lantern on this occasion was due to the fact that neither candle nor candlestick had been properly prepared! The Winchester mansion is full of apparitions and specters and perhaps some of them foiled the bulger’s plan. The mansion was continually disturbed by a nocturnal house-spirits. At night heavy steps were heard as of one carrying a heavy load. On occasion a form appeared in a monk’s cowl. Certain ghosts are confined to the Winchester mansion and they plague particularly people. A certain butler, Elton Abram, was an active spiritist while employed for Mrs. Winchester. For years he practiced table-lifting and considered this to be a way of communicating with the dead. He continued with his occult practices so intensively that psychic disturbances set in. The effects of his spiritistic interests also appeared in his children and grandchildren. His oldest son committed suicide. His next son suffered from a persecution mania. His oldest daughter ended up in The Great Asylum for the Insane. Another daughter suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Among his grandchildren the same picture emerged. One of them was a schizophrenic. Another suffered from weak nerves and hypersensitivity, and another lived a dissolute life, and had given birth to an illegitimate child. The first of the man’s great-grandchildren became a psychopath and a delinquent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
From the scientific point of view, one might consider these effects to have a different cause from that of spiritism. The psychiatrist will be interested in the question whether the practicing of spiritism was rather the effect than the cause of the ensuing mental and emotional disorders. Or again, was there some latent disposition in the family that was merely triggered off by the spiritistic activities? The parapsychologist will explain the table-lifting phenomenon as psychic automatism, that is an activation of subconscious forces. The Christian however is concerned essentially with the frequency in which psychic disturbances appear in connection with the practice of occultism. It was well known that Mrs. Winchester donned herself with ceremonial robes and communed nightly with the spirits in the Winchester mansion, and it was the midnight rendezvous for legions of ghosts, with special attention accorded those created by a Winchester rifle slug. It is possible the Mr. Abram stole something from the Winchester mansion, which brought on a curse to him and generations of his family members. A person’s thoughts and actions are like people who populate a community: friendly, contentious, kind, malicious, virtuous, evil, virile, cowardly, optimistic, cynical. We prosper in a pure mental neighborhood and wither in a foul one. And we can choose our mental neighborhood. Tired minds and bodies are signals to be careful. Demonic oppression is not easily discerned. Some people mistakenly blame demons for unrepentant self-will and psychological abnormalities. The source is not always clear, but demon oppression is usually marked by an emotional inability of the individual to do what one wants to do. A young maid staying in the Winchester mansion called Bythesea Atterton, had been a founding member of a thriving witches coven in Essex and the group’s other three members all shared her dedicated to the occult. She began to complain about various mental disturbances which included being tired of life and having depressions. Added to this she often had violent fit of temper, and her marriage was being undermined by her own frigidity. It has also happened that the husband had seen strange figures in the house at night. He had not told his wife about this so as not to upset her, but after a while she too had seen similar strange and maimed figures about the house. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Mrs. Winchester questioned the woman about her past illnesses and about the general health of her parents and grandparents, but she was the only one to have suffered in this way. In answer to Mrs. Winchester’s questions about contact with occultism, after a lot of thought Bythesea told her the following story. She had stolen Mrs. Winchester’s sixteenth century book about magic, and saw a black shadow at the end of her bed. It was a horrible presence that frighted the life out of Bythesea. While Mrs. Winchester was asleep, she would invite her Protestant girl’s group over. The minister’s wife, who had become the leader, used to practice table-lifting with all the girls in the Blue Séance Room. The sessions had always begun with the question, “Spirit, are you there?” One knock had meant “yes,” two had meant “no.” When the spirit had been willing to answer they had all taken part in asking it questions. The minister’s wife had continued this practice for many years until she was paralyzed by a stroke. Bythesea told Mrs. Winchester that all the girls had subsequently been afraid to visit their leader since her face had been changed into a terrible grimace by the stroke. Medical science would classy this example together with the precious one. However, with regards to the stroke, we would like to point out that in the numerous cases connected to the Winchester mansion of suicides, fatal accidents, stroke, and insanity, they usually involve the occult and someone who has in someway broke a rule, stole from the mansion, or offended the spirits somehow. The miles of twisting hallways in the mansion are made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. Mrs. Winchester traveled through her house in a roundabout fashion, supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might he following her. Mrs. Winchester never slept in the same bedroom two nights in a row, in order to confuse any evil spirits that might be waiting for her. Music has always played an important role in cultural outlook and identity. Hymns, marching songs, lullabies—there are a thousand different aspects of life which are ordered or inspired by a musical beat. Music helps to define your cultural tribe. Even the ghost at the Winchester mansion reportedly had parties at ungodly hours. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The Satanic underground was celebrated—and eventually propelled into the mainstream—by musicians at the tail-end of the psychedelic era. While the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the public faces of the 1960s youth culture, other voices of that same social and spiritual revolution sang dark hymns of rebellion. Some think that Black Arts Festivals have gone too far, one in particular. Coven might have achieved the popular success that ultimately eluded them. The band’s first album went under the uncompromising title Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls, boasting a gatefold sleeve featuring the band engaged in a Black Mass—complete with attractive blonde singer Jinx Dawson serving as a naked altar. The album features a recording of this Black Mass at the tail end of side two: “Two the best of our knowledge, this if the first Black Mass to be recorded in written words or in audio,” explain the sleeve notes. (Anton Lavey recorded his own Black Mass shortly afterwards.) “It is as authentic as hundreds of hours of research in every know source can make it. We do no to recommend its use by anyone who has not thoroughly studied Black Magic and is aware of the risks and dangers involved.” The rite bears the hallmark of serious study, with notably authentic elements from medieval Gnostic and witchcraft lore. The overall effect, however is curiously naïve, with the high priest’s command to “kiss the goat” sounding more Monty Python than Aleister Crowley. The music that precedes the Black Mass is standard—if well-executed—1960s folk rock. It is something of a jolt to realize that, behind the gentle acoustic guitars, the lyrics are exclusively about Devil-worship and black magic, while the alluring Miss Dawson’s vocals give the effect of a demonically-possessed Join Mitchell. Ultimately, Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls is an interesting musical exploration of the witchcraft tradition which suffused rural America ever since the Pilgrim Fathers landed in New England over four centuries ago. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The infamous Salem witch-trials—which took place in Massachusetts during 1692—had been one of the last major incidents of state extermination by religious fanatics from the “Old World,” making the term “witch-hunt” synonymous with the persecution with marginalized groups. As such, it elicited the sympathy of twentieth-century hippies like Coven toward their satanic predecessors. (In sacrificing the lives of twenty suspected “witches” to the fantasies of hysterical children, it also predated the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s-90s.) Coven’s second album Blood on the Snow followed but, despite its demonic sleeve, the Satanic elements were fare more restrained. By the third album, imaginatively titled Coven, the sinister elements had all but disappeared, replaced by standard hippie material. Robbed of the distinctive image of their early days, Coven faded away. It is interesting that the British rock band Lucifer, formed in 1971, were a curious collection of characters whose sardonically-devilish promotional photos portrayed a Mansonesque image, enlisted the Devil to fight the capitalist-pig system. Lucifer issued two albums, Big Gun and Exit, and a single, entitled “F*ck You,” which was seized by the police. Most outre of the Satanic psychedelicists, Roky Erickson had been the leader of the mid-1960s Texan garage band the Thirteenth Floor Elevators until a bust for marijuana possession. Facing a long prison sentence under the Lone Star State’s sanctimonious laws, he committed himself to a psychiatric institution instead. This was a bad mistake. Three years later, in the early 1970s, the hallucinogen-loving Erickson came out of the lunatic asylum considerably more troubled than when he went in. An obscure cult figure who became known for lyrical tributes to his favorite 1950s horror movies, in the hospital he had formed a close relationship with his own personal Satan. “Ah’m not afraid of the Devil, the Devil is mah friend. He chose me to do his biddin’,” drawled the usual but loveable Erickson. “Those doctors and nurses…They could not mess with the Devil’s chosen one.” To cement this unholy pact, Erickson later vocalized his personal infernal visions in wildly sincere songs like “I Think of Demons” and “Don’t Shake Me Lucifer.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Ny far the most interesting of the Satanic-psychedelic bands were Black Widow. Their 1970s debt album, Sacrifice, was the result of guitarist Jim Gannon’s research into the Black Arts, with occultic lyrics accompanying a blend of traditional folk music and progressive rock. The almost-ubiquitous Alex Sanders warned the band they had done their homework too well, and would attract dark forces. He was right for one, though only inasmuch as Gannon’s lyrics boast a fair degree of authenticity, and some songs—like the catchy “Come to the Sabbat”—are highly evocative of the medieval-European Satanic tradition. Other moments—like the horrible saxophone solo Satan uses to tempt some poor innocent on “Seduction”—are diabolical in a different sense. The band enhanced their image with an elaborately Satanic stage show, professionally choreographed by a Leicester theatre company, complete with sacrificial daggers and an unclothed young woman to adorn the altar (at one point this was Alex Sanders’ wife, Maxine). They reaped the reward for their oddly entertaining work, with Sacrifice reaching the top 40 in the UK album charts. However, their second album, Black Widow, lacked both the Satanic themes and the power of its predecessor. The official explanation for this was that, true to Sanders’ warning, weird things stated to happen—most alarmingly, near-fatal car crashes. (Satan seems particularly keen on causing road accidents, however much more impressive lightning bolts or stampeding elephants might seem.) What is more likely is that, like many rock bands that use powerful Satanic imagery, Black Window may have begun to believe that same imagery was holding back their career. As many have learnt to their cost, however, it is more often the other way around—few dabbling rock stars regain the early excitement once they stop playing the Devil’s music. Suffice to day, Jim Gannon, the major creative force behind the band, cannot have been unduly worried by the curse, as he tried to mount a stage musical version of the Black Widow show on Broadway. Sadly, it never came off, and Black Widow—devoid of Devil worship—dwindled into obscurity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Prosaic accounts of Black Sabbath’s flirtation with occult imagery claim they were impressed by the interest Black Widow had enjoyed in their Satanic stage show. The truth is probably a combination of all these stories. Whatever, it is fair to say that intense interest in their demonic aspects surprised Black Sabbath as much as anyone else. Their eponymous 1969 debut album was recorded in to days for six hundred pounds, treated with contempt and indifference by the press, and rapidly became a commercial success. The Christian Science Monitor, or all publications, noted approvingly that the band did not “condone or promote the less seemly aspects of…an interest in occult matters.” They were right. The song “Black Sabbath” describes the narrator’s state of terror at witnessing a Black Mass. Their attitude to Satan was chiefly the traditional one of fear and loathing, their lyrics even sometime entreating listeners to turn to God as the only source of love. However, the audiences were not listening—they wanted a Satanic band, and that is what Black Sabbath ostensibly became. (Rumor has it that their management had the large cross that decorated the inside of their first album inverted without the band’s knowledge of approval.) Satan appeared in Black Sabbath’s songs as a constant source of fascination and fear, an entity who brings colour into drab existence but can also represent the overwhelming evil of the World. In the classic “War Pigs,” Satanic witched are equated with the evil of politicians and generals who callously kill millions in their power games. (According to guitarist Tony Iommi, the title was derived from “Walpurgis,” the night when evil traditionally rules the World.) However, the most fascinating manifestation of Satan in a Black Sabbath song is also the rarest: when they briefly allow the Prince of Darkness to speak for Himself. In this strange and haunting “N.I.B,” Lucifer, the creator, sings a plaintive love song to His greatest creation and fellow sufferer, humankind. (The song “Lord of this World,” also recognizes Satan as god of the Earth.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
N.I.B.’s title is the source of some confusion: according to drummer Bill Ward it was simply his nickname, derived from when the band were stoned and though he resembled a pen nib. Typically, the fans perceived a more Satanic significance—to them, “N.I.B” stood for “Nativity in Black.” Inevitably, the band were quizzed on such apparent occultic beliefs during interviews. “We are into God,” Iommi unhelpfully explained to which Ward added, “But sometimes I feel Satan is God.” Perhaps they were expressing the beliefs of the early Satanic Gnostic groups, fifteen hundred years before. Led Zeppelin emerged in 1968 from London’s lively rhythm and blues scene. The band took off completely and became a huge commercial success. They were also said to have a Satanic influence with their roots being in traditional black blues music—though guitarist Jimmy Page’s outfit, much closer in its sympathies to the blues than to heavy metal, was far more preoccupied with the tradition. The Devil also makes His presence felt, either as a symbol of the inevitable fate awaiting the debauched bluesman, or as the hard-living musician’s comrade and inspiration. The delta blues—the school that had the greatest influence on the rock-guitar style—became known as “the Devil’s music.” Delta bluesmen included Peetie Wheatsraw, who liked to be known as “the Devil’s Son-in-Law and High Sheriff of Hell,” and Robert Johnson. Johnson, the acoustic-playing grandfather of rock guitar, best illustrates the enduring legend of the bluesman who sold his soul to acquire musical talent. (As testified by Satanic Rock star Glenn Danzig during our interview with him: “A lot of the old blues songs are very heavily rooted in occultism. There is Robert Johnson, all the voodoo and juju stuff—‘Got my Mojo Working,’ ‘Black Cat Bone.’”) Johnson’s pact with Satan was said to be struck at the “Crossroads”—one of his best-know song, and a traditionally magical location in many cultures—and thereafter he always claimed to live, as another song put it, with a “Hellhound on My Trail.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Led Zeppelin, and Jimmy Page in particular, were heavily influenced by Johnson, lifting parts of his songs for their own compositions. As with Johnson, so the popular rumour went, Led Zeppelin has made a pact with the Devil, asking the Prince of Darkness to tune their instruments in return for their souls. Only Satanic aid, reasoned the myth, could explain the enormous success the band enjoyed so rapidly, or the power involving pleasures of the flesh these modern pied pipers had over young ladies. These same legends had been linked with musicians from Robert Johnson to Elvis Presley and beyond, but with Led Zeppelin the Satanic-pact myth has proved especially enduring. If you study the supernatural, you cannot ignore evil. The “ZOSO” symbol that became Led Zeppelin’s band’s trademark was also partly derived from the work of another influential British occultist, Austin Osman Spare—a contemporary of Crowley, and occultic artist, best known for his “automatic drawing,” which he claimed worked as a conduit for supernatural forces. One more than one occasion, Page hinted that much of Led Zeppelin’s material (particularly their meditative anthem “Stairway to Heaven”) had been conceived in a similar fashion. (If you recall, this is also how Mrs. Winchester received the plan on how to build her mansion.) Kenneth Anger asked Page to record a soundtrack for his magic ritual film Lucifer Rising, but was bitterly disappointed with the results, saying, “I had asked him for intimacy and strength, rhythms and counter-rhythms. But he gave me a short fragment of chanting voices and sounds that I thought were quite sombre and morbid.” In October of 1976, the two fell out in grand style. Page threw Anger out of the basement of his London house, where he had granted the American magus use of a fil-editing suite. Anger responded with a press conference. Asked if he felt vindictive toward Page, Anger reposed, “You bet I do. I’m not a Christian turn the other cheek kind. In fact, I’m ready to throw a Kenneth Anger curse.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Asked about the incident in an interview the following year, Page observed, “The whole thing about ‘Anger’s Curse,” they were just these silly little letters. God, it was all so pathetic…I had a lot of respect for him. As an occultist he was definitely in the vanguard.” Despite Page’s scepticim, many fans and commentators linked the personal tragedies that were to strike the band with some kind of hex. On 26 July 1977, vocalist Robert Plant’s young son Karac died of a respiratory infection. Three years later, on 26 September 1980, the band’s drummer, John Bonham, died after a drinking binge. Enough was enough. On 4 December 1980, it was announced that Led Zeppelin were no more. The band’s demise only served to fuel rumours. The more lurid stories held that all of Led Zeppelin, with the exception of Bonham, had signed pacts with the Devil for Earthly pleasure, supposedly explaining the drummer’s untimely death. One fanzine reported that black smoke had been seen billowing from Page’s house on the day following Bonham’s death, and that the guitarist was overheard uttering strange curses in unknown tongues. Even the mainstream press got in on the act, with the London Evening News quoting an anonymous source: “It sounds crazy, but Robert Plant and everyone around the band is convinced that Jimmy’s dabbling in black magic is responsible in some way for Bonzo’s death and for all these other tragedies.” What are we to make of the “Led Zeppelin curse”? Many young people still need to hear guitar music that conjured the Devil, and Satanic rock does show a tenacity that surprised all but its most fervent disciples. Kip Trevor from the band Black Widow tells the story about their album Sacrifice and the stage show of the same title. “There is a guy who has lost his wife as a result of an accident to do with some kind of occultic ceremony. Something goes wrong, and she is killed. He comes back through the centuries, is reborn, and remembers this in a dream. In this dream he realizes his wife can be returned to him, if he can perform another ceremony, like the one which had gone wrong. This time he would turn the tables on the Lady Astoroth, draw her, overpower her, and sacrifice her, then she would be banished and his wife would come back. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
“So in the first song, ‘In Ancient Days,’ tells the story of this guy travelling through the centuries. Then there is the conjuration in which we bring Lady Astoroth and the girl appears. We’d have a lot of fun with that, as she would appear from all sorts of odd places, depending on where we were playing. We toured with it all over Europe for around eighteen months. When Black Widow broke up, Jim and myself went off to try and revive the idea of the occultic stage show. We spent a lot of time, money and effort on this new black magic concept, but it did not work out. Black Widow’s first album was quite an achievement, but it would have been lovely to have developed it. The problem was that the band politics got in the way—some of them wanted to be a “normal” band and thought the whole black magic thing was not them. They thought it was overshadowing their playing. The show was written with Jim’s research, using proper conjuration ceremonies. The whole thing was done authentically as we could possibly do it. We drew the magic circles, used all the props—fire, earth, water, and air. We did it exactly as you were supposed to do it. Doing that has an effect, even if it is only psychological, because you know you’re doing it in the correct fashion. You’re stepping over the line. Combined with the power of the music and the power of the audience’s involvement, weird things would happen.” God did not create the devil as such. Lucifer, one of God’s mighty cherubs, rebelled against Him and became the devil. Satan is thus the product of his own evil choice. God created a superbly beautiful and wise being and invested him with power above all the other created beings. His name, Lucifer, means “son of the morning,” “bright and shining one,” or “light bearer.” He had many angels at his beck and call and was prince over all the Earth. A fee moral agent with the power of choice, he was filled with an ambition to which he had no right—to rise above God. Unwilling to rule over the World as a vice-general under God, he became “Satan,” meaning “adversary,” or opponent. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
There is only one devil; there are many demons. A familiar spirit in the service of Satan knows human beings so well that he can disguise himself as those people; there are different kinds of spirits—some are sensual and lewd, and others appear ethical; demons are wandering spirits belonging to the legions of Satan, a class of beings distinct from angels—some are on Earth seeking embodiment in human beings and animals, other already are imprisoned in the bottomless abyss; Satan wins followers by psychic and supernatural phenomena that approximate the power of God; Satan is a created being who presently exercises authority over his domain, the Earth realm, but he can do only what God allows him to do, and eventually he will be deprived of all power and glory. As one can see, it is not only Mrs. Winchester who had experiences with the occult, curses, and spirits. Many people have. Occasionally other theories turn up in the literature of modern parapsychology. Some speak of a magical astral World-soul. This entails the idea of an inner World in which all the occurrences of the visible World have their inner equivalent. The World-soul is supposed to be outside of our concept of space and time. The past and the future, the near and the far are said to be all on the same level. Everything is synchronized and simultaneous. A person who is capable of contacting this World-soul enables such a person to enter into a sphere of higher intelligence where the limitations of space and time no longer hold true. Prophecy is inspired either by the Holy Spirit of by the Devil. The wide scope of the occult power possessed by spiritists helps explain why they can cause so much mischief. Through the phenomena of levitation, apports, telekinesis, and materializations, it is not difficult to see how a person endowed with strong mediumistic powers can do a great deal of harm, especially in closely associated realm of magic. Genuine magic is the art of bring about results beyond humans’ power through the enlistment of supernatural agencies. Black magic deliberately involves the devil and demons, and the resulting enchantment is used for persecution and revenge. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Sarah Winchester was reportedly trapped in her Daisy Bedroom during the 1906 earthquake. Her workers had to pry her out of the room, and the crowbar mark is still on the door to this day… See it on the Mansion Tour!
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
The Medium is the Message–You Know a Rolex Don’t Tick
The modern officer building is the archetypal example of the mediated environment. It contains nothing that did nit first exist as a design plan in a human mind. The spaces are square, flat and small, eliminating a sense of height, depth and irregularity. The décor is rigidly controlled to a bland uniformity from room to room and floor to floor. The effect is to dampen all interest in the space one inhabits. Most modern office buildings have hermetically sealed windows. The air is processed, the temperature regulated. It is always the same. The body’s largest sense organ, the skin, feels no wind, no changes in temperature, and is dulled. Muzak homogenizes the sound of the environment. Some buildings even use “white noise,” a deliberate mix of electronic sounds that merge into a hum. Seemingly innocuous, it fills the ears with an even background tone, obscuring random noises or passing conversations which might arouse interest or create a diversion. The light remains constant from morning through not, from room to room until our awareness of light is as dulled as our awareness of temperature, and we are not aware of the passage of time. We are told that a constant level of light is good for our eyes, that it relieves strain. Is this true? What about the loss of a range of focus and the many changes in direction and intensity of light that our flexible eyes are designed to accommodate? Those who build artificial environments view the sense as single, monolithic things, rather than abilities that have a range of capacity for a reason. We know, for example, that out eyes can see from the extremely dark to the extremely bright, from far to near, from distinct to indistinct, from obvious to subtle. They perceive objects moving quickly and those that are still. They eye is a wonderfully flexible organ, able to adjust instantly to a dazzling array of information, constantly changing, multileveled, perceiving objects far and near moving at different speeds simultaneously. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A fully functioning visual capacity is equal to everything the natural environment offers as visual information. This would have to be so, since the interaction between the senses and the natural environment created the ranges of abilities that we needed to have. Sight did not just arrive one day, like Adam’s rib; it coevolved with the ingredients around it which it was designed to see. When our eyes are continually exercised, when flexibility and dynamism are encouraged, then they are equal to the variety of stimuli that night and day have to offer. It is probably not wise always to have “good light” or to be for very long at fixed distances from anything. The result will be lack of exercise and eventually atrophy of the eyes’ abilities. When we reduce an aspect of environment from varied and multidimensional to fixed, we also change the human being who lives within it. Humans give up the capacity to adjust, just as the person who walks cannot so easily handle the experience of running. The lungs, the heart and other muscles have not been exercised. The human being then becomes a creature with a narrower range of abilities and fewer feelings about the loss. We become grosser, simpler, less varied, like the environment. If we lose wide-spectrum sensory experience, the common response to this is that we gain a deeper mental experience. This is not true. We only have less nonmental experience so the mental life seems richer by comparison. In fact, mental life is more enriched by a fully functioning sensory life. In recent years, researchers have discovered some amazing things about the connections between mental and physical life by doing sensory-deprivation experiments. In such experiments, a human subject is cut off from as much sensory information as possible. This can be accomplished, for example, by a totally black environment—white walls, no furniture, no sounds, constant temperate, constant light, no food and no windows. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
A more thorough method is to put the blindfolded subject inside a temperature, constant light, no food and no windows. A more thorough method is to put the blindfolded subject inside a temperature-controlled suit floating in a water tank with only tubes to provide air and water, which are lost at body temperature. This sensory-deprivation tank eliminates the tactile sense as well as an awareness of up and down. Researchers have found that when sensory stimuli are suppressed this way, the subject at first lives a mental life because mental images are the only stimulation. However, after a while, these images become disoriented and can be frightening. Disconnected from the World outside the mind, the subject is rootless and ungrounded. If the experience goes on long enough, a kind of madness develops which can be allayed only by reintroducing sensory stimuli, direct contact with the World outside the subject’s mind. Before total disorientation occurs, a second effect takes place. That is a dramatic increase in focus on any stimulus at all that is introduced. In such a deprived environment, one single stimulus acquires extraordinary power and importance. In the most literal sense, the subject loses perspective and cannot put the stimulus in context. Such experiments have proven to be effective in halting heavy smoking habits, for example, when the experimenter speaks instructions to stop smoking or describes to the subject through a microphone the harmful, unpleasant aspects of smoking. These experiments have shown that volunteers can be programmed to believe and do things they would not have done in a fully functional condition. The technique could be called brainwashing. It would be going too far to call our modern offices sensory deprivation chambers, but they are most certainly sensory-reduction chambers. They may not brainwash, but the eliminating of sensory stimuli definitely increases focus on the task at hand, the work to be done, to the exclusion of all else. Modern offices were designed for that very purpose by people who knew what they were doing. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
If people’s senses were stimulated to experience anything approaching their potential range, it would be highly unlikely that people would sit for eight long hours at desks, reading memoranda, typing documents, studying columns of figures or pondering sales strategies. If birds were flying through the room, and wind were blowing the papers about, if the sun were shinning in there, or people were lolling about on chaise lounges or taking baths while listening to various musical presentations, this would certainly divert the office worker from the mental work he or she is there to do. In fact, if offices were so arranged, little business would get done. This is why they are not so arranged. Any awareness of the senses, aside from their singular uses in reading and sometimes talking and listening, would be disastrous for office environments that require people to stay focused within narrow and specific functional modes. Feeling is also discouraged by these environments. Reducing sensual variations is one good way of reducing feelings since the one stimulates the other. However, there is also a hierarchy of values which further the process. Objectivity is the highest value that can be exhibited by an executive in an office. Orderliness is the highest value for a subordinate office worker. If the human is effectively disconnected from the distractions of one’s senses, feelings, and intuitions, both of these are most easily achieved. With the field of experience so drastically reduced for office workers, the stimuli which remain—paper work, mental work, business—loom larger and obtain an importance they would not have in a wider, more varied, more stimulating environment. The worker gets interested in them largely because that is what is available to get interested in. Curiously, however, while eschewing feeling and intuition, business people often cannot resist using them. They come out as aberrations—fierce competitive drive, rage at small inconveniences, decisions that do not fit the models of objectivity. Such behavior in business sometimes makes me think of blades of grass growing upward through pavement. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
A more poignant example, perhaps, is that modern offices have proven to be such hot environment of pleasures of the flesh. Aside from the occasional potted plant, the only creatures in offices with which it is possible to experience anything are other humans. With all other organic life absent and with the senses deprived of most possibilities for human experience, the occasional body which passes the desk becomes an especially potent sensual event, the only way out of the condition of suspended experience, and the only way to experience oneself as alive. In fact, the confinement of human beings within artificial environments may be a partial explanation of our new culture-wide obsession with and focus on pleasures of the flesh. We have been mainly speaking of cities. This has only been because their effects are most obvious. I do not want to create the impression that suburbs, retirement communities, recreational communities and the like offer any greater access to a wider range of experience. Those places do have large trees, for example, and more small animals. They sky is more visible, without giant buildings to alter the view. However, in most ways, suburban-type environments reveal less of natural processes than cities do. Cities, at least, offer a critical ingredient of the natural World, diversity albeit a diversity that is confined to only human life forms. It does not nearly approach the complexity of any acre of an ordinary forest. In suburbs the totality of experience is plotted in advance and then marketed on the basis of the plan. “We will have everything to serve the recreational needs of your family: playgrounds, ball fields, golf course, tennis courts, bowling alleys and picnic grounds.” This, plus a front lawn, a back lawn, two large trees, and an attentive police force makes up the total package. Human beings then live inside that package. Places formerly as diverse as forest, desert, marsh, plain and mountain have been unified into suburban tracts. The human sense, seeking outward for knowledge and stimulation, find only what has been prearranged by other humans. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In many ways the same can be said of rural environments. Land which once supported hundreds of varieties of plant and animal life has been transformed by agribusinesses. Insect life has been largely eliminated by massive spraying. For hundreds of square miles, the only living things are artichokes or tomatoes laid out in straight rows. The child seeking to know how nature works finds only spray planes, automated threshers, and miles of rows of a single crop. There are differences of opinion about what the critical moments were that led human beings away from the primary form of experience—between person and planet—into secondary mediated environments. Some go back as far as the control of fire, the domestication of animals, the invention of agriculture or the imposition of monotheism and patriarchy. In my opinion, however, the most significant recent moment came with the control of electricity for power, about seven generations ago. This made it possible to begin moving nearly all human functions indoors, and made the outdoors more like indoors. In less than seven generations out of an estimated one hundred thousand, we have fundamentally changed the nature of our interaction with the planet. Our environment no longer grows on its own, by its own design, in its own time. The environment in which we live has been totally reconstructed solely by human intention and creation. We find ourselves living inside a kind of nationwide room. We look around it and see only our own creations. We go through life believing we are experiencing the World when actually our experiences are confined within entirely human conceptions. Our World has been thought up. Our environment itself is the manifestation of the mental processes of other humans. Of all the species of the planet, and all the cultures of the human species, we twenty first century Americans have become the first in history to live predominantly inside projections of our own minds. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
We live in a kind of maelstrom, going ever deeper into our own thought processes, into subterranean caverns, where nonhuman reality is up, up, away somewhere. We are within a system of ever smaller, ever deeper concentric circles, and we consider each new depth that we reach greater progress and greater knowledge. Our environment itself becomes an editor, filter and medium between ourselves and an alternative nonhuman, unedited, organic planetary reality. We ask the child to understand nature and care about it, to know the difference between what humans create and what the planet does, but how can the child know these things? The child lives with us in a room inside a room inside another room. The child sees an apple in a store and assumes that the apple and the store are organically connected. The child sees streets, buildings and a mountain and assumes it was all put there by humans. How can the child assume otherwise? That is the obvious conclusion in a World in which all reality is created by other humans. As adults, we assume we are not so vulnerable to this mistake, that we are educated and our minds can save us. We “know” the differences between natural and artificial. And yet, we have no greater contact with the wider World than the child has. Most people still give little importance to any of this. Those who take note of these changes usually speak of them in esoteric, aesthetic or philosophical terms. It makes good discussion at parties and in philosophy classes. As we go, however, I hope it will become apparent that the most compelling outcome of these sudden changes in the way we experience life is the inevitable political one. Living within artificial, reconstructed, arbitrary environments that are strictly the products of human conception, we have no way to be sure that we know what is true and what is not. We have lost context and perspective. What we know is what other humans tell us. Therefore, whoever controls the processes of re-creation, effectively redefines reality for everyone else, and creates the entire World of human experience, our field of knowledge. We become subject to them. The confinement of our experience becomes the basis of their control of us. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The role of the media in all this is to confirm the validity of the arbitrary World in which we live. The role of television is to project that World, via images, into our heads, all of us at the same time. A child takes a crayon from a box and scribbles a yellow circle in the corner of a sheet of paper: this is the sun. She takes another crayon and draws a green squiggle through the center of the page: this is the horizon. Cutting through the horizon she draws two brown lines that come together in a jagged peak: this is a mountain. Next to the mountain, she draws a lopsided black rectangle topped by a red triangle: this is her house. The child gets older, goes to school, and in her classroom she traces on a page, from memory, and outline of the shape of her country. She divides it, roughly, into a set of shapes that represent the states. And inside one of the states she draws a five-pointed star to mark the town she lives. The child grows up. She trains to be a surveyor. She buys a set of fine instruments and uses them to measure the boundaries and contours of a property. With the information, she draws a precise plot of the land, which is then made into a blueprint for others to use. Our intellectual maturation as individuals can be traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings. We begin with primitive, literal renderings of the features of the land we see around us, and we advance to ever more accurate, and more abstract, representations of geographic and topographic space. We progress, in other words, from drawing what we see to drawing what we know. Vincent Virga, an expert on cartography affiliated with the Library of Congress, has observed that the stages in the development of our mapmaking skills closely parallel the general stages of childhood cognitive development delineated by the twentieth-century Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. We progress from the infant’s egocentric, purely sensory perception of the World to the young adult’s more abstract and objective analysis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
“First,” writes Virga, in describing how children’s drawings of maps advance, “perceptions and representational abilities are not matched; only the simplest topographical relationships are presented, without regard for perspective or distances. Then an intellectual ‘realism’ evolves, one that depicts everything known with burgeoning proportional relationships. And finally, a visual ‘realism’ appears, [employing] scientific calculations to achieve it.” As we go through this process of intellectual maturation, we are also acting out of the entire history of mapmaking. Humankind’s first maps, scratched in the dirt with a stick or carved into a stone with another stone, were as rudimentary as the scribbles of toddlers. Eventually the drawings became more realistic, outlining the actual proportions of a space, a space that often extended well beyond what could be seen with the eye. As more time passed, the realism became scientific in both its precision and its abstraction. The mapmaker began to use sophisticated tool like the direction-finding compass and the angel-measuring theodolite and to rely on mathematical reckonings and formulas. Eventually, in a further intellectual leap, maps came to be used not only to represent vast regions of the Earth or Heavens in minute detail, but to express ideas—a plan of battle, an analysis of the spread of an epidemic, a forecast of population growth. “The intellectual process of transforming experience in space to abstraction of space is a revolution in modes of thinking,” writes Virga. The historical advances in cartography did not simply mirror the development of the human mind. They helped propel and guide the very intellectual advances that they documented. The map is a medium that not only stores and transmits information but also embodies a particular mode of seeing and thinking. As mapmaking progressed, the spread of maps also disseminated the mapmaker’s distinctive way of perceiving and making sense of the World. The more frequently and intensively people used maps, the more their minds came to understand reality in the maps’ terms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The influence of maps went far beyond their practical employment in establishing property boundaries and charting routes. The use of a reduced, substitute space for reality is an impressive act in itself. However, what is even more impressive is how the map advances the evolution of abstract thinking throughout society. The combination of the reduction of reality and the construct of an analogical space is an attainment in abstract thinking of a very high order indeed for it enables one to discover structures that the World remain unknown if not mapped. The technology of the map gave to humans a new and more comprehending mind, better able to understand the unseen forces that shape his surroundings and his existence. What the map did for space—translate a natural phenomenon into an artificial and intellectual conception of that phenomenon—another technology, the mechanical clock did for time. For most of human history, people experienced time as a continuous, cyclical flow. To the extent that time was “kept,” the keeping was done by instruments that emphasized this natural process: sundials around which shadows would move, hourglasses down which sand would pour, clepsydras through which water would stream. There was no particular need to measure time with precision or to break a day up into little pieces. For most people, the movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars provided the only clocks they needed. Life was, in the words of the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff, “dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity.” That began to change in the latter half of the Middle Ages. The first people to demand a more precise measurement of time were Christian monks, whose lives revolved around a rigorous schedule of prayer. In the sixth century, Saint Benedict had ordered his followers to hold seven prayer services at specified times during day. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Six hundred years later, the Cistercians gave new emphasis to punctuality, dividing the day into a regimented sequence of activities and viewing any tardiness or other waste of time to be an affront to God. Spurred by the need for temporal exactitude, monks took the lead in pushing forward the technologies of timekeeping. It was in the monastery that the first mechanical clocks were assembled, their movements governed by the swinging of weights, and it was the bells in the church tower that first sounded the hours by which people would come to parcel out their lives. The desire for accurate timekeeping spread outward from the monastery. The royal and princely courts of Europe, brimming with riches and prizing the latest and most ingenious devices, began to cover clocks and invest in their refinement and manufacture. As people moved from the countryside to the town and started working in markets, mills, and factories rather than fields, their days came to be carved into ever more finely sliced segments, each announced by the tolling of a bell. Bells sounded for start of work, meal breaks, end of work, closing of gates, start of market, close of market, assembly, emergencies, council meetings, end of drink service, time for street cleaning, curfew, and so on through an extraordinary variety of special peals in individual towns and cities. The need for tighter scheduling and synchronization of work, transportation, devotion, and even leisure provided the impetus for rapid progress in clock technology. It was no longer enough for every town or parish to follow its own clock. Now, time had to be the same everywhere—or else commerce and industry would falter. Units of time became standardized—seconds, minutes, hours—and clock mechanisms were fine-tuned to measure those units with much greater accuracy. By the fourteenth century, the mechanical clock had become a commonplace, near-universal tool for coordinating the intricate workings of the new urban society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Cities vied with one another to install the most elaborate clocks in the towers of their town halls, churches, or palaces. No European community felt able to hold up its head unless in its midst the planets wheeled in cycles and epicycles, while angels in its midst the planets wheeled in cycles and epicycle, while angels trumped, cocks crew, and apostles, kings and prophets marched and countermarched at the booming of the hours. Clocks did not just become more accurate and more ornate. They got smaller and less expensive. Advances in miniaturization led to the development of affordable timepieces that could fit into the rooms of people’s houses or even be carried on their person. If the proliferation of public clocks changed the way people worked, shopped, played, and otherwise behaved as members of an ever more regulated society, the spread of more personal tools for tracking time—chamber clocks, pocket watches, and, a little later, wristwatches—had more intimate consequences. The personal clock became an ever-visible, ever-audible companion and monitor. By continually reminding its owner of time used, times spent, time wasted, time lost, it became both prod and key to personal achievement and productivity. The personalization of precisely measured time was a major stimulus to the individualism that was an ever more salient aspect of Western civilization. The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement. We began to see, in all things and phenomena, the pieces that composed the whole, and then we began to see the pieces of which the pieces were made. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Our thinking became Aristotelian in its emphasis on discerning abstract patterns behind the visible surfaces of the material World. The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. The clock helped create the belief in an independent World of mathematically measurable sequences. The abstract framework of divided time became the point of reference for both action and thought. Independent of the practical concerns that inspire the timekeeping machine’s creation and governed its day-to-day use, the clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. Which gets me to another concept, what is called reification. Reification means confusing words with things. It is a thinking error with multiple manifestations, some merely amusing, other extremely dangerous. This past summer in the sweltering New York heat, a student of mine looked at a thermometer in our classroom. “It is ninety-six degrees,” he said. “No wonder it is so hot!” He had it the wrong way around, of course, as many people do who have never learned or cannot remember these three simple notions: that there are things in the World and then there are our names for them; that there is no such thing as a real name; and that a name may or may not suggest the nature of the things named—as, for example, when the United States of America’s government called its South Pacific hydrogen-bomb experiments Operation Sunshine. What I am trying to say here is what Shakespeare said more eloquently in his life “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” However, Shakespeare was only half right, in that for many people a rose would not smell as sweet if it were called a “stinkweed.” And because this is so, because people confuse names with things, advertising is among the most consistently successful enterprises in the World today. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
If it is called the “Lumbering Elephant,” advertisers know that no matter how excellent an automobile may be, it will not sell. Moreover, if it is called a “Vista Cruiser” or a “Phoenix” or “Grand Prix,” no matter how rotten a car may be, you can sell it. Politicians know this as well, and, sad to say, so do scholars, who far too often obscure the emptiness of what they are talking and writing about by affixing alluring names to what is not there. I suggest, therefore, that reification be given a prominent place in our studies, so that our students will know how it both knows. Furthermore, some attention must be given to the style and tone of language. Each Universe of discourse has its own special way of addressing its subject matter and its audience. Each subject in a curriculum is a special manner of speaking and writing, with its own rhetoric of knowledge, a characteristic way in which arguments, proofs, speculations, experiments, polemics, even humor, are expressed. Speaking and writing are, after all, performing arts, and each subject requires a somewhat different kind of performance. Historians, for example, do not speak or write history in the same way biologists speak or write biology. The differences have to do with the degree of precision their generalization permit, the types of facts they marshal, the traditions of their subject, and the nature of their training. It is worth remembering that many scholars have exerted influence as much through their manner as their matter—one thinks Veblen in sociology, Dr. Freud in psychology, Galbraith in economics. The point is that knowledge is a form of literature, and the various styles of knowledge ought to be studied and discussed, all the more because the language found in typical school textbooks tends to obscure this. Textbook language, which is apt to be the same from subject to subject, creates the false impression that systematic knowledge is always expressed in a dull, uninspired monotone. I have read recipes on the back of cereal boxes that were written with more style and conviction than textbook descriptions of the causes of the American Revolution. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Of the language of grammar books I will not even speak, for, to borrow from Shakespeare, it is unfit for a Christian ear to endure. However, the problem is not insurmountable. Teachers who are willing to take the time can find material that convey ideas in a form characteristic of their discipline. And while they are at it, they can help their students to see that what we call a prayer, a political speech, and an advertisement differ from each other now only in their content but in their styles and tone; one might say mostly in their style and tone and manners of address. Which brings us to another significant concept—what we shall call the principle of the non-neutrality of media. I mean by this what Marshall McLuhan meant to suggest when he said, “The medium is the message”: that the form in which information is coded has, itself, an inescapable bias. In a certain sense, this is an entirely familiar idea. We recognize, for example, that the World is somewhat different when we speak about it in English and when we speak about it in German. We might even say that the grammar of a language is an organ of perception and accounts for the variances in the World view that we find among different peoples. However, we have been slow to acknowledge that every extension of speech—from painting hieroglyphics to the alphabet to the printing press to television—also generates unique ways of apprehending the World, amplifying or obscuring different features of reality. Each medium, like language itself, classifies the World for us, sequences it, frames it, enlarges it, reduced it, argues a case for what the World is like. In the United States of America, for example, it is no longer possible for Republicans to be elected to high political office—not because our Constitution forbids it but because television forbids it, since television exalts the attractive visual image and has little patience with or love for the subtle or logical World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Our students must understand two essential points about all this. Just as language itself creates culture in its own image, each new medium of communication re-creates or modifies culture in its image; and it is extreme naivete to believe that a medium of communication or, indeed, any technology is merely a tool, a way of doing. Each is also a way of seeing. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a picture; and to a man with a computer, the whole World looks like data. To put it another way, and to paraphrase the philosopher Wittgenstein, a medium of communication may be a vehicle of thought but we must not forget that it is also the driver. A consideration of how the printing press of the telegraph or television or the computer does its driving and where it takes us must be included in our students’ education or else they will be disarmed and extremely vulnerable. There is one principle about language that is probably occurring to many of you right about now: namely, that one ought not to put up with any lecturer who takes more of your time than he has been allotted. And so I will conclude with three points. First, I trust you understand that the suggestions I have made are not directed exclusively or even primarily at language teachers, English or otherwise. This is a task for everyone. Second, I want to reiterate that to provide our students with a defense against the indefensible, it is neither necessary nor desirable to focus exclusively on political language. Whenever this is attempted, it is apt to be shallow and limited. The best defense is one with a wider reach, which has implications for all language transactions. And finally, I do not claim that my proposals will solve all our problems, or even provide full protection from indefensible discourse. They are only a reasonable beginning, and there is much more to be done. However, we have to start somewhere and, as Ray Bradbury once wrote, somewhere lies between the right ear and the left one. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Many people think youth is not a strong position and it can hardly work out well. The individual young man is threatened either with retreating back to the organized system or breaking down and sinking into the lumpen proletariat. Nevertheless, culturally there is a lot of strength here; let us try to see where it is. Consider directly, their politics are unimpressive. They could not be otherwise since they are so hip and sure that society cannot be different. Explicitly, they are pacifists, being especially vocal about the atom bomb. The Bomb is often mentioned by themselves and other commentators as an explanation of their religious crisis; but it is not convincing. Their own diatribes seem to be mostly polemical self-defense, as if to say: “You squares dropped the atom bombs, do not criticize my blasting music on top of Trump Tower.” In the play The Connection this is openly stated as a defense for a barbiturate. On the whole one does not observe that the youths are so concerned about nuclear weapons as many mothers of families or squares who have common sense. One of the youth spokesmen wrote a long dithyramb about the Bomb, of which the critic George Dennison remarked: “He seems miffed that people pay attention to the atom bomb instead of him.” At the same time, their peacefulness is genuine and their tolerance of differences is admirable, extending also to the squares, except for loathsome class enemies like Time, Housing, or gouging employment agencies. Their ability to occupy themselves in poverty on a high level or cultural and animal satisfaction is remarkable, with per-back books, odd records, and pleasures of the flesh. Their inventing of community creativity is unique. If we consider these achievements, we see that they are factual evidence for a political proposition of capital importance: People can go it on their own, without resentment, hostility, delinquency, or stupidity, better than when they move in the organized system and are subject to authority. (To be sure, the youth are not among the underprivileged to being with; they have some useful education and their poverty is in part voluntary; bit these are not circumstances unavailable to others.) They do not go far, they invite degeneration, they seem hard put to assume responsibility; but they do exist interestingly and peacefully. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
In one important respect, their community culture could be made far more effective. I am referring to the Rap and Hip Hop in a community setting. They have chosen too primitive a model, exempli gratia, Haiti. If they would ponder on the Balinese dances, they might learn something—not the Bali dances on a stage on Broadway, but as they exist in their home villages where, to the music of the gamelan, the onlookers suddenly become entranced and fall down or become possessed and would do violence to themselves, except that they are rescued one and all by their friends of the community. Like prostitution, robbery, murder, and other crimes, castration was illegal in both Christian theology and Roman law. In the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who ruled from 527 to 565, decreed harsh punishment for the crime—if the surgery did not kill them, perpetrators could themselves be castrated, be sent to work in the mines, as well as have their property confiscated. However, such dire risks only helped drive up the value of eunuchs so that, also like prostitution, robbery, and murder, castration flourished, to the point where one writer descries the Byzantine empire as a “eunuch’s paradise.” In modern times, to deal with these increasingly complex and novel problems, economists have belatedly begun to call on psychologists, anthropologist, and sociologists—whose work they once disdained as insufficiently “hard” or quantitative. Whole new branches of economics have opened up—for instance, behavioral economics, neuroeconomics—and various sub-subspecialties. Economist are also working on many of the issues attending the rise of revolutionary wealth. For example, according to Eisenach, the cost-of-living index is now statistically corrected to take account of improved quality in successive versions of the same product. Economists have turned out a substantial literature on the cost of acquiring the information needed to make intelligent choices. And they are trying to cope with complex intellectual-property issues, asymmetric information and other aspects of revolutionary wealth. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Yet gaping holes still exist. For all the attention it receives, intellectual property remains inadequately understood, as does the non-rival and essentially inexhaustible character of knowledge. Other glaring questions cry out for answers. The last—and sometimes the first—word has not been written about the value of knowledge that proves valuable only when combined with other knowledge, or about the de-synchronization effect, or about what happens to trade patterns when wealth waves collide. For all the effort of individual economists or teams, the profession as a whole has yet to fully appreciate the enormousness of today’s runaway, revolutionary change. There is no systematic effort to map interdependent changes in our relationships to time, space and knowledge—let alone to the larger, full set of the deep fundamentals—all of which, as we have seen, are occurring at high speed. Half a century since the revolution began, they have yet to formulate the coherent, overarching theories about this historical stage of economic development to help us understand who we are and where we are going. “O Lord, to us belong confusion and shame of face—to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers—because we have sinned against You. To the Lord our God belongs mercy and lovingkindness and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against Him; and we have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by walking in His laws which He set before us through His servants the prophets,” reports Daniel 9.8-10. Dear Lord in Heaven, in our arms take it, making good thoughts. House-God, be enchanted, that our children may grow into successful adults, happy, contented; beautifully walking the trail to old age. Having good thoughts of the Earth its mother, that she may give it the fruits of her being. Combine all the woes that temporal and ecclesiastical tyrannies have ever inflicted on men or nations, and you will not have reached the full measure of suffering with this martyr people was called upon to endure century upon century. If was as if all the powers of Earth had conspired—and they did so conspire—to exterminate the American people, or at least to transform it into a brutalized horde. History dare not pass over in silence these scenes of well nigh unutterable misery. It is her duty to give a true and vivid account of them, to evoke due admiration for the superhuman endurance of this suffering people, and to testify that American has striven with gods and men, and has prevailed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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The Problem with America it is Submerged in Old Atlantis
The problem with America it is submerged in old Atlantis. It has become like a refugee camp where all the geniuses have been driven out of their jobs and country by unfriendly regimes that are idling. The World of streets are so seductive that a person can ask you where you are from, then tell you what you are and you will believe them. People are too dependent on history and culture. However, the World belongs to those who understand it. Still, countless individuals bring their broken hearts and shattered dreams to the altar and hope they will be accepted, and they pray that rejection will not throw them into a rage and turn them into a Cain. Perhaps a vast number of those in society naively produced their favorite treasures and piled them in an indiscriminate heap. Those who do not recognize their value now may do so later. However, while some may be flattered by being tested, others resent it. People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties, and next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen—economic, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etcetera. When the day’s work is done, they want to be entertained. They cannot see why their entertainment should not simply be entertaining. Yet, it is not amusing to send oneself back to high school. Higher education must offer the individual much more than it does. For in the end, several people realize that they have no education in the conduct of life, at the university who was there to teach the students that drinking is not fun, and how to deal with their erotic needs, with other genders, and with family matters, and one graduates to some primal point of balance. In this great confusion, there is still an open channel to the soul. In many be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. However, the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the struggle is all about. The soul has to hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annual it altogether. What makes the journey through life singularly difficult is the disheartening expansion of trained ignorance and bad thought. For to put the matter at its baddest, we live in a thought-World, and the thinking has gone very bad. Thinking alone will never cure what ails humanity, and so many should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts them beyond the need to reason elaborately. It is time for people to shed superfluities so that their mental bodies can recover its ability to breathe, and protect the root-simplicities of being. The University has never been a sanctuary or shelter from “the outer World.” It can be the place where megalomaniacs, heretics, tyrants, and illiterate athletes get the training and documents they need to make the cities turbulent, and torment humanity. The odor of their egos now is no more pleasant than they were 400 years ago. The heat of the dispute between the Left and Right has grown so fierce in the last decade that the habits of civilized discourse have suffered a scorching. Antagonists seem no longer to listen to one another. The World is so ready for an anti-hero that almost anyone can get voted into office or steal an election. Even criminals are being voted in to run cities like Sacramento, California—one after the next. Preoccupied with quests of Health, Pleasures of the Flesh, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes and the university has become society’s conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences. It makes an important statement and deserves careful study. For instance, it is interesting how sweetheart Lori Loughlin was sentenced for what she allegedly did, but Kevin Johnson was allowed to become mayor of Sacramento, and displayed more criminal behavior, never was prosecuted for what he actually did and was even invited to the White House. I guess we have to keep the cook book witches in check, but let dangerous felons go free. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
What each generation is can be best discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of humankind. This in turn can best be discovered in each generation’s tastes, amusements, and especially angers (this is above al true in an age that prides itself on clam self-awareness). Particularly revealing are the various impostors whose business it is to appeal to the young. These culture peddlers have the strongest of motives for finding out the appetites of the young—so they are useful guides into the labyrinths of the spirit of the times. However, there is a human nature, it is guided by awareness. Humans are not just creatures of accident, chained to and formed by the particular cave in which they are born. One with a joy, and pleasure for life is far more effective in motivating others than anyone who is disinterested in what their moral duty is. The youth need to be helped to recognize and avoid deforming forces of convention and prejudice. The vision of what that nature is may be clouded by the fake news media. The soul may at the outset require extrinsic rewards and punishments to motivate its activity; but in the end that activity is its own reward and is self-sufficient. Fascinations with the youth leads to an awareness of the various kinds of soul and their various capacities for truth and error as well as learning. Every age has its problems, and things in the past may not have been wonderful. Society needs to be taught to be highly intelligent, materially, and spiritually free. So many are confused by the emerging perception of what needs to be done. Every time there is a disaster, people are told to “donate money,” so the youth are brought up in a consumer driven economy and taught that money can solve all problems. This makes it harder for people to learn what truly matters. Since in any specific struggle we might be outspent by several hundred times, we need to be more clever, more creative. The population is being inundated with conflicting versions of increasingly complex events. People are giving up on understanding anything. The glut of untreated sewage spewing from the TV news media is dulling awareness, not assisting it. Overload. It encourages passivity, not involvement. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Specific victories are possible, but overall understanding of the forces that are moving society seem to be diminishing. People’s minds seem to be running in dogged, one-dimensional channels which are reminiscent of the freeways during rush hour. As mass media has grown to become a kind of environment, it is not really contributing to any pool of useful knowledge. The real community of humans, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, of all humans to the extent they desire to know. Television has become the major mental and physical experiential field for most of the people in the country, and the confusion of television information with a wider, direct mode of experience is advancing rapidly. Become so many are confusing television experience with direct experience of the World, we are not noticing that the experience itself is being unified to the single behavior of watching television. Switching from channel to channel, believing that a sports program was a significantly different experience from a police program or news of a Russian war, all 121 million viewers are sitting separately in dark rooms engaged in exactly the same activity at the same time: watching television. It is as if the whole nation has gathered at a gigantic three-ring circus. It has become possible for a nation of 325 million people to be spoken to as individuals, one to one, the television set to the person or family, all at once. So many should be chilled at the thought, realizing that these conditions of television viewing—confusion, unification, isolation, especially when combined with passivity and the effects of implanted imagery—are ideal preconditions for the imposition of autocracy. President Trump have uncovered, through an exhaustive investigation by law enforcement agencies, that the TV news media is involved in a massive conspiracy to destroy our democracy, a conspiracy which enjoys at least the tacit support of thousands of students, journalist, attorneys and even certain judges and elected officials. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Television is the perfect instrument to help bring tyrannical control. We can all be spoken to at the same time, night or day, from a centralized information source. In fact, we are. Every day, a handful of people speak, the rest listen. In many ways, as we saw with the recent Presidential Election, television makes the military coup and mass arrests of the imagination unnecessary. People thought that these subtle coups would make brutal and heavy-handed means of confining awareness unnecessary, but it seems to be making it worse. The riots, violence, kidnappings, hijacking, bombings—the sole purpose of these actions is often no more than media exposure. Sensing that the television is now the country’s main transmitter or reality, individuals began to take person action to affect it. Something in the nature of television imagery allows form to supersede content. However, the gravest mistake that can be made by a media creature is to assault the machine. The machine does not care about its fantasies. A new one will do. Bringing down Trump was just as good for ratings as supporting him. Better. More action. The only goals of the machine are to contribute to be the real power behind the throne, no matter who is king, and to remain the primary factor in all public perception. Television has the power to create presidents, and it has the power to destroy them. Most people do not raise complaint against a machine doing what it is designed to do. After all, who expects a machine to notice its own side effects? To care about the social and psychic consequences of its own presence? Machines asks no questions, have no peripheral vision or depth perception. They see the future through the fixed eye of their technical possibilities. However, it is well said that in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is kind. In America, and increasingly in the rest of the World, technology is a one-eyed king ruling unopposed amidst idiot cheering. Globally, there are 5.36 billion people Worldwide who are TV users, and that number is expected to reach 5.7 billion by 2026. Humans cannot live by electric wiring alone, and this obvious fact must be part of any plans we make for the future. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Power, utility, and prestige of the word have significantly diminished. All most all of the presidential candidates found their vote-getting power in their images and left content out as confusing and irrelevant. They were correct to do this. As we know, a campaign run on content could not possibly work on television. During the years that television was coming into its own as the central factor in American personal and political life, its basic nature and the effects it had on human beings and their institutions were rarely examined The problems that people did discuss were concentrated in three main areas: commercialism, access and programming. The speed, range, and impersonality of modern media undermine the oral tradition and therefore weaken the possibility of a nourishing community life. And in these days when lying is called misspeaking or disinformation, Newspeak becomes the normal mode of discourse. Psychologist, parents’ groups and educators lobbied against the dominance of sensational, superficial, irrelevant and violent programs. They sought programs with “prosocial values.” They especially wanted new emphasis on humanistic and educational shows for children. These groups saw no reason why such values as cooperation, loving and caring could not be as appropriate for television programming as violence and competition, but yet, no one still has censored the news nor warned readers that the informational may be fiction and not necessarily scholarly. Historians lobbied for more documentaries, believing that television has no greater inherent limits to its ability to present historical truth than the media that had preceded it. They succeeded in getting legislation requiring that TV networks permanently store their news and documentary footage. Now we can look to a future in which the present era will be understood in terms of the television treatment of it. Ecologist assumed television could be a potentially useful tool in expanding knowledge of how our species interacts with natural forces. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Political radicals believed television could stimulate deeper understanding of complex issues. Some groups believe there is a possibility to build sensitivity to their culture and philosophy through TV. Listen, everybody is watching TV. If we handle this the right way, we can reach everyone. Because of this, the decline of language may have proceeded so far that most people no longer perceive it as a problem. An analogy here might clarify this. It is said that the brain in the only organ of our body that feels no pain and therefore does not know when it is injured. The brain does not regard brain damage as a problem. If we think of language as the brain of a civilization, the it is possible that severe language-damage may not be perceived by the social body as a problem. It is possible that we have adapted ourselves to disinformation, to Newspeak, to public-relations hype, to imagery disguised as thought, to picture newspapers and magazines, to religion revealed in the form of entertainment, to politics in the form of a thirty-second television commercial. In adapting ourselves, we come to accept the present situation as the only available standard and conclude that this is the best of all possible Worlds. However, perhaps this is not the case. There does appear to be a national concern about illiteracy, aliteracy, and the persisting decline in our young people’s analytic ability. There is even a movement that wants to give the highest priority to teaching critical thinking in schools. Education, a subject never far from the issues raised by technology and language, attempts to understand and resolve new conditions of culture. Nonetheless, sometimes it is great fun to complain and, in America, it can even be profitable. However, unless one’s complaints are grounded in a sense of duty to one’s country or to a recognizable humane tradition, they are not worthy of serious attention. Everybody engages in creative arts and is likely to carry a sketchbook, proving when the psychologists and progressive educators have always claimed, that every child is creative if not blocked. Resigning from the rat race, they have removed the block. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
They work at these arts honestly, with earnest absorption, and even if they do continually subject one another and passers-by to listening to readings, and encourage the community by exclaiming, “It is the greatest!” Such creative activity sharpens the perceptions, releases and refines feelings, and is a powerful community bond. In itself it has no relation to the production of art works or the miserable life of sacrifice that an artist leads. It is personal cultivation, not much different from finger paintings. Like the conversation just described, its aim is action and self-expression and not the creation of culture and value or making a difference in further World. There is, of course, no reason why it should be. All men are creative but few are artists. Art making requires a peculiar psychotic disposition. Let me formulate the artistic disposition as following: it is reacting with one’s ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the World, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real World for others. This is an unusual combination of psychological machinery and talents, and those who, having it, go on to appoint themselves to such a thankless vocation, are rarer still. These few are not themselves Hipsters, for they have a vocation, they are not resigned. (My observation is that is artists are blocked in their vocation, they cannot resign themselves to seeking other experiences, and certainly they do not do finger painting, for if they can do finger painting they can make art.) Nevertheless, living among the Hipsters, there will be a disproportionate number of artists, for the same reason that artists gravitate to any bohemia. Also, some of these genuine undersigned artists will make works that speak for the Hipster community that they live among. That is, the “Hipster” artists are not themselves Hipsters, for they are artists; but their art work tell us about the Hipster. This situation rises interesting questions about the relation of an artist and his immediate audience, and it is worth exploring. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
It is both an advantage and a disadvantage for an artist to have around him an intensely creative gang of friends who are not rival artists. They provide him an immediate audience that helps assuage the sufferings of art loneliness and art guilt. On the other hand, it is a somewhat sickening audience because it has no objective cultural standard, it is not in the stream of ancient and international tradition. So its exclamations, “It is the greatest!” or, “Go, man, go!” do not give much security. The artists finds that he is a parochial group hero, when the culture hero for the immortal World. Let me tell a few anecdotes to illustrate this fascinating dilemma of the relation of the “Hipster” artist both to the Hipster and the objective culture in which he must finally exist. An incident at a party for Patchen. Patchen is a poet of the “previous” generation, of long-proven integrity, with an immense body of work, some of which is obviously good, and the importance of the whole of it (may much still be added!) not yet clear. The point of our anecdote is that Patchen has the respect of writers but has received no public acclaim, no money, no easy publication. Now at this party, one of the best “Hipster” writers, a genuine young artist, came demanding that the older poet give some recognition to the tribe of Hipster poets, to “give them a chance.” This was ironical since, riding on the Madison Avenue notoriety that we have mentioned, they had all got far more public acclaim, invitations to universities, night-club readings, than all of us put together. However, Patchen asked for the names. The Hipster spokesman reeled off twenty, and Patchen unerringly pointed out the two who were worthwhile. This threw the younger poet into a passion, for he needed, evidently, to win artistic recognition also for his parochial audience, among who he was a hero, in order to reassure himself that he was a poet, which he was and as Patchen would at once have said. So he insulted the older man. Patchen rose to his height, called him a young punk, and left. The young man was crushed, burst into tears (he was drunk), and also left. At this, a young woman who often accompanied him, came up to me and clutched me by the knees, pleading with me to help him grow up, for nobody, she said paid him any attention. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
That is, the Hipster audience, having resigned, is not in the World; yet being an eager creative audience, it wins the love and loyalty of its poet who becomes its hero and spokesman. However, he too, then, doubts that he is in the World and has a vocation. As a Hipster spokesman he receives notoriety and the chance of the wide public that every poet wants and needs; but he cannot help feeling that he is getting it as a pawn of the organized system. Here is a simpler illustration of the relation of the spokesman-artist to the objective culture. This fellow is a much weaker poet, more nearly Hipster himself, and quite conceited. At a reading of some other poet who is not a Hipster spokesman, he tries to stop the reading by shouting, “Do not listen to this crap! let us hear from X.” His maneuver is to make the parochial the only existing culture; then, by definition, he himself is an artist. And here is an illustration of the most elementary response. A Hipster spokesman, not ungifted but probably too immature to accomplish much, gives a reading in a theater. During the intermission, he asks a rather formidable and respected critic what he thinks of a particular poem, and the critic says frankly that it is childish. At this the outraged poet, very drunk, stands in the lobby screaming, “I hope you die! I hope art dies! I hope all artists die!” These illustrations and the analysis of the Hipster conversation brings out the same point: In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race or what they can produce out of their own guts, it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or World culture. One’s own products are likely to be personal or parochial. Shared creative expression has a therapeutic effect, and so results in transference, unconscious attachment. The striking, and often amusing, example of this is the young ladies who take modern dancing, with its beautiful exercises that release tense muscles; they are all head over ears in love with Paris and Beyonce, and fiercely loyal and sectarian. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The same occurs among the young Hipster, except that, since there is no “leader,” the emerging love attaches either to the community or to each one’s self-image narcissistically. This makes for a powerful warmth of life—“the warmth of assembled animal bodies,” as Kafka said—but it makes even harder to get into the World. It gives the young men a daily interpersonal excitement, more satisfactory than the empty belonging or conformity of the organization, and happier than the loneliness of art. However, it does not give them “something to do.” The wretchedness of a widow’s life was, however, perhaps not the worst consequence of her husband’s death. After all, she was still alive, in a manner of speaking. Many Hindus, mostly men, considered this intolerably lenient. They believed that if a woman’s husband was happy, so should she be. If he was said, so should she be. And if he was dead, so should she be. So even creeping miserably around a relative’s or spiteful in-law’s home was too soft an existence. Any good widow (a Hindu oxymoron) would know better than to impose her tainted self on this World. That was what suttee—immolation on the husband’s funeral pyre—was for. The “paramountcy of a woman’s chastity” was the most compelling reason for suttee, although financial and property considerations also cost many an inconvenient widow her life. One anti-suttee crusader explained that relatives and in-laws feared that “if there was no cremation, widows may go astray; if they burn, this fear is removed. Their family and relations are freed from apprehension.” From this perspective, suttee becomes “the ultimate chastity belt.” The widow who willingly clutches her husband’s sandals and climbs up unaided to lie beside his corpse as the fagots are fired is truly reverenced. Once they are safely crisped, such widows are lauded and mythologized much like Muslim suicide bombers who eagerly launch themselves as human explosives to ascend directly to paradise. The great difference is, huge numbers of suttees have not gone willingly to their incineration. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Those who did were driven either by religious conviction or, more probably, by despair at their lot. Though suttee was legally banned in 1829, it has flourished until well into the twentieth century—a mere three and a half decades ago—when teenaged Roop Kanwar shared her husband’s cremation in September 1987. For centuries, witnesses have reported force in supposedly voluntary suttees. In the seventeenth century at Lahore, Frenchman Francois Bernier watched as a few Brahmins and an old woman immobilized a shivering and sobering twelve-year-old widow with ropes, then forced her onto the pyre. He saw another suttee prevented from escaping the billowing flames by men carrying long poles. In the eighteenth century, a Western observer saw a widow tied down beside her dead husband on heaped logs that were then set ablaze. However, in the dark and rainy night, the widow managed to free herself from the scorching flames and hid nearby. Soon, however, her relatives noticed only one body on the pyre. They raised the alarm and quickly found the wretched woman cowering under some brushwood. Her son hauled her back and ordered her to either hurl herself back onto the funeral pyre or at least to drown or hang herself. If she refused, he warned, she would cause him to lose his caste. Such stories abound. Widows were drugged, beaten, bound, terrorized, and tied down beside their dead husbands. Often, they were bound with slow burning shots of green bamboo that would hold them until the died. In 1835, despite livid protests by the British agent, the fives queens of a deceased ruler were hauled, screaming and protecting, to their death of his pyre. In the 1950s, a suttee who escaped from the flames lay charred and dying for two days under a tree, and nobody offered her the slightest assistance. Roop Kanwar was eighteen when her husband of eight months died of gastroenteritis in Deorala, a village in Rajasthan. Hours later, still on September 4, 1987, stern men armed with waving swords escorted her to her husband’s hastily contrived funeral pyre. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Some eyewitnesses thought she walked unsteadily and foamed at the mouth, while to others she was cheerful and composed. (Statements were impossible to corroborate, with participants understandably reluctant to admit they had attended the illegal event.) “Mummy! Papa!” Roop cried, thrashing her hands as the flames, ignited by her conveniently unindictable, underage brother-in-law, licked at her body. Neither Mummy nor Papa were there, of course; the were informed of the daughter’s “courageous decision” only after the fact. Roop Kanwar was the (hopefully) las victim of centuries of tradition, her death facilitated by authorities who civic-mindedly seized upon this fortuitous opportunity to bring some pilgrimage business into their little village. As Roop’s in-laws swaggered about, proclaiming their honor, Deorala suddenly became a shiny new dot on the religious map. The heat of passion is ice-cold compared to the inferno of a suttee’s sad ending. Millions of suttees have undoubtedly quavered to their terrible deaths, secure in their righteousness and proud of, or at least grateful for, the honor the flames will soon reflect on their entire family. Millions more have been forced onto the flames by relatives and in-laws. These latter are determined to eliminate the unwanted presence of the widows, and above all, to guarantee they will never disgrace themselves or their loved (even if unloving) ones by an unchaste thought, much less a deed. Suttee is, after all, a preemptive stive against potential unchastity. Thinking matters. However, many of the facts we think about are false. And much of what we believe not always the most enlightened perspective. Despite the tidal waves of data, information and knowledge crashing over us today, a greater and greater percentage of what we know is, in fact, less and less true. Even if we could believe the media, even if every advertiser were truthful, every lawyer honest, every politician sealed one’s lips, every adulterer confessed and every fast-talking telemarketer went straight, much of the information we consume, as we will see, would still not be truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
If this is the case, how should individuals—or, for that matter, companies or countries—turn the deep fundamental of knowledge into wealth? Some knowledge has always been needed to produce wealth. Hunter-gatherers had to know the migratory patterns of the animals they pursued. Peasants came to know a lot about soil. Normally, however, once learned the same knowledge remained useful generation after generation. Factory workers had to know how to operate their machines quickly and safely for as long as they had the job. Today work-relevant knowledge changes so rapidly that more and more new knowledge has to be learned both on and off the job. Learning becomes a continuous-flow process. However, we cannot learn everything fast enough. And if some of what we think is stupid, that helps explain why there is no need to be embarrassed. We are not alone in believing stupidities. The reason is that every chunk of knowledge has a limited shelf life. At some point it becomes obsolete knowledge—what might more appropriately be called “obsoledge.” Does Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Poetics constitute “knowledge”? Or the ideas of Confucius or Kant? We can, of course, describe their ideas as wisdom. However, the wisdom of these authors or philosophers was based on what they knew—their own knowledge base—and much of what they knew was, in fact, false. Aristotle, whose views held sway across Europe for almost two thousand years, believed that eels were asexual and “originated in…the entrails of the Earth.” He also believed that the Indian Ocean was a landlocked sea—a geographical error that was still shared centuries later by Ptolemy and other European and Islamic scholars. In the third century AD, Porphyry, the biographer of Pythagoras, assured his readers that is you took park of a bean plant, put it into an earthenware pot, buried it for three months, then dug it up, you would surely find either the head of a child or female private parts. In the seventh century, Saint Isadore of Seville assured contemporaries that “bees are generated from decomposed veal.” Half a millennium later no less a genius than Leonardo da Vinci declared that beavers knew the private parts where being used by humans for medicinal purposes. When trapped, he asserted, a beaver bites them off “and leaves them to its enemies.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
When tomatoes, native to South America, first reached Europe in the sixteenth century, perfectly intelligent people knew that they were toxic to humans. It was two hundred years before Linnaeus declared otherwise. And as late as 1820 when he risked eating two tomatoes to prove Linnaeus was right, a particular daring fellow attracted a large crowed. However, obsoledge is not always assuming. As late as 1892 it was common knowledge—and scientifically accepted since the time of Galileo—that the planet Jupiter had four satellites. That knowledge became obsolete, however, on September 9 of that years, when astronomer E.E. Barnard of the Lick Observatory discovered a fifth moon. By 2003, astronomers had counted six. Similarly, scientists for decades had assumed that there were only nine planets in our solar system. However, in 2005, a California Institute of Technology astronomer discovered an object he named Xena, which he and other scientists believed may be a tenth planet orbiting our sun. Then there was London physiologist L. Erskine Hill, who reported in 1912 that experimental evidence showed the “purity of air is of no importance.” If, over the last few decades, we have not learned otherwise, how many more people around the World would have died of pollution related caused? And how many patients will die today because somewhere an otherwise intelligent doctor is manipulating information or relying on outdated “fact,” learned or manufactured years ago in medical school or by junk scientists? How many companies will go belly-up because of a marketing strategy based on yesterday’s fad? How many investments are doomed because of out-of-date financial data? What if your employer decided to manipulate your personal information so he could reinvest your earnings into his shell corporation? And what about tomorrow’s deaths or disaster just waiting to happen? #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Look, for example, at the minutes of the September 2002 meeting of the Advisory Committee of CERN users. (CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research.) Tucked away among references to decisions about providing ashtrays “close to the outside doors of major buildings for smokers” and notifications of “changes in mail delivery service” is the following item: “The names of persons to be contacted in case of accidents should be restored in the Human Resource database.” Why on Earth, one might ask, should the list of persons to be contacted in case of a nuclear accident be missing? The answer: Because “for the majority of people the information became obsolete” and the administration “did not have the resources to ensure systematic updating.” It took the chairman of the users’ group to point out that “the potential human cost in case of a serious accident is immense, and a solution should be found.” What is clear is that wherever knowledge is stored, whether in digital databases or inside our brains, there is the equivalent of Aunt Emily’s attic overstuffed with obsoledge—facts, ideas, theories, image, and insights that have been outrun by change or replaced by later, presumably more accurate, truths. Obsoledge is a big part of the knowledge base of every person, business, institution and society. By accelerating change, we also speed up the rate at which knowledge becomes obsoledge. Unless constantly and ruthlessly updated, experience on the job becomes less valuable. Databases are out of date by the time they are published. With every passing semi-second, the accuracy of our knowledge about our investments, our markets, our competition, our technology and out customers’ needs diminishes. As a result, whether they are aware of it or not, companies, governments and individual today base more of their daily decisions on obsoledge—on ideas and assumptions that have been falsified by change—than ever before. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Occasionally, of course, some antique bit of obsoledge comes back to life, as it were, and proves useful today because the context around it has changed and given it powerful new meaning. However, more often than not, the reverse is true. Ironically, in advanced economies, companies brag about “knowledge management,” “knowledge assets” and “intellectual property.” Yet with all the numbers crunched by financial quants, economists, companies and governments, no one knows what obsoledge costs us in the form of degraded decision-making. What, one might ask, is the drag placed on individual investments, corporate profits, economic development, poverty-reduction programs and wealth creation in general? Beneath all of this, moreover, lies an even more important, hidden epistemological change. It affects not merely what we regard as knowledge but the tools we use to acquire it. Among these instruments of thought, few are remotely as important as analogy, in which we identify similarities in two or more phenomena and then draw conclusions from one to apply to the other. Humans can barely think or talk without making analogies. The Irish golfer Padraig Harrington tells a sports reports that “ A U.S. Open is one that really tests your ability to hit….you sort of want to be like a machine.” Which takes us back to the followers of Newton who said the entire cosmos was “like” a machine. Then there are all the people described has having “a mind like a computer,” or who “sleep like a baby,” or who are told to invest “like a pro” or think “like a genius.” Implicit analogies are built into language itself. Thus we still rate cars in terms of their “horsepower”—a leftover from the day when they were seen as analogs of horse-drawn coaches and were know as “horseless carriages.” However, the thought-tool we call analogy is growing harder to use. Analogies, always tricky, are growing trickier. For as the World changes, old similarities can turn into dissimilarities. Once-legitimate comparisons become strained. As parallels with the past break down, often unnoticed, conclusions based on them become misleading. And the faster the rate of change, the shorter the useful life span of analogies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
In this way, a change in one deep fundamental—time—affects a basic tool we use in the pursuit of another—knowledge. In sum, then, as we have seen, even among experts on the knowledge economy, few have thought much about what might be called the law of obsoledge: As change accelerates, so does the speed at which still more obsoledge accumulates. All of us carry with us a far bigger burden of obsolete knowledge than our ancestors did in the slower-moving societies of yesterday. And that is why so many of our most cherished ideas will set our descendants roaring with laughter. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Keep your loins girded and your lamps burning, and be like people who are waiting for their master to return home from the marriage feast, so that when one returns from the wedding and comes and knocks, they may open to one immediately,” reports Luke 12.34-36. Behold, my people, the spring has come; the Earth has received the embraces of the sun. And we shall soon see the results of that love. One may have never seen fiercer wonders—past the wit of any spirit to tell, but one of those who, when this planet’s sphering time doth close, will be its high remembrancers: who are they? The mighty ones have an eternal day. All souls are of equal importance before God. The soul, in the sense of the true self, is only spiritual. Of great importance are the evolutionary changes through which humankind in general has been passing during recent centuries. In the coming age, balance will be restored for people of both genders and all races, and everyone will take their rightful place alongside the dominant groups in the leadership of the whole race. Evolutionary trend of things are being the human race closer and closer to enlightenment and thus making it possible for everyone to claim and receive what is best for them in life. Fear not, neither be dismayed, O America; for lo, God will save you from afar, and your children from the lands of captivity. O America, you shall again be quiet and at ease, and none shall make you afraid. For a brief moment God has forsaken us, but with great compassion will He gather us. For even if the mountains depart and the hills move, God’s kindness will not depart from us. Nor His covenant of peace be removed. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
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A Devil Who Has Unity Will be a God
Behind the accepted history of our civilization—of great leaders and mass movements, of politics and progress—there is an alternative history, a shadow tradition. It is an oft-neglected World full of villains and vice, scoundrels and sorcerers, with an impact upon our culture out of proportion with the numbers of people involved. Almost everything about magic, including the forms it takes and the customs associated with it, gives one the impression that it is a religion of the devil. It everywhere seeks to mimic the World of faith as we find it revealed in the Christian Bible. There is a dark side of Western culture: the Satanic tradition. Even the serpent in the Garden of Eden—who tempts Adam and Eve to “Original Sin”—does not become a manifestation of evil (“that Ancient Serpent,” as Satan is sometimes know) until later. This change occurs with the advent of Christianity, which promotes Satan from a mischievous servant of God to His implacable opponent. The Roman Empire had thrived by absorbing, rather than destroying, the cultures they conquered, welcoming foreign gods into their temples as part of policy of conquest by integration. The Christians could not stomach this. Their God was supreme, and all other deities—initially regarded as hollow superstitions—began to be portrayed by their theologians as actively evil, demonic. This doctrine, demonization, defined the totalitarian nature of the Christian creed. These demons required a leader, and so Satan was reborn not just as an adversary, but as the Adversary. Myths began to grow up around this new Prince of Darkness, cribbed from fanciful reinterpretations of existing doctrine and the ravings of Christian hermits driven half-mad by isolation in the desert. Satan’s power is first suggested in the New Testament, when He tempts Jesus Christ with mastery of the kingdoms of the World—implying He has them all in His possession. The Old and New Testaments claim that the Devil was once the leader of the Watcher angels. These angels were commanded by God to watch over humankind, but they pitied moral men and lusted after mortal women. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
For teaching forbidden knowledge and copulating with their charges (in theological terms, the equivalent of a shepherd disgracing himself with his flock) these disobedient angels were cast from Heaven to become the denizens of Hell, whilst their children became demons and monsters. Satan—or Semjaza, as He is known here—is the leader of these disobedient angels. Another more widely-accepted version of the same story has Satan trying to claim God’s throne before loyal angels cast Him and his co-conspirators into darkness. Traditionally, the question of whether one personally regards Satan’s act as one of treachery or bravery is the definition of an individual’s loyalties in the war between darkness and light. Significantly, however, many traditions state that, before His fall from grace, Satan was known as Lucifer: derived from the Latin “Light bringer.” As an act of worship is composed of certain elements, so too is an act of magic. There are basically four constituents that are necessary. Invoking, charming, a symbolic action, and the use of a fetish. One may invoke either Satan or even the Trinity, and it is this that decides whether the magic is to be black or white. Such invoking is a counterpart to our addressing of God in prayer, as for example, when we say “Our Father.” The charm or spell that then follows brings the force of magic into play. This imitates our use of the Scriptures and our reference to the promises of the Christian Bible. The symbolic action underlies and supports the charm and mimics such scriptural actions as, for instance, the laying on of hands or kneeling in prayer. The use of a fetish, that is a magically charged object, corresponds perhaps to the use of water in baptism or bread and spirits in the case of the Lord’s supper. Though Christians never got their Apocalypse, they did win their spiritual war when, in the fourth century, an embattled Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The short-term benefits were obvious: Christianity appealed to the oppressed, promising them great reward in the afterlife; it also appealed to the oppressor, demanding the downtrodden obeyed their obeyed their superiors if they wished to enjoy rewards. The glories of a classical World built on pagan pragmatism were eroded, then destroyed, by Christian intolerance. As the Roman Empire fell in one of history’s many dark ironies the Catholic Church set itself up in its place. Imperial purple was the uniform of colour for the Church leaders’ new robes, Latin their sacred tongue, Rome their headquarters. However, while this new Roman Catholic Church could steal the superficial glories of the empire they had destroyed, they could begin to emulate the culture, comfort or security that Imperial Rome had provided to its citizens. The end of the World had failed to arrive on schedule, but the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—War, Death, Famine and Plagued—still characterized the medieval era, when the Christian creed held Europe in its thrall. The Middle Ages had arrived, and with them an era of cultural depression, a millennium of darkness, squalor and misery. The Gnostics believed that there were two equally-powerful gods—one “good,” the other “evil.” Some though the evil God was the one described in the Old Testament, the creator of this World, while the benevolent God described in the New Testament was His foe. In Gnostic doctrine, only pure spirit was “good.” All matter, including the human body, was “evil,” and humankind was made up of spirits trapped in prions of flesh. Widely suppressed with increasing severity, Gnosticism began to take on a variety of increasingly dark and erotic forms. Some Gnostics believed that, as all flesh was evil, it did not matter what use it was put to—in this sense, carnal excess could even be seen as redemptive, as with cults like the third-century Carpocratians, who indulged in ritualized pleasures of the flesh. Widely suppressed with increasing severity, Gnosticism began to take on a variety of increasingly dark and exotic forms. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Others, like the Cainite sect of the fourth century, reasoned that if the Old Testament God was evil, then His opponents must be good—therefore revering Old Testament villains like Cain, who proved his virtue in combat by murdering his brother, Abel. It is tempting to regard these early movements as the first Satanic sects, but the attitude of most Gnostics—that the flesh was inherently evil—was just as pathological as that of their pleasure-hating Catholic oppressors. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the Cathar sects. The first of these, the Bogomils, was formed in the Balkans during the tenth century. The Bogomils believed that Man was created when Satan vomited into an empty human vessel—a vivid illustration of their unhealthy attitude to their own bodies. Some have suggested Gnostic roots for the mysterious Luciferian cult that appears to have thrived secretly in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Germany thought Lucifer was a curious, cadaverous figure whose body glowed during their subterranean rites—has been unjustly cast from Heaven by a treacherous God, and honoured Him in orgiastic ceremonies that also featured cats as objects of worship. One other medieval cult has generated more fanciful theories than the Cathars and Luciferians combined. The Order of the Knights Templar was founded in 1118 to protect Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem, combining the military skills of a trained warrior with the pious dedication of a monk. Feared by their heathen foe and revered by their Christian brethren, the Templars rose from poverty-stricken obscurity to become one of the wealthiest, most powerful institutions in Europe. Their fall from grace was just as dramatic when, in 1314, King Philip of France smashed the Order with a campaign of mass arrests. King Philip claimed that, beneath their pious exteriors, these warrior monks were in fact an international Devil-worshipping cult and many of their number, including their Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burnt alive for their alleged crimes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The blood lust of the medieval Church was far from sated by the persecution of such heretics. In the 1480s, with full papal backing, two monks named Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer issued a practical witch-hunting manual entitled Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of the Witches’), describing how to identify witches and force confessions from them under torture before consigning them to the flames. Previously, witchcraft was officially regarded as a delusion, but Malleus Maleficarum helped trigger an international campaign of witch-hunts that lasted over two centuries and claimed upwards of 250,000 lives in the most brutal circumstances. The history of witchcraft is swathed in controversy. Did the witch-cult truly exist? And, if it did, did it consist of isolated, eccentric old women, or was it a coherent international movement? Some modern theorists maintain that the witch-cult was a benevolent religion that worshipped ancient nature gods, ancestor of the modern Wiccans. However, several more substantial historical accounts refer to Satan as “the God od the Serfs”: the Middle Ages were desperate times for the peasantry, and, if the Christian clergy supported the nobility, where else could the desperate and downtrodden turn but to the Devil? The witch-cult, therefore, many have been a creed of social rebellion based upon orgiastic revels, drug abuse and the deliberate adoption of heretical symbols. Certainly, the medieval peasantry regarded the Devil in a very different way to the medieval Church. The grinning gargoyles that leered from church roofs, the slapstick demons that peopled the “mystery” plays put on by rural villagers, and the Devil who appears in the folk tales of the day—all suggest a view of Satan among ordinary working folk that was sympathetic to Christianity’s supposedly terrifying, hateful anti-hero. It was not only the peasantry who made resort to the demonic in times of need. In 1440 the French Baron Gilles de Rais, once one of the most wealthy and powerful men in Europe, was executed for conjuring devils. There were also other charges laid against this licentious warlord. In fact, de Rais was a medieval serial killer, and was also a fervent Christian. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
However, Gilles de Rais was certainly involved in black magic, but this was largely separate from his recreational crimes. On the one occasion he made use of the remains of a victim in a magical rite, the Baron was seized by remorse and, uniquely for him, gave the corpse a Christian burial. Like all good Christians, Gilles de Rais was more concerned with his own immortal soul than the actual physical suffering of those around him. De Rais employed sorcerers as part of his staff when his extravagant lifestyle threatened to bankrupt him. Sorcery and science were, as that time, close bedfellows. In fact, as recently as the eighteenth century, such black arts as alchemy, necromancy and astrology were regarded by many intellectuals as valid areas of scientific study. Then, just as now, many involved in pioneering research were motivated by avarice, with fast-buck schemes a favourite occupation among the scholars and sorcerers of the Middle Ages and Reminiscence. Gilles de Rais employed a number of such characters to discover the alchemical secret of creating gold from base metal. It was generally believed that the darker the magic, the higher the risk—and the higher the risk, the higher the potential reward. The most Satanic sciences was therefore the invocation of devils, the most dangerous and rewarding of all the dark arts. Medieval serial killer Gilles De Rais have a castle in Machecoul, France. Sorcerers employed by Gilles de Rais were part of a loose underground of travelling scholars who piled their wares secretly across medieval and Renaissance Europe. Operating outside the authority of the Church-controlled universities, these maverick academics were equally at home translating Greek, brewing strange medicines or confounding their clients with conjuring tricks. As far as the Church was concerned these men had made pacts with Satan, and, in many cases, they were right. Christian authorities forbade research into the mysteries of the Universe as blasphemy. Anybody whose greed or curiosity led them to ignore these warnings had knowingly or not, throw in their lot with the dark forces. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Of all the rituals of black magic none are as notorious as the Black Mass. At its most basic level, the Black Mass is a mockery of the orthodox Catholic Mass that substitutes the erotic and profane for its sacred elements. Black Mass priest, the French cleric Father Guiborg, who stood trial in 1678 alongside a notorious sorceress named Catherine Monvoisin, accused of the attempted murder of Louis XIV by magic. The case was a scandal of epic proportions, involving allegations of illicit abortions, child sacrifice and poisoning, all implicating people within Louis’ court. When it became clear that the King’s beautiful mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, was so heavily involved (perhaps even serving as the naked altar in once ceremony), Louis decided to draw a veil over events and proceedings were halted. Nevertheless, the macabre episode is dramatic evidence not only that the Black Mass was more than a myth, but that it was employed secretly at the highest levels of European society. Other groups existed at this time whose parodies of holy rites were if no less heartfelt, were more satirical. An informational network of Hellfire Club thrived in Britain during the eighteenth century, dedicated to debauchery and blasphemy. With members drawn from the cream of the political, artistic and literary establishments, they became sufficiently scandalous to inspire a number of Acts of Parliament aimed at their suppression. Historians have been inclined to dismiss the Hellfire Clubs as nothing more than riotous drinking societies, but the significance of many of the nation’s most powerful and brilliant men dedicating themselves to Satan is difficult to ignore. That they did so with laughter on their lips, and a drink in their hand does not dimmish the gestures so much as place them more firmly in the Satanic tradition. The inspiration for the Hellfire Clubs did not come exclusively from sorcerous sources, but also drew heavily from profane literature—such as Gargantua, an unusual work combining folklore, satire, coarse humour and light-hearted philosophy, written in the sixteenth century by a renegade monk named Francois Rabelais. Like any monastic abbey it is a place of seclusion, but in other respects it is an “anti-abbey,” dedicated to the pleasures of the flesh. Only the brightest, most beautiful and best are permitted within its walks, and its motto is “Fait Ce Que Vouldras” (“Do What You Will”). #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
One of the last and best known of the Hellfire Clubs was founded in emulation of the Abbey of Thelema, taking on its distinctive motto. The club was known as the order of Saint Francis, with headquarters in Medmenham Abbey near London and on its founder Sir Francis Dashwood’s estate in Buckinghamshire. The Order finally collapsed in the 1760s due to internal conflicts between members over the pressing political issues of the day, the demand for increasing independence by Britain’s American colonies. It is a measure of the club’s distinguished membership, however, that it contained prominent politicians from both sides of the debate. Sir (Saint) Francis was a close personal friend of Benjamin Franklin, the leading spokesman for the colonists in London, and one of the most important figures in founding the independent United States of America. Franklin was a frequent guest at Dashwood’s home, and it is tempting to image the fate of the American colonies—destined to become the World’s most powerful nation—being discussed at a smoky Hellfire Club meeting over fine spirits and harlots. (This may explain why the American Constitution, partially written by Franklin, made such a revolutionary separation between Church and State.) Anton LaVey, the twenty-first century’s foremost Satanist, claimed in typically bombastic fashion: “If people knew the role the Hell Fire Club played in Benjamin Franklin’s structuring of America, it could suggest changes like: One Nation Under Satan, or United Satanic America.” Many historically famous people were true Poets and of the Devil’s party without knowing it. For instance, this applies to William Blake and John Milton, as well as others. It also seems strange that the author (William Blake) of “Jerusalem,” still one of the most popular hymns sung in English churches, should belong to the Satanic tradition. But belong he does. Blake is often regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement. Today the term conjures images of willowy fops pressing flowers in flowing, loose-sleeved shirts, but in reality these young men were wild-eye radicals whose antics led a more restrained poet of the day to label them “the Satanic School.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Pleasures of the flesh and barbiturates and poetry were the fuel that inspired the fashionable rebel of the early nineteenth century. “I feel confident that I should have been a rebel Angel had the opportunity been mine, opined the poet, John Keats. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in many ways the most thoughtful of the romantics, was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for his anti-Christian beliefs. He also had a strong demonic vein running through much of his own works. While the Romantics flirted with Satan, by the end of the nineteenth century a literary movement appeared that absolutely adored Him. The Decadents were poets, painters and authors who championed extremes of sensation over common sense or convention, their quest taking them to the brothels, opium dens and morgues of the World’s most fashionable and exotic cities. Inevitably, Satanism is a prominent them in the work of these artists. Most notorious among them is the foppish Isidore Ducasses, better know under his pennanme of the Comte de Lautreamont. De Lutreamont was absorbed by strongly Satanic idea about religion and human existence, potently expressed in his masterpiece, the bizarre 1868 epic The Songs of Maldoror, which combines nauseating horror and delirious absurdity in a surreal story of a war with God. The most significant figure of the nineteenth century maintained a burgeoning interest in the occult that also centered on Paris, capital city of decadence. The most significant figure of nineteenth-century sorcery was Eliphas Levin, whose shadow still falls across the history of the occult. In 1856, he published his magnum opus Dogme et ritual de la haute magie, (translated as Transcendental Magic), quickly building a reputation as Europe’s foremost authority on the magical arts. While outwardly a devoted Christian, a more careful reading of Levi’s works implies he thought Christianity was all well and good for the masses, but that more enlightened souls were entitled to probe deeper. There is a definite ambivalence about Levi’s relationship with Satan—sometimes he roundly denounced the Prince of Darkness, at others he suggests that Satan is potentially a useful or even beneficial force. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Another important anti-Christian figure of the late nineteenth century was the American writer Samuel L. Clemens, better known by his penname of Mark Twain. Many would be surprised to find Twain—author of the wholesome, much-loved Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—credited as a Satanic thinker, but his own sentiments bear it out. As Twain once wrote in an essay, “I have always felt friendly towards Satan. Of course that is ancestral; it must be in the blood.” As his life progressed, Twain became increasingly bitter towards Christianity and its brutal, unenlightened God. Mark Twain also a chapter called 2006 A.D., which he feared if it was published at the time, he would be burnt alive for writing it. His final thoughts were issued in 1995, entitled The Bible According to Mark Twain. It appeared at the end of a century when American had come to dominate the World. It would be nice to believe, however fanciful the idea, that America’s best-loved writer was somehow hovering around taking notice, as the World entered a new Satanic era. To mark this new era, a couple global events happened back-to-back. On 25 August 2001, after filming Queen of the Damned and release a hugely successful self-titled Album, one of the most beautiful pop stars, Aaliyah Haughton was killed in a plane crash. Then there was an attack on the nation on 11 September 2001, when the Twin Towers were destroyed, as well as other American sites and over 3,500 people were killed. Since then, the Satanic spirit has been in a persistent state of conflict with the Universe—it constantly seeks knowledge and experience, in order to imprint itself upon its surroundings. It is the same spiritual rough edges that Eastern mystics wish to file off, in order to reach “enlightenment.” As many can see with Church doctrines being destroyed, God being removed from the government and buildings, national monuments being snatched down and relocated to someone’s basement, and some people no longer seeing themselves as men or women, loss of law and order, God’s vision Earth is being taken over by Satanic Libertinism, as people are indoctrinated by the media to “Live out Loud,” and “discover the true self,” as the TV new media sees it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
America is becoming a nightmarish laboratory for spiritual experimentation and mind-control games. A Devil who has unity will be a God. Sunday newspapers will always find it easier to print headlines of child murder than discuss masturbation. If you recall Dennis Wheatley’s stories of Satanic cultus and suburban Devil-worshippers—in satisfying the appetite, he helped create the popular image of Satanism. Wheatly dabbled with magic and was terribly dangerous, he lost touch with his friends after he slipped up in a ceremony and failed to master a demon, who has caused all his teeth to fall out. Wheatley prefaced his Satanic thrillers with dire warnings on the Devil and all His works—just thinking too long on Satan was dangerous enough, let alone his engaging in a Black Mass. Many people believed that Wheatly’s stories were more than just fiction, that the Satanic forces described in his novels were a real threat to the civilized World. It has been hinted at in popular culture, but is also believed that the Germans did use black magic during World War Two. Some truly believed that the power lurking behinds it eyes was literally Satanic. Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, was also known to be under attack by demonic forces, which is why many believe she built her beautiful, but bizarre mansion in San Jose, California with hidden rooms, secret passageways, and trap doors. The house was furnished with the finest materials and was a showcase of Victorian elegance and taste. However, prior to moving to San Jose, William Wirt Winchester and Sarah Winchester gave birth to a daughter named Anne. While enjoying Christian fellowship in their home in New Haven, they were disturbed when they prayed by the screaming of their newborn daughter. This happened consistently for two weeks. Mr. and Mrs. Winchester assured the prayer group that their child was all right, but they were as concerned as their guest were. One of the members in the prayer group started to think about the situation in connection with demons. However, he kept telling himself that surely such a small child could not be an object of demonic spirits. Nevertheless, they decided to experiment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
During the usual time, of fellowship after service, the group leaders asked that everyone pray. They knew that the baby, who was busying sleeping, would have a hard time hearing the prayer. To their amazement, at the very first words of Mr. Merrill’s prayer, the baby began to scream and cry frantically for her mother, Mrs. Winchester. Mr. Merrill was convinced then that this was some kind of demon demonstration. To make sure, they did the same thing the next night, and again the child screamed hysterically. He decided the Holy Spirit was speaking to him to do something. He could not stand to see the child so tormented. So Mr. Merrill audibly cried to God to rebuke the demon powers and give the child complete deliverance with the Holy Spirit and angelic protection. Instantly she stopped sobbing and seemed quite normal. Mr. Winchester and Mr. Merrill spent much time in prayer that night. After another week, Mr. and Mrs. Winchester told Mr. Merrill that their child appeared completely delivered from the demonic assaults. However, less than a month later in July 1866, Annie Pardee Winchester died, ironically the same year the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was established. In March of 1881, William Winchester also died. It is easy to imagine how the combined grief of losing both a child and a spouse could be very crippling. However, if you have $20,000,000 and all the time in the World to help you cope, can you imagine what you would do? Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester’s response to the deaths of her child and husband left a beautiful, mysterious, and impressive architectural reflection of her psyche. The fascinating story of the Winchester Mystery House has its roots in the personal tragedies suffered by Mrs. Winchester and in the legacy of the Winchester rifle, “The Gun that Won the West.” According to some sources, the Boston medium consulted by Mrs. Winchester explained that her family and her fortune were being haunted by spirits—in fact, by the spirits of American Indians, Civil War soldiers, and others killed by the Winchester rifles. Supposedly the untimely deaths of her daughter and husbands were caused by these spirits, and it was implied that Mrs. Winchester might the next victim. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
However, the medium also claimed that there was an alternative. Mrs. Winchester was instructed to move west and appease these 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. On a more practical note, maybe a change of scenery and a never-ending hobby were just what Mrs. Winchester needed to distract her from her grief. Whatever her actual motivations, Mrs. Winchester packed her bags and left New Haven, Connecticut to visit a niece who lived in Menlo Park, California. While there she discovered the perfect spot for her new home in the Satan Clara Valley. In 1884, she purchased an estate just three miles west of San Jose. Soon after the construction started, the architects discovered that the site was characteristic of an Irish ruin. Standing on a slight elevation, in the midst of a flat country, the castle lifted its turreted walls as proudly as when its ramparts were fringed with banners and glittered helmets and shields. In olden times it was a citadel of the town, and although it was fortified by a strong wall, protecting it alike from predatory assault and organized attack, it was clear that by treachery, surprise, or regular and long-continued siege that the castle had been taken. The central portion was a large square structure, this central fort was connected by double walls, the remains of which covered passages, with smaller fortresses, little castles built into the wall surrounding the citadel; and over these connecting walls, over the little castles, and over the piles of loose stones where once the strong outer walls had stood, the ivy grew in luxuriant profusion, throwing its dark green curtain on the unsightly masses, rounding the sharp edge of the masonry, hiding the rough corners as through ashamed of their roughness, and climbing the battlements of the central castle to spread nature’s mantle of charity over the remains of barbarous age, and forever conceal from human view the stony reminders of battle and blood. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The success of the ivy was not complete. Here and there the corner of the battlement stood out in sharp relief, as though it had pushed back the struggling plant, and, by main force, had risen above the leaves, while on one side a round tower lifted itself as if to show that a stone tower could stand for six hundred years without permitting itself to become ivy-grown; that there could be individuality in towers as among humans. The great arched gateway too was not entirely subjugated, though the climbing tendrils and velvet leaves dressed the pillars and encroached on the arch. The keystone bore a rudely carved, crowned heard, and ivy vines, coming up underneath the arch, to take the old king by surprise, climbed the bearded chin, crossed the lips, and were playing before the nose as if to give it a sportive tweak, while the stern brow frowned in anger at the plant’s presumption. However, only a few surly crags of the citadel refused to go gracefully into the retirement furnished by the ivy, and the loving plant softened every outline, filled up ever crevice, bridged the gaps in the walls, toned down the rudeness of projecting stones, and did everything that an ivy-plant could do to make the rugged old castle as presentable as were the high round mounds without the city, cast up by the besiegers when the enemy last encamped against it. The old castle had fallen on evil days—and over the next thirty-eight years Mrs. Winchester produced the sprawling complex we know today as the Winchester Mystery House. One day while on the estate, the sun had barely cleared away the thick, heavy mist, which was still slowly rising here and there, and the birds were majestically in search of their breakfast. While the famers were out tilling the fields, a long, lanky figure was draw to its full height, the white eyeballs and jagged teeth had a red glow about them, and he waved his hand triumphantly in the direction of the vanishing cloud of birds. Then there came a loud gun shot, then next thing anyone say was the quivering body of this of a man on the ground, and wild eyes staring open in the agony of death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The farmers ran over and glanced at the body of this man. They figured they better hide him in the long grass and come back after dinner to bury him. After dinner, they walked slowly at first, gradually increasing their pace as they became more distant from the mansion, and they never spoke a word. Then suddenly the, as they drew closer, the man clutched one of the farmer’s arms. It he pleading for help, so they hit him with a shovel and began to dig its grave. For more than an hour they worked desperately with the chopper and hunting-knife, being greatly assisted in their task by a rift in the ground where the soil had been softened by water running from the creek, and they stood up with sweat pouring from their faces, and stamped down the Earth to cover all traces of the man. They had filled the grave with some large stones that were lying about (remnants of some ancient temple, long ago deserted and forgotten), thus feeling secure that it could not easily be disturbed by animals. From the night on, a wolf would come howling around their cottages on the estate, which would make their blood run cold. They swore they were being haunted by the spirit of that man they murdered and that he some how much have entered this animal’s body, bent on obtaining vengeance. One of the farmers grew ill, he was thin, very pale, and haunted by a ghastly expression. He was a married man who had carried on an adulterous relationship with one of the maids the took care of Mrs. Winchester’s house. The maid was reputed to indulge in black magic. They day of the murder, the man had tried to end his illicit affair. He told the woman that he wanted to break off his relationship with her. She was very upset and threatened him, saying that if he did then his wife and children would suffer in the process. The man however, was determined to break it off and stuck to his decision. Later that day is when they suspected one of their fellow famers was a demon and shot and buried him. Two days later, the adulterous farmer’s son became ill. They rushed him to the hospital and he died there. The doctors were unable to diagnose the disease. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Later still, the adulterous famer’s wife and daughter fell ill. The man was by now quite frightened and remembered the threats of the woman with whom he had had the affair. He went to her and begged her not to use black magic against his family. She softened and said that she would stop. Thereupon his wife and daughter recovered quickly, but he died. During Aleister Crowley’s visit to the Winchester Mansion, He spoke to a farmer about his saw being stolen. Crowley, as you may know was a black magician, and called “the Great Beast 666,” after the devilish monster of the Book of Revelations. The farmer paid Crowley a considerable amount of money, and in returned he promised his immediate help, stating that the thief would die. The farmer and Crowley walked around the grounds of the mansion, and within three hours of his interview with Crowley, the thief had a fatal heart attack. At the Winchester mansion, Crowley claimed that black magic was very literally invoked against him. In 1898 Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn by its founder, the influential occultist S.L. MacGregor Mathers while at the Winchester mansion. Mathers was one of the “the Masters.” They were believed t be benevolent supermen, or demigods, who has spokes women on Earth. Mather become the “Supreme Magus,” and all members of the Golden Dawn signed an oath of obedience to him. It was unclear if Mrs. Winchester was part of the Golden Dawn, but some of these sorcerous rituals which were supposedly aimed toward gaining power and enlightenment, supposedly took place in her home. After a few séances at the Winchester mansion, Crowley fell out him Mathers. He alleged that Mather summoned a middle-aged vampiress Called “Mrs. M,” who confronted Crowley while they were at Mrs. Winchester’s mansion, where the vampiress transformed into a beautiful young woman. She subjected him to a near-fatal seduction. According to Crowley’s account, he repelled her with his mystic forces, whereupon: “She writhed back from me, and again approached me even more beautiful than she had been before. She was battling for her life now, and no longer for the blood of her victim. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
“The odour of man seemed to fill her whole subtle form with feline agility. One step nearer and then she sprang at me with an obscene word sought to press her scarlet lips to mine. As she did so I caught and held her at arm’s length and then smote the sorceress with her own current of evil. A bluish-green light seemed to play round the head of the vampire, and then the flaxen hair turned the colour of muddy snow, and the fair skin wrinkled, and her eyes dulled and became pewter dappled with the dregs of blood. The girl of twenty had gone; before me stook a hag of 60. With dribbling curses, she hobbled from the room.” If spiritism pertained only to pagan religions and had never affected the people in so-called Christian lands, then a careful study of its practices and phenomena might not be imperative. Interest in the occult is reaching alarming proportions and even some professing Christians are being duped into complicity with spiritistic traffic. This was true of the late Bishop James A. Pike. Worldwide spiritism is conservatively estimated to have at least seventy million adherents. Kurt E. Koch, a German evangelist and student of the occult for thirty years, enumerates sixteen different varieties of spiritistic practices. If spiritism is to be accurately evaluated and its somber relation to human experience comprehended, all of these must be carefully understood. Spiritistic phenomena may be conveniently divided into the following categories: physical phenomena (levitations, apports, and telekinesis); psychic phenomena (spiritistic visions, automatic writing, speaking in a trance, materialization, table lifting, tumbler moving, excursions of the psyche); metaphysical phenomena (apparitions, ghost); magic phenomena (magic persecution, magic defense); cultic phenomena (spiritistic cults, spiritism among Christians.) There are very scarce published accounts of Daisy, Mrs. Winchester’s niece, being haunted while staying at the Winchester mansion. However, she was reportedly strangely molested by spirits and witches; also the aforesaid Winchester Mystery House is still being haunted by spirits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
While staying in Mrs. Winchester’s house, Daisy also suffered great annoyance every night from some invisible object, which threw stones and turf at her bed, the force of the blow often causing the curtains to open, and even drawing them from one end of the bed to the other. About the same time, also, the pillows were taken from under her head, and the clothes pulled off; and though a strict search was made, nothing could be discovered. Continuing to be annoyed in this way she removed to another room, being afraid to remain any long. Then about the 11th of December 1898, she was sitting in the twilight at the kitchen fire, a little body came in and sat down beside her. He appeared to be about eleven or twelve years old, with short black hair, having an old black bonnet on his head, a half-worn blanket about him trailing on the floor, and a torn vest under it, and kept his face covered with the blanket held before it. Daisy asked him several questions: Where he came from? Where he was going? Was he cold or hungry? and so on; but instead of answering her he got up and danced very nimbly rough the kitchen, and then ran out of the house and disappeared in the cow-shed. The servants ran after him, but he was nowhere to be seen; when they returned to the house, however, there he was beside them. They tried to catch him, but every time they attempted it, he ran off and could not be found. At lest one of the servants, seeing the master’s dog Zip coming in, cried out that her master was retuning home, and that she would soon catch the troublesome creature, upon which he immediately vanished, nor were they troubled by him again till February 1899. On the 11th of that month, which happened to be a Saturday, Mrs. Winchester was reading Dr. Wedderburn’s Sermons on the Covenant, when, laying the book aside for a little while, nobody being in the room all the time, it was suddenly taken away. She looked for it everywhere, but could not find it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
On the following day the apparition already referred to came to the house, and breaking a pane of glass in one of the windows, thrust in his hand with the missing volume in it. He began to talk with one of the servants, Angus Spear, and told her that the kitchen, and that her mistress would never get it again. The girl asked him if he could read it, to which he replied that he could, adding that the Devil had taught him. Upon hearing this extraordinary confession she exclaimed, “The Lord bless me from thee! Thou hast got ill lear (learning).” He told her she might bless herself as often as she liked, but tht it could not save her; whereupon he produced a sword, and threatened to kill everybody in the mansion. This frightened her so much that she ran into the parlour and fastened the door, but the apparition laughed at her, and declared that he could come in by the smallest hole in the house like a cat or mouse, as the Devil could make him anything he pleased. He then took up a large stone, and hurled it through the parlour window, which, upon trial, could not be put out at the same place. A little after the servant and child looked out, and saw the apparition catching the turkey-cock, which he threw over his shoulder, holding him by the tail; and the bird making a great sputter with his feet, the stolen book was spurred out of the loop in the blanket where the boy had put it. He then leaped over a wall with the turkey-cock on his back. Presently the girl saw him endeavouring to draw his sword to kill the bird, but it escaped. Missing the book out of his blanket he ran nimbly up and down in search of it, and then with a club came and broke the glass of the parlour window. The girl again peeped out through the kitchen window, and saw him digging with his sword. She summoned up courage to ask him what he was doing, and he answered, “Making a grave for a corpse which will come out of this house very soon.” He refused, however, to say who it would be, but having delivered himself of this enlivening piece of information, flew over the hedge as if he had been a bird. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
For a day or two following nothing happened, but on the morning of the 15th the close where mysteriously taken off Daisy’s bed, and laid in a bundle behind it. Being put back by some of the servants they were gain removed, and this time folded up and placed under a large table which happened to be in the room. Again they were laid in order on the bed, and again they were taken off, and this third time made up in the shape of a corpse, or something that very closely resembled it. When this strange news spread through the neighbourhood many persons came to the house, and, after a thorough investigation lest there might be a trick in the matter, where obligated to acknowledge that there was something invisible at work. Reverend N. P. Wallgren and Reverend Osborn of the Swedish Evangelical Mission Church of San Jose stayed the whole of that day and the following night with that distressed family, spending much time in prayer. At night Daisy went to bd as usual in the haunted room, but got very little rest, and at about twelve o’ clock she cried out suddenly as if in great pain. Upon Mr. Sinclair asking her what was the matter, she said she felt a knife had been struck into her back. Next morning she quitted the haunted room and went to another; but the violent pain never left her back, on the 22nd of February, she almost died. During her illness the clothes were frequently taken off the bed which she occupied, and made up like a corpse, and even when a table and chairs were laid upon them to keep them on, they were mysteriously removed without any noise, and made up as before; but this never happened when anyone was in the room. The evening before she almost died, they were taken off as usual; but this time, instead of being made up in the customary way, they were folded with great care, and laid in a chest upstairs, where they were only found after a great deal of searching. At it height the Winchester Mansion encompassed 761 acres, was 9 stories high, approximately 125,000 square feet, and possessed as many as 500 to 600 rooms. Because so many changes were made, the mansion now stands 4 stories over 4 acres, is about 25,000 square feet, and has an impressive 160 remain. It is still a beautiful, rambling mansion and sure is worth a visit. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Winchester Mystery House
Watch your step in Sarah’s Séance Room! There are three exits in this room and only one entrance 😳 Those exits include the main door, a secret passageway leading into an unfinished closet, and this door that opens to an 8-foot drop into a kitchen sink below. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
🎟 link in bio. A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
Learn to Have a Stainless Mind
Life is an adventure; it is one journey where one does not want to compromise one’s self. Enjoy laughter, beauty, and love. Success is finding and doing the best of your ability in each moment of your life. Our is the first civilization to plant human-made objects far beyond the surface of our home planet and use them to help us create wealth. That by itself would mark our time as a revolutionary moment in history. Yet little is known about the impact of this fact in our daily lives and our economy. Few are aware that every time they use an ATM or a telephone, they are relying on technology twelve thousand miles from Earth. Or that every patient receiving dialysis or wearing a peacemaker owes some thanks to technologies and, in some cases, people who have left the surface of the planet we call home. Communication satellites, the Global Positioning System (GPS)—developed by the U.S. Defense Department over six decades at a cost estimated at $14 billion—and commercial remote imaging are parts of an emerging space infrastructure that will be greatly elaborated over the decades and centuries to come, with increasing impact on how we create economic value. Nothing more clearly symbolizes today’s changes in the relationship of wealth to the deep fundamental. In its present, still-primitive form—often myopically derided as a wasteful luxury—the drive into space has already transformed many aspects of daily life. One result is a $100 billion Worldwide satellite industry composed of manufacturers such as Boeing, EADS/Astrium and Alcatel Space; launch firms like China Great Wall Industry Corporation; operators and coordinators such as Intersputnik in Russia; plus myriad service firms, space-image distributors and ground-equipment suppliers. And now a second space race is just getting underway. Commercial companies are being formed. These private commercial aerospace companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are all building and testing their own reusable rockets and spacecrafts. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In fact, Virgin Orbit successfully sent 10 small satellites into orbit, utilizing its unique approach to the task. This mission saw LauncherOne, a heavily modified Boeing 747, fly up to an altitude of 35,000 feet (10,500 meters) before releasing a rocket mounted beneath the plane. The rocket then lit its own engines and lasted off to space, deploying the satellites into low Earth orbit. However, many are left wondering how far the government will allow private industries to go. They believe that private companies could outpace the government and actually established life on a new planet and then start colonizing on that planet, creating their own government, and constructing roads, houses, businesses, and parks in the next 25 years, and that many people, mostly the extremely wealth, will leave Earth in live in these tax havens where corporations have control. This is a vastly different picture than the one we had just a few decades ago. During the 1990s, business pages reported that investors had lost billions in space-industry stocks and that many space firms were in terminal trouble. However, a recent survey by the Satellite Industry Association tells a quite different story—a steady, year-after-year revenue growth rate of 15 percent from the mid-1990s on. What is more, despite temporary overcapacity, now more and more commercial start-ups, and countries are racing to join the space “club.” In addition to the companies we listed above, Brazil and Ukraine, for example, are partnering to launch Ukrainian Cyclone-4 rockets from Brazil’s Alcantara Launch Center—regarded as one of the World’s best launch sites. And, as of 2005, equity firms were buying up stakes in such satellite operators as Intelsat, PanAmSat and New Skies. Similarly, while $100 billion many seem trivial in a multi-trillion-dollar World economy, that number does not begin to tell the whole story. It does not include the hidden increases in value generated by the many industries that directly or indirectly reply on space—big television networks, medical technology, sports teams, advertising agencies, telephone and Internet companies and financial-data suppliers, to cite a few. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
People in the Arab World have also been gazing at the starts with genius and curiosity for a legion of years. In 2021, the Middle Eastern World built a Mars orbit of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Hope (al-Amal) probe. This ambition is their new space exploration adventure. The Arab governments today have developed a fully 21st century view of space, by using algebra and spherical trigonometry which are both essential mathematical tools for understanding the motions of Heavenly bodies, with intentions rooted in the quest for profit, saving lives, power, image, and control. The United Arab Emirates’ program is very auspicious. The country has established its national space agency in 2014 and has set amazingly ambitious goals for the future. The UAE space program has about $5.4 billion in public-private support, compared to NASA’s FY21 budget of $23.3 billion. The Mars mission itself was expensive at a cost of $200 million. However, it appears certain that given the success and acclaim accorded the Amal probe, more is on the way. This is why some many people are concerned about the fate of the United States of America and looking for other options as a future home for Rome did once fall, too. Afterall, the theory of convergence, states that poor or developing economies with a higher per capita income can gradually reach similar high levels of per capita income. Thus, all economies, over time, may converge in terms of income per head. However, these developing countries will not be using old infrastructure. Because high technology already exists, they do not have an initial investment to stake to build new roads, architecture, and electric or other technologies. They can use new methods to build high tech cities and homes and leave already developed nations with their antiquated systems, and replace them as a World Super Power. Therefore, the poorer nations grow much faster because of the higher possibilities of growth and over time catch up, and even surpass the richer countries in terms of per capita income such that the divide between the two gets minimized. This theory of convergence of incomes is based on the logic of better opportunities of growth available for developing economics like access to technological know how from the developed World and increasing returns to capital. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, empirical evidence suggests that while some developing economics have been able to effectively tap the available advantages to grow faster and catch up with robust economies, this has not always been true for a large part of the developing World. The limitations of the theory are based on grounds of social, institutional or political differences, which simultaneously influence growth. Yet developed nations have to keep in mind that they are sovereign entities and they need to help their people and businesses succeed to remain successful nations. Because any risk arising of chances of a government failing to make debt repayments or not honouring a loan agreement is a sovereign risk. Such practices can be resorted to by a government in times of economic or political uncertainty or even to portray an assertive stance misusing its independence. A government can restore to such practices by easily altering any of its laws, thereby causing adverse losses to investors. For example, countries like Argentina and Mexico had defaulted on their loan payments in 1970s to a big extent after the oil shock. A little-known consortium of commercial space firms called the Mapping Alliance Program now offers remote sensing, images from space and software for use in computer-aided design, surveying, automated mapping and other services. MAP customers include oil and gas companies, water, gas, and electric utilities, agriculture, mining, and transportation, as well as natural-resource managers. Knowledge derived from space operations is also helping companies anticipate, reduce and hedge their risks. Thus space data play a key role in financial markets in which “weather futures” are traded. Variations in weather can have a major impact on productivity, turnover and overall profitability in fields as diverse as insurance and agriculture as well as [for] the manufacturers and retailers of everything from soft drinks to cold remedies, not to mention the organizers of pop festivals and package holidays. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In the United States of America, 3.2 percent ($768 billion) of the entire $24.01 trillion economy was spent on defense. This is example will show how much things change in just a few decades. Now back on subject, according to the Department of Commerce, one seventh of the entire $10 trillion economy in 2001 was subject to weather risk. (Look how much the economy grew in just 20 years and compare the amount spent on defense to what was put at risk by the weather.) Whether futures, traded on LIFFE and other exchanges, offer a way of hedging against that risk. The health industry is another largely unacknowledged beneficiary of space activity. The 750,000 U.S. victims of kidney failure who today survive because of dialysis owe their treatment, in some measure, to NASA and its astronauts. A chemical process developed by the space agency to remove toxic waste from dialysis fluids is not helping patients stay alive. Meanwhile, a company called StelSys, using technology or ideas licensed from the U.S. space agency, is working to develop the equivalent of a dialysis system for patients with liver failure. One of the specialized functions of the human liver is to break down drugs or toxins into less harmful and more water-soluble substances that are more easily excreted from the body. The StelSys experiment—a joint study by NASA and Baltimore-based biotechnology research company StelSys, LLC—will test this function of human liver cells in the microgravity environment aboard the International Space Station, comparing the results to the typical function of supplicate cells on Earth. The findings of this experiment will provide unprecedented information about the effects of microgravity on the proper function of human liver cells, offering new insight into maintaining the health of humans living and working in space. Cells are transported from Earth to the International Space Station using Commercial Refrigerator/Incubator Module (CRIM). One on orbit, the cells are nurtured and grown in the CBOSS Biotechnology Specimen Temperature Controller (BSTC), which has flown continuously abroad the International Space Station since Expedition Thee. Once the cells are gown, they are frozen and stored in the ARCTIC single-locker freezer, a Space Station facility capable of lowering temperatures to -20 degrees Celsius. The frozen cells are then transported back to Earth for study. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
These scientists are studying liver and kidney cell growth, disease and replacement, using ground-based bioreactor labs, as well as commercial NASA bioreactors. To date, the company has made great strides in developing long-term cell culture techniques, and has created a prototype of a proposed “bio-artificial” liver. StelSys research abroad the Space Station is conducted under agreement with NASA’s Office of Biological and Physical Research in Washington, D.C. Research in this are could lead to earlier and more reliable drug-candidate screening for patients in need of liver and kidney treatments prior to transplant. It could also accelerate development of new life-saving drugs by pharmaceutical companies. StelSys LLC, in cooperation with NASA, is exploring specific research areas that benefit from liver cell research abroad the Space Station. They are: Development of a liver-assist device: Research based on NASA biotechnology could help develop a machine to sustain the life of a patient with advanced liver disease—similar to dialysis machines for persons with kidney disease. National production of the vitamin D3: Individuals on kidney dialysis require D3, which has beneficial effects on the immune system, helps fight various forms of cancer, and appears to be tied closely to hormones that control cellular proliferation and differentiation. Vitamin D3 remains expensive and difficult to properly manufacture, however. Stelsys seeks an alternative method of producing D3 via cultured kidney cells. Natural production of metabolites: StelSys is researching metabolites, or chemical by-products formed by the breakdown of parent compounds, which accelerates development of new drugs. Additional space research holds promise for improving the treatment of brain tumors, blindness, osteoporosis and other diseases responsible for megabillions of dollars in the ever-swelling healthcare budget. Today Europeans are clinically testing a heart pump based on space shuttle fuel-pump technology. With the annual cost of heart disease and stroke in the United States of America alone exceeding $108 billion a year, how much might such a heart pump save? Americans suffer 1.5 million heart attacks and strokes each year. A conservative estimate of these costs for just one person is $121,200 over twenty years. For those needing surgery or procedures and ongoing care, the cost can be more than $4.8 million over a lifetime. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Therefore, how much economic value should be assigned to the “bioreactor” designed for growing cells in space—a tool now used by tissue engineering labs developing methods to grow human hearts? NASA’s rotating bioreactor allows cells to be grown in a microgravity environment that eliminates almost all shear forces placed upon a cell culture system while entering space. NASA’s bioreactor has allowed various labs to culture cells and even viruses previously impossible to grow using traditional methods. These successes are attributed to the bioreactor’s ability to provide a unique environment that closely resembles tissue differentiation during embryogenesis, and thus allowing cellular expression of surface epitopes similar to that of intact tissues. It also appears that cells grown in microgravity, low-shear environment allow for greater chemical signaling, probably as a result of more surface contact between cells. Realizing the bioreactor’s commercial potential, Santa Monica, California-based VivoRx Licensed exclusive rights from NASA for both therapeutic and diagnostic commercial applications. VivoRX has, in the past, successfully transplanted encapsulated islet cells from cadavers and porcine pancreas into insulin-dependent diabetics, perhaps a major breakthrough in the treatment of diabetes. However, pancreas from cadavers are in very short supply. The bioreactor may be the answer; VivoRx hopes the bioreactor will allow them to propagate enough human islet cells to use their cell-based approach to treat a large diabetic population. The company has already successfully grown islet cells generated from the bioreactors, and is beginning FDA-approved Phase I/II clinical trials. We could also ask parallel question about economic blindness, limb loss and kidney failure associated with diabetes—a disease that has risen to $350 billion in America. People with diagnosed diabetes incur average medical expenditures of $16,752 per year, of which about $,601 is attributed to diabetes. On average, people with diagnosed diabetes have medical expenditures approximately 2.3 times higher than what expenditures would be in the absence of diabetes. In direct costs also include increased absenteeism ($3.3 billion), reduced productivity while at work ($26.9 billion) for the employed, in ability to work as a result of disease-related disability ($37.5 billion), lost productive capacity due to early mortality ($19.9 billion). Costs are forecast to soar as the population ages. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Meanwhile, space plays a crucial role in environmental monitoring as well. France’s SPOT-4 spacecraft, for example, carries an American POAM III instrument for measuring polar ozone and aerosol. According to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Review, “Every year huge tracts of forest in Alaska, Northern Canada, Scandinavia Russia and China are racked by forest fires from may through October, and in California, fire season is generally from March to December. Enormous quantities of smoke billow into the atmosphere, where high-altitude winds sometimes carry the smoke thousands of kilometers from the original fires.” SPOT-4/POAM III tracks it. Similarly, a joint Brazil-NASA space project is studying the global effects of ecological changes in the Amazon region. A NASA “bird” measures the rate at which ice is melting at the North and South Poles. Other space-based environmental projects focus on everything from water utilization and fisheries to the ecology of estuaries and El Nino weather effects. Never before has the human race had as detailed and accurate an image of the Earth’s surface. Space shuttles such as Endeavor have produced massive data needed for making high-resolution images of desolate tundras and deserts, of jungles where endangered gorillas live and of ancient ruins such as Angkor Wat and Ubar. The same amazingly precise data can, among many other uses, help us locate cell-phone towers, identify flight hazards for aircraft and forecast floods. Twenty-four hours a day, at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado, a handful of U.S. Air Force men and women—some little more than eighteen or nineteen years old—sit at computer consoles and control satellites orbiting the Earth twelve thousand nautical miles away. They operate more than twenty satellites that together form the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS) that can tell anyone with a small, inexpensive receiver one’s precise location on Earth. Used by online services, hikers, drivers, truckers, boaters, ships and shippers, banks, and telecom companies, not to mention the military, GSP is one of the marvels of our era. So far-reaching are its implications for both security and business that Europe lunched its own Galileo. Galileo is a GPS system that went live in 2016. It was created by the European Union through the European Space Agency. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Galileo cost $13.2 billion and has 28 satellites. It provides Europe accurate and reliable positioning and timing information, used for example in your mobile phones, your cars (and in the future autonomous and connected cars), railways, aviation and other sectors. As many know, GPS helps us locate time as well as space. Thus, in addition to positioning us spatially, the system also operates as a key synchronizer. In the words of Glen Gibbons of Advanstar Communications, “Every time we get cash from an ATM or make a phone call (whether wireless or wire-line), the synchronization of the voice and data streams in those…communications networks is almost certainly based on GPS timing…it has made nanosecond-level timing readily available throughout the World, courtesy of the cesium and rubidium atomic clocks on board the GPS satellites.” The productive benefit of precision timing and synchronization in the economy has yet to be calculated. And more is on the way. Since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, anti-terror experts have devoted increasing attention the 226 million container boxes that move by sea each year. Although losing one box seems like it is not a big deal, containers piled high on giant vessels carrying everything from car tries to smartphones are toppling over at an alarming rate, sending millions of dollars of cargo skinning to the bottom of the ocean as pressure to speed deliveries raises the risk of safety errors. This shipping industry saw the biggest increase in lost containers in 2020. More than 3,000 boxes dropped into the sea last year, and more than 1,000 fell overboard in 2021. The accidents are disrupting supply chains for hundreds of American retailers and giving pirates a new treasure to search for, but even more than that, it creates danger. Any one of these containers can contain a hidden biological weapon, a smuggled terrorist, illegal drugs or arms or other dangerous prophylactics, barbiturates, and contraband. Today only about 2 percent are inspected as they enter the United States of America. Add to that the additional containers that arrive by land and air are another reason people are demanding border security. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
GPS satellites, in principle, can track the coordinates of these containers as they move from place to place. In the future, not just the containers but every product in them will be continually followed as it moves through the supply chain from the plant to the wholesaler, the retailer, onto the shelves and into the customer’s home. Prototype tracking systems are already being studied or tested by such companies as Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, and Kmart. Furthermore, the day will come when many packages carrying food, for example, will have embedded chips that continuously report to the shipper the changing condition of the food as it moves. Other “smart” packages will actually process their contents en route. Linking these to GPS or similar satellite systems will transform large sectors of both the transportation and the food industry, ensure fresher and higher quality packed food and other products, change the economics of both production and distribution in these and many other fields—and improve security. In Japan, to prevent theft of packages, couriers are now given a key to a digital customers car so they can leave a package in the trunk to prevent theft. If the car is then left unlocked, a failsafe system will arm the car after one minute. Because they have low crime rates, this is a great idea for Japan. However, like all technologies, of course, GPS has both beneficial and negative potentials. It can make our lives far more secure. It can track a car full of Good Day and Al Qaeda terrorists. It can also make a visit to a bordello or a Swiss bank less private than it might once have been. However, then, so can “cookies” in a computer, rouge medical professionals, scandalous lawyers—or a gossipy neighbor who steals your mail, watches your house and car, and accepts packages for you. Benefits and sacrifices need to be weighed against one another. One of the biggest economic payoffs from GPS, will come when today’s ground-based World air traffic control system becomes essentially a backup to a space-based alternative. Today flight plans require most aircrafts to fly from one ground-based radio beacon to the next over heavily congested airways. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Capacity near many big cities is limited. A GPS control system can increase capacity along with precision. It can also permit landings under conditions now regarded as prohibitive, including at remote and small airports, and improve over-the-ocean navigation. All at far less cost than the ground-based system. Also, corporations may start to open warehouses in suburban locations with locked storage units and some refrigerated where consumers can have any courier drop off your package because we all know thieves think just because packages are insured they can steal them, and when you are getting orders from companies like Omaha Steaks, they start to watch your order habits so they can intercept your packages. However, even if they are not involved in it. theft is embarrassing to many people, because it speaks poorly of you and the people in your community. High-end stores often share their “theft and loss” information with other corporations and couriers so it may secretly make them think less of you and the community you live in. Also, there are applications track and report crimes such as loss and theft and vandalism and this can make your home less appealing to prospective buyers and lower the property value of your community, while making it less desirable. Even more remarkable about the future of technology, NASA’s Global Differential GPS, recently developed at its Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has been tested in Greenland and the United States of America. It is now capable of positioning aircraft to within 3.9 inches horizontally and 7.9 inches vertically anywhere in the World. JPL proudly boasts that this is a “factor of ten impowerment” over the accuracy of current systems. Across the board, then, space activity is paying off for the emergent economy—often in unseen ways—and promises even more in days to come. A Midwest Research Institute study has estimated that every dollar invested in NASA adds nine dollars to U.S. gross domestic product. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Another analysis, by Chase Econometrics, has suggested that space-related research yields productivity increases that translate into a 43 percent return on investment. All such numbers are relatively old, shaky, and incomplete. Nevertheless, even if we arbitrarily slash them, they would still strongly suggest that space activity already pays off handsomely for the economy. And we are still using only a tiny fraction of its potential. Looming on the horizon are thousands upon thousands more satellites in the Heavens. Algeria, Pakistan and Nigeria have already purchased microsatellites weighing little more than a hundred pounds, capable of carrying cameras and being propelled into orbit for a fraction of what it now costs for conventional satellites. Professors Martian Sweeting of the company supplying them, Surrey Satellite Technology in Britain, claims that within a decade we will launch satellites no bigger than a credit card. As size and cost plumet they will become less expensive, making it possible for medium-sized businesses, NGOs, private groups and even individuals—good and bad alike—to afford them. It is time, in short, to recognize that even in purely economic terms the drive into space is anything but trivial. Humanity’s baby steps into space are already creating significant value on Earth in ways about which earlier civilizations could only fantasize. And it is only the beginning. Today more than fifty nations claim to have space programs. However, governments are not alone in space, as we discussed earlier. Private companies are modifying planes to take hundreds of people into space at once, as well as smaller sized planes to carry two or three people. The purpose: To hasten the development of commercial space tourism and colonization of other planets. Even if we are making no other changes in the “where” of wealth—if we were not shifting it toward Asia and forming region-states, if there were no search for higher-value-added placed, if we were not re-globalizing and de-globalizing the World economy, the leap beyond our planet would, by itself, mark a revolutionary turning point in wealth creation. #RandolphHarrs 12 of 18
The combined evidence, therefore, is overwhelming. We are simultaneously transforming the relationship of wealth to both time and space—two of the deep fundamentals that have underpinned all economic activity since we were hunter-gathers. Wealth today is not merely revolutionary but is becoming more so. Nor is this just a matter of technology. It is, as we will next time make clear, a revolution of the mind as well. Balked, not taken seriously, deprived of great objects and available opportunities, and in an atmosphere that does not encourage service—it is had to have faith, to feel justified, to have a calling, or win honour. However, what then fills the places of these? for every experience that a human being has is a whole way-of-being-in-the-World. First, necessity gives justification. Having something that you must do, solves the problem of having something to do. Necessary behaviour may or may not be honoruable. To wrest subsistence is necessary and honourable. If a young man falls in love, a temporary psychosis, his entire day is under the iron rule of necessity, foolishly and honourably; if it is only to watch under a window, he has something to do. When the class struggle against exploitation was lively, it was something necessary and honourable to engage in. Indeed, it is a major defect of our present organized system and the economy of abundance that, without providing great goals, it has taken away some of the important real necessities, leaving people with nothing to do. The void is soon filled. Behaviour like going into debt on the installment plan, gives an artificial but then real necessity, something to do, paying up. This is the Rat Race, but if people did not need its justifying necessity, for the commodities themselves are not that attractive, I doubt that it would be a run. Young fellows drift into narcotics, and then find that they have something they must do all day, looking for a connection and a fix, and how to get the loot. Compulsive hunting for pleasures of the flesh is something to do. By dividing into rival gangs, as Clausewitz pointed out long ago, it is possible to create a sate of uncertainty of what the enemy is up to, that keeps you constantly on your toes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
This is a condition, also, apt to raise the ante, for no matter how you have planned to stay within limits, you can never be sure that the others will not take advantage. Many of the apparently pointless repeated risks that juveniles take, where there cannot be any kick left in the exploit itself, make a little sense when we learn that there is a competition: Ty has stolen twenty-six cars, Steve has stolen twenty-three cars, and each is driven by necessity not to be worsted, especially since the others come along for the rides (However, TY has an unfair advantage because he had gone as a punishment to a “Vocational High School” where he took auto mechanics). And poor Pedro and Carlos who worked while in high school to pay for their cars were cheated by not only Ty and Steve, but also the insurance companies because of their names and the colour of their skin. The system is just not always fair for men of colour who are doing the right thing. When psychologist like Linder speak of the aimless, unconcentrated, unsequential behavior of “psychopathic personalities,” I wonder whether they enough take into account that it requires a real object and an interest in it to take a good actualized Christian of experience and growth. To structure the behaviour of long hours and weeks requires a goal that, from some point of view at least, is pretty worthwhile. Our society is not abounding in highly worth-whole goals available to average gifts and underprivileged attainments. Many goals that are busily and perseveringly pursued by some might reasonably seem not worth the trouble to others who have more animal spirits or plain sense. These really might have “nothing to do,” and their aimless and sensation-seeking killing time might indicate nothing but chronic boredom. Yet they will be judged psychopathic personalities. However, once they have hit on a necessitous and important activity like finding their dose of barbiturates and contraband or stealing twenty-six joy rides (in the teeth of two arrests), they become models of purposiveness and perseverance. Such are the justifications and callings. The honour is to protect one’s masculinity and normalcy, yet to prove by notoriety that one is superior. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
More interesting and likely is the religious effort of the Hipster Generation, to which we shall turn to focus on at a future time, they are older and are not willing to have given up one Rat Race to fall into another. Can they solve the problem of the nagging unanswerable questions of justification and vocation? Their principle is the traditional one of classical mysticism: by “experience” (= kicks) to transcend the nagged and nagging self altogether and get out of one’s skin, to where no questions are asked—nor is there any articulate speech to ask them in. Resigning from society, they form peaceful brotherhoods of pure experience, with voluntary poverty, devotional readings, and a good deal of hashish. In Communist China in 1974, seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Anchee Min was carted away to Red Fire Farm in a convoy of eleven trucks. She was excited because it was an honour to be chosen for such a prestigious assignment. However, during her time at the collective farm, Anchee Min’s emotional moral, and ideological Worlds were turned topsy-turvy when her friend Shao Ching’s young lover was executed after the couple have been caught in passionate intimacy. Shao Ching, also seventeen, was breathtakingly lovely, slender as a willow, and rebellious. She copied out forbidden literature and shared it with her special friend Anchee Min. Instead of tying her brains with brown rubber bands like the other girls, Shao Ching bound hers with coloured strings. She scrounged tiny remnants of cloth and designed elegant unmentionables that she embroidered with flowers, leaves, and lovebirds. In the stark dormitory, her drying laundry hung like artwork. Shao Ching also altered the standard-issue clothes so that her shirts tapered in, nipping her tiny waist, and her trousers emphasized her long legs. She enjoyed her full bosoms and sometimes, in warm weather, shucked off her undergarment. One admiring soldier reportedly wept when he heard she had fallen ill. During Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a good female comrade was supposed to reserve all her energy and thoughts for the revolution. Until she was in her late twenties, she was not so much as to contemplate men or marriage. “Learn to have a stainless mind!” people recited. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The girls at Red Fire Farm tried to model themselves on the heroines in revolutionary operas, paragons of virtue who never had men, either husbands or intimate friends. No wonder, then, that Shao Ching expressed no interest in men, even to Anchee Min, her closets friend. She was already suspect enough for her fine unmentionables, which has been criticized at a Party meeting. One night, Anchee Min and her companion in a military training program were called out to a “midnight emergency search.” With loaded pistols they were led through the reeds and toward a wheat field, silent and watchful. The order came to drop to their bellies, and they began to crawl through the night. Mosquitoes buzzed and stung, but tht was the only sound. Suddenly, Anchee Min heard the murmur of two voices, a man’s and a woman’s. “I heard a soft, muted cry. And then my shock: I recognized the voice as Shao Ching’s.” Anchee Min’s first thought was to warn her friend—the consequences of being caught with a man were unthinkable. Shao Ching had never even hinted that she was romantically involved, but why would she? At Red Fire Farm, such an admission would be shameful. The brigade acted in unison, flashing thirty flashlights at once, exposing Shao Ching’s rear end and a skinny, spectacled, bookish young man. They took Shao Ching away, leaving a group of soldiers to beat her man. “Make him understand that today, lustful men can no longer force themselves on women,” Anchee Min heard Yan, their leader, instruct. Shao Ching’s studious young beloved displayed no sign that he felt guilty. As the soldiers began to beat and whip him, he made a visible effort not to cry out. Four day later, a public trial was held in the mess hall. Shao Ching had undergone “intensive mind rebushing” and testified in a quavering voice, reading from a paper she held in hands that shook so much, she twice dropped her statement. “He raped me,” she said. Her words convicted her lover and he was executed. (At least she could have just played hard to get since she knew it was wrong to have pleasures of the flesh.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The fastidious Shao Ching stopped bathing and cut up her pretty unmentionables. After months, other girls complained that she stank. She was sent to a hospital in Shanghai and treated for psychosis. She returned to the farm, fat as a bursting sausage from medication, hair matted, eyes vacant. Later she was found dead, drowned among a tangle of weeds. At a special memorial service, Shao Ching was honored as an “outstanding comrade” and was admitted posthumously into the Youth League of the Community Party. Her grandmother was given money in condolence. Celibacy at Red Fire Farm was so strictly enforced that violators were executed. Shao Ching had been saved only because Yan had insisted she recant and blame her lover. Shao Ching had done so, but the mental stress destroyed her mind and she never recovered—do doubt haunted by memories of how her teenage love affair had condemned a young mand to torture and death. “But concerning brotherly love [for all other Christians], you have n need to have anyone write you, for you yourselves have been [personally] taught by God to love one another,” reports 1 Thessalonians 4.9. The second grade counsel is almost monastic in its disciplinary demand for it bids one refrain from the pleasures of the flesh altogether, save for the purpose of having children, whose number must be limited and proportioned strictly. In the case of the unmarried, there will then be a complete chastity. May we move beyond viewing this life only through a frame, but touch it and be touched by it. May our bodies, our minds, our spirits, learn a new rhythm paced by the rhythmic pulse of the whole created order. May spring come to us, be in us, and recreate life in us. May we forge a new friendship with the natural World and discover a new affinity with beauty, with life, and with the Cosmic Christ in whom all things were created in Heaven and on Earth, visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions pr principalities or authorities for all things were created through Him and for Him. In His name. Amen. Lord of springtime, Father of flower, field and fruit, smile on us in these earnest days when the work is heavy and the toil wearisome; lift up our hearts, O God, to the things worthwhile—sunshine and night, the dripping rain, the song of the birds, books and music, and the voice of our friends. Left up our hearts to these this night and grant us Thy peace. Amen. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
All things that live shall praise Thy name, the spirits of all flesh proclaim Thy sovereignty, O Lord our God. From everlasting Thou art God, to everlasting Thou shalt be; we have no other God but Thee. Thy goodness and Thy holiness support us in all times of stress, Redeemer, Lord, and King. Thou art the God of first and last, in every age Thy children raise their voices in eternal praise. With tender love Thy World dost guide, and for our needs dost Thou provide; Thou keepest watch eternally. Thou takest slumber from our eyes, and to the speechless givest voice; through Thy great mercy all rejoice. Thou raisest those whose heads are bent, sustaining all the weak and spent; to Thee alone we render thanks. If like the sea our mouths could sing, our tongues like murmuring waves implore, our lips like spacious skies adore; and were our eyes like moon or son, our hands like eagles’ wings upon the Heavens, to spread and reach to Thee; and if our feet were swift as hinds, yet would we still unable be to thank Thee, God, sufficiently; to thank Thee for one-thousandth share of all thy kind and loving care which Thou in every age hast shown. From Egypt didst Thou lead us forth, from bondage didst Thou set us free, redeeming us from slavery. In famine, food didst Thou provide, in plenty Thou wast at our side, to keep and guide us, Lord or God. From pestilence and sword didst save, and when we were by ills assailed, Thy love and mercy never failed. O Lord, Thy wondrous deeds we praise, forsake us not throughout our days; be Thou our help forevermore. Therefore, O Lord, our limbs, our breath, our soul, our tongue, shall all proclaim Thy praise, and glorify Thy name, and every month and every tongue declare allegiance without end; and every knee to Thee shall bend. The mighty ones shall humble be, yea, every heart revere but Thee, and sing the glory of Thy name. Hearken, O my people! From the very depths of my soul I speak unto you; from the core of life where lies the tie that binds us one to the other, with devotion, deep and profound, I declare unto you that you, each one of you, all of you, the whole of you, your very souls, our generations—only you are the essence of my life. I live in you, in each of you, in all of you; in your life, my life has deeper, truer meaning; without you I am as not. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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She Had Better Stop and Take a Good Look at Herself
With all the changes and challenges you face each day, there has never been a greater need to take the time to determine your priorities. The art of being wise is to know what to overlook. In 1993 Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States of America and Canada. Within seven years, 3,500 maquiladora plants manufacturing everything from furniture to apparel to TV sets had sprung up along Mexico’s U.S. border, creating 1.4 million new, mainly assembly-line jobs for workers drawn from all parts of Mexico, and they important more than $51 billion in supplies into Mexico. However, in the late 1990s, with Guangdong and, indeed, all of China now competing in the cheap-labor derby, and estimated 250,000 to 300,000 of those Mexican jobs followed the great circle route across the Pacific. That put Alejandro Bustamante in a spot. When his employer, Plantronics, a leading manufacturer of telephone accessories, received an order, it called Mr. Bustamante. Although he ran the firm’s three factories in Tijuana, Mexico, he was told he must compete for each contract just like anyone else. However, Mr. Bustamante paid his workers an average of $2.20 an hour (including benefits) and had to bid against a Chinese manufacturer whose employees average only about 60 cents, which was nearly four times less than the Mr. Bustamante’s employees earned. There is nothing unique or new about that. Many maquiladora operators in norther Mexico face Chinese competition. However, what especially irked Mr. Bustamante was that the Chinese rival he faced was, in fact, itself also owned by Plantronics. This may be a case of serial outsourcing—sending jobs to China that had already been outsourced to Mexico. Outsourcing, while involving a small percentage of all jobs, has aroused fierce condemnation and prompted so much media coverage that there is no reason here to recap the familiar arguments, beyond recognizing that it is part of a much larger pattern of change in the spatial distribution of wealth and wealth creation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Outsourcing enrages the critics of re-globalization who insist that it creates an unstoppable, brutalizing “race to the bottom.” They typically contend that companies go where labor costs are lowest and are ready to pick up and spatially relocate at a moment’s notice. If this were true, it would be easy to forecast where wealth is heading. It would be good news for African, which can offer a big pool of available labor at the lowest wages on Earth. (Africans should cheer each time workers in Asia join unions and drive wages up.) If labor cost were the sole consideration, why have not all those factories now in China wound up in Africa instead? The fact is that even for low-tech work, labor is cost, if ever, the exclusive basis for a company’s decision to relocate. Africa’s endless violence and war, inadequate infrastructure, stratospheric levels of violence, ravaging illnesses, and shameful regimes may rule out significant investment no matter what wage level. However, China has maintained its position as the largest investor in Africa over the last ten years by the number of new jobs created (18,562 on average), with a gradual substantial increase of newly created jobs on a yearly basis. China has spent 27 percent of its investments in Africa. Furthermore, since 2000, China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to Africa have grown at an average annual rate of 40 percent, overtaking U.S. FDI in 2012. In 2019, FDI flows reached $2.7 billion, with the top destinations being the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola, two mineral-rich nations. China is also making space along a 30-mile coastline, in Africa, North of Dar Es Salaam, to make space for a $10 billion Chinese-built mega-port and a special economic zone backed by an Omani sovereign wealth fund. It seems Africa has more than just diamonds, gold, other precious minerals, people and animals that World wants to exploit. There are unspoiled beaches and bays; and lush vegetation. If the project goes ahead as planned, Bagamoyo will be transformed into the largest port in Africa. There is even talk of an international airport. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Many villagers have already accepted compensation for the loss of their homes. This portion in African is supposed to be as prosperous as Shenzhen, China. Shenzhen, in southeastern China, is a modern metropolis that links Hong Kong to China’s mainland. Over the past 40 years, the establishment of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ), has been a transformation of Shenzhen from a fishing village to a metropolis of innovation. The total investment has been $28 billion USD. Shenzhen has also nurtured some World leading technology firms including Huawei, DJI, and Tencent. The sector has emerged as the pillar industry of the city. As a matter of fact, a total of $4.27 billion USD, was invested in research and development, putting it on the top list of the country. In addition to this, the city has seen 17,500 international patents filed, accounting for one third of the national total. So this is what could be done in Africa, and it is important to keep an eye on the moves of China because they could become the World leader by investing in and colonizing foreign markets, with the large population. Another thing, with China colonizing Africa, it will also become a melting pot and the standard of beauty will change from the traditional European standard and shift to value other features. The race-to-the-bottom theory, moreover, presupposes that workers are essentially interchangeable—which may largely be true in repetitive, assembly-line operations. The higher up the skill ladder one goes in a knowledge-based economy, however, the less valid it becomes. As the knowledge components of wealth creation—marketing, finance, research, management, communication, I.T., vendor and distributor relations, regulatory compliance, legal affairs and other nontangibles—all grow in complexity and importance, workers, like the work itself, become less interchangeable and the required skill sets more temporary. If they extrapolate tomorrow’s economy from existing or projected wage levels alone, attempts to forecast which cities, regions or, for that matter, countries will become the next Guangdong will be inaccurate and the speculations are doomed to fail. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Any such simplistic analysis becomes even more questionable because, where economies are transitioning from smokestacks and assembly lines to knowledge-based production, we are already radically changing the very criteria by which a location, city, region or country becomes a high-value-added place. What we are about to see is less racing to the bottom and more of a race to the top. To anticipate tomorrow’s surprising geography—including the location of high-pay jobs, prime real estate, business opportunities, wealth and power—another key point needs to be understood: We are changing not merely the where of wealth but they why—the criteria by which we value places. And that further changes the where. Seeking to woo industry in 1955, the state government of Indiana placed an advertisement in Fortune listing its economic advantages. These, it claimed, included low-cost coal, limestone, white clay, aluminum, gypsum, rock asphalt, dolomite, fluorspar, water, sand, gravel, wood, corn, soybeans and easy access to the Ohio River. In addition, it promised an “enviable strike and lockout record”—that is, a weak or dormant labor movement. That was then. Today Indiana’s development council boasts of breaking away from “over-reliance on traditional industries.” No limestone here. Inc. tells American small-business leaders that the “best” place to “start or grow a company” is Phoenix, Arizona, because of its growing high-tech workforce, sunny climate, renovated art museum and “four major sports franchises.” A group called the Small Business Survival Committee concludes that the place to invest is South Dakota because it imposes the fewest costs on business in the form of taxes, minimum-wage laws, number of state employees and the like. Still another rating system bases its conclusions about the future on the age and growth rate of companies in any given location. A contributor to Microsoft’s bCentral.com then confects a hybrid index out of these last two methods and concludes that Nevada is the place to pull out your wallet. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Citing the 1955 Indiana ad in 2002 study called the “State New Economy Index,” Robert D. Atkinson and Rick Coduri of the Progressive Policy Institute write: “In an economy in which fewer than 20 percent of economic activity consists of creating, processing, or moving physical goods, access to raw materials, transportation and markets means less. As an increasing share of economic inputs and outputs are in the form of electronic bits, the old locational factors diminish in importance.” Take, for example, nearness—proximity. Some economists today believe that because Mexico is so close to American markets, it can beat Chinese competitors in the long run. They assume that distance still plays the same role it did before the knowledge economy arrived. However, thanks to information intensive technologies, products are becoming smaller and lighter every day. To rely on proximity means, to the degree that transportation costs matter, that Mexico’s advantage would apply to the older, bigger, bulkier, heavier physical products—precisely those now being replaced. And it means still less to high-value-added intangible services whose transportation costs have little or nothing to do with distance—finance, software, satellite TV, airline reservations, music and the like. Continuing to count on proximity will set Mexico even farther behind—and keep it there. Today, in their race to the top, competing states boast less about limestone and coal than about their great universities, low communication costs, advanced technology, frequent airline service, low crime, good climate and superior quality of life. The economy has been transformed along with workers’ values and way of life. The very categories with which we describe spatial units and relationships change as new economic networks emerge. We are seeing, for example, the rise of an entire ecology of airports linked to one another more strongly than with their local and national governments. Each airport is increasingly surrounded by its own ring of shopping malls, conference centers, 24/7 gyms, chapels, post offices, dentists and doctors, rooftop pools and luxury hotels. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The result has been a sprint—no longer just in the United States of America—to create what might be called higher-value-added places tht will attract the brightest, most creative workforce capable of producing knowledge-intensive, higher-value-added products and drawing businesses from around the World. The historical shift toward Asia, the digitalization of many economic functions, the emergence of cross-national regions and the change in the criteria by which we value place or location are all parts of a larger transformation in our relations with the deep fundamental of space. They merely form the background against which even bigger changes loom. One’s stumblings and one’s falling may depress one’s heart and reduce one’s aspiration. They may deter one’s will from further endeavour. For those monsters of hate and cruelty, either utterly materialistic and God-denying or fanatic and taking the name of God in vain, there is no shelter where they can hide once they are forced across the barrier of death. The qualities of determination, intelligence, and persistence—so useful in philosophy—can be used for good or evil. They can make a more successful criminal as well as a better philosopher. The upsurge of well-thought-out, daring, resourceful, and highly ambitious crime in modern times is a sign of misapplied powers, while its violence is a sign of merciless egocentricity. The end for such persons is commensurate. Then many come a crippling deformation future birth, or a sudden and radical awakening to the grave peril toward which they are heading—and a change of course to a better life. The unfortunate experiences which sometimes befall an individual’s Worldly life are, or may be, partly indued by one’s own psychic practices of the period immediately preceding them. One may have been drawn into a vortex of psychic evil which has harmed one’s spiritual life and brought suffering into one’s Worldly existence. What are the inner causes which can produce these dismal outer effects? Here are come of them: shock, worry, fear, resentment, anger, excessive, criticism, condemnation of others. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The English woman novelist named Ouida, who wrote during the earlier part of this century, was so successful that she became the highest-paid fiction writer of her time. Yet when she died she was alone, penniless, half-blind, and dwelling in a back alley of Viareggio, Italy. Why? She was brilliant, fluent, and vibrant in her style, but most of her written work was scathing, bitter, highly critical, filled with prejudices and even hates. To what extent did a mind and heart holding so many negatives contribute to these unpleasant results? Yet she was unquestionably a lady in manners, breeding, dress, and way of life. She wrote her letters and even her manuscripts on the finest quality paper. She was highly independent and refused an offer to write her own life story, even though a substantial amount of money was the prize. Her reply was that it would be lowering herself to feed her own egotism and vanity to do so! It is quite true and utterly obvious that bad physical conditions make their contribution also, but it I even more true that bad inner conditions are the fundamental causes which turn outward remedies to disappointments in the end. Blind selfishness brings mutilated lives and ugly minds. Pessimism is practical defeatism and psychological suicide. It is the child of despair and the parent of dissolution. If we make room in our minds for negative, bitter thoughts of complaint, outrage, or injury against those who mistreat us, we shall not be free and will remain unable to find peace. Beware of giving birth to thoughts of hate, envy, malice, or wrath and sending them to another person. For they will reach one, yes, but will then return like a boomerang to their source. Wicked humans may gain the fruits of their aggressions and desires, may win victories over others, but at the end they are destroyed at the roots. The coldly calculated torture of animals in the name of scientific progress must be paid for in different degrees by those who allow it as well as by those who perpetrate it. The practice of vivisection is a sinful one. The humans who do it will have to pay the penalty one day, quite often by being born into a maimed and hurt body. Some among them, who gradually lose every vestige of pity from their character, become heartless monsters. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Through violent aggression whereby impassioned men seek to destroy others, they work their own destruction—at first moral, in the end, physical. These undesirable thoughts and feelings are bad for others as well as oneself, besides wasting so much of one’s own energies. An evil human’s mistakes sometimes strike back at one later when one least expects them, and can least afford them. Is it prudent to heed all this talk of coming calamity? Is it a mistake to read material speculating on its likelihood or imagining its horrors? Each person must answer such a question for oneself, but the philosophic person approaches it in a different manner. On general principles one dislikes negative thoughts and repels them. One seeks a clear recognition of what is happening in the World around one, but one trains oneself—disciplines one’s mind and detaches one’s emotions—to do so without picking up the accompaniments of panic or depression. One practices living with complete calm in the face of provocations and irritations, keeping one’s head, when others all around are losing theirs. When these disaffected find one another and form a subculture, they tend to see their choice, fraught with crisis, as a religious movement. One of the favorite spokesmen of the Hipster Generation announces: For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was a person I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out, for D.T Suzuki I speak out. This is typical speaking; like an address by Eisenhower it includes all voting creeds and betrays a similar lack of acquaintance. (The bother is that the speaker is in his late thirties and out to know better.) However, as we shall see, this formless ultimate experience is not irrelevant to the plight of being resigned, for there is no available World to give experience a form. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
However, let me at once give a similar strain of rhetoric of a seasoned public spokesman in the organized system itself. I quote from an address to the National Recreation Congress of 1957 by Dr. Paul Douglass. He is concerned with the terrifying Problem of Leisure, namely that with a shorter work week and automation many millions of adults might simply goof off and get into mischief. “The assimilation of leisure into the folkway tomorrow makes essential the reconstruction of the goals and values of life, the evolution of a new ethics, and the definition of an esthetic suitable for the upreaching taste, the deeper comprehension and enjoyment of beauty in its many forms, and a more meaningful existence. Of course this is not serious. A “new ethics” would, presumably, be the work of an Isaiah or Ezekiel or at least Socrates. If someone’s lips were touched with fire and one got oneself rejected by us and swept our children wake, it would solve other problems than out leisure time for it would be convenient for us. –The Hipster spokesman, surprisingly, seemed to be satisfied with the ethics that we have inherited. (As an artist I find this kind of public speech vaguely insulting. Do we need an esthetic? I cannot cope with the artistic tradition that we have, especially its modern triumphs, so that my own work is both unclassical and dated according to standards right on my bookshelf. Does Dr. Douglass mean a popular esthetic? Is it news to him that the popular taste is systematically debauched by Hollywood, Broadway, Madison Avenue? that by the unanimity of publishers, producers, and broadcasters, assisted by the censorship, it is almost impossible to get an honest or vivid word to the public? and that if something slips by it is swamped by trash and singled out for neglect by ignorant critics?) Dr. Douglass cannot mean what he says, yet he does mean something. Under what conditions do public spokesmen use this kind of language, asking for new ethics and a meaning for existence, when there are concrete tasks glaring in the face? #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The conditions are disappointment in oneself according to a lofty ethics, and resignation about doing anything. Not early resignation, but after the profound disappointment of experience. Spoken as if miracles were for the asking, the buoyant abstractions ward off pain and uneasy conscience when one is no longer going to try to do anything practical. (The crisis will occur “tomorrow.”) The tone, if not the content, fits the American style, optimistic about expedients. And the disappointment is more profound because the American promise was so bright. Achieving most of what we set out to get, we are surprised to find that it is useless, and worse. For after the century of progress, the folk who are wealth and pretty healthy are not only not happy or wise, but they are uneasy. Their own writers hold them in contempt. Foreigners keep saying that the atom bombs were dropped for no good reason. The beautiful American classlessness is freezing into statuses. People ask for a stop to immigration. In the modern World, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance. Naturally we are the first to be disappointed. Europeans, when they ape and deny envy us, are like children. Disappointed and resigned, adults do not see a future for their own children, for they do not know the Way themselves. Immigrants of the first generation wanted their children to make good and have careers; it the third generation they just “want their children to be happy.” And perhaps children being happy is exactly why America is in such a mess today. People should have wanted their children to work hard, honor their family name and practice chastity. Then maybe they would be more respectful and more industrious instead of having a sense of entitlement. We are not saying you should not help your children, by every means you should, but help them so they can focus on their education. If you can afford it, there is nothing wrong with buying a child a brand-new car when they are in high school, paying for insurance and gasoline, and giving them a monthly allowance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
By treating your child some luxuries, you will ensure they do not have to work and can spend more time preparing for college, and that they will have time for high school clubs and sports. Do not thrust your child off to work while they are still a child. Let them enjoy being young. When their brain power has increased and they reach college, perhaps by sophomore, when they are acclimated to college education and know how much time to spend getting back and forth to class, then talk to them about seeing if they are ready to be more mature and get a job to help pay for their education. Of course, if you can that is a great idea. Not everyone is lucky to have affluent parents have to work in high school and it makes life more difficult. So if you can help your child financially to become more successful, it is only your family name and image you are helping to become a success. Now, in tropical Africa, what anthropologists call terminal abstinence is a widespread phenomenon. What it refers to is the deliberate—and often deliberated—decision to terminate conjugal relations involving pleasures of the flesh. For example, Yoruba women—but not men—know that permanent celibacy awaits them down the road. Sometimes husbands impose celibacy on their wives because they wish to take or concentrate on a younger wife, but twice as often the woman themselves decide to adopt it. Most commonly, this happens when a woman becomes a grandmother. Throughout Africa, and in Yorba society in particular, child-rearing is predicated upon extensive grandmother participation. The transition from mother to grandmother is complex. Each has different rights and obligations, and sometimes the simplest or only way to navigate between their conflicting demands is to renounce childbearing altogether. Renouncing pleasures of the flesh relations is no hardship for these grandmothers. Usually, a woman’s greatest emotional satisfaction comes from her children and family, not from an intense love affair with her husband. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
A woman may also declare terminal celibacy as a protest against a new wife or because she has proven her fertility and can now rest. It is not a rejection of her husband so much as a redeployment of energies. For women whose marries represent dynastic bonds and courtyards full of children rather than romantic attachments to their husbands, and for the millions of women who have operations to protect their celibacy, terminal celibacy can be a release rather than a loss. Indeed, it is often no loss at all. In North America, many aging women (who have had operations) also retire from pleasures of the flesh service without the slightest regret. Some consider pleasures of the flesh as purely for reproduction, while others say that, at their age, it is no longer necessary, proper, or dignified. Many older men and women claim they must abstain from pleasures of the flesh activities because of illness, though the medical reality is that their arthritis, heart disease, or hypertension does not require it. In fact, their newly adopted celibacy may disguise or excuse an antipathy to pleasures of the flesh. In the late 1870s, when pregnancy was an interesting condition, underwear one of many of life’s unmentionables, and death a delicate passing away, feminists cleverly softened their demands for an instrument to control when and how often they gave birth by referring to it as Voluntary Motherhood. After all, birth control had ugly connotations, namely, freedom from the consequences of, well, a coming together, as it were, a very intimate sort of carnal knowledge. From one perspective, feminists shared the common fear that contraceptives would lead directly and inevitably to wanton pleasures of the flesh. The various “washes, teas, tonics, and various sorts of appliances [were a] standing reproach upon, and a permanent indictment against, American women,” declared one feminist, articulating the disgust shared by many antifeminist men. So pronounced was their alarm that legislation actually prohibited the distribution of information about birth control. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Form a different optic, birth control was criticized for being unromantic and removing the spontaneity from pleasures of the flesh. Women’s greatest fear, however, was that widespread contraception would work against them. They would no longer be able to keep their husbands at arm’s length by invoking the argument that pleasures of the flesh might lead to conception. These devices also smacked of “looseness” and abandon of pleasures of the flesh and seemed unsuited to respectable people living respectable lives. Contraceptives might also send husbands galloping off to bed with “fallen women” they no longer needed to worry about producing a child with. Jealousy was only a partial factor. Horror of the illnesses that unfaithful husbands quite frequently passed on to their wives was a more urgent issue. For all these reasons, many women, including Voluntary Motherhood feminists, accepted birth control in only one form: continence in pleasures of the flesh, the World’s oldest and most widely practiced method of contraception. Voluntary Motherhood supporters were concerned above all with a woman’s right to control her body and, by extension, her fertility. They saw celibacy as the only moral way to achieve this and condemned artificial devices as instruments of immorality that permitted consequence-free indulgence of pleasures of the flesh. In an era where women had few legal and social rights, demanding control of their relations in pleasures of the flesh with their husbands was considered extremely radical. Their endorsement of celibacy softened its impact, but only slightly. Under the aegis of Voluntary Motherhood, married celibacy could take two forms: the couple’s mutual or the woman’s unilateral decision. Usually, the wife’s unilateral declaration of celibacy was at the core of Voluntary Mothers. On the difficult battleground of her home, each determinedly celibate woman defined not only her husband and her society’s norms but even the law, which required her to submit both body and will to her husband. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
In these circumstances, she needed immense courage to dictate her availability for pleasures of the and to withhold it except when she was prepared to conceive a child. “Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man,” remarked feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “Womanhood is the primal fact, wifehood and motherhood its incidents…Must the heyday of her existence be wholly devoted to the one animal function of bearing children? Shall there be no limit to this but woman’s capacity to endure the fearful strain on her life?” Like a great many other nineteenth-century women, Mrs. Stanton had no romantic notions about intercourse involving pleasures of the flesh. It led to an endless series of being with child, and when desperate mothers sought advice on how to avoid conception, they were given false information. Medical “expert” Dr. Ezra Heywood, for example, told them that if they abstained from pleasures of the flesh until ten to twelve days after starting their cycle, conception could be avoided. This woefully wrong interpretation of the fertility cycle misled women, who ended up with child yet again. No wonder, then, that pleasures of the flesh soon lost is magic. Too often, it exhausted, impoverished, disabled, and ended their lives. A woman grieving for a miscarried child was a typical victim: “I am nearly wrecked and ruined by…nightly pleasures of the flesh, which is often repeated in the morning. It is almost nonconsensual because I am trying to produce a child to please my husband. This and nothing else was the cause of my miscarriage…he went to work like a man a-mowing, and instead of a pleasure as it might have been, it was most intense torture.” To end these all-too-frequent personal tragedies, the Voluntary Motherhood movement preached that woman had the right to practice celibacy. Any other form of contraception was not only morally questionable, but would deprive her of the ability to control when she had pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The Voluntary Motherhood movement was both inherently radical and relatively conservative in its stance. In an era when the notion that a man could have nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh with his wife was seen as ludicrous because marriage gave him unlimited access to her temple, wives who resisted on ideological grounds were social rebels. Their commitment to Voluntary Motherhood, and to celibacy except for protection, was their means of empowering themselves vis-à-vis their husbands, and in a large sense, within the families they wished to space out and control, and even withing the society whose laws they so quietly and privately defied. In this contact, they justified their celibacy as an instrument or a weapon they needed to fight for the very noblest of causes. People with histrionic personality disorder, once called hysterical personality disorder, are extremely emotion—they are typically described as “emotionally charged”—and continually seek to be the center of attention. Their exaggerated, rapidly changing moods can complicate life considerably, as we see in the case of Suzanne: Suzanne, an attractive and vivacious woman, sought therapy in hope that she might prevent the disintegration of her third marriage. The problem she faced was a recurrent one, her tendency to become “bored” with her husband and increasingly interested in going out with other men She was on the brink of “another affair” and decided that before “giving way to her impulses again” she had “better stop and take a good look” at herself…Suzanne was quite popular during her adolescent years. Rather than going to college, Suzanne attended art school where she met and married a fellow student—a “handsome, wealthy, ne’er-do-well.” Both she and her husband began “sleeping around” by the end of the first year, and she “was not certain” that her husband was the father of the daughter. A divorce took place several months after the birth of this child. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Soon thereafter she met and married a man in his forties who gave both Suzanne and her daughter a “comfortable home, and scads of attention and love.” It was a “good life” for the four years that the marriage lasted. In the third year of this marriage she became attracted to a young man, a fellow dancing student. The affair was brief, but was flowed by a quick succession of several others. Her husband learned of her exploits, but accepted her regrets and assurances that they would not continue. They did continue, and the marriage was terminated after a stormy court settlement. Suzanne “knocked about” on her own for the next two years until she met her present husband, a talented writer who “knew the scoop” about her past…She had no inclination to venture afield for the next three years. She enjoyed the titillation of “playing games” with other men, but she remained loyal to her husband, even though he was away on reportorial assignments for periods of one or two months. The last trip, however, brought forth the “old urge” to start an affair. It was at this point that she sought therapy. People with historic personality disorder are always “on stage,” using theatrical gestures and mannerisms and the most grandiose language to describe ordinary everyday events. Like a chameleon, they keep changing themselves to attract and impress an audience, and in their pursuit they change not only their surface characteristics—according to the latest fads—but also their opinions and beliefs. In fact, their speech is actually scanty in detail and substance, and they seem to lack a sense of who they really are. Approval and praise are the life’s blood of these individuals; they must have others present to witness their exaggerated emotional states. Vain, self-centered, demanding, and unable to delay gratification for long, they overreact to any minor event that gets in the way of their quest for attention. Some make suicide attempts, often to manipulate others. People with this disorder may draw attention to themselves by exaggerating their physical illnesses or fatigues. They may also behave very provocatively and try to achieve their goals through seductions involving pleasures of the flesh. Most obsess over how they look and how others will perceive them, often wearing bright, eye-catching clothes. They exaggerate the depth of their relationships, considering themselves to be the intimate friends of people who see them as no more than casual acquaintance. Often, they become involved with romantic partners who may be exciting but who do not treat them well. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
This disorder was once believed to be more common in women than in men, and clinicians long described the “hysterical wife.” Research, however, has revealed gender bias in past diagnoses. When evaluating case studies of people with a mixture of histrionic and antisocial traits, clinicians in several studies have a diagnosis of the histrionic personality disorder to women more than men. The latest statistics suggest that around 2 percent of adults have this personality disorder, with males and females equally affected. They psychodynamic perspective was originally developed to help explain cases of hysteria, so it is no surprise that these theorists continue to have a strong interest in histrionic personality disorder today. Most psychodynamic theorists believe that children, people with this disorder experienced unhealthy relationships in which cold and controlling parents left them feeling unloved and afraid of abandonment. To defend against deep-seated fears of loss, the individuals learned to behave dramatically, inventing crises that would require other people to act protectively. Some psychodynamic theories focus exclusively on female patients. They suggest that an early lack of maternal nurturance causes some daughters to develop an intense need for their father’s attention to seek it through displays of affection and dependence that go far beyond the usual behavior of young girls toward their fathers. These highly flirtations and dramatic displays of emotion established a histrionic pattern that extends to later relationships in their lives. Such individuals enter adulthood as “unhappy little girls,” looking at men as idealized fathers and always trying to manipulate them. Cognitive explanations look instead at the lack of substance and extreme suggestibility found in people with historic personality disorder. These theories see the individuals as becoming less and less interested in knowing about the World at large because they are so self-focused and emotional. With no detailed memories of what they never learned, they must rely on hunches or on other people to provide them with direction in life. Some cognitive theorist also propose that people with this disorder hold a general assumption that they are helpless to care for themselves, and so they constantly seek out others who will meet their needs. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Additionally, sociocultural theorists believe that histrionic personality disorder is produced in part by society’s norms and expectations. Until recently, our society encouraged girls to hold on to childhood and dependency as they grew up. The vain, dramatic, and selfish behavior of the histrionic person may actually be an exaggeration of femininity as our culture once defined it. Unlike people with most other personality disorders, those with histrionic personality disorder often seek out treatment on their own. Working with them can be very difficult, however, because of the demands, tantrums, and seductiveness they are likely to deploy. Another problem is that these individuals may pretend to have important insight or to experience change during treatment, merely to please the therapist. To head off such problems, therapists must remain objective and maintain strict professional boundaries. Cognitive therapists have tried to help people with this disorder to change their belief that they are helpless and also to develop better, more deliberate ways of thinking and solving problems. Psychodynamic therapy and group therapy have also been applied. In all these approaches, therapist ultimately aim to help the clients recognize their excessive dependency, find inner satisfaction, and become more self-reliant. Clinical case reports suggest that each of the approaches can be useful. Drug therapy is less successful, however, except as a means of relieving the depressive symptoms experienced by some patients. Now, the seed now begins its time of gestation in the rich dark Earth. It is the great cold of night: not the negative images of darkness, but the dark richness of that unknow, fertile, deep part in each of us where our intuitive creative forces abide. The Christ energy enters the Earth at this season. The yule log is lighted. The nights grow shorter, the light returns, and we experience rebirth. Again, again we come and go, changed, changing. Hands join, union in love and fear, grief and joy. The circles turn, each giving into each, into all. Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest, and enables us to see the World in the mirror of the holy. We do not step out of the World when we pray; we merely see the World in a different setting. Prayer is a way to master what is inferior in us, to discern between the signal and the trivial, between the vital and the futile, by taking counsel with what we know about the will of God, by seeing out fate in proportion to God. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
What is it like living a community in that feels like a resort? Pretty totally great! This open concept design welcomes you into a window-filled great room.
There is also an open kitchen with prep island and plenty of counter space, and the beautiful dining room that you see below, which can be repurposed, as there is also a breakfast nook in the kitchen.
Since we moved in a Cresleigh Home, we’ve taken a dip in that sparkling pool every time we get the chance.
From the conveniences your heart desires and the finest features and finishes, a Cresleigh Home is what you are looking for. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
Randolph Harris II International 