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Why Art Thou So Foolish and Fearful!
I was spending the first week of January alone in Llanada villa. A combination of circumstances had driven me to this drastic course: my nearest relations were enjoying winter sports abroad, and the friends who had been kindly anxious to replace them had an infectious complaint in the house. Doubtless I might have found someone else to keep company with me. “However,” I reflected, “most of them have made up their parties, and, after all, it is only for three or four days at most that I have to fend for myself, and it will be just as well if I can get a move on with my blueprints. I might she the time by going down to the garden and listening to my estate about plans to incorporate in the architecture.” The first day alone in Llanada Villa, it was so stormy that I got no father the designing stained-glass windows. As I sat in the Hall of Fires, I felt uncomfortable, and this feeling persisted. I felt like I was being watched by some unseen force, and my nerves began to tense under the strain. I reflected on how some of my staff had left not because they wanted to but because they were driven, driven by forces greater than themselves that they could not resist. On this very night, I had seen vivid apparition of my butler, then miles away, in San Francisco. He was a plump, amicable man who I distinctly saw walking down the hall in a bathrobe, with blooding running down his leg. A small pool of blood was forming on the floor. The frightened me terribly. My hair stood up on my head and chills shook my body. The apparition looked so stern that my heart failed me, and I wished myself anywhere but there, though I had before been summoning up my courage. “Good Heaven,” said I to myself, “give me the courage to stand before this spirit. O soften him, or harden me!” I knew this was a glimpse into eternity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
The following day, I received news that my butler, Chaleb Heroldsbach, had died after being attacked by a dog. My home is built in what some have called a “trinity triangle,” it has forged a mystical link with other pilgrimage sites and is supposed to help bring the Devil’s power on Earth to an end. This is being prevented by Satan, however, with the help of The Curse of the Winchester Fortune. That evening, I was awakened at three o’clock in the morning, seemingly for no reason with the same uncanny feeling that something was wrong. Being a sensible person, I put all my energies into polishing furniture and getting newly added rooms into proper condition. However, somewhere not so far away, a baby was crying: a mournful wail of a sound that—though it was surely human—reminded me of the noises the coyotes would make some nights. After a few moments of listening, the baby’s cry seemed to falter for a moment, and I feared it would fade completely before I could find the little darling. Then, the infant seemed to find a new seam of grief to mine, and the wail rose up again, more plaintive than ever. I was alone, but trying to figure out which direction the sound was coming from. I mused for a moment, and realized a lifetime of suffering had caught up with me. I knew in my heart that I deserved to know everything, after all I have been through. I have earned the truth. Maybe the dead are close to the threshold of reality in this house. I only know it is real. I have seen them. Others have seen them. They are hybrids. Sometimes there is a kind of beauty in them. However, sometime all I see is ugly sin. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
The sky was dark and cloudy, and by the time I woke up, I could hear a steady soaking rain pounding on the roof. I was preparing breakfast in one of the kitchens. As I was buttering a piece of toast, I happened to glance up toward the doorway. There, immaculately dressed, stood a man. The stranger, I noticed, wore shiny black shoes, black pants, and a white shirt. I could see him so clearly that I could make out the way the man’s jet-black hair was parted. Immediately, I was shocked that he had somehow entered my house, and I was about to greet him, when it occurred to me that I had not heard the door opening or any other sound—no footsteps, nothing. I turned around to grab my revolver, but by the time I turned around, the man was gone like a mist. I was not too frightened by what I had witnessed, I was growing accustomed to apparitions. I had often wondered what had taken place a century and a half on the land this eighteen-room farmhouse I purchased was on, and what the former owner really had been. However, it is fortunate that they carpenters were all strong men of action and simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle introspectiveness and mental complexity they would have fared ill indeed. Herford Hulsmann was the most disturbed; but even he outgrew the darkest shadow, and smothered memories in prayer. While I was alone, I did my best in the blotting out of unwholesome images, and was thankful that the carpenters, Daisy, and other caretakers would be returning to Llanada Villa soon. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
My house was not altogether liked by sensitive people because of the sounds heard here at night. It was said that I entertained strange visitors, and the lights seen from my windows were not always the same colours. The knowledge I displayed concerning long-dead persons and long-forgotten events was considered distinctly unwholesome. Frau Maassen swore that on 13 June 1889, in the fruit orchard, that “forty Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete in the Woodes behind Mrs. Winchester’s house.” Then several people claimed to have found William’s unfinished manuscript in his handwriting, couched in a cipher none could read. After a year of possessed this manuscript, Mr. Maassen had intensely and feverishly tried to decipher, he never stated whether or not he had succeeded. I confronted Mr. Maassen, “Why are you so foolish and fearful! You have done no harm! What, if you fear an unjust judge, when you are innocent, would you do before a just one, if you were guilty? Have courage, Mr. Maassen; you know the worst! And how easy a choice poverty and honesty is, rather than plenty and wickedness.” “Mrs. Winchester, do not let your heart ake for me?—I am sure mined flutters about like a new-caught bird in a cage,” said Mr. Maassen. “O how can wicked men seem so steady and untouched with such black hearts, while poor innocents stand, like malefactors, before them!” Mr. Maassen cheered himself up; but yet I could tell his poor heart sunk, and his spirits were quite broken. Everything that stirred, he thought was to call her to her account. Shortly after, he restored to a sojourn abroad, and did not return to claim his lands. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Mr. Maassen had apparently been careful to destroy most of his correspondence, but the citizens who took action in 1892 found and preserved a few letters and papers which excited their wonder. There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other hands which Mr. Maassen either copied with care or had photographed, and one extremely mysterious letter was written in blood. I had to learn to live with my ghosts, especially considering some of these had ben here before me. Perhaps some of these ghosts could even become friendly. One night at dinner, Daisy, myself and Zip were enjoying stuffed pheasant, when an enormous crash shook the house. It felt as if a boulder had fallen on the parlour floor. When we rushed to the parlour, everything was in order, nothing misplaced. We said a silent prayer for the souls of the disturbed. However, moments later, things got worse. The lights started going off and on by themselves. When we tried to return to the dining room and finish supper, the atmosphere was so thick that we could not get near the table. Enveloped by the strong vibrations, I felt myself levitating, and when I came to my senses, I was lying on the floor. I had given Daisy such a scare. Daisy clearly senses the presences of the spirits and she started to cry. “Oh, God, it can’t be true, Aunt Sarah,” she said. With a piercing scream, she ran up the stairs, weeping out of control. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
“I have great trouble, and some comfort, to acquaint you with. The trouble is, that my good lady began to have her bad nights, and complained to me and other persons, in particular what discomfort she suffered from her pillow and bedclothes. She said she must buy some to suit her, and should do her own marketing. And accordingly brought home a parcel which she said was of the right quality, but where she bought it we had then no knowledge, only they were marked in thread with a coronet and a bird. The merchant said they were of a sort not commonly met with and very fine, and Mrs. Winchester said they were the comfortablest she ever used, and she slept now both soft and deep. Also the feather pillows were the best sorted and her head would sink into them as if they were a cloud: which I have myself remarked several times when I came to wake her of a morning, her face being almost hid by the pillow closing over it. I had never any communication with Dr. Wayland after I came back to Llanada Villa, but one day when he passed me in the garden and asked me whether I was not looking for another service, to which I answered I was very well suited where I was, but he said I was a tickleminded maidan and he doubted not he should soon hear I was on the World again, which indeed proved true.”
Dr. Wayland is next taken up where she left off.
“On the 5th I was called up out of my bed soon after it was light—that is about five—with a message that Mrs. Winchester was dead or dying. Making my way to her house, I found there was no doubt which was the truth. All the persons in the house expect the one that let me in were already in her chamber and standing about her bed, but none touching her. She was stretched in the midst of the bed, on her back, without any disorder, and indeed had the appearance of one ready laid out for burial. Her hands, I think, were even crossed on her breast. The only thing not usual was that nothing was to be see of her face, the two ends of the pillow or bolster appearing to be closed quite over it. These I immediately pulled apart, at the same time rebuking those present for not at once coming to the assistance of their master. However, I was informed that only one person had stayed with her until her dying moment and most had fallen asleep. She looked at me and shook her head, having no more hope than myself that there was anything but a corpse before us. Indeed it was plain to anyone possessed of the least experience that Mrs. Winchester was not only dead, but had died of suffocation. Nor could it be conceived that her death was accidentally caused by the mere folding of the pillow over her face. How should she not, feeling the oppression, have lifted her hands to put it away? whereas not a fold of the sheet which was closely gathered about her, as I now observed, was disordered.
“I could tell no more, at least without opening the body, then we already knew. As to any person entering the room with evil purpose (which was the next point to be cleared), it was visible that the bolts of the door were burst from their stanchions, and the stanchions broken away from the door-post by main forced; and there was a sufficient body of witness, the smith among them, to testify that this had been done but a few minutes before I came. The chamber being, moreover, at the top of the house, the window was neither easy of access nor did it show any sign of an exist made that way, either by marks upon the sill or footprints below upon soft mould. My evidence forms of course part of the report of the inquest, the large organs were in a healthy state and there was coagulation of blood in various parts of the body. My verdict was ‘Death by visitation of spirits.’ Upon further consideration, I think I can divine a reason for Mrs. Winchester’s death. It related to the rifling of her mansion. This is the property of a noble family. The outrage was not that of a natural death. The object, it seemed likely, was theft. The account is blunt and terrible. I shall not quote it here. A dealer in San Francisco suffered heavy penalties as a receiver of stolen goods in connexion with the affair.
“Mrs. Winchester has left us all much grieved for the loss of her; for she was a good lady, and kind to all her caretakers. Much I feared, that as I was taken by her ladyship to wait upon her person, I should be quite destitute again. Mrs. Winchester has given mourning and a year’s wages to all her caretakers; and she game me with her own hand four golden guineas, and some silver, which were in her pocket when she died. And I sent Daisy those four guineas for her comfort; for Providence will not let me want: and so you may pay some old debt with part, and keep the other part to comfort yourself.” Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
What if I Do Not Believe in Ghosts?
Once when I was little, my dad took me to this placed called Sodom Hill. It must be some kind of gateway because the curious thing is, you feel like you are driving down a hill along this road. This was the first time that I believe I saw a ghost. As our carriage passed by Saint Mary Parish, a woman was standing near the church, starring at us. However, she was really looking at my father. Though the weather was warm, she was wearing a long black dress beneath a hooded cloak. She was hugging herself, and she looked cold. Beneath the hood, her face was pale, and even from a distance I could tell that she was distresses. And she was very beautiful. The hood slipped down to her shoulders. I saw her hair was red. Her dark eyes were trusting and innocent. And suddenly I knew where I had seen her before. Onn the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury Ferry. She had been weeping on deck. The beautiful maiden with the red hair kept staring at my father. He did not notice. I was curious to know if my father could see the woman. I said, “Father, what is that pretty tree over there? By the tower of the church?” I pointed toward the woman. The woman saw me point. She looked at me, questioningly, but only for a moment. Then she looked back at my father. The woman did not care if I was being immodest. She just looked through me, just as she had on the deck of the ferry. How had she gotten here, and what did she want from me and my father? All this seemed to take forever. However, I do not think more than a minute passed before my father said to me, “What tree? I don’t see any trees near the tower of the church.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
“Father, what do you see?” I asked. “The lawn,” he said. I watched him for a sign. I could not believe that he could not see the lady with crimson hair near the tower of the church. “Nothing else? I said. “No one?” “Nothing,” he replied. “No one? Who would be there?” When I looked again there was no one there. The woman had vanished. I felt as if I had lost something. “What’s wrong?” said my father. “Nothing,” I said. “I think I must have been having a daydream.” “Poor Sarah,” said my father. “It must be the sun. Let’s get you inside and get you something to drink.” We made our way back home. My mother was in the garden, kneeling down among the tall plants and rut niblicks. My father poured me some milk and gave me a cracknel, baked by my mother. “Eat this,” he said. “It’ll help you get your strength back.” My father nibbled on one himself. I told myself: No man sees a ghost and starts nibbling a cookie like nothing happened. If he said there was no woman near the tower of the church, it meant he had not seen her. It meant something was seriously wrong with me. I had not been feeling all that well lately. I felt as if the colours of everything had gotten a little brighter, and sounds a little louder, and when people speak to me, their voices have a tiny echo, like I am hearing them from the far end of a tunnel. It does not happen all of the time. I have these little spells, and then they pass, and I am normal again. Spirits whispered in the rustling leaves, ghost lurked in the murky nooks, the deep baying of a hound floated up out of the distance, an owl answered with his sepulchral note. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. What place do these spirit beings hold in the scheme of creation which by some are thought neither to have stood fast when the rebel angels fell, nor to have joined with them to the full pitch of their transgression? It was the middle of the moonlight in October night with heavy rain underfoot, I was sitting by the fire—it was a cold evening—and I stretched out my hand towards the warmth, and just then the fire-irons, or at least the poker, fell over towards me with a great clatter. There resourced over the estate and the surrounding land a series of cries which brought sleepy heads to every window; we all saw a ghost ship. It was a 26-gun frigate. There were distant gunshots, and I could feel the throb of titanic and thunderous words resounding in the upper air. Muskets flashed and cracked, and the flaming ship fell to the ground. A second flaming thing appeared, and a shriek of human origin was plainly distinguished. Then just before dawn when a howling darkness descended upon the ships and they vanished. As I ran up the stairs, I hit what felt like an ice wall and was momentarily stopped in my tracks. The air around me became instantly chilled, and although every fireplace was lit, I was cold and could see my breathe. I was then able to get up the last six steps, but when I turned around, I saw an opalescent fog crystalize into the form of a woman. She wore a long dress, and a hat, and when she turned towards me, I realized in was the woman with red hair that I had seen at the tower of the church with my father when I was a child. In her face, I could see uncountable horrors and sorrows written in the depth of her dark eyes. She then vanished, and the air around me returned to its warm state. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
There was certainly a time when I was so much harassed by my dreams that I could not keep them to myself, but would tell them to my friends. There was a dream which had come to me several times of late, and even more than once in a night. It was to this effect, that I seemed to myself to wake under an extreme compulsion to rise and go outdoors. So I would dress myself and go down to the garden door. By the door there stood a spade which I must take, and go out into the garden, and at a particular place in the boxwood hedges, somewhat clear, and upon which the moon shone (for there was always in my dream a crescent moon), I would feel myself forced to dig. And after some time, the spade would uncover something light-coloured, which I would perceive to be a stiff, linen or woolen, and this I must clear with my hands. It was always the same: of the size of a man and shaped like the chrysalis of a moth, with the folds showing a promise of an opening at one end. I could not describe how gladly I would have left all at this stage and run to the house, but I mist not escape so easily. So with many groans, and knowingly only too well what to expect, I parted these folds of stuff, or, as it sometimes seemed to be, membrane, and disclosed a head covered with a smooth pink skin, which breaking as the creature stirred, show me my own face in a state of death. Upon ever recurrence of this dream, I woke and found myself, as it were, fighting for my breath. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Moments later a chill wind blew up. It produced a kind of clutching, amorphous fear beyond that of the tomb or the charnel-house. Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows rattled as its echoes dies away. It was deep and musical; powerful as a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books in the secret library. What it said, no one can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue. Objects were being hurled about the room. Puddles of water appeared on the floor. The sheet and blankets were torn off the bed. Then I was alarmed when I heard a very loud vibration as if a hole were being drilled through the all. I went into the chamber next to mind and saw that a Victorian fireplace had been ripped from its casing and hurled upon the floor. A wailing distinctly burst out. It was almost articulate, though no one could trace the exact words; and at one point it seemed to verge toward the confines of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark madness wrenched from scores of demon throats—a yell which came strong and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst; after which a darkness and silence ruled all things. Spirals of acrid smoke ascended, though no flames appeared. This must have been the witches’ Sabbath. Death does not mean that your loved one’s have left your mind, and your mind sends messages to your eyes that sometimes have nothing to do with what you actually see. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
The Winchester Mystery House
Santa Clare Valley was in an uproar after the death of Mrs. Winchester. On Wednesday (October 3, 1923) consequently on the circulation of a report that the household goods of Sarah Winchester were being smashed and removed by some unknown agency. All day long crowds of excited people wended their way towards the Winchester Mansion, drawn thither by the accounts of the mysterious occurrences said to have been witnessed by the inmates and others. “As I enter the door I myself saw an eleven-foot-tall 18th century George I burl walnut longcase clock by James Marwick levitate several feet into the air before relocating itself to the other side of the room. After hearing what the folks had to say, I was joining in the conversation, when a late 18th century crystal chandelier began to raise in a slanting direction over my head and then fell as my feet, smashing into bits. I had not the slightest belief in the supernatural. I cannot account for what I saw. No one was nearer to the chandelier than myself and, as far as I saw, there was no cause for the phenomenon. The room was dimly lighted by a lamp. We were talking about things, and the caretaker were saying, “It is a very mysterious thing,” with his back turned Neoclassical Italian Crystal vase suddenly flew up slantingly over his head, and fell down and smashed at his feet. The caretaker looked at the mess on the floor, and thinking the devil was in the place, he left and went home. About half-a-dozen people were in the parlour whilst these things happened.
Come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Today We Begin the Harrowing Story
I have many beautiful art glass windows in my house, but the most expensive in the house was specially designed for me by Tiffany’s of New York. I originally installed it in an outside wall, but later added a series of rooms that blocked off all direct sunlight. There is a peculiar apparition that is seen in the window itself. The form seen is that of a figure dressed in white walking across the window. At first there was only one figure, and then thirteen appeared. The figures began to move across the window long before the carpenters noticed them. They did so as many as twenty or thirty times a day, and would stop shortly after noon. Of the three figures, one was a man, stone was a woman, and one was a child. the man was an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray shepherd’s-check trousers, not over-clean black frock coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head and the expression of extreme chagrin and discontent upon his features. The woman was very distinct in appearance. She was tall and very graceful. The two-year-old boy showed signs of disturbed behaviour, laughed hysterically and talked of “funny drinks.” The order of the apparitions in the window had a slight variation: the mother came alone from the northside of the window, and having gone about halfway across, she would stop, turn around, and wave her arms towards the quarter whence she had come. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
This gesture was answered by the entry of the father with the child. Both parents then bent over the child, and seemed to bemoan his fate; but the mother was always the most endearing in her gestures. The father then moved towards the other side of the window, taking the child with him, leaving the mother in the center of the window, from which she gradually retired to the north corner, whence she had come, waving her hand, as though making signs of farewell, as she retreated. After some little time she again appeared, bending forward, and evidently anticipating the return of the father and son, who never failed to reappear from the south side of the window where they had disappeared. The same gestures of distress and despair were repeated, and then all three retired together to the north side of the window. One evening, about nine o’clock, I was at the south-west door with Mr. Hansen. As I was unlocking it, I said, “Did you ever find anybody locked in here by accident?” “Mrs. Winchester, twice I saw shadows moving in that beautiful window. What a noise they did make!” Mr. Hasen then waited, leaning against the pillar, and watched the light wavering along the length of the landing. Mr. Hansen said they were well worthy seeing. “I suppose,” he said, as we walked toward the steps to the third floor, “that you’re too much used to going about here at night to feel nervous—but you must get a start every now and then, don’t you, when a book falls down or a door swings to?” “No, Mr. Hansen, I can’t say I think much about noises, not nowadays: I’m much more afraid of finding an escape of gas or a burst in the stove pipes than anything else. Still there have been times, years ago. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
“If you have an have half an hour to spare, sir, when we get back down to the second floor, Mr. Hansen, I could tell you about a tomb that was unearthed. I will not begin now; it strikes cold here, and we do not want to be dawdling about all night.” “Of course, Mrs. Winchester, I should like to hear it immensely.” “Very well, sir, you shall. Now if I might put a question to you,” I went on, as we passed down the hallway of the third floor, “in my little local guide—and not only there, but in the little book on Llanada Villa in the series—you will find it stared that this portion of the mansion was erected previous to the twelfth century. Now of course I should be glad enough to take that view, but—mind your step, sir—but, I put it to you—doe the lay of the stone here in this portion of the wall (which I tapped with my key), does it to your eye carry the flavour of what you might call Saxon masonry? No, I thought not; no more it does to me: now, if you will believe me, I have said as much to the other carpenters. However, there it is, I suppose every one’s got their opinions.” The discussion of this peculiar trait of human nature occupied Mr. Hansen almost up to the moment when we returned to the second floor. Usually the apparitions appeared during musical performances in the Grand Ballroom, and especially during one long eight-line hymn, when—for the only occasion without the child—the two parents rushed on (in stage phrase) and remained during the whole hymn, making the most frantic gestures of despair. Indeed the louder the music in that hymn, the more carried away with their grief did they seem to be. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Nothing could be more emphatic than the individuality of the several figures; the manner of each had its own peculiarity. If the stained glass were removed, I do not doubt that a much plainer view would be obtained. I think so, because the nearer the center of the window, where the stained glass was thickest, there the less distinct were the forms. It was like catching glimpses of them through leaves. However, nearer the edge of the window, where the colours were less bright, they were perfectly distinct; and still more so on the pane of unstained glass at the edge. There they seemed most clear, and gave one the impression of being real persons, not shadows. Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of Mr. Hasen since working on this project had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquired. While standing on the landing looking at the window, I noticed his respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible. His skin had a morbid chill and dryness. Of course, we were witnessing the most remarkable and perplexing incident in the whole spectacle. When the father and the child had taken their departure, the mother waved her hands, and after walking slowly to the very edge of the window, turned round whilst on the pane of unstained glass and waved her arm towards the other two with what one would call a stage gesture, and then I most distinctly saw, and emphatically declare I did see, the arm bare nearly to the shoulder, with beautiful folds of drapery hanging from it like a picture of a Greek vase. Nothing could be plainer than the drag of the robes on the ground after the figures as they retired at the edge of the window, where the clear glass was, previous to going out. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
The impression produced was that one saw real persons in the air, for though the figures were seen on the window, yet they gave one the impression of walking past the window outside, and not moving upon the glass. I am not inclined to think that the trees outside the mansion at the east end can originate the appearance by any optical illusion produced by waving branches. I could see their leaves rustling in the air, and their movement was evidently unconnected with the appearance and movement of the figures. So I began making enquires on my estate. I discovered that several people had indeed seen the shapes upon the glass. One spoke of a female figure with a slightly skipping step. Another servant said he saw an ancient gravestone from the window. The belief that the tree beside the Tiffany window were somehow responsible for the optical illusion was soon dashed; the trees were cut down, but the figures appeared still. One correspondent wrote to me in the winter of 1889, explain that “as I have no faith in ghost, I have been most wishful to have the matter cleared up. On 25 March 1687, the land you now own was involved in a remarkable satanic horror story. A young girl came to the farmhouse for help, saying that she wanted to get away from a group of satanists who had threatened to kill her. She confessed to the owner that she had murdered her own baby in ‘frenzied ritual.” He befriended the girl, twenty-three-year-old Caludia, and allowed her to stay in his home. She kept telling him that she couldn’t stand hearing the screams of her children inside of her head. And on April 20th, 1687, she died from an overdose of Laudanum and postmortem examination revealed thirteen scars and burns on her body which he tended to and which supported her claims of having been involved in satanic ritual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
“Further, Claudia left a 13-page diary in which she said he had been involved with a satanic group since she was hired to work on a nearby farm at age thirteen and her writings went on to make incredible claims. She described how she went to coven meetings with a boy named Dorian whom she had met while living on the farm. The boy’s mother was a High Priestess and his father was The Master—a known satanic term for the leading member of the group. She described other practice which are known to be common in satanic altar initiations—that of having her armed pricked and blood drained into a chalice from which it was drunk. ‘Much sexual perversion went on that night…later I learned more of Satan and practiced my arts calling on my power of darkness. Satan had become my Lord and Master.’ Later she described how she aborted a baby she was expecting by Dorian then made the claim that Dorian himself was sacrificed by his own father in retribution, and how she was forced to watch as he was hung upside down. She claimed to have seen other sacrifices of many new born babies, stabbing them at orgies in which Laudanum was taken heavily. She also appeared to have had another child of her own which was also offered up for sacrifice. At her inquest of 13 May, the midwife recorded an open verdict after the she noted that Claudia’s body had signs which confirmed she had given birth at least once, and had been subject to sexual abuse. The constables took up the case, but no charges were brought and the investigation was closed without further action.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
I was shocked of these allegations which seemed to be more than enough to inspire the most lurid of headline writers, more than to testify to the credibility of all who were proffering these dramatic and barely believable accounts of satanic abuse. Everything these people said was being taken as gospel in the village because the allegations were coming from the mouths of so-called experts. However, there were claims of rampant satanic worship in Nova Albion at this time, which was documented by English charters led by Sir Francis Drake for England. There were horrifying claims that fifty women were suffering from the after-effects of cannibalism and an average of ten occult survivors a week were being sacrificed. Dr. Harley said he read of several cases recorded by Theodorous de Bry where children had been killed. There were, of course, also several stories concocted around these three figures in my home. Some said that they issued from the grave beside the east window. Other said that they were victims of the plague, and were burned outside where this window now stands. It may or may not be relevant that the figures seemed to appear when the sound of the organ and of voices raised in song. The case was thoroughly investigated in 1889 by Dr. Robert Radakovic of The Ghost Club, where it was revealed that Llanda Villa had been “haunted” for two or three hundred years by the same figure or figures. Optical tests on the possible patterns of light and reflection had come to no results. It was remarked that “the ghost has been seen from the inside while outside nothing was visible.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
The interior of Lalanda Villa was much altered in the late nineteenth century, and a complex of rooms was built behind this haunted window. However, no satisfactory explanation has ever been given for the strange phenomena reported here. While designing Lalanda Villa, I was gaining my tastes from the venerable town around me, and from the relics of the past which filled every corner of my mansion. With the years, my devotion to ancient things increased; so that history, genealogy, and the study of gothic architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length crowded everything else from my sphere of interests. These tastes are important to remember for they outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters so that one would have fancied the they are literally transferred to a former age through some obscure short of autohypnosis. However, the true madness, I am certain, came with a later change; after the portrait and ancient papers of Saint Adalrich the Duke of Alsacre had been unearthed. Some terrible invocations being chanted under strange and secret circumstances; after certain answers to these invocations had been plainly indicated, and a frantic letter penned under agonizing and inexplicable conditions; after the wave of vampirism and the ominous legends of Neustria; and after the farmer’s memory commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst his voice failed and his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many subsequently noticed. He was later diagnosed with porphyria. And a final investigation resulted which virtually proved the authenticity of the papers and of their monstrous implications at the same time that those papers were borne forever from human knowledge. Loving antiquities so keenly, the papers and portrait were secretly concealed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Bedroom fashions changed dramatically over the Victorian years due to several factors. Early in the period, homes were heated by fireplaces and therefore could be uncomfortable in the colder mothers, although a heated bedroom was considered an indulgence and windows were left open during the winter. In reality, only the rich had fireplaces in their bedrooms. Still, one had to keep warm while asleep and bed drapery, consisting variously of canopies, tents, and other enclosures used to shut out drafts, was essential, as was heavy draper on windows. Even doors had decorative, but also functional, drapes called portieres that served to keep out drafts when covering the door.
Mrs. Winchester was wealthy and her wealth and prosperity were even envied among the elite. She had no less than 47 fireplaces in her home. By the end of the century, two things had changed that affected bedroom styles. First, coal and woodburning parlour stoves came into use, were more efficient at heating a house, and could be installed in any room. (Central heating, though available after the Civil War, was really only for the very rich.). Secondly, and more importantly, was an increased knowledge of diseases, germs, and bacteria and how to combat them. Plenty of fresh air with good circulation, and the elimination of materials such as bed draper that not only impeded air circulation but provided a place for dust and bacteria to collect were deemed essential. Since the bedroom served as the place where daily and weekly ablutions were performed (until bathrooms became separate entities), and as a birthing and maternity room, it was important that it have a healthy environment.
Styles of bedroom furniture were affected by this new found interest in and concern for prevention of illness and diseases. The classic English styles of Sheraton, Chippendale, and Hepplewhite migrated from the eighteenth century into the Victorian period. Tall, four-poster canopied beds enclosed the sleeper in heavy drapes of wool or lined damask of velvet, a carryover from the time when houses were built without corridors, and enclosures around the bed were needed for privacy, as well as warmth. By the time mid-century had arrived, the full enclosure had receded to the half-tester, or half-canopy, from which hung draperies that covered only the head and shoulders. Fully enclosed beds were now considered unhygienic, as they limited air circulation and the yards of fabric attracted dust. Dust ruffles and window valances were also discarded in the same house cleaning. In the southern climates, netting was still necessary to protect against insects, and its slightness did not impede air movement.
Gothic Revival furniture was the style into the 1840s and its massiveness was particularly suited to bedrooms. Closets were not an architectural feature at this time; clothing was stored in large cabinets called armories or wardrobes, usually with double, mirrored, and washstand, topped with marble or wood, were manufactured for middle-class homes in the cottage style. “Spool” beds were popular, nicknamed “Jenny Lind beds” because the Swedish Nightingale was rumoured to have slept in when she toured the United States of America. Made of less costly woods like maple or pine, the simple furniture could be elaborately painted with floral or foliage patterns. The well-to-do preferred the more opulent style of Rococo Revival or Renaissance Revival in woods or walnut, mahogany, or rosewood with carvings and applied moldings. As with other furniture in the house, golden oak, promoted by the Arts and Crafts Movement, was popular at the end of the century. Additional pieces of furniture found in the bedroom were writing desks, chaises, or other upholstered furniture.
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Happy is One Who Wisely Considers the Poor
Once upon a time, the police knew the community and community members so well that if your interior lights were on later than usual, they would knock on your door and check to see if everything was well. Times have changed. Economic good fortune smiles, if not on everyone, then on more people than in the past, and glossy magazines offer readers images of well-stocked refrigerators and other scenes from a good life of consumer plenty. It is the era of Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber, and Beyonce. The American youth rebels are clad in leather and denim, wilding out of rap concerts. Replacing an old, destroyed World burdened with memory with a shimmy new and complacently forgetful one has become its own type of redemption. In the face of so much good fortune, maybe people feel less need for cosmic solace, less fear of cosmic retribution. No wonder we associate the post 911 years more with economic miracles than religious ones. However, some fear that various evils such as atomic weapons, genetic experimentation, chemical food additives, a massive overreliance on pharmaceuticals, and the fact that large portions of the Earth will soon become uninhabitable is an indication that people are becoming blind to godly powers. It is believed that people need to relearn it, to use spiritual powers to recover and maintain the divine order. Even Communist ideology is losing its influence on the minds of people in general, and of the young generation in particular, and it becomes apparent in a number of reports from Russia. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A very vivid description of this development was to be found in an article by Marvin L. Kalb, “Russian Youth Asks Some Questions.” The author reports from Moscow about a new questionnaire of the “Public Opinion Institute” of Komsomol Pravada, organ of the Communist youth organization. The paper found it necessary to ask questions like “Do you personally have a goal in life?”, “What is it?”, et cetera, not so much for the purpose of a statistical inquiry, but in order to combat the widespread phenomena of apathy and materialism, which are found in the young generation. This is the text of one letter, which is characteristic of others: “‘Are you satisfied with your generation?’ the questionnaire asked. ‘No!’ the nihilist answered. ‘Why’ the questionnaire asked. ‘I’m 19 years old,’ she explained, ‘ and I am filled with apathy and indifference to everything around me—so much so that grown-ups are surprised and wonder, “So young, and yet so bored; what will happen to her when she is 30?” However, this should not be surprising, for it is a simple fact: life is just not very interesting. And this view is not only my own, but all those people with whom I am friendly.’ ’Have you a goal in life?’ the questionnaire asked. ‘Earlier, when I still poorly understood life,’ she wrote, ‘I had a goal—to study. I finished high school; and now I am in an institute part time. But now all my pure dreams lead to only one thing money. Money is everything. Luxury, prosperity, love and happiness—if you have money, you can have all of these things, and more…I still do not know how I am going to get these things; but every girl dreams about a successful marriage with lots of money. Naturally, not everyone succeeds, for there are more people who want money than who have it…But I assure you I shall succeed. My conviction is based on the fact that I always do what I want; and what I want I normally get.’” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
I do not mean to imply, of course, that his letter is representative of all the young generation in the Soviet Union. However, the survey and the publication of letters like this show how serious the leaders take the problem. We in the West, of course, should not be surprised. We are dealing with the same problems of juvenile delinquency and juvenile immortality, and for the same reasons. The materialism, prevalent in our system as well as in the Soviet Union, corrodes the sense of meaning of life in the young generation and leads to cynicism. Neither religion, humanist teaching, nor Marxist ideology is a sufficiently strong antidote—unless fundamental changes occur in the whole society. Just because ideology is not synonymous with lies, just because they—and we—are not aware of the reality behind the conscious ideology, we can not expect that they will—or could—tell us in an aside “we really do not mean what we say; all this is for public consumption, for keeping control over the minds of the people.” Maybe there is an occasional cynic who thinks this; but it is the very nature of ideology that it deceives not only others, but also those who use it. Hence the only way of recognizing what is real and what is ideology is through the analysis of actions and not in accepting words for facts. If I watch a father treating his boy harshly because he considers it his duty to teach him virtue, I shall not be so foolish as to ask the father for his motivations; instead I shall examine his whole personality, many other acts of his nonverbal manifestations, and I shall arrive at an evaluation of the weight of his conscious intention in comparison with his real motivation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
To return to the Soviet Union, what is its ideology? It is Marxism in its crudest form; the development of man is bound up with the development of productive forces. With the development of productive forces, techniques, modes of production, man develops his own faculties, but he also develops classes which become increasingly antagonistic to each other. The development of new productive forces is hampered by the older social organization and class structure. When this contradiction becomes sufficiently drastic the older social organization is changed to accommodate the full development of the productive forces. The evolution of mankind is a progressive one; both man and his domination of nature develop increasingly. Capitalism is the most highly developed system of economic and social organization, but the private ownership of the means of production throttles the full development of the productive forces and thus hinders the full satisfaction of the needs of all men. Socialism, the nationalization of the means of production plus planning, frees the economy from its shackles; it frees man, it abolishes classes and eventually the state. At present a strong state is still needed to defend socialism against attack from abroad, but the Soviet Union is already a classless, socialist society. Capitalism, still beset with its inherent contradictions, must one day adopt the socialist system, partly because of its incapacity to cope with its own contradictions, partly because the example of the socialist countries will be so compelling that all countries will want to emulate it. Eventually, then, the whole World will be socialist, and this will be the basis for peace and the full realization of man. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
This, in short, the Soviet catechism. It contains a mixture of ideology and theory. There is one difficulty the Western observer must overcome. We are not surprised that medieval thinking was structured in the frame of reference of theology. History was seen in terms of God’s creation, man’s fall, Christ’s death and resurrection, and the final drama of the second coming of Christ. Controversies, and even purely political disputes, were expressed in terms of this central frame of refence. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a secular political-philosophical frame of reference. Monarchy versus republic, liberty versus submission, environmental influence versus innate human traits, et cetera, were the battlefields. We in the West still think in a frame of reference that is partly religious, partly political-philosophical. The Russians, on the other hand, have adopted a new frame of reference, that of a socio-economic theory of history, which, according to them, is Marxism. The whole World is looked upon from this perspective, and argument and attacks are expressed in terms of it. For the Western observer for whom such theories are at best the business of a few professors, it is difficult to understand that the Russians constantly talk in terms of class struggle, conflicts with capitalism, victory of communism. The Westerner assumes that this talk must express an aggressive and active attempt to proselytize the World. It may be useful to remember that our religious ideology, in which, for instance, Christians believe that all men will eventually believe in the true God, et cetera, does not imply that we are all set to convert the pagans. It is simply that, considering our central frame of reference, we have to express our ideas in certain term; the Russians, have their frame of reference, do so in other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Soviet thinking is evolutionary and sees as the central factor in human evolution the development of the productive forces, the transformation of one social system to the next higher one. This view is not ideological in the sense in which I have used the term, but is the way the Soviet leaders really look at history, following a crude form Mr. Marx’s historical theory. It is ideological only in the negative sense that the soviet leaders do not employ this theory to analyze their own system. (Such a Marxist analysis of the Soviet system would immediately show the fictitious character of Soviet ideology.) For most Western observers, however, the theory lends itself to serious misunderstanding. When the Communist catechism says, “Communism will be victorious all over the World,” or when Mr. Khrushchev said “We will bury you,” these statements should be understood in terms of their historical theory that the next stage of evolution will be that of communism, but that does not imply that the Soviet Union sees it as its task to bring about this change by force, subversion, et cetera. It is important to understand the ambiguity of the Marxian theory. It is a theory that claims that historical changes occur when the economic development permits and necessitates the change. This aspect of the theory is one that was the basis of socialist reformist thinking in Europe, as represented by Mr. Bernstein and others. These socialists believe in the “final victory” of socialism, but they postulated that the working class need not—and could not—push events. They held that capitalism had to go through all the necessary stages, and eventually, at some unspecified time in the future, it would transform itself into socialism. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Mr. Marx’s view was not as deterministic and passive as that. Although he too thought that socialism could be ushered in only when the economic conditions were ripe for it, he believed that at this point the working class and the socialist parties, who by then would be in the majority, would have to take an active part in defending the new system against all hostile attacks from the former ruling groups. Mr. Lenin’s position deviated from Mr. Marx’s in that he substituted the avant-garde for the working class, and that he had more faith in the efficacy of force, especially in a Russia which had not yet gone through its bourgeois revolution. The Marxist goal of the final victory of socialism was common both to the nonactivist reformists and to Mr. Lenin. The formula itself—“Final victory of communism”—is a historical prediction and perfectly applicable to an evolutionary, nonaggressive policy as represented by Mr. Khrushchev. In judging whether Mr. Khrushchev aimed at a “World revolution” it is useful to ask oneself what one means by “revolution.” Of course, the word can be used in many different meanings, the most general one being that of any kind of complete and violent change of an existing government. In this case, Mr. Hitler, Mr. Mussolini, and Mr. Franko were revolutionaries. However, if one uses the concept in a more specific sense, namely the overthrow of an existing, oppressive government by popular forces, then none of these three men could be called “revolutionaries.” In fact, this usage is generally accepted in the West. When we speak of the English, the French, the America revolutions, we refer to revolutions from below, and not from above; to the popular attack against authoritarian systems not to the seizure of power by an authoritarian system. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
It was in this sense that Mr. Marx and Mr. Engels used the term revolution, and it was in this sense that Mr. Lenin believed he had started his revolution. He was convinced that the avant-grade expressed the will and the interests of the vast majority of the population, even though the system he created ceased to be the expression of popular will. However, the Communist “victories” in Poland, Hungary, et cetera, were not “revolutions” they were Russian military take-overs. Neither Stalin nor Mr. Khrushchev are revolutionaries; they are leaders of conservative, bureaucratic systems, the very existence of which is based on unquestioning respect for authority. It is naïve not to see the connection between the authoritarian-hierarchical character of a system and the fact that the leaders of such a system can not be “revolutionaries.” Neither Mr. Disraeli nor Mr. Bismarck were revolutionaries although they brought about considerable changes in Europe, and remarkable advantages for their respective countries; nor was Napoleon a revolutionary, even though he used the ideology of the French Revolution. However, even though Mr. Khrushchev is not a revolutionary, his belief in the superiority of communism is perfectly sincere. For him, and probably also for the average Russian, communism and socialism are not, as for Mr. Marx, a humanist system which transcends capitalism, but an economic system that produces more effectively, that avoids economic crises, unemployment, et cetera, and hence is more capable, in long run, of satisfying the needs of a mass and machine society. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
This is exactly why the Russian Communists believe that peaceful competition between the two systems will eventually lead to the acceptance of the Communist system throughout the World. Their concepts, here as in so many other respects, are those of capitalism—competition in the sphere of economic efficiency. Yet we hesitate to accept Mr. Khruschev’s challenge to compete with his system, and we preferred to believe that he wants to conquer us by force of subversions. While the basis general aims of humanistic socialism are the same for all countries, each country must formulate its own specific aims in terms of its own traditional and present situation, and devise it own methods to achieve this aim. The mutual solidarity of socialist countries must exclude any attempt on the part of one country to impose its methods on another. In the same spirit, the writings of the fathers of socialist ideas must not be transformed into sacred scriptures which are used by some to wield authority over others; the spirit common to them, however, must remain alive in the hearts of socialists and guide their thinking. Humanistic socialism is the voluntary, logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions. It is the realization of democracy, which has its roots in the humanistic tradition of mankind, under the conditions of an industrial society. It is a social system which operates without force, neither physical force nor that of hypnoid suggestions by which humans are forced without being aware of it. It can be achieved only by appealing to man’s reason, and to his longing for a more human, meaningful, and rich life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Humanistic socialism is based on faith in man’s ability to build a World which is truly human, in which the enrichment of life and the unfolding of the individual are the prime objects of society, while economics is reduced to its proper role as the means to humanly richer life. In discussing the goals of humanistic socialism we must differentiate between the final socialist goal of a society based on the free cooperation of its citizens and the reduction of centralized State activity to a minimum, and the intermediate socialist goals before this final aim is reached. The transition from the present centralized State to a completely decentralized form of society cannot be made without a transitory period in which a certain amount of central planning and State intervention will be indispensable. However, in order to avoid the dangers that central planning and State intervention may lead to, such as increased bureaucratization and weakening of individual integrity and initiative, it is necessary: a) that the State is brought under the efficient control of its citizens; b) that the social and political power of the big corporations is broken; c) that from the very beginning all forms of decentralized, voluntary associations in production, trade, and local social and cultural activities are promoted. While it is not possible today to make concrete detailed plans for the final socialist goals, it is possible to formulate in a tentative fashion the intermediate foals for the socialist society. However, even as far as these intermediate goals are concerned, it will take many years of study and experimentation to arrive at more definite and specific formulations, studies to which the best brains and hearts of the nation must be devoted. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Following the principle that social control and not legal ownership is the essential principle of socialism, its first goal is the transformation of all big enterprises in such a way that their administrators are appointed and fully controlled by all participants—workers, clerks, engineers—with the participation of trade union and consumer representatives. These groups constitute the highest authority for every big enterprise. They decide all basic questions of production, price, utilization of profits, et cetera. The stockholders continue to receive an appropriate compensation for the use of their capital, but have no right of control and administration. The autonomy of an enterprise is restricted by central planning to the extent to which it is necessary to make production serve it social ends. Small enterprises should work on a cooperative basis, and they are to be encouraged by taxation and other means. Inasmuch as they do not work on a cooperative basis, the participants must share in the profits and control the administration on an equal basis with the owner. Certain industries which are of basic importance for the whole of society, such as oil, banking, television, radio, medical drugs, and transportation, must be nationalized; but the administration of thee nationalized industries must follow the same principles of effective control by participants, unions and consumers. In all fields in which there is a social need but not an adequate existing production, society must finance enterprise which serve these needs. The individual must be protected from fear and the need to submit to anyone’s coercion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
In order to accomplish this aim, society must provide, free for everyone, the minimum necessities of material existence in food, housing, and clothing. Anyone who has higher aspirations for material comforts will have to work for them, but the minimal necessities of life being guaranteed, no person can have power over anyone of the basis of direct or indirect material coercion. Socialism does not do away with individual property for use. Neither does it require the complete leveling of income; income should be related to effort and skill. However, differences in income should not create such different forms of material life that the life experience of one cannot be shared by, and this remains alien to, another. The principle of political democracy must be implemented in terms of the twenty-first century reality. Considering our technical instrumentalities of communication and tabulation, it is possible to reintroduce the principle of the town meeting into contemporary mass society. The forms in which this can be accomplished need study and experimentation. They may consist of the formation of hundreds of thousands of small face-to-face groups (organized along the principle of place of work or place of residence) which would constitute a new type of Lower House, sharing decision-making with a centrally elected parliament. Decentralization must strive at putting important decisions into the hands of the inhabitants of small, local areas which are still subject to the fundamental principles which govern the life of the whole society. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
However, whichever forms are to be found, the essential principle is that the democratic process is transformed into one in which well-informed and responsible citizen—not automatized mass-men, controlled by the methods of hypnoid mass suggestion—express their will. Not only in the sphere of political decisions, but with regard to all decisions and arrangements, the grip of the bureaucracy must be broken in order to restore freedom. Aside from decisions which filter down from above, activity in all sphere of life on the grass-roots level must be developed which can “filter up” from below to the top. Workers organized in unions, consumers organized in consumers’ organizations, citizens organized in the above-mentioned face-to-face political units, must be in constant interchange with central authorities. This interchange must be such that new measures, laws, and provisions can be suggested and, after voting, decided from the grass roots, and that all elected representatives are subject to continuous critical appraisal and, if necessary, recall. Origin of knowledge. –Over vast stretches of time, the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them turned out to be useful and species-preserving: whoever hit upon or inherited them waged the battle for themselves and their offspring with better luck. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were further passed on and finally became almost the basic endowment of the human species, are, for example: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, materials, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in and for itself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Only very late did the deniers and doubter of such propositions come on the scene—only very late did truth come on the scene as the weakest form of cognition. It seemed as if one could not live with it; our organism was geared to the opposite: all its higher functions, sense perception and every kind of sensation generally, worked with those fundamental errors, incorporated from archaic times. Moreover, even in the realm of knowledge those propositions became norms according to which one measured “true” and “untrue”—down to the mot remote regions of pure logic. Thus, the strength of knowledge lies not in its degree of truth but in its age, its being incorporated, its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to come into conflict, there was never any serios contest; denial and doubt were considered madness. Those exceptional thinkers, such as the Eleatics, who, in spite of everything, fixed and held fast to the opposite of the natural error, thought it possible also to live this opposite; they invented the sage as the man of immutability, impersonality, universality of intuition, as at once one and all, with a special capacity for that inverted knowledge; they were of the belief that their knowledge was also the principle of life. However, in order to assert all this, they had to deceive themselves about their own condition: they had to credit themselves with impersonality and duration without change to misconceive essence of knowledge, to deny the force of impulses in knowledge, and to conceive of reason in general as a wholly free, self-originating activity; they closed their eyes to the fact that they, too, had arrived at their propositions in opposition to what was considered valid, or from a desire for tranquility, or disinterestedness, or domination. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The more refined development of honesty and skepticism in the end rendered even these men impossible; their life and judgment, too, turned out to be parasitic on the age-old drives and fundamental errors of all sentient existence. That more refined honesty and skepticism arose where two antithetical propositions both seemed to apply to life, both being compatible with the fundamental errors, hence where it was possible to argue about greater and lesser degrees of utility for life; likewise, where new propositions showed themselves to be, if not especially useful to life, then at least not harmful either—expressions of an intellectual play impulse, innocent and happy like all play. Gradually the human brain filled itself with such judgments and convictions, and a ferment, a struggle, a craving for power emerged in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took part in the fight over “truths”; the intellectual fight became occupation, attraction, profession, duty, dignity; knowledge and striving for the true in the end took their place as a need among other needs. From then on, not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all “evil” instincts were subordinated to knowledge, put in its service, and acquired the luster of the permissible, the honored, the useful, and finally the eye and the innocence of the good. Knowledge thus became part and parcel of life itself and as such an ever-increasing power—until finally knowledge and those age-old fundamental errors collided, both as life, both as power, both in the same man. The thinker: this is now the creature in whom the drive to truth and all those life-preserving errors wage their first battle, once the drive to truth has proved that it, too, is a life-preserving power. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Compared to the significance of this battle, all else is a matter of indifference: here, the ultimate question concerning the condition of life is posed, and here, the first attempt is made to answer the question with an experiment. To what extent can truth be incorporated?—that is the question, that is the experiment. Victory over the ultimate negative as a tempter, and all its temptations—whether direct or indirect—must be learned by the believer from personal experience. One must remember that not all “temptations” are recognizable as temptations, nor are they always visible—for half their power lies in their being hidden. A believer often thinks that one will be as conscious of the approach of temptations as one is of a person coming into the room. Hence the children of God are only fighting a small proportion of the ultimate negative’s workings: that is, only what they are conscious of as supernatural workings of evil. Because of their knowledge of the ultimate negative’s character and methods of working is limited and circumscribed, many true children of God only recognize “temptation” when the nature of the thing presented is visible evil, and accords with their limited knowledge of evil. So they do not recognize the temper and one’s temptations when they come under the guise of lawful and apparent “good.” When the ultimate negative and one’s emissaries come as angles of light clothe themselves in light, which, in their case, stands for evil. It is a “light” which is really darkness. They come in the guise of good—for darkness is opposed to light, ignorance is opposed to knowledge, falsehood is opposed to truth. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Darkness is a term we ordinarily apply to evil morality and moral darkness. Hence the believer may need to discern evil spirits in the realm of the supposed good. That which comes to them as “light” actually may be darkness. The apparent “good” may be really evil. And so the apparent “help” which the believer clings to may be really a hindrance. There needs to be a choice between good and evil made perpetually by every man. The Hebrew priests of old were specially called to discern and tech the people the difference between “the holy and the common,” “the unclean and the clean,” reports Ezekiel 44.23. Yet is the Church of Christ today able thus to discern what is good and what is evil? Does she not continually fall into the snare of calling good “evil,” and evil “good”? Because the thoughts of God’s people are so often governed by ignorance and limited knowledge, they can call the works of God “diabolic” and the works of the ultimate negative “divine.” For they are not taught the necessity of learning to discern the difference between “the unclean and the clean,” nor how to decide for themselves what is of God and what is of the ultimate negative—although they are unknowingly compelled to make a choice every moment of the day. Neither do all believers know that they have a choice between good and good, id est, between the lesser and the greater good—and the ultimate negative often entangles them here. The place of the church is in a purely vertical relationship to God, the distinction between the latent and manifest church is challenged, and, the Spirit which constitutes the churches is not the Spirit of Jesus. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The Gestalt of grace and the sacramental principle are vehicles for the holiness of the “is,” the actual presence of the divine which, in turn, provides the positive base for the prophetic demand for the holiness of the “ought.” Furthermore, the church portrays an image which it presents to the non-believer who is incapable of seeing its theological side. On the one hand, the latent church under the vivifying power of the Spiritual Presence is in preparation for the reception of the New Being in Jesus the Christ. However, the latent church is not simply an infant awaiting baptism; it is already a mature, adult member of the Spiritual Community, ad under the drive of the Spirit it voices criticism of the manifest church through non-sectarian, secular, or even anti-religious movements. Its protest appears as a cultural phenomenon, but the underlying inspiration is religious. On the other hand, the manifest church openly and consciously acknowledges the New Being in Jesus the Christ, and, united by the bonds of a common faith, it proclaims the Word of the Gospel and the sacraments of the New Law. However, these acts of religion must be expressed in relevant cultural form. The latent church joins the Spiritual Community by participation in the New Being, but it does not know Jesus crucified. The manifest church’s explicit acknowledgement of Jesus as the bearer of the New Being gains for it the symbol of the Cross, the Protestant principle of self-reformation which is the only antidote to demonization. Possession and non-possession of the Cross seems a clear-cut distinction. How can the secular World voice truly prophetic criticism unless it too has the Cross, the symbol of the struggle against the demonic, at least implicitly? #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
What does the explicit reception of the New Being in Jesus the Christ add to the manifest church? In the manifest church, one finds that the Christian Bible, the document of the reception of final revelation, the sacraments which deepen the experience of the New Being, and the corporate organization rallies and sustains Christians in their effort to live the Gospel. Here is certainly a concrete difference between the latent and manifest churches. However, what immediately springs to mind, the demonization and profanization into which these two churches inevitably fall makes one wonder if the transition from the latent to the manifest church is worth the price. It seems that most of the latter’s energy is expended in applying the Cross to correct its own ambiguities. The impression is that the latent church is dynamic, exciting, productive, and pregnant with hope, while the manifest church is tired, dull, weighed down with ambiguities, and moribund—despite the fact that it has received the New Being in Jesus the Christ. One is tempted to conclude almost blasphemously—because it has received the New Being in Jesus the Christ. All Americans are brothers, responsible for one another. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for al. If there be among you a need may, do not harden your heart. The generous heart shall be enriched, and one that satisfies others hall be satisfied oneself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
It is safe to say that the second most important room in the Victorian home was the dining room, where not only the family gathered, but where social interaction took place among family and visitors. In the family it should be observed as a rule to meet together at all meals of the day around one common table where the same rules of etiquette should be as rigidly observed as the table of a stranger.
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Are We All Liars?
When it comes to Russia, the question that raises perhaps the greatest difficulty of all for the realistic understanding of the nature of Soviet Russia and her political intentions is that of the meaning of Communist ideology. If it is true that Russia since 1923 has not been a revolutionary system, has not attempted to bring about revolution in the Western countries, and, in fact, has tried to contain them, how is one to look upon the fact that the Russians constantly speak of “the final victory of communism in the World,” and of capitalism as the enemy which eventually will be displaced by communism, et cetera? To understand this apparent paradox, one must understand ideologies. “An ideology” is a system of ideas. In talking, for instance, about conservative ideology one refers to the conservative system of thought, et cetera. This use of ideology may be called descriptive. Since the middle of the nineteenth century one finds other, more dynamic concepts. The dynamic concept of ideology is based on the recognition of the fact that man has longings and passions that are deeply rooted in his nature and in the very conditions of human existence. These inherently human needs are freedom, equality, happiness, and love. If these needs remain unsatisfied, they become perverted into irrational passions like the striving for submission, power, destruction, and so on. In many cultures these irrational passions are the main driving forces, yet only few societies openly admit that they want destruction or conquest. Man’s need to believe that he is prompted by humans and constructive impulses is so great that it always makes one disguise (to oneself and to others) his most immortal and irrational impulses, making them appear as though they were noble and good. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
In the history of the last four thousand years the great spiritual leaders of mankind—Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lao-tse, Buddha, Isaiah, Zoroaster, Jesus, and many others—have articulated the deepest longings of man. It is remarkable how similar are the fundamental ideas that have been expressed by the various leaders. They penetrated the crust of custom, indifference, and fear by which most people protect themselves from authentic experience, and found followers who awakened from half-slumber to follow them in their ideas. This happened in China, India, Egypt, Palestine, Persia, Greece—where new religions and philosophical schools were formed. However, after a while these ideas lost their strength. While people in the first flush of bloom experienced what they thought they thought, they slowly began to have purely cerebral, alienated thoughts, instead of authentic experiences. This is not the place to discuss the complex and difficult problem of why this deterioration occurs. It suffices to say that it would be much too easy to explain the problem by the fact of the death of the charismatic leader. It is even not enough to point to the fact that freedom, love, and equality are qualities for the achievement of which one needs courage, will, and the capacity for making sacrifices; nor is it enough to say that much as people want freedom, they are also afraid of it, and want to escape from it, and hence that when the first period of enthusiasm has evaporated, people are no longer capable of holding on to the original ideas. True as all this may be, there is another and more important reason. Man, in the process of history, changes his environment and changes himself. However, this process is slow. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Aside from primitive societies, the development of civilization and the development of man has proceeded in such a way that the majority of men have had to serve the minority, because the material basis for a dignified life for all was not available. How could the ideal of love and of equality be experienced authentically over any length of time by enslaved people, by serfs, by the poor whose lives were mainly a struggle against starvation and sickness? How could the ideal of freedom remain alive among those who had to submit to the demands of the few who had power over them? Yet people could not live without faith in these ideals, and without the hope that in time they could be realized. The priests and kinds who came after the prophets made use of this need. They appropriated the ideals, systematized them, transformed them into a ritual, and used them to control and to manipulate the majority. Thus the ideal was transformed into an ideology. The words remain the same, yet they have become rituals, and are no longer living words. The idea becomes alienated; it ceases to be the living, authentic experience of man, and becomes instead an idol outside of him, which he worships, to which he submits, and which he also uses in order to cover up rationalize his most irrational and immoral acts. The ideology serves to bind people together, and to make them submit to those who administer the proper use of the ideological ritual; it serves to rationalize and to justify all irrationality and immorality that exist within a society. At the same time the ideology, containing in itself the froze idea, as it were, satisfies the adherents of the system; they believe themselves to be in touch with the most fundamental needs of man, with love, freedom, equality, brotherliness—because they hear and say these words. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
And at the same time, however, the ideology also presents these ideas. While they become rituals they nevertheless remain expressed; they become living ideas again when the historical situation enables man to awaken and to experience again as real that which had become an idol. When the ideology ceases to be a ritual, when it becomes connected again with individual and social reality, then it is retransformed from ideology into an idea. It is as if ideology were a seed, resting for years in sand and then transplanted into fertile ground where it grows again. An ideology, then, is at the same time a deceptive substitute for an idea and its preservation, until the time has come for its revival. Ideologies are administered by bureaucracies that control their meaning. They develop systems, they decide what is right and what is wrong thinking, who is faithful and who is a heretic; the manipulation of ideologies becomes one of the most important means for the control of the people through the control of their thoughts. The ideologies become systematized and acquire their own logic; words have their specific meanings and—this is very important—new or even opposite ideas are still expressed in the terms of the older ideological frame of reference. (One of the most drastic examples of this is Mr. Spinoza’s negation of the God of monotheism which he expressed in terms of a definition of God apparently only slightly different from the orthodox definition.) The ideas of Mr. Marx were transformed into ideologies. A new bureaucracy took over, and established its rulership on principles exactly the opposite of the original ideas. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The Russians say that they are a classless society, that they have achieved a true democracy, that they are moving toward the withering away of the state, that their aim is the fullest development of the individua personality, the self-determination of man. These are Mr. Marx’s ideas; indeed, they are ideas that Mr. Marx shared with other socialist and anarchist thinkers, with enlightenment thought, and, in the last analysis, with the whole tradition of Western humanism. Yet, the Russians have transformed these ideas into an ideology; a bureaucracy which makes the state increasingly powerful at the expense of the individual, rules in the name of the ideas of individuality and equality. How can this phenomenon be understood? Are the Soviet leaders plain lairs deceiving their people? Are they cynics who do not believe a word they say? This is a puzzling question; many people are prone to assume that the Russians either fully mean what they say, or that they are outright liars. Yet if we were to examine ourselves more carefully, we might find that we too do the same thing without being aware of it. Most people in the West believe in God, hence in God’s principles of love, charity, justice, truth, humility, et cetera. Yet these ideas have little influence on our behaviour. Most of us are motivated by the wish for greater material comfort, security, and prestige. While people believe in God, they are not concerned with God, that is, they do not worry or lose sleep over religious or spiritual problems. Yet we pride ourselves on being “God-fearing” and call the Russians “godless.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Or, mot Americans believe that the capitalist system under which we live is based on the free, unmanaged market, on private property, a minimum of government control, on individual initiative. While that was true nearly two hundred years ago, it is not true now. The means of production are essentially not controlled by those (still only a small minority) who own them; individual initiative is drowned in a bureaucratic system and more often found in “Western” films than in real life; the “free” market has become a directed and manipulated market; the state, instead of interfering minimally, is the biggest employer and customer and support industry whenever it seems desirable to the “government-business-armed services” bureaucracy. We say that we are an alliance of freedom-loving people, yet quite a number of dictatorships belong to our alliance. We accuse the Communists of wanting to proselytize us and make communism a World system—but we sat that “it is our aspiration also to see the Russian people freed from their present enslavement, and the Chinese people, too. We want people everywhere to be free.” Are we all liars? Or are we, and they, genuinely starting convictions? In order to fully understand that these alternatives are not the only one, it is useful to think of one of the most important discoveries of Dr. Freud: the nature of rationalization. Before Dr. Freud, it was generally believed that unless a person were lying one’s conscious thoughts are what one really thinks. Dr. Freud discovered that a person can be fully sincere, subjectively, and yet that one’s thought may have little weight or reality, that it may be only a cover, a “rationalization” for the real impulse which motivates one. Examples of this mechanism are known to many people by now. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Who does not know the scrupulously moral person who in the name of virtue and goodness dominates his wife and children and deprives them of their freedom and spontaneity? He is not lying when he recites his principles, yet if we analyze him, that is to say, if we study his effective motivations, we find that a wish for power or control or even a sadistic impulse to strangle any kind of spontaneity is what in reality motivates him. This reality is unconscious—while his consciousness is not real. Yet he is sincere and, in fact, would be genuinely indignant if his motives were even questioned. Moreover, his ideology is not simply an empty lie and a means to dominate his family all the better because he uses noble phrases and this impresses them. He actually has a genuine longing for goodness, virtue, and love, but instead of acting upon these impulses, he transforms them into words and deceives himself with the illusion that he is in touch with love when he talks about love. Mr. Stalin or Mr. Khrushchev, using the words of Mr. Marx use them ideologically, just as most of us use the words of the Christian Bible, Book of Mormon, of President Jefferson, of Mr. Emerson, ideologically. We fail, however, to recognize the ideological and ritualistic character of Communist utterances, just as we overlook the ideological and ritualistic character of many of our own statements. Hence, when we hear Mr. Khrushchev pronounce Mr. Marx’s or Mr. Lenin’s words, we believe that he means what they meant, while the fact is that these ideas are no more real to him that the wish to save pagan souls was to the European colonialists. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Paradoxically, the only people who take the Communist ideology seriously are we in the United States of America, while the Russian leaders have the greatest trouble in shoring it up with nationalism, moral teaching, and increased material satisfactions. Every social and economic system is not only a specified system of relations between things and institutions, but a system of human relations. Any concept and practice of socialism must be examined in terms of the kind of relations between human beings to which it is conducive. The supreme vale in all social and economic arrangements is man; the goal of society is to offer the conditions for the full development of man’s potentialities, his reason, his love, his creativity; all social arrangements must be conductive to overcoming the alienation and crippledness of man, and to enable him to achieve real freedom and individuality. The aim of socialism is an association in which the full development of each is the condition for the full development of all. The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man. In relations between people, every man is an end in himself and must never be made into a means to another man’s ends. From this principle it follows that nobody must personally be subject to anyone because one owns capital. Humanistic socialism is rooted in the conviction of the unity of mankind and the solidarity of all men. It fights any kind of worship of State, nation, or class. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The supreme loyalty of man must be to the human race and to the moral principles of humanism. It strives for the revitalization of those ideas and values upon which Western civilization was bult. Humanistic socialism is radically opposed to war and violence in all and any forms. It considers any attempt to solve political and social problems by force and violence not only as futile, but as immoral and inhuman. Hence it is uncompromisingly opposed to any policy which tries to achieve security by armament. It considers peace to be not only the substance of war, but a positive principle of human relations based on free cooperation of all men for the common good. From socialist principle it follows not only that each member of society feels responsible for his fellow citizens, but for all citizens of the World. The injustice which lets two-third of the human race live in abysmal poverty must be removed by an effort far beyond the other ones hitherto made by wealthy nations to help the underdeveloped nation to arrive at a humanly satisfactory economic level. Humanistic socialism stands for freedom. It stands for freedom from fear, want, oppression, and violence. However, freedom is not only from, but also freedom to; freedom to participate actively and responsibly in all directions concerning the citizen, freedom to develop the individual’s human potential to the fullest possible degree. Production and consumption must be subordinated to the needs of man’s development, not the reverse. As a consequence all production must be directed by the principle of its social usefulness, and not by that of its material profit for some individuals or corporations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Hence if a choice has to be made between greater production on the one hand, and greater freedom and human growth on the other, the human as against the material value must be chosen. In a socialist industrialism the goal is not to achieve the highest economic productivity, but to achieve the highest human productivity. This means that the way in which man spends most of his energy, in work as well as in leisure, must be meaningful and interesting to him. It must stimulate and help to develop all his human powers—his intellectual as well as his emotion and artistic ones. While, in order to live humanly, basic material needs must be satisfied, consumption must not be an aim in itself. All attempts to stimulate material needs artificially for the sake of profit must be prevented. Waste of material resources and senseless consumption for consumption’s sake are destructive to mature human development. Humanistic socialism is a system in which man governs capital, not capital man; in which, so far as it is possible, man governs his circumstances, not circumstances man; in which the members of society plan what they want to produce, rather than have their production follow the laws of the impersonal powers of the market and of capital with its inherent need for maximum profit. Humanistic socialism is the extension of the democratic process beyond the purely political realm, into the economic sphere; it is political and industrial democracy. It is the restoration of political democracy to its original meaning: the true participation of informed citizens in all decisions affecting them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Extension of democracy into the economic sphere means democratic control of all economic activities by the participants: manual workers, engineers, administrators, et cetera. Humanistic socialism is not primarily concerned with legal ownership, but with social control of the large and powerful industries. Irresponsible control by bureaucratic management representing the profit interest of capital must be replaced by administration acting on behalf of, and controlled by, those who produced and consume. The aim of humanistic socialism can be attained only by the introduction of a maximum of decentralization compatible with a minimum of centralization necessary for the coordinated functioning of an industrial society. The functions of a centralized state must be reduced to a minimum, while the voluntary activity of freely cooperating citizens constitutes the central mechanism of social life. Does our definition of freedom as non-submission to any higher power exclude sacrifices, including the sacrifice of one’s life? This is a particularly important question today, when Fascism proclaims self-sacrifice as the highest virtue and impresses many people with its idealistic character. There are two entirely different types of sacrifice. It is one of the tragic fact of life that the demands of our physical self and the aims of our mental self can conflict; that actually we may have to sacrifice our physical self in order to assert the integrity of our spiritual self. This sacrifice will never lose its tragic quality. Death is never sweet, not even if it is suffered for the highest ideal. It remains unspeakably bitter, and still it can be the utmost assertion of our individuality. Such sacrifice is fundamentally different from the “sacrifice” which Fascism preaches. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
There, sacrifice is not the highest price man may have to pay to asset his self, but it is an aim in itself. This masochistic sacrifice sees the fulfillment of life in its very negation, in the annihilation of the self. It is only the supreme expression of what Fascism aims at in all its ramifications—the annihilation of the individual self and its utter submission to a higher power. It is the perversion of true sacrifice as much as suicide is the utmost perversion of life. True sacrifice presupposes an uncompromising whish for spiritual integrity. The sacrifice of those who have lost it covers up their moral bankruptcy. One last objection is to be met: If individuals are allowed to act freely in the sense of spontaneity, if they acknowledge no higher authority than themselves, will anarchy be the inevitable result? In so far as the word anarchy stands for heedless egotism and destructiveness, the determining factor depends upon one’s understanding of human nature. Man is neither good nor bad; life has an inherent tendency to grow, to expand, to express potentialities; if life is thwarted, if the individual is isolated and overcome by doubt or a feeling of aloneness and powerlessness, then one is driven to destructiveness and craving for power or submission. If human freedom is established as freedom to, if man can realize his self fully and uncompromisingly, the fundamental cause for his asocial drives will have disappeared and only a sick and abnormal individual will be dangerous. This freedom has never been realized in the history of mankind, yet it has been an ideal to which mankind has stuck even if it was often expressed in abstruse and irrational forms. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
There is no reason to wonder why the record of history shows to much cruelty and destructiveness. If there is anything to be surprised at—and encouraged by—it is the fact that the human race, in spite of all that has happened to men, has retained—and actually developed—such qualities of dignity, courage, decency, and kindness as we find them throughout history and in countless individuals today. If by anarchy one means that the individual does not acknowledge any kind of authority, the answer is to be found in what has been said about the difference between rational and irrational authority. Rational authority—like a genuine ideal—represents the aims of growth and expansion of the individual. It is, therefore, in principle never in conflict with the individual and one’s real, and not one’s pathological, aims. Freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an “individual,” but that at the same time he had become isolated, powerless, and an instrument of purpose outside of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual’s potentialities, together with one’s ability to live actively and spontaneously. Freedom has reached a critical point where, driven by the logic of its own dynamism, it threatens to change into it opposite. The future of democracy depends on the realization of the individualism that has been the ideological aim of modern thought since the Renaissance. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell. The victory of freedom is possible only if democracy develops into a society in which the individual, his growth and happiness, is the aim and purpose of culture, in which life does not need any justification in success or anything else, and in which the individual is not subordinated to or manipulated by any power outside of himself, be it the State or the economic machine; finally, a society in which his conscience and ideals are not the internalization of external demands, but are really his and express the aims that result from the peculiarity of his self. These aims could not be fully realized in any previous period of modern history; they had to remain largely ideological aims, because the material basis for the development of genuine individualism was lacking. Capitalism has created this premise. The problem of production is solved—in principle at least—and we can visualize a future of abundance, in which the fight for economic privileges is no longer necessitated by economic scarcity. The problem we are confronted with today is that of the organization of social and economic forces, so that man—as a member of organized society—may become the master of these forces and cease to be their slave. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
There is a psychological side of freedom, but the psychological problem cannot be separated from the material basis of human existence, from the economic, social, and political structure of society. It follows from this premise that the realization of positive freedom and individualism is also bound up with economic and social changes that will permit the individual to become free in terms of the realization of his self. We cannot afford to lose any of the fundamental achievements of modern democracy—either the fundamental one of representative government, that is, government elected by the people and responsible to the people, or any of the rights which the Bill of Rights guarantees to every citizen. Nor can we compromise the newer democratic principle that no one shall be allowed to starve, that society is responsible for all its members, that no one shall be brightened into submission and lose one’s human pride through fear of unemployment and starvation. These basic achievements mut not only be preserved; they must be fortified and expanded. In spite of the fact that this measure of democracy has been realized—though far from completely—it is not enough. Progress for democracy lies in enhancing the actual freedom, initiative, and spontaneity of the individual, not only in certain private and spiritual matters, but above all in the activity fundamental to every man’s existence, his work. What are the general conditions for that? The irrational and planless character of society must be replaced by a planned economy that represent the planned and concerted effort of society as such. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Society must master the social problem as rationally as it has mastered nature. One condition for this is the elimination of the secret rule of those who, though few in number, wield great economic power without any responsibility to those whose fate depends on their decisions. We may call this new order by the name of democratic socialism but the name does not matter; all that matters is that we establish a rational economic system serving the purposes of the people. Today the vast majority of the people not only have no control over the whole of the economic machine, but they have little chance to develop genuine initiative and spontaneity at the particular job they are doing. They are “employed,” and nothing more is expected from them than that they do what they are told. Only in a planned economy in which the whole nation has rationally mastered the economic and social forces can the individual share responsibility and use creative intelligence in his work. All that matters is that the opportunity for genuine activity be restored to the individual; that the purposes of society and of one’s own become identical, not ideologically but in reality; and that he apply his effort and reason actively to the work he is doing, as something for which he can feel responsible because it has meaning and purpose in terms of one’s human ends. We must replace manipulation of men by active and intelligent co-operation, and expand the principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, so help me God, from the formal political to the economic sphere. The only criterion for the realization of freedom is whether or not the individual actively participates in determining one’s life and that of society, and this not only by the formal act of voting but in one’s daily activity, in one’s work, and in one’s relations to others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Modern political sphere, cannot sufficiently counteract the results of the economic insignificance of the average individual. However, purely economic concepts like socialization of the means of production are not sufficient either. I am not thinking here so much of the deceitful usage of the word socialism as it has been applied—for reasons of tactical expediency—in National Socialism. I have in mind Russia where socialism has become a deceptive word; for although socialization of the means of production has taken place, actually a powerful bureaucracy manipulates the vast mass of the population; this necessarily prevents the development of freedom and individualism, even if government control may be effective in the economic interest of the majority of the people. Never have word been more misused in order to conceal the truth than today. Betrayal of allies is called appeasement, military aggression is camouflaged as defense against attack, the consequences of small nations goes by the name of a pact of friendship, and the brutal suppression of the whole population is perpetrated in the name of National Socialism. The words democracy, freedom, and individualism become objects of this abuse too. There is one way to define the real meaning of the difference between democracy and Fascism. Democracy is a system that creates the economic, political, and cultural conditions for the full development of the individual. Fascism is a system that, regardless under which name, make the individual subordinate to extraneous purposes and weakens the development of genuine individuality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Obviously, one of the greatest difficulties in the establishment of the conditions for the realization of democracy lies in the contradiction between a planned economy and the active co-operation of each individual. A planned economy of the scope of any big industrial system requires a great deal of centralization and, as a consequence, a bureaucracy to administer this centralized machine. On the other hand, the active control and co-operation by each individual and by the smallest units of the whole system requires a great amount of decentralization. Unless planning from the top is blended with active participation from below, unless the stream of social life continuously flows from below upwards, a planned economy will lead to renewed manipulation of the people. To solve this problem of combining centralization with decentralization is one of the major tasks of society. However, it is centrally no less soluble than the technical problems we have already solved and which have brought us an almost complete mastery over nature. It is to be solved, however, only if we clearly recognize the necessity of doing so and if we have faith in the people, in their capacity to take care of their real interest as human beings. In a way it is again the problem of individual initiative with which we are confronted. Individual initiative was one of the great stimuli both of the economic system and also of personal development under liberal capitalism. However, there are two qualifications: it developed only selected qualities of man, his will and rationality, while leaving him otherwise subordinate to economic goals. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
It was a principle that functioned best in a highly individualized and competitive phase of capitalism which had room for countless independent economic units. Today this space has narrowed down. Only a small number can exercise individual initiative. If we want to realize this principle today and enlarge it so that the whole personality becomes free, it will be possible only on the basis of the rational and concerted effort of a society as a whole, and by an amount of decentralization which can guarantee real, genuine, active co-operation and control by the smallest units of the system. Only if man masters society and subordinates the economic machine to the purpose of human happiness and only if he actively participates in the social process, can he overcome what now drives him into despair—his aloneness and his feelings of powerlessness. Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning. The victory over all kinds of authoritarian systems will be possible only if democracy does not retreat but takes the offensive and proceeds to realize what has been its aim in the minds of those who fought for our freedom throughout the last centuries. It will triumph over the forces of nihilism only if it can imbue people with a faith that is the strongest the human mind is capable of, the faith in life and in truth, and in freedom as the active and spontaneous realization of the individual self. Ideologies and culture in general are rooted in the social character; the social character itself is molded by the mode of existence of a given society; and in their turn the dominant character traits become productive forces shaping the social process. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The collapse of medieval society threatened the middle class; this threat resulted in a feeling of powerless isolation and doubt; this psychological change was responsible for the appeal of Mr. Luther’s and Mr. Calvin’s doctrines; that these doctrines intensified and stabilized the characterological changes; and that the character traits that thus developed then became productive forces in the development of capitalism which in itself resulted from economic and political changes. With regard to Fascism the same principle of explanation was applied: the lower middle class reacted to certain economic changes, such as the growing power of monopolies and postwar inflation, with an intensification of certain character traits, namely, sadistic and masochistic strivings; the Nazi ideology appealed to and intensified these traits; and the new character traits then became effective forces in supporting the expansion of German imperialism. Germany is already looked at as a superior country, and known for producing some of the best products known to mankind. When a certain class is threatened by new economic tendencies, it reacts to this threat psychologically and ideologically; and that the psychological changes brought about by this reaction further the development of economic forces even if those forces contradict the economic interests of the class. Economic, psychological, and ideological forces operate in this way: that man reacts to changing external situations by changes in himself, and that these psychological factors in their turn help in molding the economic and social process. Economic forces are effective, but they must be understood not as psychological motivation but as objective conditions. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All. The Sacramento Fire Department has been proudly serving the City of Sacramento since 1851, and they are not receiving all of their resources. Please open your hearts this holiday season and make any donation you can. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Winter’s Chill was in the Air
In the middle of the night, I was awaked by a frightful scream which came, or seemed to come from the roof of the mansion: and noises simultaneously reached me which seemed as if twenty or thirty chattering workmen were removing the tiles, and flinging them down as fast as possible into the garden below. I hastily got up, the apparition made itself visible, in its manly guise, just a foot from me, as its wont, and then caused my candle to go out, though it had no breath of its own with which to do it with. I summoned the man-servant, want downstairs with him to the front door, armed with a brace of loaded Winchester ‘73s. We expected to find thieves, or a body of lunatics, or Chartist rioters on an errand of destruction. However, on opening the door and making examination, not a soul was to be seen—not a sound heard. None of the tiles had been removed; while the garden was perfectly still and deserted. Amid the elms and the dogwood, the bird of paradise plants and the palms, noting had been disturbed. Coming back to my chamber, I found my windows open and the drapes flapping in the breeze, and had to latch the windows again. The linen from my bed had been thrown hither and tither, and my papers had been scattered about. I stayed awake for some time afterwards when suddenly the door of my bedroom opened, and shut again rather quickly. I fancied it might be one of the servants and called out, “Come in!” After a short time the door opened again, but no one came in—at least no one I could see. Almost at the same time as the door opened for the second time, I was a little startled by the rustling of some curtains belonging to a hanging wardrobe that stood by the side of the bed; the rustling continued, and I was seized with the most uncomfortable feeling, not exactly of fright, but a strange unearthly sensation that I was not alone. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
I had had that feeling for some minutes, when I saw at the foot of the bed a priest buttoned up tight in a black rain coat. His face was shadowed, deep-hollowed under brow and cheekbone. He looked to be in his forties. Looks can be deceiving. Something compelled him to raise his eyes to my face, and when he did so, he halted. Eyes momentarily alive, he scrutinized my face. The man seemed as if he were on the bed, and came gliding toward me as I lay. The sensation of panic deepened. My breath came shallow and rushed, my thoughts flew wildly in all directions, I was simply terrified and could not move. I tried to speak to him but could not. He came slowly on up to the top of the bed, and then I saw his face clearly. He seemed in great trouble; his hands were clasped and his eyes were turned up with a look of entreaty, an almost agonized look. Then, slowly unclasping his hands, he touched me on the shoulder. The hand felt icy cold, and while I strove to speak he was gone. I felt more frightened after the priest was gone than before, and began to be very anxious for the time when the servant would make her appearance. Whether I slept again or not, I hardly know. However, by the time the servant did come, I had almost persuaded myself that the whole affair was nothing but a very vivid nightmare. However, when I came down to breakfast, there were many remarks made about my not looking well—it was observed that I was pale. In answer, I told the servants that I had had a most vivid nightmare, and I remarked if I was a believer in ghosts I should imagine I had seen one. Nothing more was said at the time upon the subject, except that my guest, Dr. Wayland, observed that I had better not sleep in that room again, at any rate not alone. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
As the evening came, the twilight deepened; and in many parts of the tangled hallways there was an approach to absolute blackness. I found myself walking unusually slow. It was unlike me, and the queer disorienting sense of being unreal, of having stepped into another World, was totally new. I was so panicked I could hardly catch my breath. I wanted to run out of the hallway, wanted to run out of my mansion. It was as if a demon had appeared to me. It breathed into my face, shoved me about, tried to pull me under. I would suffocate: I would be destroyed. The sensation was possibly the most unpleasant I had ever experienced in my life though it carried with it no pain and no specific images. Why I was frightened I could not gasp. Why I wanted nothing more than to run out of my home, to escape the unseen, yet curious eyes, I was never to understand. However, I could not flee. To form even a rudimentary idea of my thoughts and feelings as I slowly penetrated this aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and impressions. The sheer alluring antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements were the recent unexplained horror. And the revelations all too soon effected by the terrible wailing and creaking sounds all around us. The apparitions rearing and dwelling in this frightful catacomb were wise and old. They are the makers and enslavers of life. They are the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when the Earth was young—the beings whose substance and powers were such as this planet had never bred. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
So the following night, one of the chambermaid slept with me in the Crystal Bedroom. Neither one of us saw nor heard anything out of the way during that night or the early morning. That being the case, I persuaded myself that what I had seen had been only imagination and, much against everyone’s expressed wish, I insisted the next night on sleeping in the Daisy Bedroom again, and alone. Accordingly, having retired again to the same room, I was kneeling down at the bedside to say my prayers, when exactly the same dread as before came over me. The drapes of the wardrobe swayed about, and I had the same sensation as previously—that I was not alone. I felt too frightened to stir when, at that very moment, a chilling atmosphere and queer presence seemed to permeate the bedroom. There were unaccountable bangings and the sound of heavy breathing, accompanied by the feeling that something or somebody was in the room with me. And although I never saw anyone, I continued to hear footsteps. They went diagonally across the room, from an alcove beside the bed to the far wall where they stopped. Upon the ceiling, an apparition’s face appeared in the plaster as broad as half a crown. Frightened, I ran to the door, but could not open it for it was not unlatch. I nervously shuffled through my pockets to find the key to the door, but it slipped from my clutches and fell upon the floor. Kneeling to get the key, I noticed such a queer thing, a blue eye was seen peering through a knot-hole in the wooden floorboard. My troubled, I must confess it, increased upon me. As I lit my candle, something whispered to me, “Let me wish you a Happy New Year.” I could not had been mistaken: it spoke distinctly and with a peculiar emphasis. Had I dropped my candle, as I all but did, I tremble to think what the consequences must have been. As it was, I managed to get in bed quickly, and experienced no other disturbance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Another curious thing happened on December 28. I had occasion to come downstairs to my library for my watch, which I had inadvertently left on my table when I went up to bed. I think I was at the top of the flight when I had a sudden impression of a sharp whisper in my ear, “Take care.” I clutched the balusters and naturally looked round at once. Of course, there was nothing. After a moment I went on—it was no good turning back—but I had as nearly as possible fallen: a car—a large one by the feel of it—slipped between my feet, but again, of course, I saw nothing. It may have been the kitchen cat, but I do not think it was. In shock, I went to back down to the library and worked from 9 to 10. The hall staircase seemed to be unusually full of what I can only call movement with sound: by this I mean that there seemed to be continuous going and coming, and that whenever I ceased writing to listen, or looked out into the hall, the stillness was absolutely unbroken. Nor, in going to my room was I conscious of anything that I could call a noise. It so happened that so happened that I told Heinrich Schnell to come to my room for the letter to Cynthia Hesdra which I wished to have delivered early in the morning at her mansion. He was to sit up, therefore, and come for it when he heard me retire. This I had for the moment forgotten, though I had remembered to carry the letter with me to my room. However, when as I was wining up my watch, I heard a light tap at the door, and a low voice saying, “May I come in?” (which I most undoubtedly did hear) I recollected the fact, and took up the letter from my dressing-table, saying, “Certainly: come in.” When I went to open the door she appeared before my eyes then vanished. As I strongly suspect I committed an error, I opened the door and held the letter out. There was certainly no one at that moment in the passage, but, in the instant of my standing there, the door at the end opened and Heinrich appeared carrying a candle. I asked him whether he had come to the door earlier; but am satisfied that he had not. I do not like the situation; but although my senses were very much on the alert, and thought it was sometime before I could sleep, I must allow that I perceived nothing further of a figment of my imagination. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
I adjure thee, Emperor Lucifer by the hierarchy of superior intelligences to make our magick our Divine will imposed upon limitation and stasis. Allow our sorcery to be an external manifestation of our God self. All of your reality is a mirror upon which we can view the true essence of self and divinity. Allow the inner vision to become within the eternal darkness. May we feel and experience the colours emanating from the fire of spirit and unite them with the darkness. Allows these colours to move outward from within and merge to create the blackness and nothingness of the void so when they move back into our consciousness, we will notice how in our reality these colours again separate to create our physical surroundings through our observation and perception of them. May we maintain the knowledge that we are in complete control of all creation and how destiny within this World unfolds. I offer my blood unto the Divs and Druj, whom are of the essence of counter creation. I offer my life force unto the powers of eternal darkness found within. May they devour and destroy the imposed shackled of divine light and stasis that I may become as Zohak who is Ahriman in the flesh! Pursron and 22 Legions of Spirits, I awaken the powers of darkness which dwell within you by the power of the blood of the three headed Dragon Zohak that you may serve to empower my great work! Please bring forth hidden treasures, and devour all limitations for the sake of evolution and reveal the truth of the lie unto the Dark Apostles! Ediamazay acsat acsat acmahgnay acah tahsa ahteav oruha adzam ohgnav itiap ensey taa matah ehgney. Oybihzhkav acsaybieahdxuhsar acsaybarhtoaz acanhtoahys acacav…acarhtam ahgnahgnad ovzih. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
The son of one of the caretakers of The Winchester Mystery House believed himself to be haunted with ghosts, and was confident that he met with an evil spirit in a certain field at the mansion, as he often went to school that way. He confessed that a woman, which appears to him, lived in the Winchester Mansion. Her name was Helena Blavatsky. She never spoke to him, but passed by hastily, and would always leave the footpath to him, and she commonly meet him twice or three times in the breadth of the field. She began to meet him constantly morning and evening, and always in the same field, and sometimes twice or thrice in breadth of it. After about a year, he began to suspect and believe she was a ghost, and had courage enough not to be afraid; but kept it to himself a good while, and only wondered very much at it. He did often speak to her, but never had a word in answer. Then he changed his way and went to school the under horse road, and then she always met him in the narrow lane, which was worse. At length he began to be terrified of her, and prayed continually that God would either free him from her or let him know the meaning of it. Night and day, sleeping and waking, the shape was ever running in his mind. Thus by degrees he grew very pensive, insomuch that it was taken notice of by all his family; whereupon being urged to it, he told his brother William about it. William laughed at him, sometimes chided him, but commanded him to keep his school and put such fopperies out of his head. He did accordingly go to school often, but always met the woman in the way.
After weeks, William noticed that his brother was losing weight, getting pale and was not sleeping. Early one morning, he decided to escort his brother to school. They walked for about an hour’s space in meditation and prayer before stepping into the disturbed field. The ghost appeared, and William spoke to hear in a loud voice, in some such sentences as the way of these dealings directed him, whereupon it approached but slowly, and when they came near it, it moved not. William spoke to it again, and it answered, in a voice neither very audible nor intelligible. He was not in the least terrified, and therefore persisted until it spoke again, and gave him satisfaction. However, the work could not be finished at that time; wherefore the same evening, an hour after sunset, the apparition met the brothers again in the same place, and after a few words of each side it quietly vanished; and neither doth appear since, nor will ever more to any man’s disturbance. The discourse in the morning lasted about a quarter of an hour. These things are true, and I know them to be so with as much certainty as eyes and ear can give me; and until I can be persuaded that my senses do deceive me about their proper object, I must and will assert that these things in this paper are true.
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The Most Delicious Morsel of Our Self Love?
Colleges such a University of Southern California—Los Angeles, Cornell, Duke and Chapman are now offering courses on how to be a social media influencer as part of their business and communications department. A social media is someone who has a platform on the Internet and vast amounts of fans. Some of these influencers have hundreds of thousands to millions of fans. A lot of them are even more popular than well-known celebrities. When these influencers get popular enough and gain the attention of a brand, the brand will usually sponsor them to market their goods and/or services for a profit. The goal is for the brand to gain more popularity and increase their revenue. Some popular social media influencers are people like Taylor Swift, who by just advocating voting or mentioning that she is attending a football game, can get millions of fans to vote and attend football games. There are of course other social media influencers who may or may not be major celebrities, but became famous by marketing their talents on the Internet and/or other forms of media. A great example is Jillian Harris, who starred on Love it or List it, Too, which is a HGTV program, which comes on television and focuses on renovating and decorating homes. Now Jillian Harris uses her social media platform to help support charities and market items that her followers love. She has over 1 million fans on social media. Austin Harris Mahone, who sang Justin Bieber songs, is also a social media influence. He was discovered and currently an American singer. Micro-influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 fans may earn anywhere between $40,000 and $100,000 per year. However, Cristiano Ronaldo, with over 570 million fans on social media charges around $2.4 million for a social media post. People are now seeing becoming a social media influencer as the great equalizer that education once used to be. With the desire of so many to become famous, it leaves many wondering if fame really just the most delicious morsel of our self-love? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Fame has, after all, attached itself to the most uncommon men and women, as an ambition, and in turn to their most uncommon moments. These are moments of sudden illumination in which a human stretches out a commanding arm, as if creating a World, light shining forth and spreading out around one. One is then filled with the deeply gratifying certainty that what enraptured and exalted one into the farthest regions, the height of this one sensation, can never be denied to posterity; in the eternal necessity of this rare illumination for all those to come humans see the necessity of their fame. Far into the future, human kind need man, and just as that moment of illumination is the embodiment and epitome of his innermost essence, so, too, he believes himself, as the man of this moment, to be immortal, dismissing all others as dross, rot, vanity, brutishness, or pleonasm, leaving them to perish. We view all disappearance and demise with discontent, often with astonishment, as if we experienced in it something at bottom impossible. We are disturbed when a Victorian mansion is torn down, and a crumbling tower aggrieves us. Every New Year’s Eve, we feel the mystery of the contradiction of being and becoming. What offends moral man above all, though, is that an instant of supreme universal perfection should vanish without a trace, like the Mansion of the Gilded Age, leaving nothing to posterity. Humans’ imperative reads instead: whatever once served more beautifully to propagate the concept “man” must continue to exist forever. That all the great moments form a chain; that, like mountain peaks, they unite humankind across the millennia; that the greatest things from a bygone age are also great for me; and that the prescient faith of the lust for fame will be fulfilled—that is the idea at the very foundation of culture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The terrible struggle of culture is ignited by the demand that what is great should be eternal; for everything else that continues to live cries out, No! The customary, the small, the common fills every nook and cranny of the World like an oppressive atmosphere we are all condemned to breathe, smoldering around what is great; hindering, choking, suffocating, deadening, smothering, dimming, deluding, it throws itself onto the road the great must travel on the way to immortality. The road goes through human brains! Through the brains of pitiful, short-lived creatures who, given over to their cramped needs, rise again and again to the same afflictions and, with great effort, manage to fend off ruin for a short time. They want to live, to live a bit—at any price. Who would discern among them that arduous torch race that only the great survive? And yet time and again some awaken who, seeing what is great, feel inspired, as if human life were a glorious thing, and as if the most beautiful fruit of this bitter plant were the assurance that someone once walked proudly and stoically through this existence, another with deep thoughts, a third with mercy, but all of them leaving behind a single lesson: that one who lives life most beautifully is one who does not hold it in great esteem. However, while the common man regards this bit of existence with such morbid seriousness, those on their journey to immortality knew how to respond to it with an Olympian laugh, or at least with sublime disdain; often they went to their graves with irony—for what did they have to bury? #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The boldest knights among those addicted to glory, those who believe they will find their coat of arms hanging on a constellation, must be sought among the philosophers. They address their efforts not to a “public,” to the agitation of the masses and the cheering applause of their contemporaries; it is in their nature to travel the road alone. Their talent is the rarest, and in a certain respect, the most unnatural in nature, shutting itself off from and hostile even to kindred talents. The wall of their self-sufficiency must be hard as diamond not to be shattered and destroyed, for everything is on the move against them, humans and nature. Their journey to immortality is more arduous and impeded than any other, and yet no one can be as sure as the philosopher about reaching one’s goal, since one knows not where to stand, if not on the wings of all ages; for a disregard of the present and the momentary is of the nature of philosophical contemplation. One has the truth; let the wheel of time roll where it will, it can never escape the truth. It is important to realize that such humans did indeed once live. One could never imagine as a mere idle possibility the pride of the wise Heraclitus, who may serve as our example. For all striving for knowledge seems in itself unsatisfied and unsatisfying, which is why, without having learned it from history, one could hardly believe in such regal self-esteem, such boundless confidence in being the one lucky suitor of truth. Such humans live in their own solar system; that is where one must look for them. Even a Pythagoras, an Empedocles treated himself with a superhuman esteem, indeed with an almost religious awe, though the bond of compassion, together with grand faith in the transmigration of souls and the unity of all living things, led them back again to other humans, and to their salvation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The World is not the way they tell you it is. Unconsciously we know this because we have al been immunized by growing up in the United States of America. The little girl watching television asks will she really get the part in the spring play if she uses Listerine, and her good mother says no, darling, that is just the commercial. It is not long before the moppets figure out that parents have commercials of their own—commercials to keep one quiet, commercials to get one to eat, and so on. However, parents—indeed all of us—are in turn being given a whole variety of commercials that do not seem to be commercials. Silver is in short supply, and the Treasury is running out and begins to fear a run. So the Treasury tells the New York Times that, what with one thing and another, there is enough silver for twenty years. Those who listened to the commercial sat quietly, expecting to get the part in the spring play, and the cynics went and ran all the silver out of the Treasury and the price went through the roof. Image and reality an identity and anxiety and money are all major concerns to us. If that does not scare you, nothing will. It is not really that serious and there is a message in here from Lord Keynes to that effect. You already know about image and reality, and you probably already know all about identity and anxiety, and everybody knows about money, so all we are doing is stirring them up together. Many are wondering, as Mr. Adam Smith did, the famous economist and moral philosopher, “To what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this World?” What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and preheminence?” he asked in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
We are taught—at least those of us who grew up without a great deal of it—that money is A Very Serious Business, that the stewardship of capital is holy, and that the handler of money must conduct oneself as a Prudent Human. It is all part of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of Capitalism and I suppose it all helped to make this country what it is. Penny saved, penny earned, waste not, want not, Summer Sale Save 10 Percent, and so on. The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and overexacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst one who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate told. Drs. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern developed, some years ago, a Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. This game theory has had a tremendous impact on our national life; it influences how our defense decisions are made and how the marketing strategies of great corporations are worked out. What is the game theory? You could say it is an attempt to quantify and work through the actions of players in a game, to measure their options continuously. Or, to be more formal, game theory is a branch of mathematics that aims to analyze problems of conflict by abstracting common strategic features for study in theoretical models. By stressing strategic aspects, id est, those controlled by the participants, it goes beyond the classic theory of probability, in which the treatment of games is limited to pure chance. Drs. Von Neumann and Morgenstern worked through systems that incorporated conflicting interests, incomplete information, and the interplay of free rational decisions and choice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
They started with dual games, zero sum two-person games, id est, those in which one player wins what the other loses. At the other end you have something like the stock market, an infinite, n-person game. (N is one of the letters economists use when they do not know something.) The stock market is probably temporarily too complex even for the Game Theoreticians, but I suppose some day even it will become a serious candidate for quantification and equations. The market is both a game and a Game, id est, both sport, frolic, fun, and play, and a subject for continuously measurable options. If it is a game, then we can relieve ourselves of some of the heavy and possibly crippling emotions that individuals carry into investing, because in a game the winning of the stake is clearly defined. Anything else becomes irrelevant. Is this so startling? “Eighty percent of investors are not really out to make money,” says one leading Wall Streeter. Investors not out to make money? It seems almost like a contradiction in terms. What are they doing then? That can be a subject for a whole discussion, and will be, a bit later. Let us go back to the illumine, that the investment game is intolerably boring save to those with a gambling instinct, while those with the instinct must pay to it “the appropriate toll.” This really does say it all. Active investors do not pursue bonds (except convertibles) and preferreds (except convertibles). It is not that one cannot make money with these instruments, it is that they lack romance enough to be part of the game; they are boring. It is very hard to get excited over a bond basis book, where your index finger traces along a column until it gets to the proper degree of safety and yield. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Sometime illusions are more comfortable than reality, but there is no reason to be discomfited by facing the gambling instinct that saves the stock market from being a bore. Once it is acknowledged, rather than buried, we can “pay to this propensity the appropriate toll” and proceed with reality. There is really no more than recognizing an instinct. Dr. Thomas Schelling, a Harvard economist and the author of a number of works on miliary strategy, foes a lot further. Writing on “Economics and Criminal Enterprise,” Dr. Schelling says: “The greatest gambling enterprise in the United States has not been significantly touched by organized crime. That is the stock market…The reason is that the market works too well, Federal control over the stock market, designed mainly to keep it honest and informative…makes it a hard market to tamper with.” Sentences like the first one in that excerpt must make the public-relations people at the New York Stock Exchange wake up screaming. For years the New York Stock Exchange and the securities industry have campaigned to correct the idea that buying stocks was gambling, and while there may be some dark corners of this country that persist in a Populist suspicion of Wall Street, by and large they have succeeded. Dr. Schelling’s phrasing has to be counted as unfortunate, and in no sense is the stock market a great gambling enterprise like a lottery. However, it is an exercise in mass psychology, in trying to guess better than the crowd how the masses will behave. Sometimes the literature which was produced in order to dispel the pre-1929 suspicions can get in the way of seeing things the way they are. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
If you are a player in the Game, or are thinking of becoming one, there is one irony of which you should be aware. The object of the game is to make money, hopefully a lot of it. All the players in the Game are getting rapidly more professional; the amount of sheer information poured out on what is going on has become almost too much to absorb. The true professionals in the Game—the professional portfolio managers—grow more skilled all the time. They are human and they make mistakes, but if you have your money managed by a truly alert mutual fund or even by one of the better banks, you will have a better job done for you than probably at any time in the past. However, if you have your money managed for you, then you are not really interested, or at least the Game element—with that propensity to be paid for—does not attract you. There are a lot of investors who came to the market to make money, and they told themselves that what they wanted was the money: security, a trip around the World, a new sloop, a country estate, an art collection, a Caribbean house for cold winters. And they succeeded. So they sat on the dock of the Caribbean home, chatting with their art dealers and gazing fondly at the new sloop, and after a while it was a bit flat. Something was missing. If you are a successful Game player, it can be a fascinating, consuming, totally absorbing experience, in fact it has to be. If it is not totally absorbing, you are not likely to be among the most successful, because you are competing with those who do find it so absorbing. The lads with the Caribbean houses and the new sloops did not, upon the discovery that something was missing, sell those trophies and acquire sackcloth and ashes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The sloops and the houses and the art are still there, but the players have gone back to the Game, and they do not have a great deal of time for their toys. The Game is more fun. It probably does not make you a better person, and I am not sure it does any good for humanity; the best you can say is what Samuel Johnson said, that no man is so harmlessly occupied when he is making money. The irony is that this is a money game and money is the way we keep score. However, the real object of the Game is not money, it is the playing of the Game itself. For the true players, you could take all the trophies away and substitute plastic beads or whale’s teeth; as long as there is a way to keep score, they will play. There are cases of a predatory government just as they are in cases of firms and agencies of a benevolent government. Modeling of dynamics seems essential for a more satisfactory treatment of the distinction between roving and stationary bandits than the simple ad hoc procedures. Hierarchical agencies are important in practice because a government has to use middle-level administrators to implement its policies, and these can have their own objectives and information advantages. Thus a top-level government may be more or less benevolent while its middle-level agents are predatory, or both may be predatory and the middle-level agents may be trying to keep some of the extorted sums for themselves. Agricultural reforms in China in the late 1970s eventually won the approval of the top-level government, overcoming initial resistance by local bureaucrats. There are especially harmful consequences when a citizen needs permission from several officials of a predatory government to conduct one’s productive activities, and each of them demand a bribe. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
If we continue in our present direction, the Soviet Union serves as a warning to Western industrialism of where we will arrive. In the West we have developed a managerial industrialism, with the concomitant “organization man”; Russia, having jumped over the intermediate stage in which we in the West still find ourselves, has carried this development to its logical end—under the names of Marxism and socialism. Nationalization (the abolition of private property in the means of production) is not an essential distinction between “socialism” and “capitalism.” It is merely a technical device for more efficient production and planning. The Soviet system is an efficient, completely centralized system, ruled by an industrial, political and military bureaucracy; it is the completed “managerial revolution,” rather than a socialist revolution. The Soviet system is not the opposite of the capitalist system, but rather the image into which capitalism will develop unless we return to the principles of the Western tradition of humanism and individualism. If concentrated ownership of property, bureaucratic management of the process of production, and manipulated consumption are essential elements of twenty-first century capitalism, the difference from Soviet communism seems to be one of degree rather than of quality. If capitalism, as Mr. Keynes said, can survive only with a considerable degree of socialization, it may be said with equal justification that Soviet communism has survived by incorporating a considerable amount of capitalism. In fact, the Soviet system and the Western system are both confronted with the same problems of industrialization and economic growth in a highly developed, centralized managerial society. They both use the methods of a managerial, bureaucratically ruled mass society characterized by an increasing degree of human alienation, adaptation to the group, and a prevalence of material over spiritual interests; they both produce the organization man who is ruled by the bureaucracies and the machines and yet believes himself to be following the lofty aim of humanistic ideals. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The similarities between the Soviet system and “capitalism” were strikingly demonstrated in the presentation of the class stratification and the educational goals of the Soviet Union, a comparison which shows that in many respects the Soviet system resembles the capitalist system of the nineteenth century while in some other it is more modern and “advanced” than that of the West. These similarities become even clearer if we consider one factors that, In Western opinion, is the cornerstone of capitalism: monetary incentives. What are the facts about incentives in Soviet Russia? As far as the workers in Russian are concerned the incentive is cash. The cash incentive operates in two ways. First, is the fact that wages are for the most part based on the piece-work principle. Wages “are fixed for the required output planned for the specific job. As the worker exceeds one’s quota, the incentive system sets up a rising scale to compensate one for increased production. For the labourer who raises one’s output from 1 to 10 percent, the commensurate increases in the piece rate is 100 percent.” If one consistently doubles one’s quota, one’s monthly pay will be almost double one’s regular wage. The second cash incentive for the worker is bonuses, which are paid out of the profit of the enterprise. “In many cases the bonus will make up the larger amount of a Russian worker’s annual wages.” As far as Soviet managers are concerned, the chief incentives is that of the bonus paid for the overfulfillment of targets. “The amount of income earned in the form of bonuses is substantial. The managerial personnel of the iron and steel industry earned bonuses averaging 51.4 percent of their basic income. In the food industry at the low end, the percentage was 21 percent. Since these are averages, many individual managers earned considerably more than this. Bonuses of this magnitude must be a potent incentive indeed.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Also the status symbol and the expense account have become, according to Javits, an important incentive for the Soviet manager. Summing up, Berliner states that “private gain has for the last 25 years been the keystone of the management incentive system” and “we are safe in saying that for the next several decades at least, private gain will be the central economic incentive in both [the America and the Russian] systems.” For the peasants too, cash is one of the main economic incentives. There is one incentive that is paradoxical insofar as it shows a relaxation of state incentive on the one had by the Soviet, and a continued experimentation on the other hand by the United States of America. It refers to the highly publicized incentive to agriculture offered by the United States of America at its expense for the private gain of the farmer. In the Soviet Union…after having sold the required crop to the government, the members of the collectives are permitted to market the excess to the public on a supply-and-demand basis. This area of Soviet economy is about the only one in which a free marker can be found. In the period before the German Revolution of 1918, the authority of the monarchy was undisputed, and by leaning on it and identifying with it the member of the lower middle class acquired a feeling of security and narcissistic pride. Also, the authority of religion and traditional morality was still firmly rooted. The family was still unshaken and a safe refuge in a hostile World. The individual felt that one belonged to a stable social and cultural system in which one had one’s definite place. One’s submission and loyalty to existing authorities were a satisfactory solution of one’s masochistic strivings; yet one did not go to the extreme of self-surrender and one retained a sense of the importance of one’s own personality. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
What one was lacking in security and aggressiveness as an individual, one was compensated for by the strength of the authorities to whom one submitted oneself. In brief one’s economic position was still solid enough to give one a feeling of self-pride and of relative security, and the authorities on whom one learned were strong enough to give one the additional security which one’s own individual position could not provide. The postwar period changed this situation considerably. In the first place, the economic decline of the old middle class went at a faster pace; this decline was accelerated by the inflation, culminating in 1923, which wiped out almost completely the savings of many years’ work. While the years between 1924 and 1928 brought economic improvement and new hopes to the lower middle class, squeezed in between the workers and the upper classes, was the most defenseless group and therefore the hardest hit. However, besides these economic factors there were psychological considerations that aggravated the situation. The defeat in the war and the downfall of the monarchy was one. While the monarchy and the state had been the solid rock on which, psychologically speaking, the petty bourgeois had built his existence, their failure and defeat shattered the basis of one’s own life. If the Kaiser could be publicly ridiculed, if officers could be attacked, if the state had to change its form and to accept “red agitators” as cabinet ministers and saddle-maker as president, what could the little human put one’s trust in? One had identified oneself in one’s subaltern manner with all these institutions; now, since they had gone, where was one to go? The inflation, too, played both an economic and a psychological role. It was a deadly blow against the principle of thrift as well as against the authority of the state. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
If the savings of many years, for which one had sacrificed so many little pleasures, could be lost through no fault of one’s own, what was the point in saving anyway? If the state could break its promises printed on its bank noted and loans, whose promises could one trust any longer? It was not only the economic position of the lower middle class that declined more rapidly after the war, but its social prestige as well. Before the war one could feel oneself as something better than a worker. After the revolution the social prestige of the working class rose considerably and in consequence the prestige of the lower middle class fell in relative terms. There was nobody to look down upon any more, a privilege that had always been one of the strongest assets in the life of small shopkeepers and their like. In addition to these factors the last stronghold of middle-class security had been shattered too: the family. The postwar development, in Germany perhaps more than in other countries, had shaken the authority of the father and the old middle-class morality. The younger generation acted as they pleased and cared no longer whether their actions were approved by their parents or not. The decline of the old social symbols of authority like monarchy and state affected the role of the individual authorities, the parents. If these authorities, which the younger generation has been taught by the parents to respect, proved to be weak, then the parents lost prestige and authority too. Another factor was that, under the changed conditions, especially the inflation, the older generation was bewildered and puzzled and much less adapted to the new conditions than the smarter, younger generation. Thus the younger generation felt superior to their elders and could not take them, and their teachings, quite seriously any more. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Furthermore, the economic decline of the middle class deprived the parents of their economic roles as backers of the economic future of their children. The older generation of the lower middle class grew more bitter and resentful, but in a passive way; the younger generation was driving for action. Children, after being limbs of Satan in traditional theology and mystically illuminated angels in the minds of educational reformers, have reverted to being little devils—not theological demons inspired by the Evil One, but scientific Freudian abominations inspired by the Unconscious. They are, it must be said, far more wicked than they were in the diatribes of the monks; they displayed, an ingenuity and persistence in sinful imaginings to which in the past there was nothing comparable except St. Anthony. Is all this the objective truth at least? Or is it merely an adult imaginative compensation for being no longer allowed to wallop the little pests? Germany’s economic position was aggravated by the fact that the basis for an independent economic existence, such as their parents had had, was lost; the professional market was saturated, and the chances of making a living as a physician or lawyer were slight. Those who had fought in the war felt that they had a claim for a better deal than they were actually getting. Especially the many young officers, who for years had been accustomed to command and exercise power quite naturally, could not reconcile themselves to becoming clerks or traveling salesmen. The increasing social frustration led to a projection which became an important source for National Socialism: instead of being aware of the economic and social fate of the old middle class, its members consciously thought of their fate in term of the nation. The nation defeat and the Treaty of Versailles became the symbols to which the actual frustration—the social one—was shifted. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Instead of denying or seeking to minimize the effects of social investigation on the behaviour of the people investigated, it is probable that social science has much to gain by making them the focus of greater attention. For if the reflexive consequences of social inquiry can be isolated and studied, it is possible that the precise condition under which they occur can be predicted, and ultimately utilized. This outcome is far form certain; it may be that with every cycle of self-examination new conditions are generated, so that prediction is always one move behind self-knowledge, and the concrete outcomes will always remain indeterminate. Abstractly, on the other hand, each increment of self-knowledge is likely to produce at least an enhanced sense of self-determination. If in all social research, furthermore, the subjects were systematically made party to the research, as well as to the findings—as the subjects’ curiosity and co-operation have always seemed in fairness to warrant—the result promises new techniques of self-expression and social planning. Suppose that a survey of all parents in a certain community reveals that 75 percent of those parents beat their children for defying commands and 25 percent do not. The mere interviewing of parents to find this out may have caused large numbers of them to reflect upon beating as a debatable practice, and to discuss it with other. Suppose that the figure found are then published for the information of the whole community. Some parent who beat their children may be encouraged by realizing how many other do likewise; other may be influenced by the fat that many parents et along without beating. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Some parents who do not go in for beating may be encouraged to learn that there are many others who do not; others may be discouraged to realize they are in a minority. However, since many parents do not fall neatly into one category or the other, and may resort to beating only under extreme circumstances, it is likely that the interviewing process will force them to clarify their conception of themselves as beaters or nonbeaters. Also, when the results are published, knowledge of how many endorse or condemn each practice is likely to send further waverers in one direction or the other. Human beings quickly lose patience with being studied—unless they are studying themselves. As people become more aware of what is taking place in their community, discussion will occur and opinion form. Instead of the findings remaining mere factual records objectively gathered by disinterested observers, they become indices of progress and achievement; the community commences to measure itself against itself, to accentuate a direction of change guided by a preferred self-characterization; goals of the “Let’s do better next year!” type are informally or formally set up for each period. The adoption of these goals releases the energy for their achievements; new values and motives are created. Human beings change their behaviour as a consequence of studying it. Planning becomes not a procedure for reducing freedom but for increasing the scope of self-determination. Social science becomes not a technique for manipulation but a means for everyone to explore new possibilities of self-development. Family life becomes a lifelong series of experiments in personality reorganization conducted by the persons involved, and family agencies become their sources of leadership. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
If the goal of family research and family agencies is to be the development of competent personalities, then this implies a good deal more than the acquisition and application of matter-of-fact knowledge. It requires above all the will to carry out these theoretical and practical programs. Not the least of the threats confronting western communities is a dangerous paralysis of the general will. There is compelling evidence in the volume of sales of religious books and self-help books for the existence of an almost universal desire for greater competence. As humans achieve a competence with respect to the social World comparable to their mastery over the material World, some old values may make way for new, but other are realized in higher degree. As some means become an ends in themselves, so some formers ends are reduced to the function of means. Perhaps the substitution of the pursuit of competence for the pursuit of wealth will be such instance. In the contemporary world, a parent is far better advised to endow one’s child with competence in the new sense than to leave one with “a competence” in the old sense. Democracies do not know what kind of citizen the want to create. It is likely, however, that a later generation will look back and observe that we were not trying to create a fixed type of person, as other ages and place have done. Instead, we were groping toward the creation of a person who, not conforming to a predetermine image, is unprecedently capable of determining oneself. The members of a family change and develop, and it is other family members who are the principal determinants of such development. If this is assumed to be true, then the reflexivity quotient of any participant experiment is maximized, the more the behaviour of the subjects resembles that of the members of the family. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The more each means to the others, and they do one, the greater the consequence of their interactions. Conversely, the influence of others upon the self sharply declines as they move outside one’s constellation of significant others. Family patterns are normally transferred to interpersonal relations in other institutions. It is the possibility of progressively reconstituting the family through experimentally establishing its preferred relations in the quasi-families which offers hope of raising the quality of family life and of making accessible to experimental research a subject previously almost inviolate to observation. It is clear that incompetence in marriage and parenthood are very common, and its consequences are difficult for millions to bear. The usual references to rates of divorce only crudely suggests how far families fall short of hopes they inspire when formed, since even families that last often fail to achieve the optimal development of their members, so much so that many writers incline to assume that marital and parental misfeasance are the normal human condition. A basic finding is that changes in certain components of competence can be produced through series of meetings of quasi-family groups of young adults, who role-play and discuss problematic family life situations. By over performance a member learns to exhibit greater competence within the sheltered forum of a small group of comparable others, before whom one is willing to expose oneself in challenging tasks of learning. They carry-over to actual life—in one’s real family and interpersonal relations—is a problem not only of competence but of identity-change. It can be accomplished by a process of identification and progressive involvement in one’s practice group from week to week. How stable such gains are is yet to be determine, but as other investigators have frequently found, the only permanent change is structural change. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Thus it is assumed that only as increments in competence are stabilized through changed conceptions of identity, and fortified through the actual growth of friendship, commitment, and obligation to other members of the practice group, is there reasonable chance of achieving the substantial results envisaged. And if the family as the cellular component of society can be reconstituted through participant experimentation—if the gap from quasi-family to real life situations can be steadily bridged through wider development of interpersonal competence in the next generation—then the family itself will gain in value and public honour. Because of the domination of the physical pat of the human, and the emphasis placed upon the supernatural experiences in the body, the body is made to do the work of the spirit and is forced into a prominence which hides the true spirit life. It feels the pressure, feels the conflict, and thus becomes the locus of the sense instead of it being the spirit. These believers do not perceive where they feel. If they are question as to where they “feel,” they cannot answer. They should learn to discriminate, and know how to discern the feelings of the spirit, which are neither emotional (soulish) nor physical. The spirit may be likened to an electric light. If the humans’ spirit is in contact with the Spirit of God, it is full of light; apart from Him it is in darkness. Indwelt by Him, “the spirit of the human is a lamp of the Lord,” reports Proverbs 20.27. The possibilities and potentialities of the human spirit are only known when the spirit is joined to Christ and, united to Him, is made strong to stand against the powers of darkness. The Lord will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the land; He will make the people lie down in safety. Violence shall no more be heard in your land, neither desolation nor destruction within your borders. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All. The Sacramento Fire Department has been serving the community since 1851, they are not receiving all their resources, please make donations to them. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Humans Have an Innate Drive for Progress
The pseudo character which thinking can assume is better known than the same phenomenon in the sphere of willing and feeling. There is a difference between genuine thinking and pseudo thinking. Let u suppose we are on an island where there are fishermen and summer guest from the city. We want to know what kind of weather we are to expect and ask a fisherman and two of the city people, who we know have all listened to the weather forecast on the radio. The fisherman, with his long experience and concern with this problem of weather, will start thinking, assuming that he had not as yet made up his mind before we asked him. Knowing what the direction of the wind, temperature, humidity, and so on mean as a basis for weather forecast, he will weigh the different factors according to their respective significance and come to a more or less definite judgment. He will probably remember the radio forecast and quote it as supporting or contradicting his own opinion; if it is contradictory, he may be particularly careful in weighting the reasons for his opinion; but, and this is the essential point, it is his opinion, the result of his thinking, which he tells us. The first of the two city summer guests is a man who, when we ask him his opinion, knows that he does not understand much about the weather nor does he feel any compulsion to understand anything about it. He merely replies, “I cannot judge. All I know is that the radio forecast is thus and thus.” The other man who we ask is of a different type. He believes that he knows a great deal about the weather, although actually he knows little about it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
This man is the kind of person who feels that he must be able to answer every. He thinks for a minute and then tells us “his” opinion, which in fact is identical with the radio forecast. We ask him for his reasons and he tells us that on account of wind direction, temperature, and so on, he had some to his conclusion. This man’s behaviour as seen from the outside is the same as the fisherman’s. Yet, if we analyze it more closely, it becomes evident that he had heard the radio forecast and has accepted it. Feeling compelled, however, to have his own opinion about it, he forgets that he is simply repeating somebody else’s authoritative opinion, and he believes that this opinion is one that he arrived at through his own thinking. He imagines that the reasons he gives us preceded his opinion, but if we examine these reasons we see that they could not possibly have led him to any conclusion about the weather if her had not formed an opinion beforehand. They are actually only pseudo reasons which have the function of making his opinion appear to be the result of his own thinking. He has the illusion of having arrived at an opinion of his own, but in reality he has merely adopted an authority’s opinion without being aware of this process. It could very well be that he is right about the weather and the fisherman wrong, but in the event it would not be “his” opinion which would be right, although the fisherman would be really mistaken in “his own” opinion. If we study people’s opinions about certain subjects, for instance, politics, the same phenomenon can be observed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
To test this theory, as an average newspaper reader what he or she thinks about a certain political question. One will give you as “his” or “her” opinion a more or less exact account of what one has read, and yet—and this is the essential point—one believes that what he or she is saying is the result of one’s own thinking. If one lives in a small community where political opinions are handed down from father to son, “his own” opinion may be governed far more than he would for a moment believe by the lingering authority of a strict parent. Another reader’s opinion may be the outcome of a moment’s embarrassment, the fear of being thought uniformed, and hence the “thought” is essentially a front and not the result of a natural combination of experience, desire, and knowledge. The same phenomenon is to be found in aesthetic judgment. The average person who goes to a museum and looks at a picture by a famous painter, say Rembrandt, judges it to be a beautiful and impressive picture. If we analyze his or her judgement, we find that one does not have any particular inner response to the picture but thinks it is beautiful because one knows that one is supposed to think it is beautiful. The same phenomenon is evident with regard to the act of perception itself. Many persons looking at a famous bit of scenery actually reproduce the pictures they have seen of it numerous times, say on postal cards, and while believing “they” see the scenery, they have these pictures before their eyes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Or, in experiencing an accident which occurs in their presence, witnesses see or hear the situation in terms of the newspaper report they anticipate. As a matter of fact, for many people an experience which they have had, an artistic performance or a political meeting they have attended, becomes real to them only after they have read about it in the newspaper. The suppression of critical thinking usually starts early. A five-year-old girl, for instance, may recognize the insincerity of her mother, either by subtly realizing that, while the mother is always talking of love and friendliness, she is actually cold and egotistical, or in a cruder way by noticing that her mother is having an affair with another man while constantly emphasizing her high moral standards. The child feels the discrepancy. Her sense of justice and truth is hurt, and yet, being dependent on the mother who would not allow any kind of criticism and, let us say, having a weak father on whom she cannot rely, the child is forced to suppress her critical insight. Very soon she will no longer notice the mother’s insincerity or unfaithfulness. She will lose the ability to think critically since it seems to be both hopeless and dangerous to keep it alive. On the other hand, the child is impressed by the pattern of having to believe that her mother is sincere and decent and that the marriage of the parents is a happy one, and she will be ready to accept this idea as if it were he own. In all of these illustrations of pseudo thinking, the problem is whether the thought is the result of one’s own thinking, that is, of one’s own activity; the problem is not whether of not the contents of the thought are right. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
As has been already suggested in the case of the fisherman making a weather forecast, “his” thought may even be wrong, and that of the man who only repeats the thought put into him may be right. The pseudo thinking may also be perfectly logical and rational. Its pseudo character does not necessarily appear in illogical elements. This can be studied in rationalizations which tend to explain an action or a feeling on rational and realistic grounds, although it I actually determined by irrational and subjective factors. The rationalization may be in contradiction to facts or to the rules of logical thinking. However, frequently it will be logical and rational in itself; then its irrationality lies only in the fact that it is not the real motive of the action which it pretends to have caused. An example of irrational rationalization is brought forward in a well-known joke. A person who had borrowed a glass jar from a neighbour had broken it, and on being asked to return it, answered, “In the first place, I have already returned it to you; in the second place, I never borrowed it from you; and in the third place, it was already broken when you have it to me.” We have an example of “rational” rationalization when person, A, who finds himself in a situation of economic distress, asks a relative of his, B, to lend him a sum of money. B declines and says that he does so because by lending money he could only support A’s inclinations to be irresponsible and to lean on others for support. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Now this reasoning may be perfectly sound, but it would nevertheless be a rationalization because B had not wanted to let A have the money in any event, and although he believes himself to be motivated by concern for A’s welfare he is actually motivated by his own stinginess. We cannot learn, therefore, whether we are dealing with a rationalization merely by determining the logicality of a person’s statement as such, but we must also take into account the psychological motivations operating in a person. The decisive point is not what is thought but how it is thought. The thought that is the result of active thinking is always new and original; original, not necessarily in the sense that others have not thought it before, but always in the sense that the person who thinks has used thinking as a tool to discover something new in the World outside or inside of himself or herself. Rationalizations are essentially lacking this quality of discovering and uncovering; they only confirm the emotional prejudice existing in oneself. Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempts to harmonize one’s own wishes with existing reality. With feeling as with thinking, one must distinguish between a genuine feeling, which originates in ourselves, and a pseudo feeling, which is really not our own although we believe it to be. Let us choose an example from everyday life which is typical of the pseudo character of our feelings in contact with other. We observe a man who is attending a party. He is gay, he laughs, makes friendly conversation, and all in all seems to be quite happy and contented. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
On taking his leave, he has a friendly smile while saying how much he enjoyed the evening. The door closes behind him—and this is the moment when we watch him carefully. A sudden change is noticed in his face. The smile has disappeared; of course, that is to be expected since he is now alone and has nothing or nobody with him to evoke a smile. However, the change is more than just a disappearance of the smile. There appears on his face an expression of deep sadness, almost of desperation. This expression probably stays only for a few seconds, and then the face assumes the usual masklike expression; the man gets into his car, thinks about the evening, wonders whether or not he made a good impression, and feels that he did. However, was “he” happy and gay during the party? Was the brief expression of sadness and desperation we observed on his face only a momentary of no great significance? It is almost impossible to decide the question without knowing more of this man. There is no incident, however, which may provide the clue for understanding what his gaiety meant. Human beings have many ascertainable ways to find unity. Humans can find unity by trying to regress to the animal stage, by doing away with what is specifically human (reason and love), by being a slave or a slave driver, by transforming oneself into a thing, or else by developing one’s specific human powers to such an extent that one finds a new unity with one’s fellow humans and with nature by becoming a free human—free not only from chains but free to make the development of all one’s existence to one’s own productive effort. #RandolphHarris 7of 20
Humans have an innate “drive for progress,” but one is driven by the need to solve one’s existential contradiction, which arises again at every new level of development. This contradiction—or, in other words, humans’ different and contradictory possibilities—constitutes one’s essence. It can be said without exaggeration that never was the knowledge of the great ideas produced by the human race as widespread in the World as it is today, and never were these ideas less effective than they are today. The ideas of Mr. Plato and Mr. Aristotle, of the prophets of Mr. Christ, of Mr. Spinoza, and Mr. Kant, are known to millions among the educated classes in Europe and America. They are taught at thousands of institutions of higher learning, and some of them are preached in the churches of all denominations everywhere. And all this in a World which follows the principles of unrestricted egotism, which breeds hysterical nationalism, and which is preparing for an insane mass slaughter. How can one explain this discrepancy? Ideas do not influence humans deeply when they are only taught as ideas and thoughts. Usually, when presented in such a way, they change other ideas; new thoughts take the place of old thoughts; new words take the place of old words. However, all that has happened is a change in concepts and words. Why should it be different? It is exceedingly difficult for a human to be moved by ideas, and to gras a truth. In order to do that, one needs to overcome deep-seated resistances of inertia, fear of being wrong, or of straying away from the heard. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Just to become acquainted with other ideas is not enough, even though these ideas is not enough, even though these ideas in themselves are right and potent. However, ideas do have an effect on humans if it is personified by the teacher, if the idea appears in the flesh. If a human expresses the idea of humanity and is humble, then those who listen to one will understand what humility is. They will not only understand, but they will believe that one is talking about a reality, and not just voicing words. The same holds true for all ideas which a human, a philosopher, or a religious teacher may try to convey. Those who announce ideas—and not necessarily new ones—and at the same time live them we may call prophets. The Old Testament prophets did precisely that: they announced the idea that humans had to find an answer to one’s existence, and that this answer was the development of one’s reason, of one’s love; and they taught that humility and justice were inseparably connected with love and reason. They lived what they preached. They did not seek power, but avoided it. Not even the power of being a prophet. They were not impressed by might, and they spoke the truth even if this led them to imprisonment, ostracism or death. They were not humans who set themselves apart and waited to see what would happen. They responded to their fellow human because they felt responsible. What happened to others happened to them. Humanity was not outside, but within them. Precisely because they saw the truth they felt the responsibility to tell it; they did not threaten, but they showed the alternatives with which humans were confronted. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
It is not that a prophet wishes to be a prophet; in fact, only the false ones have the ambition to become prophets. One’s becoming a prophet is simple enough, because the alternatives which one sees are simple enough. The prophet Amos expressed this idea very succinctly: “The lion has roared, who will not be afraid. God has spoken, who will not be a prophet.” The phrase “God has spoken” here means simply that the choice has become unmistakably clear. There can be no more doubt. There can be no more evasion. Hence the human who feels responsible has no choice but to become a prophet, whether one has been herding sheep, tending one’s vineyards, or developing and teaching ideas. It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is one’s function to call loudly, to awake humans from their customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some humans to be prophets. Any nations have had their prophets. The Buddha lived his teachings; Mr. Christ appeared in the flesh; Mr. Socrates dies according to his ideas; Mr. Spinoza lived them. And they made a deep imprint on the human race precisely because their idea was manifested in the flesh in each one of them. According to the leaders of the Soviet Union, the “Union of Socialist Soviet Republics” is socialist not only in name but in fact. Already in 1936 Mr. Stalin proclaimed “the complete victor of the socialist system in all sphere of the national economy,” and at the present time Russian ideology claims that Russia is realizing communism. (Characterized by Mr. Marx’s famous statement: “From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs.”) #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The question of the socialist character of Russia can be decided only by making a comparison between Mr. Marx’s vision of socialism and the reality of the Soviet system. What rationale did the Soviet leaders from Mr. Stalin to Mr. Khruschev have for calling their system socialism? They make this claim essentially on the basis of their definition of Marxist socialism, in which two factors are considered decisive for a socialist society: the “socialization of the means of production” and a planned economy. However, Socialism is in the sense of Mr. Marx or, for that matter, in the sense of Mr. Owen, Mr. Hess, Mr. Fourier, Mr. Proudhon, et cetera, can not be defined in this way. What was the essence of Mr. Marx’s thought and of Marxist socialism? It is bewildering how Mr. Marx’s theory is falsified and vilified not only by the ignorant, but also by many who should and could know better. A Robert L. Heilbroner has put it so well: our public newspapers and books “obscure the fact that the literature of socialist protest is one of the most moving and morally searching of all chronicles of human hope and despair. To dismiss the literature unread, to vilify it without the faintest conception of what it represents, is not only shocking but dangerously stupid.” The very beginning of an understanding of Mr. Marx is blocked by one of the most widespread and completely erroneous cliches, that of Mr. Marx’s “materialism.” This materialism is supposed to mean that the main motivation in man is his wish for material gain, as against spiritual, moral or religious values. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
While it is rather paradoxical that those who attack Mr. Marx for this alleged materialism defend capitalism against socialism with the claim that only a monetary incentive can be a sufficiently strong motivation for humans to give their bet, the fact is that Mr. Marx’s theory is precisely the opposite of this alleged materialism. One’s main criticism of capitalism was that it is a system that put a premium on selfish and materialistic motivations, and his concept of socialism was that of a society that favours humans who are much instead of having much. Mr. Marx’s historical materialism never speaks of the economic factor as a psychological motivation, but as a socio-economic condition that leads to a certain practice of life and this shapes the character of humans. His difference with Mr. Hegel’s idealism (idealism and materialism are philosophical terms and have nothing to do with ideal versus materialistic motivation, as any high school student should know), lies in the fact that “…we do not set out from what men imagine, conceive, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of the life process.” Or, as he put it elsewhere: “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production. Both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Mr. Marx’s discovery was that the practice of life, as it is determined by the economic systems, determines the feeling and thinking of the people involved. According to this view, a certain system may be conducive to the development of materialistic strivings; another system may lead to the preponderance of ascetic tendencies. The word “anarchy” is often used in the sense of complete chaos or disorganization, but M. Hirshleifer argues for a more subtle distinction. He used the word “amorphy” for the chaotic scramble for resources that are not owned or protected by anyone, or in other words, for cases of failure to solve common resource-pool problems. By contrast, anarchy is interference competition; people attempt to sequester resources (assets property rights) and to defend these resources (provide private protection) from others’ attempts at predation or theft. The equilibrium of an anarchic game of aggression and defense can exhibit spontaneous order. For the administrators of an agency, the appraisal of the planning process offers the opportunity for self-conscious accumulation of skill and know-how, of tried and tested techniques of action. If appropriately publicized, annual reports offer one of the most reliable means of communicating information to a clientele and quickening its involvement and support of the agency. Through unflinching reports, an agency can get the confidence of the public. The perspective derived from its annual appraisals gives balance and wisdom to day-by-day decisions on policy and personnel. Periodicity itself is a security-giving organization of work, and reports contribute to periodicity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Like interim reporting, and supplementing it, annual reporting helps a worker in an organization to visualize one’s place in the whole, to assist in co-ordinating one’s work with that of others with less requirement of supervision. It strengthens discipline of members of a group by each other, instead of by supervision, and thereby can accentuate the morale of personnel. By facilitating adoption by working groups of quotas and schedules as personal commitments, annual reporting like interim reporting adds appreciably to the motivation and sense of responsibility among personnel. By causing reflection upon the method employed by an agency in achieving its results, the systematic backward look at how far they have come encourages personnel to ingenuity in devising new methods to economize effort and resources. Since the annual report, unlike interim types of reporting, goes out to the public of the agency, the mere existence of annual reports tends to increase the consciousness by personnel of their responsibilities toward clientele, and invites a sense of identification with clientele. Least these claims for the virtues of annual reporting seem too unrealistic, let note be made of the nuisance and imposition that report-writing becomes to administrators when conceived as mere record-keeping. Interim reporting especially can easily register as a pro forma duty, whose principal function is to interrupt and distract ongoing activity. Interim reporting, however should principally apply intramurally to agency personnel, and be for them not only a report to other but a means of exhibiting to themselves, in a graphic and economical way, jut how they are doing in the execution of their interlocking quotas and schedules. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Annual reporting, on the other hand, suffers more from under- than from overdoing—not so much in the sense of quantity as in the sense of profundity of retrospection. Unless it achieves the degree of detachment, of withdrawal from action, which permits basic and imaginative reconsideration of what the activity is all about, its result is undoubtedly stultification instead of simulation. However, reporting itself, like agency programs, benefits from inclusion within the scope of regular review; if it is working poorly, it deserves improvement, not rejection. With regard to clientele, annual reports, when properly exploited, also function to bring about identification. Thorough reporting provides the factions among the clientele at once with non-hearsay material for criticism and appreciation of an agency’s operation, and for defending it against its opponents. The public is going on to evaluate an agency anyway, but when the clientele feels itself a party to the formulation and revision of agency programs, their judgments are more likely to be responsible, sound, and fair; their own overt participation in execution, more vigorous and effective. The reporting of success enhances the appetite for more success, especially when the reaching of goals is not only matter-of-factly reported but given ceremonial recognition in meetings of personnel and clientele, exempli gratis, awards made to leaders and outstanding performers by the voluntary associations among the clientele. Finally, there is another group for whom annual reports perform an extremely valuable function. That is the planners in similar agencies elsewhere, the professionals and technical specialist who, in fashioning proposals, must draw upon as much relevant prior experiences as possible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Each instance of planning is in a sense a pilot projector for similar ventures by others confronted with matching problems. And if the experience of planning is to be made available to others, the ideal form for its communication is adequate annual reports. Like the journals of scientific societies, the annual reports of planning agencies, as they come to be prepared by professional standards, develop as the media for the more repaid evolution of planning technology through its sharing. Very much like the duty of the scientist to publish one’s findings, it has become the obligation of planners to make known the assessments of their own experience in return for sharing the findings of others. Planning of the piecemeal, democratic character which we have outlined above is not a dream of the future. It is a fait accompli on the American scene, and our model is already descriptive of the operation of hundreds if not thousands of family agencies. Yet though many agencies perform these phases without explicit formulation of what they are doing, they may find it helpful to unify and clarify their activities as they examine themselves from this point of view. That is, the model of the planning process which we have sketched offers itself as a standard for the evaluation of the practice of any action agency, whether it already conceives of itself as practicing planning or not. And to evaluate is already to commence to plan, for one cannot assign a value to anything, including past experience itself, save by reference to its potential role in future action. It is, however, the task and prerogative of each family agency itself to judge its own proper degree and quality of planning. To attempt to usurp such functions would be futile as well as inconsistent with what has already been said about outside experts. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The notion of planning is comparable to embarking upon an endless journey. Any existing ways can be improved. Development is cumulative, one cycle of change leads to another. Planning therefore implies a sociology, a psychology, a philosophy. It is at once a theory of social organization and of social change, of motivation and personality formation, or valuation and metaphysics. Some of these implications, though not explorable further here, become visible in part as we note how another phase of one cycle of planning merges into the first phase of the next. By considering in a matter-of-fact way each previous cycle, as well as its current situation, a group can voluntarily and advisedly alter its existing procedures. Culture and social organization then become cumulatively the self-conscious product of rational intent. The group is freed from those bounds of necessity which were only necessary because they were thought to be so. This does not mean that the lessons of the past are discarded or ignored. It means that according to circumstances, what is worthy is conserved, and what is not is changed. No church can be founded on a protest, yet Protestantism became a church…The inner dilemma of Protestantism lies in this, that it must protest against every religious or cultural realization which seeks to be intrinsically valid, but that it needs such realization if it is to be able to make its protest in any meaningful way. By the power of what reality does the Protestant principle exercise its criticism? There must be such a reality, since the Protestant principle is not mere negation. The ultimate answer is the New Being manifest in Jesus as the Christ. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The basis of the solution is rooted in the axiom that the negative can live only from the positive, that negation must build upon affirmation. Thus, protest can exist only within a Gestalt to which it belongs, Gestalt being understood as the total structure of living reality, a structure which includes both form and negation of form, a Yes and a No. This union of protest and creation we call “the Gestalt of grace.” Grace as a reality grace as embodied in a structure, goes against the Protestant grain, for it sounds perilously similar to the Roman Catholic teaching which supposedly objectifies grace. And the objectification of grace opens the door to a whole legion of Catholic doctrines such as a sacred hierarchy, an infallible ecclesiastical authority, and the system of automatic sacraments. Many Protestants would consider a Gestalt of grace a betrayal of the essence of Protestantism. However, the jargon of Reformation controversy should not be allowed to obscure the theological facts, that the choice is not simply between the Roman Catholic objectification of grace and a completely structureless Protestant grace. There is a third possibility which is clearly seen in the Protestant notion of faith. Faith is in man, but not from man. Consequently, Protestantism can assert that grace appears through a living Gestalt which remains in itself what it is, while the Protestant protest prohibits the appearance of grace through finite forms from becoming an identification of grace with finite forms. Granted that the Gestalt of grace embraces both the positive and the negative, where is the protest voiced. In the secular World, of course. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
For according to the Protestant principle, grace cannot be tied down to any particular form, not even to a religious form. History shows that nonreligious, even anti-religious, movements can express a religious protest more effectively than religion itself. Consequently, Protestantism stands in a special relationship to secularism, a relationship which by its very nature, demands a secular reality. It demands a concrete protest against the sacred sphere and against ecclesiastical pride, a protest that is incorporated in secularism. Protestant secularism is a necessary element of Protestant realization. The formative power of Protestantism is always tested by its relation to the secular World. If Protestantism surrenders to secularism, it ceases to be a Gestalt of grace. If it retires from secularism, it ceases to be Protestant, namely, a Gestalt that includes within it the protest against itself. As guidance, the believer should understand that when there is no action in one’s spirit, there is no use for the brain at all, but the spirit does not always speak. There are times when it should be left in abeyance. In all guidance the mind decides the course of action—not only from the feeling in the spirit but by the light in the mind. In coming to a decision, the deciding is an act of mind and will, based upon either the mental process of reasoning or the sense of the spirit, or both, id est: Decision by mental process, reasoning, or decision by sense of the spirit, id est, moment impelling; drawing or restraint; spirit as if “dead”—no response; contraction of spirit; openness of spirit; fullness of spirit; compression of spirit; burden on spirit; wrestling in spirit; resisting in spirit. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
God have three ways of communicating His will to humans. By vision to the mind, which is very rare; understanding by the mind; and consciousness to the spirit, that is, by light to the mind and consciousness in spirit. In true guidance, spirit and mind are of one accord, and the intelligence is not in rebellion against the leading in the spirit—as it is so often in counterfeit guidance by evil spirits, when the human is compelled to act in obedience to what one thinks is of God, supernaturally given, and fears to disobey. This all refers to guidance from the subjective standpoint, but it must be emphasized in addition that all true guidance from God is in harmony with the Scriptures. The “understanding” of the will of God by the mind depends upon the mind being saturated with the knowledge of the written Word: and true “consciousness in the spirit” depends upon its union with Mr. Christ through the indwelling Spirit of God. The mind should never be dropped into abeyance. The human spirit can be influences by the mind, therefore the believer should keep one’s mind in purity, and unbiased, as well as having an unbiased will. I pledge allegiance to Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All. Woe until them that call evil “good,” and good “evil,” that turn darkness into light, and light into darkness. Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, protect the fatherless, defend the case of the widow. The Sacramento Fire Department has been proudly serving the community since 1851. Currently, they are not receiving all of their resources, and it would be greatly appreciated if you could donate to the Sacramento Fire Department, so they can help keep the community safe. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Does Every Institution in America Need to be Under Federal Investigation?
Exceptional people should not be hindered by bureaucratic laws, especially not when on the streets, there are people in the shadow economy trading tinfoil balls for outrageous prices. Obviously, dysfunction is happening not only because of corruption, but due to a lack of resources to investigate and properly remediate the problems. Because of this, dysfunction spreads until communities, cities, and even states become undesirable. There comes a time when you have to ask yourself what is important. As leaders, and lawmakers, do you want to keep spending resources on people from other nations, while homeless Americans camp outside of hotels? Do you want to pack this nation so full of people, that no laws will be enforced? People are getting tired and frustrated of dealing with the dysfunction, crime and taxation without representation, and many fear what may happen as a consequence. One can report things until they are blue in the face, but nothing is done. However, if certain people, or Americans took these same kinds of liberties with others or in other countries, not only would they be arrested, but they might even face the death penalty without trial. I know I am sick of dealing with chaos, incompetence, and repetitive dysfunction every day. Even if one is not being physically assaulted, it is physically and mentally painful to have to withstand corruption, violence, unnecessary noise, violation of constitutional rights, the deterioration of the church, family and state. While some people are rich enough to run from these problems and pretend the World is perfect, not all people are able to do the same. It is not just a problem with the democrats, it takes two to tango, and republicans are sitting back doing the Harlem Flame, and complicit in the obstruction of justice, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You cannot serve two masters. You have to serve America, or step aside. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
People say the country is too big to run. However, you notice when you call US Bank or any other bank, someone picks up the phone and can immediately address their issue because they are trained to and have adequate staff. The American government has more resources than any private company, yet the country is falling apart. Perhaps privatization is the answer because public employees are not held responsible for financial malfeasance. We cannot blame everything on the organized crime carried on by the fake news media because law enforcement is allowing them to engage in criminal acts, and if they are terrorizing and committing treason, that is grounds for a federal investigation. American streets are starting to resemble an army camp. The number of people without homes has swelled to such proportions that the Red Cross needs to provide people with tents, food, water, soap, warm clothes, shoes, blankets and medication. Some people have lung ailments and COVID. The head of the local health office has warned of the possibility of an epidemic. Officials need to resolve to the American military police to provide security. As housing prices continue to rise and inflation is sky high, mass hysteria is developing. Things cannot be allowed to go on a they are. The swarm of people without homes is being caused by the state of California being overpopulated. Half of all Americans living outside on the streets, federal data shows, live in California. California’s homelessness crisis is a homegrown problem that is deepening amid a shortage of affordable housing and emergency shelter, and it is often the brutal conditions of living on the street that trigger behavioural health problems, such as depression and anxiety. At least 90 percent of adults who are experiencing homelessness in the state became homeless while living in California due primarily to the dire lack of affordable house. Let us be realistic, the population of the United States of America is approximately 325,000,000. Therefore, realistically at least 10 percent of those people are homeless. They may be living with someone and are not officially counted, but there are probably 32,500,000 people without homes in America. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Homeless people are at relatively high risk for a broad range of acute and chronic illnesses. Precise data on the prevalence of specific illnesses among homeless people compared with those among nonhomeless people are difficult to obtain, but there is a body of information indicating that homelessness is associated with a number of physical and mental problems. This is evident not only in recent data from Social and Demographic Research Institute but also in individual published reports in medical literature. In examining the relationship between homelessness and health, the committee observed that there are three different types of interactions: some health problems precede and causally contribute to homelessness, others are consequences of homelessness, and homelessness complicates the treatment of many illnesses. Of course, certain diseases and treatments cut across these patterns and may occur in all three categories. Certain illnesses and health problems are frequent antecedent of homelessness. The most common of these are the major mental illnesses, especially chronic schizophrenia. As mentally ill people’s disabilities worsen, their ability to cope with their surroundings—of the ability of those around them to cope with their behaviour—becomes severely strained. In the absence of appropriate therapeutic interventions and supportive alternative housing arrangements, many wind up on the streets. Another contemporary example of illness leading to homelessness are deadly viruses. As the illness progresses and leads to repeated and more serious bouts with opportunistic infections, the individual becomes unable to work and may be unable to afford to continue paying rent. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Other health problems contributing to homelessness include alcoholism and drug dependence, disabling conditions that cause a person to become unemployed (which is why people are thankful prescription grade pain medication exists), or any major illness that results in massive health care expenses. One type of health problem in this category—about which the committee heard much during several site visits—is accidental injury, especially job-related accidents. Although such programs as Workers’ Compensation were designed to prevent economic devastation as a result of workplace casualties, they often fall far short of what is optimal for many reasons, including lack of knowledge of the program by the employee, low levels of benefits under the program, and lack of benefits for “off the books” work and migrant farm labour. Homelessness increases the risk of developing health problems such as diseases of the extremities and skin disorders; it increases the possibility of trauma, especially as a result of physical assault or rape. It can also turn a relatively minor health problem into a serious illness. Other health problems that may result from or that are commonly with homelessness include malnutrition, parasitic infestations, dental and periodontal disease, degenerative joint disease, venereal disease, hepatic cirrhosis secondary to alcoholism, and infectious hepatitis related to intravenous (IV) drug abuse. For even the most routine medical treatment, that state of being homeless makes the provision of care extraordinarily difficult. If not impossible, even the need for bed rest is complicated when the patient does not have a bed or, as is the case in may shelters for the homeless, must leave the shelter in the early morning hours. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Diabetes, for example, usually is not difficult to treat in a domiciled person. For most people, daily insulin injections and control of diet are adequate. In a homeless person, however, treatment is virtually impossible: Some types of insulin need to be refrigerated; syringes may be stolen (in cities where IV drug abuse is common, syringes have a higher street value) or, sometimes, the homeless diabetic may be mistaken for an IV drug abuser; and diet cannot be controlled because soup kitchens serve whatever they can get, which rules out special therapeutic diets. Contusions, lacerations, sprains, bruises, and superficial burns are more commonly reported in the homeless population. Homeless people are frequently victims of violent crimes such as rape, assault, and attempted robbery. In addition, primitive living conditions result in unusual risks; for example, the use of open fires for warmth predisposes them to potential burns. Pustular skin lesions secondary to insect bites and other infestations are common among homeless people. In addition, venous stasis of the lower extremities (id est, poor circulation because of varicose veins) caused by prolonged periods of sitting or sleeping with the legs down predisposes homeless people to dependent edema (swelling of the feet and legs), cellulitis, and skin ulcerations. Although there is reason to speculate that venous valve incompetence would develop more frequently in homeless patients and lead to chronic phlebitis, data are meager. Recurrent dermatitis, which is possibly related to inadequate opportunities to bathe or shower and which is associated with infestations with lice and scabies, is prevalent among the homeless population. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This form of dermatitis is frequently confused with bacterial cellulitis, since they both present with red, warm, tender skin lesions. Finally, homeless people are at high risk of developing subu-Collecting tenuous abscesses, but this may be related in part to an increased prevalence of needle-stick infections from drug abuse. Acute nonspecific respiratory diseases (MINURI and SERRI) are commonly reported in populations of homeless people in shelters. Living in groups, crowding, environmental stresses, and poor nutrition may predispose homeless people to infections of the upper respiratory tract and lungs. Tuberculosis has become a major health problem among homeless people. Characteristically, this has been a disease associated with exposure, poor diet, alcoholism, and other illnesses that can lead to decreased resistance in the host. Substance abusers and the elderly are at high risk for developing tuberculosis. Immigrants from less developed countries (LCDs) also have an increased risk of infections. Many homeless people also suffer from greater frequency of hypertension, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Also there is a tendency for cardiovascular and renal diseases, as well as metabolic disorders. Homeless people are more likely to contract superficial fungal infections and calluses, corns, bunions that are apparently the result of trauma from ill-fitting shoes. Homeless people suffer from many dental problems. Reports of poor oral hygiene, cavities, gingival disease, and extraction with no prosthetic replacements appear to be extremely common among homeless people. These problems are also common among indigent patients in general who have limited or no access to dental care. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Finally, various illnesses associated with increased mortality are related to environmental exposure, such as hypothermia and frostbite or hyperthermia. These life-threatening problems are especially prevalent among alcoholic homeless people and those who abuse other drugs. Many homeless adults suffer from chronic and severe mental illness. The visibility of mentally ill people has led to the creation of a negative stereotype for the entire homeless population, but let us keep it real. Many of the homeless people that I see are more civilized than the people who live at a particular address in Midtown Sacramento, California. It leads some to believe that some parts of Sacramento have become a psychiatric dumping ground. Personality disorders should not be seen primarily as a consequence of homelessness. Rather, because they impair a person’s ability to cope with the demands of life and the expectations of society, they may contribute to the factors that cause certain people to become homeless. Other psychiatric illnesses, such as the anxiety and phobic disorders and milder depressive reactions, can either be contributing factors in causing homelessness or, more commonly, result from the stress of homelessness. Becoming homeless is a psychologically traumatic event that commonly is accompanied by symptoms of anxiety and depression, sleeplessness and loss of appetite. Sometimes, homeless people try to “mediate” these feelings away with alcohol or drugs. Veterans who experience sheltered homelessness often live in places such as emergency shelters, transitional housing programs or other supportive settings. Veterans who experienced unsheltered homelessness live in places not meant for human habitation, such as cars, parks, sidewalks, abandoned buildings and literally on the street. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Homelessness is a serious problem and is a threat to national security. Many homeless people are exposed to animals, such as rats, mice, snakes, and insects such roaches, fleas and spiders. And without adequate public bathrooms or places to dispose of waste, some are exposed to feces, urine, and trash. As you recall, the Black Death is believed to have been the result of a plague, an infectious fever caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The disease was likely transmitted from rodents to humans by the bite of infected fleas. It is not known for certain how many people died during the Black Death. About 25,000,000 people are estimated to have died in Europe from the plague between 1347 and 1351. With an extremely high level of people living on the street, the Black Death could manifest again, and even spread to those who have homes. The effects of the Black Death were many and varied. Trade suffered for a time, and wars were temporarily abandoned. Many labourers died, which devasted families through lost means of survival and caused personal suffering; landowners who used labourers as tenant farmers were also affected. Yersinia causes three types of plague in humans: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic. Although there is DNA evidence that Yersinia was present in victims of the Black Death, it is uncertain which form the majority of the infection took. It is likely that all three played some role in the pandemic. Bubonic plague causes fever, fatigue, shivering, vomiting, headaches, giddiness, intolerance to light, pain in the back and limbs, sleeplessness, apathy, delirium. It also causes buboes: one or more of the lymph nodes become tender and swollen, usually in the groin or armpits. Pneumonic plague affects the lungs and causes symptoms similar to those of severe pneumonia: fever, weakness, and shortness of breath. Fluid fills the lungs and can cause death if untreated. Other symptoms may include insomnia, stupor, a staggering git, speech disorder, and loss of memory. Septicemic plague is an infection of the blood. Its symptoms include fatigue, fever, and internal bleeding. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The masses of homeless people are desperately sick. They are broken spiritually, suffering appalling things, and many see no way out, and cannot find a helping hand. They need homes and medical treatment for the body and soul. People without homes come at the cost of a considerable damage to the body of society as a whole. Many of the homeless people plead from the bottom of their hearts that someone will come, they wait with pain every day that someone will free them from suffering. Some cannot walk and wait with great yearning for a home. One should know that when one’s spirit is touched by the poison of the spirits of evil—by the injection, for instance, of sadness, soreness, complaint, grumbling, fault-finding, touchiness, bitterness, feeling hurt, jealousy, et cetera—all direct from the to the spirit. One should resist all sadness, gloom and grumbling injected into one’s spirit—for the victory life of a freed spirit means joyfulness. Believers ordinarily think that sadness had to do with their disposition, and so yield to it without a thought of resistance or reasoning out the cause. If they were asked if a human with a strong disposition to steal should yield to it, they would at once answer “no”; yet they yield to other “dispositions” less manifestly wrong without a question. In the stress of conflict, when the believer find that the enemy succeeds in reaching one’s spirit with any of these “fiery darts,” one should know how to pray immediately against the attack, asking God to destroy the causes of it. It should be noted that this touching of the spirit by the various things just named is not a manifestation of the “works of the flesh”—assuming the believer is one who knows the life after the spirit—but they will quickly reach the sphere of the flesh if not recognized and dealt with in sharp refusal and resistance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
One should know when one’s spirit is in the right position of dominance over soul and body, and not driven beyond due measure by the exigencies of conflict or environment. These are three conditions of the spirit which the believer should be able to discern and deal with: The spirit depressed, id est, crushed or “down.” The spirit in its right position, in poise and calm control. The spirit drawn out beyond “poise,” when it is in strain, or driven, or in “flight.” When the human walks after the spirit, and discerns it to be in either of the wrong conditions, one knows how to “lift” it when it is depressed; and how to check the overaction by a quiet act of one’s own volition when it is drawn out of poise by over-eagerness, or the drive of spiritual foes. The believer must know what the spirit is, and how to give heed to the demands of the spirit and not quench it: exempli gratia, a weight comes on one’s spirit, but one goes on with one’s work, putting up with the pressure; one finds the work had, but one has no time to investigate the cause…until at last the weight become unendurable, and one is forced to stop and see what is the matter—whereas one should have given heed to the claims of the spirit at the first, and in a brief prayer taken the “weight” to God, refusing all pressure from the foe. One should be able to read one’s spirit, and know at once when it is out of cooperation with the Holy Spirit, quickly refusing all attacks which are drawing one’s spirit out of the poise of fellowship with God. Even if this claim is made by a Protestant church, the Protestant principle, in name derived from the protest of the “protestants” against decisions of the Catholic majority, contains the divine and human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Is the Protestant era at an end? Is Protestantism as an historical reality dying, is its soul fleeing a moribund body that failed to adjust to the demands of its times? The social, political, economic, and spiritual disintegration of the masses can be relieved only by a tight centralization of power in all these areas. Protestantism, however, inspired by its principle of prophetic protest against hierarchical authority, ecclesiastical or political, which wraps itself in the mantle of the sacred, stands opposed to the trend toward centralization. Protestantism, out of step with the rhythm of history, leaves the field open to the tree forces capable of mass reintegration of society: communism, nationalism, and Roman Catholicism. Grim as the Protestant prospect is, renewal will be achieved by a Protestant movement that transcends all churches, political parties and ideologies and yet impregnates them. The prophetic spirit which lists where it will, without ecclesiastical conditions, organization, and traditions. Thus it will operate through Catholicism as well as through orthodoxy, through fascism as well as through communism; and in all these movements it will take the form of resistance against the distortion of humanity and divinity which necessarily is connected with the rise of the new systems of authority. However, this imperative would remain a very idealistic demand if there were no living group which could be bearer of this spirit. Such a group could not be described adequately as a sect. It would approximate more closely an order or fellowship and would constitute an active group, aiming to realize, first, in itself that transformation of Protestantism which cannot be realized either by the present churches or by the movement of retreat and defense. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
However, whether the Protestant era ends or not, the Protestant principle will never die. If the Protestant reality expires under the protesting blast of the Protestant principle, then the power and vitality of the principle is proved all the stronger. This principle is not a special religious or cultural idea; it is not subject to changes of history; it is not dependent on the increase or decrease of religious experience or spiritual power. It is the ultimate criterion of all religious and all spiritual experiences; it lies at their base, whether they are aware of it or not. It goes without saying how important it is not only to realize the dynamic role of destructiveness in the social process but also to understand what the specific conditions for tis intensity are. We have already noted the hostility which pervaded the middle class in the age of the Reformation and which found its expression in certain religious concepts Protestantism, especially in its ascetic spirit, and in Mr. Calvin’s picture of a merciless God to whom it had been pleasing to sentence part of humankind to eternal damnation for no fault of their own. Then, as later, the middle class expressed its hostility mainly disguised as moral indignation, which rationalized an intense envy against those who had the means to enjoy life. In our contemporary scene the destructiveness of the lower middle class has been an important factor in the rise of Nazism which appealed to these destructive strivings and used them in the battle against its enemies. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The root of destructiveness in the lower middle class is easily recognizable as the one which has been assumed in this discussion: the isolation of the individual and the suppression of the individual expansiveness, both of which were true to higher degree for the lower middle class than for the classes above or below. In the mechanisms we have been discussing, the individual overcomes the feeling of insignificance in comparison with the overwhelming power of the World outside of oneself either by renouncing one’s individual integrity, or by destroying others so that the World ceases to be threatening. Other mechanisms of escape are the withdrawal from the World so completely that it loses its threat (the picture we find in certain psychotic states, and the inflation of oneself psychologically to such an extent that the World outside becomes small in comparison. Although these mechanisms of escape are important for individual psychology, they are only of minor relevance culturally. Another mechanism of escape which is of the greatest social significance is the solution that the majority of normal individuals find in modern society. To put it briefly, the individual ceases to be oneself; one adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to one by cultural patterns; and one therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect one to be. The discrepancy between “I” and the World disappears and with it the conscious fear of aloneness and powerlessness. This mechanism can be compared with the protective colouring some animals assume. They look so similar to their surroundings that they are hardly distinguishable from them. The person who gives up one’s individual self and becomes an automation, identical with millions of other automatons around one, need not feel alone and anxious anymore. But the price one pays, however, is high; it is the lose of oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Avoidance of error of accepting ideologies (rationalizations) for expressions of the inner, and usually unconscious, reality may become manifest after some time. One method which has proved to be very useful is that of an open-ended questionnaire, the answers to which are interpreted as to their non-intended or unconscious meaning. Thus, when one answer to the question, “Who are the men in history whom you most admire?” is “alexander the Great, Nero, Marx, and Lenin” and another answer is “William Randolph Hearst, William Wirt Winchester, George Fisher Winchester, and Sokrates,” the inference is made that the first respondent is an admirer of power and strict authority, the second an admirer of those who work in the service of life and who are benefactors of humankind. By using an extended projective questionnaire it is possible to obtain a reliable picture of the character structure of a person. Other projective tests—the analysis of favourite jokes, songs, stories, and observable behaviour (especially the “small acts” so important for psychoanalytic observation)—help in obtaining correct results. Methodologically, the main emphasis in all these studies is on the mode of production and the resulting class of stratification, on the most significant character traits and the syndromes they form, and on the relationship between these two sets of data. With the method or stratified samples, whole nations or large social classes can thus be studied by including less than a thousand persons in the investigation. Another important aspect of analytic social psychology is what Dr. Freud called the “unconscious.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
However, while Dr. Freud was mainly concerned with individual repression, the student of Marxist social psychology will be most concerned with the “social unconscious.” This concept refers to that repression of inner reality which is common to large groups. Every society must make every effort not to permit its members, or those of a particular class, to be aware of impulses which, if they were conscious, could lead to socially “dangerous” thoughts or actions. Effective censorship occurs, not at the level of the printed or spoken word, but by preventing thought from even becoming conscious, that is, by repression of dangerous awareness. Naturally the contents of the social unconscious vary depending on the many forms of social structure: aggressiveness, rebelliousness, dependency, loneliness, unhappiness, boredom, to mention only a few. The repressed impulse must be kept in repression and replaced by ideologies which deny it or affirm its opposite. The bored, anxious, unhappy human of today’s industrial society is taught to think that one is happy and full of fun. In other societies the human deprived of freedom of thought and expression is taught to think that one has almost reached the most complete form of freedom, even though at the moment only one’s leaders speak in the name of that freedom. In some systems love of life is repressed and love of property is cultivated instead; in others, awareness of alienation is repressed, and instead the slogan, “there can be no alienation in a socialist country,” is prompted. Another way of expressing the phenomenon of the unconscious is to speak of it in terms of Mr. Hegal and Mr. Marx, that is, as the totality of forces which work behind humans’ back while they have the illusion of being free in their decisions, or as Adam Smith put it, “economic man is lead by invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
While for Mr. Smith this invisible hand was a benevolent one, for Mr. Marx (as well as for Dr. Freud) it was a dangerous one; it had to be uncovered in order to be deprived of its effectiveness. Consciousness is a social phenomenon; for Mr. Marx it is mostly false consciousness, the work of the forces of repression. The unconscious, like consciousness, is also a social phenomenon, determined by the “social filter” which does not permit most real human experiences to ascend from unconsciousness to consciousness. This social filter consists mainly of language, logic, and social taboos; it is covered up by ideologies (rationalizations) which are subjectively experienced as being true, when in reality they are nothing but socially produced and shared fictions. This approach to consciousness and the repression can demonstrate empirically the validity of Mr. Marx’s statement that “social existence determines consciousness.” As a consequence of these considerations, another theoretical difference between dogmatic Freudian- and Marxist-oriented psychoanalysis appears. Dr. Freud believed that the effective cause for repression—the most important content to be repressed being incestuous desires—is the fear of castration. On the contrary, it is believed that humans’ greatest fear is that of complete isolation from their fellow humans, of complete ostracism. Even fear of death is easier to bear. Society enforces its demands for repression by the threat of ostracism (which is why haters and cancel culture have come together to turn the tide for their unacceptable behaviour). If you do not deny the presence of certain experiences, you do not belong, you belong nowhere, you are in danger of becoming insane. (Insanity is, in fact, the illness characterized by total absence of relatedness to the World outside.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
When it comes to property rights, we generally have two categories. Rights to assets that exist in nature, such as land, forests, and mineral deposits, and the emphasis on rights to assets that have to be produced, such as buildings and machines. The latter brings in the added issues of incentives to engage in this production and the efficiency of this productive activity. Even more complex issues arise in the context of other kinds of property, such as intellectual property and commercial brand names. These issues have to do with balancing private incentives to produce new assets of this kind and the social incentives efficiently to use the assets once they exist. Study of property rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth century whaling industry supports and extends many of these ideas by considering the information aspects of the enforcement of property rights. Many boats may participate in the killing of one whale, either simultaneously or sequentially. Or one boat may kill a whale and take it in tow only to lose it, and then another boat may find it. When disputed arise in such situations, their resolution depends on the verifiability of information. Therefore it makes sense to define property rights in the first place so as to be consistent with the verifiability of information regarding any violations of these rights. Mr. Ellickson finds that the definition of fishermen’s property rights over whale carcasses did indeed differ across whale types and regions, and evolved over time, in just this way. This can be thought of as another aspect of the complexity inherent in the concept of property rights. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
However, optimal evolution of property rights and their enforcement should not be taken for granted. Given this multiplicity of dimensions of property rights, for formal and informal, explicit, and implicit allocations of rights among various claimants, the transaction costs of enforcing rights, and the conflicts that confront any attempts to change any right, it is not surprising that reform is often stalled or makes matters worse. Traditional property rights to land in Africa are a complex system—titles are granted to individual families by clan chiefs, and sales are subject to their approval and also that of heirs (all sons usually have expectations of equal division). Many family stakeholders have usufruct rights. When the Kenyan government attempted to impose a system of formal land titles, this ran into conflict with the traditional arrangements. The expected capital market did not develop because lenders knew that foreclosure was infeasible in the face of opposition from family and community, so the land could not be used as collateral. Attempts to consolidate scattered holdings for scale economy reasons did not work because there was a good economic reason (diversification of risks) for the scattering. Many formally registered titles are now being allowed to lapse and revert to older arrangements, and the laws are being changed to resemble traditional forms more closely. The importance of developing public institutions for property right protection that build on, and work synergistically with, the historical and cultural endowment of norms and practices in a society are very important. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
If a government cannot or does not provide adequate protection for property rights, individuals and groups will attempt to provide private protection. They may do this using their own individual or collective efforts, or hire professional guards. The latter approach carries the risk that the guards become predators or extortionists; this problem exists with some governments too. The outcome of such games may be more or less efficient depending on the specifics of the situation—the technologies of protection and predation, the information, the skills in alternative occupations, the time-horizon of the predation, the information, the skills in alternative occupations, the time-horizon of the participants, and so on. However, some form of private protection will usually be better than none at all. The educational system of Russian serves, like that of any other country, to prepare the individual for the function one is to assume in society. The first task is to inculcate those attitudes and values that are dominant in Russian society. The values impressed on Russian youth and citizens correspond to the dominant Western morality, although heavily accented on the conservative idea. Care, responsibility, love, patriotism, diligence, honesty, industriousness, the injunction against transgressing the happiness of one’s fellowman, consideration for the common interest—there is nothing in this catalogue of values that could not be included in the ethics of the Western tradition. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Respect for property is emphasized as respect for socialist property, submission to authority as acceptance of national or international solidarity. As far as sexual morality is concerned, Russian morality is conservative and puritanical. The family is praised as a center of social stability, and any kind of sexual promiscuity is sternly discouraged. Since the betrayal or the part or the Russian system is about the worst imaginable crime in Russian mortality, the following statement gives an idea of this Russian puritanism. Komsomolskaya Pravda asked in reporting a case of marital betrayal: “How many steps are there from this to treason in the broader sense…? Communism is described as a system of “consistent monogamy” and as being opposed in principle to liaisons born of “dissoluteness and flightiness.” Aside from the central goal of Russian education, dutiful subordination of the individual to the demands of Russian society and its representatives, the other sim is that of creating the proper spirit of a competitive work morality. Families in which a genuine mutual concern about cultural growth is evident and domestic responsibilities are properly shared by all members of the family should be held up as examples. It is necessary to encourage the participation of children, adolescents, and young men and women in the performance of domestic chores and to appreciate this as an important and integral pater of labour training. “Ye shall respect every man his mother and his father. Ye shall rise up before the hoary head, and honour the aged among you. Ye shall not steal; neither shall ye deal falsely, nor lie one to another. Ye shall do no unrighteousness in court or in commerce, in weight or in measure. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
“Correct balances and just weights shall ye have; I am the Lord your God. Ye shall not oppress your neighbour, nor steal from him; the wages of a hired servant shall not abide with you all night until the morning. Ye shall not be unrighteous in judgment; ye shall not be partial even to the poor. Ye shall not favour the person of the mighty; but in righteousness shall ye judge your neighbour. Thou shalt not go about slandering people; neither shalt thou stand idly by when thy neighbor’s life is in danger. And if a stranger sojourn with thee in thy land, thou shalt not wrong him or her. The stranger that sojourn with thee in thy land, thou shall be unto thee like the native-born. Thou shalt love one as thyself, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart; thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear any grudge. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself; I am the Lord. Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may life in the land which God gives you. You shall not prevent judgment, nor favour persons, neither shall you take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise, and perverts the words of the righteous. Hear the causes between your brothers, judge righteously your brothers and the strangers. You shall hear the small and great alike, you shall not be afraid of the face of any human; for the judgment is God’s. Woe unto them that call evil “good,” and good “evil,” that turn darkness into light, and light into darkness.” I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. Please be kind enough to donate to the Sacramento Fire Department, they are not receiving all of their resources. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 