Home » #RandolphHarris (Page 34)
Category Archives: #RandolphHarris
Ancient, Haunted, Shadowed Town
The clatter at the eastern door was terrific. The paneling was beginning to splinter. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, as days bled into weeks. Glancing up at the window, I observed that it was still dark outside, though to the north I could see lights ominously blazing from the Tower of Babel. There has seemed to be no one in the courtyard below. Every waking hour and every spectral sound seemed like a piece of an intricate puzzle. Llanada Vila was an enigma of tantalizing secrets and I was entangled in its spectral web. Its ghoulish spirits looming over me like ominous storm clouds threatening to consume me. I was a prisoner within the walls of my labyrinth, and each passing day bore a heavier, more costly weight than the day before. Llanada Villa had become my World, my obsession. Its spirits whispered to me, enticing me to build new rooms and enhance architectural features to feed its haunting heart. Echoes answers my foot falls and the gaze of the mansion’s eyes weaved their dark emotions into my skin. Walking softly on the third floor, the hallway was black, and I perceived several open doorways. Uncanny shapes were pouring in as my lantern bobbed in the darkness. Figures moved with uncertainty and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, and shambling git was abominably repellent. My reality was painted in shades of terror. Shadows pulsating with a life of their own. From several directions in the distance, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
Ascending the staircase, the steps creaked under my weight, each groan echoing the palpitations of my heart. I was shackled by dreadful anticipation. I walked rapidly, and knew there would be plenty of doorways to shelter me in case I came face to face with a macabre delight. As the figures spread throughout the fourth floor, I felt my fears increase. It was an arduous climb, and there were two shambling figures crossing in front of me. They looked dangerous. Terror washed over me with an icy wave that froze my blood. They moved with a curious gliding motion into the darkness and melted away. When I looked behind me, there was a specter disappearing into the mansion’s tapestry. To my great surprise, I saw, as it were, a dead corpse, a scream clawed its way up my throat, tearing through the silent mansion. As I thought, the corpse was lying extended upon the floor, just as a dead body should be, excepting that foot of one leg was fixed on the ground as it is in bed, when one lies with one knee up; I looked at it awhile, and by degrees withdraw my eyes from so unpleasing an object: however a strange kind of air of curiosity soon overcame my fears, and I ventured a second time to look that way, and saw it a considerable time longer fixed as before. I durst not stir from my position. I again turned from the horrible and melancholy spectacle, and, resuming my courage, after a little reflection, got up with a deign to ascertain myself of the reality of the vision by going nearer to it; but it was vanished! My home has become a haunted stage where my fears came to life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
Llanada Villa was veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality. As I was sitting, no, moving about, in an old-fashioned sort of paneled room, there was a fireplace and a lot of burnt papers in it, and I was in a great state pf anxiety about something. There were intermittent flashes of light in the distance. They were definite and unmistakable, and awakened my mind to a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. There was someone else—a servant, I suppose, and I heard several people coming upstairs and a noise like spurs on the wooden floor, and then the door opened and whatever it was that I was expecting happened. It was the sort of shock that upsets you in a dream. You either wake up or else everything goes black. That was what happened to me. Then I was in a big dark-walled room, paneled like the other, and a number of people, and I was being tried, for my life. I had no one speaking for me, and somewhere there was a most fearful fellow—on the bench; he was pitching into me most unfairly, and twisting everything I said, and asking most abominable questions about dates when I was at particular places, and letter I was supposed to have written, and why I had destroyed some papers; and he was laughing at answers I made in a way that quite daunted me. It does not sound like much, but it was really appalling. This man, he was such a horrible villain. The things he said. The next morning, I awoke to a horrifying sight. Tracing the length of my arm were savage scratches, crimson welts etched into my skin. Then I recollected an attack, claws ripping into me in the room on the fourth floor while I was being questioned. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
From that day on, the hauntings gained a monstrous momentum. I would find myself in unknown corners of Llanada Villa, with no recollection of my journey. Each phenomenon brought new marks, bruises blooming on my skin, cuts etching their painful paths. Fear was my constant companion, ghoulish shadows leered at me from the corners of my home. I was lost in a whirlwind the supernatural. There were cryptical flashings of ghosts and unexplainable beacons appeared before my eyes. For a moment my brain reeled with sheer hopelessness. The feeling of being watched amplified, a malevolent crescendo in the haunting symphony of my mansion. A dread, bone-deep and paralyzing, filled me. There was a spectral figure inching closer, its icy breath on my neck. I became conscious of a peculiar sound in the room—a sort of shuddering sound in the room, as of suppressed dread. It seemed close to me. I gave little heed to it at first, setting it down for the wind in the chimney, or a draught from the half-open door; but moving about the room I perceived that the sound moved with me. Whichever way I turned it followed me. I went to the furthest extremity of the chamber—it was also there. Feeling uneasy, and being quite unable to account for the singularity of this stranger horror, I closed my eyes and put every ounce of will power into the task of holding my eyelids down. Of course, my resolution to keep my eyes closed failed. It was foredoomed to failure—for whom could crouch blindly while a legion of croaking, ghouls hovered noisomely around? #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before. My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal. Can it be possible that this mansion actually spawned such demonic, blasphemous things that human eyes have never truly seen? Despite Llanada Villa’s imposing grandeur, its gilded embellishments, and regal expanse, I found myself unable to dispel the gnawing sense of dread that lingered on the fringe of my reality. Each creak of the ancient wood, the muted rustle from the ghouls’ cloaks, the cold draughts of phantom breath, and the ghostly echoed in my heart. My mansion’s cryptic maze, each chamber was a portal to some other realm. I was a woman divided. Caught in the eternal conflict between the angel of my better nature and the demon of my dark distress. As heiress to the Winchester Rifle Fortune, I was curse for all eternity to be haunted. As the days went on, the atmosphere of Llanada Villa grew denser, the air chillier. They very walls were constricting around me, Llanada Villa was swallowing me into its haunted foundation. Even as I expanded the mansion, my mind found itself incessantly pulled back to the clandestine otherworldly depths manifestations that waver between the phlegmatic and the melancholy. As I gaze over Llanada Villa’s grandiosity, I saw it clearly. Spirits swept through the veins of my mazelike corridors, casting eerier shadows through this ancient mansion, which concealed ghastly secrets for ages untold. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them—and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction lurking beneath the foundation and ancient towers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
The Winchester Mystery House
In 1923 when the Winchester Mansion opened for tours, the ghosts were known as “hobs.” They often performed the role of nightwatchmen, and under cover of night and darkness their footsteps could be heard. One of the tour guides became so accustomed to the tread that she would call out “Hello there, I’m quite all right, thank you,” Then the hob would depart. The owners were alerted to the presence of the ghost when they heard from time to time the noise of skittles in one of the kitchens; when they would investigate, no one was playing However, glasses left on the counter overnight to dry, would often be returned to their proper places. Clean linen was pressed and folded.
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/
God, Fate, History, Nature
We have seen that certain socioeconomic and political changes, notably the decline of the middle class, war on vehicles powered by gasoline, and the rising power of the monopolistic capital, has had a deep psychological effect. These effects are increased or systematized by a political ideology—as by religious ideologies in the sixteenth century—and the psychic forces thus aroused became effective in a direction that was opposite to the original economic interest of that class. Nazism resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position. It mobilized its emotional energies to become an important force in the struggle for the economic and political aims of German imperialism. Mr. Hitler’s personality, his teachings, and the Nazi system express an extreme form of the character structure which we have called “authoritarian” and that by this very fact he made a powerful appeal to those parts of the population which were—more or less—of the same character structure. Mr. Hitler’s autobiography is as good an illustration of the authoritarian character as any, and since in addition to that it is the most representative document of Nazi literature used for analyzing the psychology of Nazism. The essence of the authoritarian character has been descried as the simultaneous presence of sadistic and masochistic drives. Sadism was understood as aiming at unrestricted power over another person more or less mixed with destructiveness; masochism as aiming at dissolving oneself in an overwhelmingly strong power and participating in its strength and glory. Both the sadistic and the masochistic trends are caused by the inability of the isolated individual to stand alone and one’s need for a symbiotic relationship that overcomes this aloneness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The sadistic craving for power funds manifold expression in Mein Kampf. It is characteristic of Mr. Hitler’s relationship to the German masses whom he despises and “loves” in the typically sadistic manner as well as to his political enemies towards whom he evidences those destructive elements that are an important component of his sadism. He speaks of the satisfaction the masses have in domination. “What they want is the victory of the stronger and the annihilation or the unconditional surrender of the weaker.” “Like a woman,…who will submit to the strong man rather than dominate the weakling, thus the masses love the ruler rather than the suppliant, and inwardly they are far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival than by the grant of liberal freedom; they often feel at a loss what to do with it, and even easily feel themselves deserted. They neither realized the impudence with which they are spiritually terrorized, nor the outrageous curtailment of their human liberties for in no way does the delusion of this doctrine dawn on them.” Mr. Hitler described the breaking of the will of the audience by the superior strength of the speaker as the essential factor in propaganda. He does not even hesitate to admit that physical tiredness of his audience is a most welcome condition for their suggestibility. Discussing the question which hour of the day is most suited for political mass meetings he says: “It seems that in the morning and even during the day men’s power revolts with highest energy against an attempt at being forced under another’s will and another’s opinion. In the evening, however, they succumb more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will. For truly every such meeting presents a wrestling match between two opposed forces. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
“The superior oratorical talent of a domineering apostolic nature will now succeed more easily in winning for the new will people who themselves have in turn experienced a weakening of their force of resistance in the most natural way, than people who still have full command of the energies of their minds and their will power.” Mr. Hitler himself is very much aware of the conditions which make for the longing for submission and gives an excellent description of the satiation of the individual attending a mass meeting. “The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who is becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people…If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction…he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion.” Mr. Goebbels describes the masses in the same vein. “People want nothing at all, except to be governed decently,” he writes in his novel Michael. They are for him, “nothing more than the stone is for the sculptor. Leader and masses are as little a problem as painter and color.” In another book Mr. Goebbels gives an accurate description of the dependence of the sadistic person on his objects; how weak and empty he feels unless he has power over somebody and how this power gives him new strength. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
This is Mr. Goebbels’ account of what is going on in himself: “Sometimes one is gripped by a deep depression. One can only overcome it, if one is in front of the masses again. The people are the fountain of our power.” A telling account of that particular kind of power over people which the Nazi ca leadership is given by the leader of the German labour front, Mr. Ley. In discussing the qualities required in a Nazi leader and the aims of education of leaders, he writes: “We want to know whether these men have the will to lead, to be masters, in one word, to rule…We want to rule and enjoy it…We shall teach these men to ride horseback…in order to give them the feeling of absolute domination over a living being.” The same emphasis on power is also present in Mr. Hitler’s formulation of the aims of education. He says that the pupil’s “entire education and development has to be directed at giving him the conviction of being absolutely superior to the others.” The fact that somewhere else he declares tht a boy should be taught to suffer injustice without rebelling will no longer strike the reader—or so I hope—as strange. This contradiction is the typical one for the sado-masochistic ambivalence between the craving for power and for submission. The wish for power over the masses is what drives the member of the “elite,” the Nazi leaders. This wish for power is sometimes revealed with an almost astonishing frankness. Sometimes it is put in less offensive forms by emphasizing that to be ruled is just what the masses wish. Sometimes the necessity to flatter the masses and therefore to hide the cynical contempt for them leads to tricks. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
To further highlight that illustration: In speaking of the instinct of self-preservation, which for Mr. Hitler as we shall se later is more or less identical with the drive for power, he says that with the Aryan the instinct for self-preservation has reached the most noble form “because he willingly subjects his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour should require it, he also sacrifices it.” While the “leaders” are the ones to enjoy power in the first place, the masses are by no means deprived of sadistic satisfaction. Racial and political minorities within Germany and eventually other nations which are described as weak or decaying are the objects of sadism upon which the massed are fed. While Mr. Hitler and his bureaucracy enjoy the power over the German mases, these masses themselves are taught to enjoy power over other nations and to be driven by the passion for domination of the World. Mr. Hitler does not hesitate to express the wish for World domination as his or his party’s aim. Making fun of pacifism, he says: “Indeed, the pacifist-humane idea is perhaps quite good whenever the man of the highest standard has previously conquered and subjected the World to a degree that makes him the only master of this globe.” Again he says: “A state which in the epoch of race poisoning dedicates itself to the cherishing of its best racial elements, must some day be master of the World.” Usually, Mr. Hitler tries to rationalize and justify his wish for power. The main justifications are the following: his domination of other peoples is for their won good and for the good of the culture of the World; the wish for power is rooted in the eternal laws of nature and he recognizes and follows only these laws; he himself acts under the command of a higher power—God, Fate, History, Nature; his attempts for domination are only a defense against the attempt of others to dominate him and the German people. He wants only peace and freedom. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
An example of the first kind of rationalization is the following paragraph from Mein Kampf: “If, in its historical development, the German people had possessed this group unity as it was enjoyed by other peoples, then the German Reich would today probably be the mistress of this globe.” German domination of the World could lend, Mr. Hitler assumes, to a “peace, supported not by the palm branches of tearful pacifist professional female mourners, but found by the victorious sword of a people of overloards which puts the World int the service of a higher culture.” In recent years his assurance that his aim is not only the welfare of Germany but that his actions serve the best interests of civilization in general have become well-known to every newspaper. The second rationalization, that his wish for power is rooted in the laws of nature, is more than a mere rationalization; it also springs from the wish for submission to a power outside oneself, as expressed particularly in Mr. Hitler’s crude popularization of Darwinism. In “the instinct of preserving the species,” Mr. Hitler sees “the first cause of the formation of human communities.” This instinct of self-preservation leads to the fight of the stronger for the domination of the weaker and economically, eventually, to the survival of the fittest. The identification of the instinct of self-preservation with power over others finds a particularly striking expression in Mr. Hitler’s assumption that “the first culture of mankind certainly depended less on the tamed animal, but rather on the use of inferior people.” He projects his own sadism upon Nature who is “the cruel Queen of all Wisdom,” and her law of preservation is “bound to the brazen law of necessity and of the right of the victory of the best and the strongest in this World.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Russian is another power the people believe wants to eventually dominate the World. The thesis that the aim of Russia is to dominate the World is based on two assumptions. The main one is the Mr. Khrushchev, being a communist and a successor of Mr. Lenin, wanted to revolutionize the World for the victory of communism. The auxiliary assumption is that Mr. Khrushchev, as the successor of the Czars, is the leader of Russian imperialism, the aim of which is World domination. Sometimes the two assumptions are combined, sometimes it is even said that it is futile “to debate whether the Soviet Union is ‘really’ interested in World domination. For the problem may be that the Soviet conception of security results in undermining all other states.” Furthermore, there are also divided opinions about how the Soviet Union wants to achieve World domination. The opinion prevailing until recently—and maybe still today—is that the Soviet Union wants to conquer the World by the force of arms, while in view of Russian peace gestures the added assumption is frequently made that, if not by violence, the Soviet Union want to achieve domination and examine the validity of the arguments in favour of the thesis. The oldest, and probably still the most popular concept is that of the continuity of the Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev regies and from the revolutionary communism of 1917-21 to Soviet power forty hears later. Indeed, if Mr. Khrushchev were the legitimate successor of Mr. Lenin and a Communist in the Marx-Leninist tradition, his main interest would be to the communization of the World; for, no doubt, Mr. Lenin hoped and worked for an international revolution, for the victory of communism—not of the Russian state—in the World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
However, Mr. Stalin and Mr. Khrushchev, all ideology to the contrary, do not represent revolutionary communism but a conservative, totalitarian managerialism, and the dominate class of this system. The question arises whether the representatives of this system and this class can be communist revolutionaries—whether they can desire, or even be in sympathy with, revolutions abroad, the spirit of which would be the opposite of that which dominates Russian. We must consider if the internal structure of a regime determines it attitude toward revolutions. A conservative power has by its very nature no use for revolutionary movements abroad. For one thing, the leaders of a conservative power are humans who rule on the basis of authority and obedience, and revolutions are movements that fight authority and obedience. Those who come to power in conservative systems are, as persons, unsympathetic to anti-authoritarian attitudes. More important, however, is the fact that revolutions in other countries, especially if they are not too distant (geographically and culturally), constitute a threat to the conservative countries. This means, concretely, that if there were workers’ revolutions in Berlin, West Germany, France, Italy, for example, the Soviet bureaucracy would have a difficult task in keeping these revolutions from spreading to East Germany, Poland, Hungary, et cetera. At best the Soviet regime would have to use tanks and machine guns again, as it had to use them against the uprising in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary to crush the uprising of the revolutionary workers. Would, or could, Mr. Khrushchev like this? #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The idea that the Soviet Union, being a conservative, hierarchical system, is against revolutions, will at first strike many readers as little better than nonsense. They will think of Mr. Lenin and Mr. Trotsky’s hope for a World revolution, of Mr. Stalin’s and Mr. Khrushchev’s declarations about the “victory of communism,” and of the conquest of the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Rumania by Russia. How, so they will argue, can one maintain that Khruschevism is not a revolutionary system in view of all the obvious evidence to the contrary? There has always been ambiguity in the relationship between Russian and the international Communist movement. However, the nature of this ambiguity changed drastically between 1917 and 1925. Mr. Lenin and Mr. Trotsky had believed that only a revolution in Germany (or Europe) could save the Russian revolution. Their foreign policy was subordinated to their revolutionary aims; but when the German revolution failed to materialize and Russian remained the only Communist country, she became the symbol and the center of the Communist hopes. The survival of Soviet Russian became a goal in itself although it was still believed that the survival of Russian was necessary for the final victory of communism. Yet, in a subtle way the interest for foreign Communist Parties began to be subordinated to the interests of Soviet foreign policy. This development began as early as 1920. After the threat from the civil war and allied intervention had virtually been ended, there were first attempts to open negotiations with the West and to put the interest of the survival of the Russian state above that of the World revolution. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Mr. Chicherin sent out an appeal to the allied governments to enter into peace negotiations, and both he and Mr. Radek declared for the first time that capitalist states and Soviet Russia could peacefully coexist, just as “liberal England did not fight continuously against serf-owning Russia.” However, the French-supported Polish attack on Russian and the initial Russian successes put a stop to this first appearance of the hope for coexistence. Instead, these events brought the revolutionary hopes of Mr. Lenin to a last intense climax. The disappointment of these hoes was virtually the end of Moscow’s revolutionary strategy in the West. The years 1921 and 1922 mark this end unmistakably. In 1921 the German Communist uprising was defeated, Mr. Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy or NEP, concluded a trade agreement with Great Britian, and supposed the Kronstadt rebellion. Mr. Lenin and Mr. Trotsky did not give up their revolutionary hopes, but they acknowledged defeat. For the first time in the history of the Comintern, the suspicion was voiced both by Italian and by German Communists and left socialists, that there might be a latent contradiction between the interests of Russian and those of the Comintern and its member parties. One of the first signs of the subordination of communism to Russian foreign policy may be seen in the new line of the Germany Communist Party (K.P.D.) about the time the Rapallo treaty. While, until then, the K.P.D. had declined to support a German bourgeois government (as evidenced in its passive attitude toward the reactionary Kapp Putsch), between the summer of 1921 to the conclusion of the Rapallo pact in April 1922, a new attitude developed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The Communist supported the treaty in the Reichstag, and the Rote Fahne praised it as “the first independent act of foreign policy by the German bourgeoisie since 1918.” These events meant, writes Mr. Carr, “that among the most advanced Communist parties in the World, attitudes and policies would be different according to whether the governments of their respective countries were in hostile or friendly relations with the Soviet government, and would have to be modified from time to time, to take into account the changes in those relations. These consequences took a long time to develop fully, and were certainly not realized by those who made the Rapallo treaty in the spring of 1922.” Six months after Rapallo, the Soviet government made a second attempt for a comeback as a World power by its support of the Turk at the Lausanne conference; the persecution of the Communist in Turkey was no hindrance to the Russo-Turkish friendship. By 1922 the failure of the revolutionary hopes was openly acknowledge. Mr. Radek declared at the IV Congress of the Comintern (November-December 1922): “The characteristic of the time in which we are living is that, although the crisis of the World capital has not yet been overcome, although the question of power is still the center of all question, the broadest masses of the proletariat have lost belief in their ability to conquer power in any foreseeable time…If that is the situation, if the great majority of the working class feels itself powerless, then the conquest of power as an immediate task of the day is not on the agenda.” The speeches of Mr. Lenin and Mr. Zinoviev, while not as drastically pessimistic, were essentially in the same minor key. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The Revolution failed. People do not cling to life when it is threatened; how else could one explain their passivity before the threat of nuclear slaughter? Furthermore, people confuse excitement with joy, thrill with love of life. They are “without joy in the midst of plenty.” The fact is that all the virtues for which capitalism is praised—individual initiative, the readiness to take risks, independence—have long disappeared from industrial society and are to be found mainly in westerns and among gangsters. In bureaucratized, centralized industrialism, regardless of political ideology, there is an increasing number of people who are fed up with life and willing to die in order to get over their boredom. They are the ones who say “better dead than red,” but deep down their motto is “better dead than alive.” The extreme form of such an orientation was to be found among those fascists whose motto was “Long live death.” Nobody recognized this more clearly than did Miguel de Unammo when he spoke for the last time in his life at the University of Salamanca, where he was Rector at the time of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War; the occasion was a speech by General Millian Astray, whose favourite motto was “Viva la Muerte!” (Long live death!) and one of his followers shouted it back from the hall. When the general had finished his speech Mr. Unamuno rose and said: “…Just now I heard a necrophilous and senseless cry: ‘Long live death!’ And I, who have spent my life shaping paradoxes which have aroused the uncomprehending anger of others, I must tell you, as an expert authority, that this outlandish paradox is repellent to me. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
“General Millan Astray is cripple. Let is be said without any slighting undertone. He is a war invalid. So was Cervantes. Unfortunately there are too many cripples in Spain just now. And soon there will be even more of them if God does not come to our aid. It pains me to think that General Millian Astray should dictate the pattern of mass psychology. A cripple who lacks the spiritual greatness of a Cervantes is wont to seek ominous relief in causing mutilation around him.” At this General Millan Astray was unable to restrain himself any longer. “Abajo La inteligencia!” (Down with the intelligence!) he shouted. “Long live death!” There was a clamour of support for this remark from the Falangist. However, Mr. Unamuno went on: “This is the temple of the intellect. And I am its high priest. It is you who profane its sacred precincts. You will win, because you have more than enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right in the struggle. I consider it futile to exhort you to think of Spain. I have done.” However, the attraction to death which Mr. Unamuno called necrophilia is not a product of fascist thought alone. It is a phenomenon deeply rooted in a culture which is increasingly dominated by the bureaucratic organization of the big corporations, governments, and armies, and by the central role of man-made things, gadgets, and machines. This bureaucratic industrialism tends to transform human beings into things. It tends to replace nature by technical devoices, the organic by the inorganic. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
In some remote corner of the sprawling Universe, twinkling among the countless solar systems, there was once a star on which some clever beings invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant, most mendacious minute in “World History,” but it was only a minute. After nature caught its breath a little, the star froze, and the clever beings have to die. One could invent a fable like this and still not have illustrated sufficiently how miserable, how shadowy and fleeting, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect appears in nature. There were eternities in which it did not exist, and when it vanished once again, it will have left nothing in its wake. For the human intellect has no further task beyond human life. Instead, it is merely human, and only its owner and producer regards it so pathetically as to suppose that it contains in itself the hinge on which the World turns. If we could communicate with a mosquito, we would learn that it, too, files through the air with this same pathos, feeling itself to be the moving center of the entire World. There is nothing in nature so abject and lowly that it would not instantly swell up like a balloon at the faintest breath of that cognitive faculty. And just as every baggage carrier wants admirers, so, too, the proudest man of all, the philosopher, thinks one sees the eyes of the Universe trained from all sides telescopically on one’s thought and one’s deeds. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is remarkable that the intellect manages this, considering it is simply an expedient supplied to the unluckiest, the most delicate, the most transitory creatures in order to detain them for a minute in existence; from which, without that added extra, they would have every reason to flee as swiftly as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s son. The arrogance involved in cognition and sensation, spreading a blinding fog over men’s eyes and senses, deceives them about the value of existence by implying the most flattering evaluation of cognition. Its most general effect is deception—but even its most particular effects have something of the same quality. The intellect, as a means of preserving the individual, develops its principal strengths in dissimulation, for this is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, it being denied to them to wage the battle of existence with the horns or shape fangs of a breast of prey. This art of dissimulation reaches it peak in humans: here deceptions, flattery, lying, and cheating, talking behind the backs of others, keeping up appearances, living in borrowed splendour, donning masks, the shroud of convention, playacting before others and before oneself—in fort, the continual fluttering around the flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that virtually nothing is as incomprehensive as how an honest and pure drive to truth could have arisen among human. They are deeply immersed in allusions and dream images; their eyes glide only over the surface of things and see “forms”; their sensations nowhere lead to truth but content themselves with registering stimuli and playing a touching—feeling game, as it were, on the back of things. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
What is more, humans let their dreams lie to them at night, their whole life long, their moral sense never trying to prevent it; whereas they say there are people who have managed to quit snoring by sheer willpower. What does man actually know of himself? Could one ever be capable, even just once, of perceiving oneself entire, laid out as if in a glass case? Does nature not conceal virtually everything from one, even one’s body, banishing and locking one up in a proud, spurious consciousness, far removed from the convolution of the bowels, the rapid flow of the bloodstream, the intricate vibrations of nerve fibers? Nature has thrown away the key; and woe unto that fateful curiosity that might once manage to peer out through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and gain intimation that humans rest in the indifference of one’s ignorance on the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, suspended in dreams on the back of a tiger. Where in the World, given this setting, can the drive to truth ever have come from? In the natural state of things, that individual, inasmuch as one wants to protect oneself against other individuals, uses one’s intellect mostly for dissimulation. However, because, out of both necessity and boredom, one wants to exist socially and in herds, humans need a peace treaty and strive at the least to rid their World of the crudest forms of bellum omnium contra omnes.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
This peace treaty, however, brings with it something like the first step in the attainment of that enigmatic drive to truth. Namely, what is henceforth to count as “truth” is now fixed, that is, a uniformly valid and binding designation of things is invented, and the legislation of language likewise yields the first laws of truth. For here a distinction is drawn for the first time between truth and lie: the lair uses valid designations—words—to make the unreal appear real; he says, for instance, “I am rich,” precisely when the proper designation for his condition would be “poor.” He misuses fixed conventions by various substitutions or even inversions of names. If he does this in self-serving or otherwise injurious ways, society will no longer trust him and will therefore exclude him from its ranks. So it is that humans flee not so much from being cheated as from being harmed by cheating. Even on this level, it is at bottom not deception they hate but the dire, inimical consequences of certain kinds of deception. So, too, only to a limited extent do humans want truth. Humans desire the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth; to pure knowledge without consequences one is indifferent, to potentially harmful and destructive truths one is even hostile. And besides, what is the status of those linguistic conventions? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, of our senses for truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is the language the full and adequate expression of all realities? Only through forgetfulness can one ever come to imagine that one possesses truth to that degree. If one does not wish to rest content with truth in the form of tautology, this is, with empty husks, one will forever be passing illusions off as truth. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
What is a word? The copy of a nerve stimulus to cause outside us, however, is already the result of a false and unjustified application of the principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been decisive in the genesis of language, and the standpoint of certainty in the genesis of the designations of things, how would we be entitled to say, “The stone is hard,” as if “hard” were something otherwise known to us and not a wholly subjective impression? We divined things according to genders: we call the tree (der Baum) masculine, the plant (die Pflanze) feminine—what arbitrary transferences! How far-flung beyond the canon of certainty! We speak of a snake: the designation pertains only to its slithering movement and so could as easily apply to a worm. What arbitrary demarcations, what one-sided preferences for now this, now that property of a thing! All the different languages, set alongside one another, show that when it comes to words, truth—full and adequate expression—is never what matters; otherwise there would not be so many languages. The “thing it itself” (which would be, precisely, pure truth without consequences) is utterly unintelligible, even for a creator of language, and certainly nothing to stive for, for one designates only the relations of things to human beings and helps oneself to the boldest metaphours. The image again copied in a sound—second metaphour! And each time a complete leap out of one sphere into an entirely new and different one. One can imagine someone profoundly dear who has never had any sensation of tone or of music: just as one will gaze in amazement at Chladnian sounds figures in sand, will find their causes in the vibration of the strings, and will swear that one now surely knows what people call a tone—so it is for all of us when it comes to language. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
How may a believer be victorious over the powers of darkness? How may one have authority and victory over psychopathological offenders rather than be mastered by them? Any Christian who has come to recognize the devices of the enemy in one’s own life, and has learned the way of deliverance, will be deeply concerned that others also be set free. “Authority…over all the power of the enemy,” reports Luke 10.19—what a wonderful goal, for oneself and for others! A believer must learn to walk in personal victory over the ultimate negative at every point if one is to have the fullest victory over darkness. For this, one needs to know the Lord Christ in all the aspects of His name and character, so as to draw upon His power in living union with Him. The believer must also learn to know the Adversary in his various workings, as described in his names and character, so that one may be able to discern the presence of the Ultimate Negative and all one’s wicked spirits wheresoever they may be—either in attacks upon oneself, upon other, or in their working as “World-rulers” of the darkness in the World. Although the ambiguous churches are not immune to demonic distortion, nevertheless the impact of the Spiritual Presence on the functions of cultural creativity is impossible without an inner-historical representation of the Spiritual Community in a church. Culture is not vague and indeterminate; cultural creations are produced by definite individuals and social groups. The Spiritual Community must be just as specific if its force is to be felt. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The Spiritual Community must be localized in a human community; the Spiritual Presence, concertized in the symbols of cult and doctrine. And yet, the Spiritual Community is broader than any church which represents it, for the Spirit cannot be fettered. The Spiritual Presence works latently to prepare for the fuller manifestations of the Spiritual Community in a church. Consequently, the role of the Spiritual Community as embodies in the churches can be described as both cause and effect. The Spiritual Presence is felt within a culture because the Spiritual Community has first opened men’s hearts to it, and the free stirring of the Spirit within the cultural realm leads humans to the Spiritual Community. The free impact of the divine Spirit on a culture prepares for a religious community or is received because such a community has prepared human beings for the reception of the Spiritual impact. Giving is not the essential thing, but to give with delicacy of the feeling. 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 Justic for All. The generous heart shall be enriched, and one that satisfies others shall be satisfied oneself. And this is the offering you shall take: Gold, silver, and copper. One who give when well, one’s gift is gold; one who gives only when ill, one’s gift is silver; one who gives only in one’s will, one’s gift is copper. From Thee, O Lord, comes our wealth, and from Thine own, do we give unto Thee. Please be sure to show charity to the Sacramento Fire Department by making a donation; they are not receiving all of their resources. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
MAGNOLIA STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA | low $600s
Now Selling!
Residence Three is the largest of the single story homes offered at Magnolia Station. At 2,827 square feet you’ll be hard pressed to a contemporary floorplan that offers this much space.
There are four bedrooms, two and one half bathrooms, and a three car garage. Utilize the den as your own private study or convert into an optional fifth bedroom if needed. The Dining Room and Kitchen are well situated to make entertaining a breeze.
The location of the Owner’s Suite makes it feel like a separate wing from the rest of the home allowing for maximum privacy and retreat.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier.
Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini! https://cresleigh.com/magnolia-station/residence-3/
The First Glimmer of Dawn
With the first glimmer of dawn, during the jovial season of merry autumn, the voice of God had sung to me through times and space, and he told me there were things I would know and understand as others could not. He told me that if I opened to him and bult this mansion and never ceased construction that He would give me His strength and secrets. He has been driven to preserve me, and He loved me. There was nothing in the World I wanted more at this moment than to look God right in the eyes and understand Him, but all the gold and diamonds in the nineteenth century could not give Him a face. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism, I fancied God looked like my beloved husband William Winchester. I paced the area between the bookcases and the overstuffed Victorian chairs. I have learned the power of the night, of fear, of blood. Terror, certainly, has a vigour, but it is nothing compared to loving. As I came to the footmark of the staircase, for an instant I gazed at a stranger, on which war, with its fatigues and its wounds, had made a great alteration. A kind of cold face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several—I do not know how many—legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body. I screamed out and fell away backward from the step on which I stood, and the creature slipped downwards, I suppose, on to that same step. But the uncertainty last no longer than a few seconds before the visitor vanished. I believe I am acquainted with the extremity of terror and repulsion which a woman can endure without losing her mind. If corpses walked, some, not nearly revived enough, stood in plain view in Llanada Villa. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Of course, there is also a room in my house in which people spend the night, and in the morning, they are found kneeling in the corner moaning and crying. One of the guests said that she heard a noise in the passing at night, opened her door, and saw someone crawling towards her on all fours with blood on his face and pale unseeing eyes, those of a dead man. I had seen queer things in my parlour. Each night around thirteen o’clock, I would wake up and go downstairs to watch these curious lights that played on my walls and ceiling. One night in particular, I saw a neat, black-clad figure moving with easy grace through the long slanting bars of moonlight. After I starred for a while, he vanished along with the lights. After these odd events, Daisy and I were discussing the occurrences. “What do you think it all means, Aunt Sarah?” she said. I waited a long time before answering. “I feel that someone is trying to contact me,” I replied. “Why?” It seemed like a simplistic question to ask, but Daisy had learned that when magic was involved, sometimes the most obvious questions brought the most interesting answers, so she asked it anyway. “Why, indeed?” I responded. “Maybe someone wants to give me more powers?” Daisy smiled and sipped her tea. She began to shiver a little. “Daisy,” I asked, “what seems to be troubling you?” “Well, Aunt Sarah, sometime after you had gone to bed last night, I remained downstairs reading, and I was going one the stairs, someone passed me. The lights flickering made it hard to see, but I thought it was one of the servants, perhaps. However, this morning I found that it could not have been so, as none of them had been out of their rooms at that hour.” I trembled a little and blinked. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
On the night of November 1, I saw the figure. I heard footsteps outside on the landing at about 3 a.m. I got up at once, and went outside. There was a bright full moon, and the apparition was then at the end of the landing at the top of the stairs, then went downstairs, stopping again when she reached the hall below. I opened the drawing-room door and she went in, walked across the room to the couch in the bow window, stayed there a little while, then came out of the room, went along the passage, and disappeared by the garden door. I spoke to her, but she did not answer. That afternoon I was in the greenhouse, and on my way to the site of the projected rose garden. I did not know much about the conditions most suitable to these nurseries, but I had a great gardener. Collin, my gardener, had disappeared mysteriously about the ground, and I was looking for him to fetch him to tea, and going down this path I suddenly saw him, not hiding in the bushes, as I rather expected, but sitting on the bench in the old summer-house—there was a wooden summer-house here, you know—up in the corner, asleep, but with such a dreadful look on his face that I really thought he must be ill or even dead. I rushed at him and shook him, and told him to wake up; and wake up he did, with a scream. I assure you the poor boy seemed almost beside himself with fright. He hurried me away to the house, and was in a terrible state all that night, hardly sleeping. Someone had to sit up with him, as far as I remember. He was better very soon, but for days I could not get him to say why he had been in such a condition. It came out at last that he had really been asleep and had had a very odd disjointed sort of dream. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
He never saw much of what was around him, but he felt the scenes most vividly. First he made out tht he was standing in a large room with number of people in it, and that someone was opposite to him who was “very powerful,” and he was being asked questions which he felt to be very important, and, whenever he answered them, someone—either the person opposite to him, or someone else in the room—seemed to be, as he said, making something up against him. All the voices sounded to him very distant, but he remembered bits of things that were said: “Where were you on the nineteenth of September?” and “Is this your handwriting?” and so on I can see now, of course, that he was dreaming of some trial: but we were never allowed to see the papers, and it was odd that he would be dreaming of what went on in court. All the time he felt, he said, the most intense anxiety and oppression and hopelessness (though I do not suppose he used such words as that to me). Then, after that, there was an interval in which he remembered being dreadfully restless and miserable, and then there cam another sort of picture, when he was aware that he had come out of doors on a dark raw morning with a little snow about. It was in a street, or at any rate among houses, and he felt that there were numbers and numbers of people there too, and that he was taken up some creaking wooden steps and stoon on a sort of platform, but the only thing he could actually see was a small fire burning somewhere near him. Someone who had been holding his arm left hold of it and went towards this fire, and then he said the fright he was in was worse than at any other part of his dream, and if I had not wakened him up, he did not know what would have become of him. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
A few weeks later, I was coming out of my dormant rose garden, and I walked toward the orchard, when I saw the figure of the ghostly woman cross the orchard, go along the carriage drive in front of the house, and in at the open side door, across the hall, and into the drawing room, I following. She crossed the drawing room and took up her unusual position behind the couch in the bow window. Daisy came in soon after, and I told her the ghost was there. Daisy could not see the figure, but went up to where I showed her the ghost was. She then went swiftly round behind Daisy, across the room, out of the door, and along the hall disappearing as usual near the garden door, we both following her. We looked out into the garden, having first to unlock the garden door, which my niece Daisy had locked as she same though, but we saw nothing of her. After a time, I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered what was going on. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. Some of my servants were queer people and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. After a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock on my hall door was being tried—cautiously, furtively, tentatively—with a key. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
My sensations upon recognizing this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard—and that was to my advantage in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder’s next move. After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I hard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realized the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale—just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
I could not, I decided, rish an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be though the less solidly built connecting doors of the rooms. In the passage outside, I saw the figure of a woman, apparently a servant, with grey hair and a white cap, the upper part of her dress being blue and the shift dark. Her arms were stretched out at full length and the hands were clasped. This figure moved with a very slow, furtive, gliding motion, as if wishing to escape notice, straight towards the head of the old staircase, which lead to the ceiling. On reaching it, she disappeared. In the full light of the archway down stairs, I saw the figure of a lady, with dark hair and dress, apparently lost in painful thought and oblivious to everything about her. Her dress was fuller than is the modern fashion and the figure, although opaque, cast no shadow. It moved with a curious gliding motion into the darkness and melted away at the spot within a yard of the place where a doorway, now walled up, led from a staircase to the hall. I saw these figures with such distinctness that I had no doubt at all I was looking at a real person, while, at the same time, although seated in a well-lighted room and chatting with friends, I was conscious of an uneasy, creepy feeling. I tried to see the features, but could not. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
Nineteenth-century America was perhaps the golden age of the ghost. It may have ceased to have any message or any advice for the living, but it was everywhere. The yearnings associated with the Romantic movement of English poetry found fruition in the spectacle of the melancholy ghost. There was much popular interest in spirit-rappings and in spirit-tappings. The fashion for mesmerism, in the middle of the century, provoked belief in some form of a plasma or magnetic fluid that might harbour the forms of spirits. Technological progress also seemed to affirm the existence of spectral bodies, with the appearance of photograph intending to reveal the ghostly occupants of rooms and chairs. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, lent seriousness and credibility to the quest for spirits. A questionnaire sent out by the society in 1894 revealed that out of seventeen thousand people, 673 claimed that they had seen a ghost in one form or another. It is perhaps curious, however, that the majority of them did not know the identity of the spirit in question. The manifestation appeared arbitrary and purposeless. It is also worth observing that many apparent “sightings” of ghost have been discredited, and that many photographs of spirits are the obvious products of fakery. In the field of ghost-hunting there are many frauds and charlatan, intent of producing a sensation rather than a verifiable record.
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/
If You Do Not Know Who You are, this is an Expensive Place to Find Out!
Since wealth awaits those who can play this game well, it is not surprising that there is a large body of serious literature devoted to telling you how. The economy is all about hopes, fears, greed, ambition, acts of God—it would be hard to put it more succinctly. The one thing we have, whether or not we ever find true Value, is liquidity—the ability to buy and sell momentarily and relatively effortlessly. Liquidity is the cornerstone of Wall Street. It is what makes it the financial capital of the World, for it is, except for rare, odd moments of panic, a truly liquid market. It is liquid and it is run honestly, and there are few places like that in the World that if you are a rich international person who wants to be able to cash in on any given day and yet wants to make capital gains, you have virtually only one place to go. The dominate note of our time is unreality. In good times it is not hard to make money, but in times of unreality the market is saying, “You do not understand me anymore; do not trust me until you understand me.” When it comes to understanding the market, computers and statistics are important, but even more import is personal intuition. One has to know how to sense patterns of behaviour. A person’s behaviour can tell you from the start if you want to do business with them or not. Do not learn the hard way. Learn to read signs and trust your intuition. If you have problems in business when dealing with people who act goofy, sarcastic and patronizing, then take that as an indication that this will be a bad business deal and do not get burned. Professional money managers often seem to make up their minds in a split second, but what pushes them over the line of decision is usually an incremental bit of information which, added to all the slumbering pieces of information filed their minds, suddenly makes the picture whole. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
What is it the good managers have? It is a kind of locked-in concentration, an intuition, a feeling, nothing that can be schooled. The first thing you have to know is yourself. It sounds simplistic to say the first thing you have to know is yourself, and of course you are not necessarily out to become a professional money manager. However, if you stop to think about it, here is one authority saying there are no formulas which can be automatically applied. If you are not automatically applying a mechanical formula, then you are operating in this area of intuition, and if you are going to operate with intuition—or judgment—then it follows that the first thing you have to know is yourself. You are—fact it—a bunch of emotions, prejudices, knowledge, education, faith, and twitches, and this is all very well as long as you know it. Successful speculators do not necessarily have a complete portrait of themselves, hair and all, in their own minds, but they do have the ability to stop abruptly when their own intuition and what is happening Out There are suddenly out of the kilter. A couple of mistakes crop up, and they say, simply, “This is not my kind of market,” or “I do not know what in the World is going on, do you?” and return to established lines of defense. A series of market decisions does add up, believe it or not, to a kind of personality portrait. It is, in one small way, a method of finding out who you are, but it can be very expensive. That is one of the cryptograms which are my own, and this is the first Irregular Rule: If you do not know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
It may seem a little silly to think that a portfolio of stocks can give you a portrait of the human who picked them, but any turned-in stock-picker will swear to it. I know a private fund where there are four managers, each with one section–$60 million or so—to run. Every three months they switch chairs. You can have no preconceived ideas. There are fundamentals in the marketplace, but the unexplored area is the emotional area. All the charts and breadth indicators and technical palaver are the statistician’s attempts to describe an emotional state. If the emotional area is the unexplored area, and the statistical area is being so thoroughly explored, why not explore the unexplored area? Such a study seems to require a cross of disciplines. Mass psychology and the marketplace are great areas of study. The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with the necessaries and connivences of life which it annually consumes, and which conflict always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. According, therefore, as this produce, or what is purchased with it, bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniences which it has occasion. However, this proportion must in every nation be regulated by two different circumstances; first, by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied; and, secondly, by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed. Whatever be the soil, climate, or extent of territory of any particular nation, the abundance of scantiness, depend on upon those two circumstances. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The abundance of scantiness of this supply too seems to depend more upon the former of those two circumstances than upon the latter. Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work, is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide, as well as one can, the necessaries and conveniences of life, for oneself, or such of one’s family or tribe as either too old, or too young, or too infirm to go a hunting and fishing. Such nations, however, are so miserably poor, that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or, at least, think themselves reduced, to the necessity of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beast. Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of times, frequently of a hundred time more labour than the greater part of those of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman or woman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if one is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and convivences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire. The causes of this improvement, in the productive powers of labour, and the order, according to which its produce is naturally distributed among the different ranks and conditions of human in the society are subjects of great importance. Whatever be the actual state of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which labour is applied in any nation, the abundance or scantiness of its annual supply must depend, during the continuance of that state, upon the proportion between the number of those who are annually employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The number of useful and productive labourers, it will hereafter appear, is every where in proportion to the quantity of capital stock which is employed in setting them to work, and to particular way in which it is so employed. The nature of capital stock, of the manner in which it is gradually accumulated, and of the different quantities of labour which it puts into motion, are central focuses and we must understand the different ways in which they are employed. Nations tolerably well advanced as to skill, dexterity, and judgment, in the application of labour, have followed very different plans in the general conduct of direction of it; and those plans have not all been equally favourable to the greatness of its produce. The policy of some nations has given extraordinary encouragement of the industry of the country; that of others to the industry of towns. Scarce any nation has dealt equally and impartially with every fort of industry. Since the downfall of the Roman empire, the policy of Europe has been more favourable to arts, manufactures, and commerce, the industry of towns; than to agriculture, the industry of the country. The circumstances which seem to have introduced and established this policy are crucial. Russia is still a reactionary welfare state; we are still a liberal welfare state. However, it is to be assumed that things in Russian will slowly change. Clearly, the more Russian can satisfy the material need of her population, the less will she need the methods of the police state. The Russian system will shift to the same means that are used in the West: the methods of psychological suggestion and manipulation that give the individual the illusion of having and following one’s own convictions, while “one’s” decisions are in reality made by the elite of “decision makers.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The Russians believe that they represent socialism because they talk in terms of Marxist ideology, and they do not recognize how similar their system is to the most developed form of capitalism. We in the West believe that we represent the system of individualism, private initiative, and humanistic ethics, because we hold on to our ideology, and we do not see that our institutions are, in fact, in many ways becoming more and more similar to the hated system of communism. We believe that the essence of the Russian system is that the individual is subservient to the State, and hence that one has no freedom. However, we do not recognize that in Western society the individual is becoming more and more subservient to the economic machine, to the big corporation, to public opinion. We do not recognize that the individual, confronted with giant enterprises, giant government, giant trade unions, is afraid of freedom, has no faith in one’s own strength, and seeks shelter by identifying with these giants. Our mode of industrial organization needs men and women similar to men and women the Russian system needs: humans who feel that they are the masters of their society (both capitalism and communism make this claim), yet who are willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction and who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the one of making good, of being on the move, of getting ahead. We try to reach this result by means of the ideology of free enterprise, individual initiative, et cetera; the Russians by the ideology of socialism, solidarity, and equality. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The question whether the Soviet system is a socialist system has been answered in the negative. We have concluded that it is a state managerialism, using the most advanced methods of total monopolization, centralization, mass manipulation, and moving slowly from exercising this manipulation by violence to exercising it by mass suggestion. It is, while resembling socialism in certain economic features, its very contradiction in a social and human sense, and is actually converging with the trends of the most advanced capitalistic countries, provided these do not change their present course. It is economically a very successful system, and while unfavourable to development of authentic freedom and individualism, it has many features of planning and social welfare which can be counted as very beneficial achievements. It has often been said tht the treatment of Germany by the victors in 1918 was one of the chief reasons for the rise of Nazism. During this time, there was also an increase in witchcraft accusations as a social problem linked to the past. In fact, witchcraft accusations were the social issues of this era. Witchcraft beliefs and the trials actually still took place in the 1950s. Lawmakers and police also held meetings to discuss popular fears of witches based on evidence provided to them. The fears inspired a search for enemies, and made outsiders out of community members, and the community was encouraged to train a suspicious gaze on these “others,” now regarded as the cause of their various misfortunes. The witchcraft fears bore clear similarities to the scapegoating and persecution of Jewish people in Nazi Germany. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
As a result, and despite attention given to the subject, the public and relevant authorities remained largely impervious to the notion of any underlying social danger in witchcraft fears—they could and did chalk them up, however vaguely, to village intrigues and “age-old” superstition. When we reflect on the Treaty of Versailles, which was a peace treaty signed on 28 June 1919, the majority of Germans felt that the peace treaty was unjust; but while the middle class reacted with intense bitterness, there was much less bitterness at the Versailles Treaty among the working class. They had been opposed to the old regime and the loss of the way for them meant defeat of the regime. They felt that they had fought bravely and that they had no reason to be ashamed of themselves. On the other hand, the victory of the revolution which had only been possible by the defeat of the monarchy had brought them economic, political, and human gains. The resentment against Versailles had its basis in the lower middle class; the nationalistic resentment was a rationalization, projecting social inferiority to national inferiority. This projection is quite apparent in Mr. Hitler’s personal development. He was the typical representative of the lower middle class, a nobody with no chances or future. He felt very intensely the role of being an outcast. He often speaks in Mein Kampf of himself as the “nobody,” the “unknow man” he was in his youth. However, although this was due essentially to his own social position, he could rationalize it in national symbols. Being born outside of the Reich he felt excluded not so much socially as nationally, and the great German Reich to which all her sons could return became for him the symbol of social prestige and security. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The old middle class’s feeling of powerlessness, anxiety, and isolation from the social whole and the destructiveness springing from this situation was not the only psychological source of Nazism. The peasants felt resentful against the urban creditors to whom they were in debt, while the workers felt deeply disappointed and discouraged by the constant political retreat after their first victories in 1918 under a leadership which had lost all strategic initiative. The vast majority of the population was seized with the feeling of individual insignificance and powerlessness which we have described as typical for monopolistic capitalism in general. Those psychological conditions were not the “cause” of Nazism. They constituted its human basis without which it could not have developed, but any analysis of the whole phenomenon of the rise and victory of Nazism must deal with the strictly economic and political, as well as with the psychological, conditions. The representatives of big industry and the half-bankrupt Junkers played a huge role in the establishment of Nazism. Without their support Mr. Hitler could never have won, and their support was rooted in their understanding of their economic interests much more than in psychological factors. This property-owning class was confronted with a parliament in which 40 percent of the deputies were Socialists and Communists representing groups which were dissatisfied with the existing social system, and in which were an increasing number of Nazi deputies who also represented a class that was in bitter opposition to the most powerful representatives of German capitalism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
A parliament which thus in is majority represented tendencies directed against their economic interest deemed them dangerous. They said democracy did not work. Actually one might say democracy worked too well. The parliament was a rather adequate representation of the respective interests of different classes of the German population, and for this very reason the parliamentary system could not any longer be reconciled with the need to preserve the privileges of big industry and half-feudal landowner. The representatives of these privileged groups expected that Nazism would shift the emotional resentment which threatened them into other channels and at the same time harness the nation into the service of their own economic interests. On the whole they were not disappointed. To be sure, in minor details they were mistaken. Mr. Hitler and his bureaucracy were not tools to be ordered around by the Thyssens and Krupps, who had to share their power with the Nazi bureaucracy and often to submit to them. However, although Nazism proved to be economically detrimental to all other classes, it fostered the interests of the most powerful groups of German industry. The Nazi system is the “streamlined” version of German prewar imperialism and it continued where the monarchy had failed. (The Republic, however, did not really interrupt the development of German monopolistic capitalism but furthered it with the means at her disposal.) There is one question that a reader will have in mind at this point: How can one reconcile the statement that the psychological basis of Nazism was the old middle class with the statement that Nazism functions in the interests of German imperialism? #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
In the postwar period it was the middle class, particularly the lower middle class, that was threatened by monopolistic capitalism. Its anxiety and thereby its hatred were aroused; it moved into a state of panic and was filled with a craving for submission to as well as for domination over those who were powerless. These feelings were used by an entirely different class for a regime which was to work for their own interests. Mr. Hitler proved to be such an efficient tool because he combined the characteristics of a resentful, hating, petty bourgeois, with whom the lower middle class could identify themselves emotionally and socially, with those of an opportunist who was ready to serve the interests of the German industrialists and Junkers. Originally he posed as the Messiah of the old middle class, promised the destruction of department stores, the breaking of the domination of banking capital, and so on. The record is clear enough. These promises were never fulfilled. However, that did not matter. Nazism never had any genuine political or economic principles. It is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism. What mattered was that hundreds of thousands of petty bourgeois, who in the normal course of development had little chance to gain money or power, as members of the Nazi bureaucracy now got a large slice of the wealth and prestige they forced the upper classes to share with them. Others who were not members of the Nazi machine were given the jobs taken away from the Jewish people and political enemies; and as for the rest, although they did not get more bread, they got “circuses.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The emotional satisfaction afforded by these sadistic spectacles and by an ideology which gave them a feeling of superiority over the rest of humankind was able to compensate them—for a time at least—for the fact that their lives had been impoverished, economically and culturally. The lover, the poet, and the mystic find a fuller satisfaction than the seeker after power can ever know, since they can retain the object of their love, whereas the seeker after power must be perpetually engaged in some fresh manipulation if one is not to suffer from a sense of emptiness. When I come to die I shall not feel I have lived in vain. I have seen the Earth turn red at evening, the dew sparking in the morning, and the snow shining under a frosty sun; I have smelt rain after drought, and have heard the stormy Atlantic beat upon the granite shoes of Cornwall. Science may bestow these and other joys among more people than could otherwise enjoy them. If so, its power will be wisely used. However, when it takes out of life the moments to which life owes its values, science will not deserve admiration, however, cleverly and however elaborately it may lead humans along the road to despair. Some feel that intellects exhaust reality, and that there is nothing of significance which cannot be grasped of it. They are skeptical toward everything which cannot be caught in an intellectual formula, but they are naively unskeptical toward their own scientific approach. They are more interested in the results of their thoughts than in the process of enlightenment which occurs in the inquiring person. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind which finds on the surface of this planet the whole of its imaginative material; which feels confident of progress, and unaware of nonhuman limitations to human power; which loves battle, with all the attendant risks, because it has no real doubt that it will achieve victory; which desires religion, as it desires railways and electric light, as a comfort and a help in the affairs of this World, not as providing nonhuman objects to satisfy the hunger for perfection and for something to be worshipped without reserve. In contrast to the pragmatist, rational thought is not the quest for certainty, but an adventure, an act of self-liberation and of courage, which changes the thinker by making one more awake and more alive. One must have faith in the power of reason, faith in the human capacity to create one’s own paradise through one’s own efforts. Humans have existed only for a very short period—1,00,000 years at the most. What they have achieved, especially during the last 6,000 years, is something utterly new in the history of the Cosmos, so far at least as we are acquainted with it. For countless ages the sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the stars shone in the night, but it was only with the coming of Man that these things were understood. In the great World of astronomy and in the little World of the atom, Man has unveiled secrets which might have been thought undiscoverable. In art and literature and religion, some humans have shown a sublimity of feeling which makes the species worth preserving? Is this to end in trivial horror because so few are able to think of Man rather than of this or that group of men? #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Is our race so destitute of wisdom, so incapable of impartial love, so blind even to the simplest dictates of self-preservation, that the last proof of its stilly cleverness is to be the extermination of all life on our planet?—for it will be not only men who will perish, but also the animals and plants, who no one can accuse of communism or anticommunism. I cannot believe that this is to be the end. I would have humans forget their quarrels for a moment and reflect that, if they will allow themselves to survive, there is every reason to expect the triumphs of the future to exceed immeasurably the triumphs of the past. There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal, as a human being to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a ne Paradise; if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death. This faith is rooted in a quality without which neither philosophy nor fight against war could be understood: one’s love for life. To many people this may not mean much; they believe that everybody loves life. Does one not cling to it when it is threatened, does one not have a great deal of fun in life and plenty of thrilling excitement? Only in the most rugged mountain wasteland can one get a chilling sense of the feeling of solitude that pervaded the recluse of the Ephesian temple of Artemis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
No overwhelming feeling of sympathetic excitement, no caving, no desire to help or to save emanates from him—he is like a shining planet without an atmosphere. His eye, fiery, and turned inward, looks lifeless and cold from without, as if just for the sake of appearance. All around him, waves of delusion and distortion crash onto the fortress of his pride; he turns away in disgust. Yet even people with tender hearts shun such a tragic mask; in some remote sanctuary, amid the images of gods, in cold, magnificent architecture, such a figure might seem more intelligible. Among humans, as a man, Heraclitus was an enigma; and when he was seen watching the games of shouting children, he was pondering what no mortal ever pondered on such an occasion: the game of the great cosmic child, Zeus, and the eternal sport of World destruction and World creation. He had no need of men, not even for his knowledge; he cared not at all for what one could learn from them, nor what other sages before him were at pains to discover. “I searched out myself,” he said, using a word that refers to the fathoming of an oracle: as if he and no one else were the true embodiment and achievement of the Delphic Maxim “Know yourself.” What he heard in this oracle, however, he took to be immortal wisdom, eternally worthy of interpretation, in the same sense in which the prophetic utterances of the sibyl are immortal. It is sufficient for the most distant generations; may they interpret it simply as the saying of an oracle, just as he himself, like a Delphic god, “neither speaks nor conceals.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Although he pronounces it “without laughter, without ornament, and scented ointments” but rather “fronting at the mouth,” it must resound thousands of years into the future. For the World always needs truth, and so will always need Heraclitus, though he does not need it. What is fame to him! “Fame among constantly fleeting mortals!” as he scornfully exclaims. That is something for singers and poets, and for those before him who were known as “wise” men—let them gulp down the most delicious morsels of their self-love; the stuff is too common for him. His fame matters to men, not to him; his self-love is the love of truth—and this very truth tells him that the immortality of man needs him, not that he needs the immortality of the man Heraclitus. Truth! Rapturous delusion of a god! What does truth matter to human beings! And what was the Heraclitean “truth”! And where has it gone? A vanished dream, wiped from the faces of humans, along with other dreams!—It was not the first! Of all that we with such proud metaphours call “World history” and “truth” and “fame,” a heatless demon might have nothing to say but this: “In some remote corner of the sprawling Universe, twinkling among the countless solar systems, there was once a stare on which some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant, most mendacious minute in World history, but it was only a minute. After nature caught its breath a little, the star froze, and the clever animals had to die. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
“And it was time, too: for although they boasted of how much they had come to know, in the end they realized they had gotten it all wrong. They died and in dying cursed truth. Such was the species of doubting animal that had invented knowledge.” This would me man’ fate were he nothing more than a thinking animal; truth would drive him to despair and annihilation, truth eternally damned to be untruth. All that is proper to man, however, is faith in the attainable truth, in the ever approaching, confidence-inspiring illusion. Does he not in fact live by constant deception? Does not nature conceal virtually everything from him, even what is nearest, for example, his own body, of which he has only a spurious “consciousness”? He is locked up in this consciousness, and nature has thrown away the key. O fateful curiosity of the philosopher, who longs to peer out just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness—perhaps then one gains an intimation that humans rest in the indifference of their ignorance on the greedy, the insatiable, the disgusting, the merciless, the murderous, suspended in dreams on the back of a tiger. “Let him hang,” cries art. “Wake him up,” cries the philosopher, in the pathos of truth. Yet, even as he believes himself to be shaking the sleeper, he himself sinks into a still deeper magical slumber—perhaps then he dreams of “ideas” or of immortality. Art is mightier than knowledge, for it wants life, and knowledge attains as its ultimate end only—annihilation. The great need of the Church is to know and understand the laws of the spirit, so as to co-work with the Spirit of God in fulfilling the purpose of God through His people. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
However, the lack of knowledge of the spirit life has given the deceiving spirits of the ultimate negative the opportunity for the deceptions of which we have spoken of in the past. There is a need for concrete embodiment of the Spiritual Presence. The twofold experience of the holy as being and as demand gives rise to two types of religion: the sacramental, priestly type founded upon the ontological presence of the holy, and the eschatological, prophetic type stemming from its moral insistence. Both components are actually present in both types, but one of them will predominate. It is consider domical to attribute holiness to finite beings, nevertheless the solid doctrines of the church according to which “the moral perfection of the community does not bring about the holiness of the church, but rather the holiness of the church sanctifies the community by preaching the forgiveness of sins and by leading it to the New Being upon which the church rest. Neither the prophetic type of Christianity can survive without the priestly type, nor can the eschatological, without the sacramental. The World can honestly respect one another by a mutual recognition of the Spiritual Presence that animates them all. In practical terms, the ecumenical movement is a limited, short-range success and long-range failure: In practical terms it is able to heal divisions which have become historically obsolete, to replace confessional fanaticism by interconfessional co-operation, to conquer denominational provincialism, and to produce a new vision of the unity of all churches in their foundation. However, neither the ecumenical nor any other future movement can conquer the ambiguity of unity and division in the churches’ historical existence. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Even if it were able to produce the United Churches of the World, and even if all latent churches were converted to this unity, new divisions would appear. The dynamics of life, the tendency to preserve the holy even when it has become obsolete, the ambiguities implied in the sociological existence of the churches, and above all, the prophetic criticism and demand for reformation would being about new and, in many cases, Spiritually justified divisions. The unity of the churches, similar to their holiness, has a paradoxical character. It is the divided church which is the united church. All your children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all God’s holy mountain, for the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. The work of righteousness shall be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and confidence forever. Then shall they sit every man under his vine. And under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid, for the Lord Himself hath spoken it. 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. All Americans are brothers and sisters, responsible for one another. If there be among you a needy man, do not harden your heart. Shut not your hand to your needy brother, but surely open your hand unto him. The Sacramento Fire Department has proudly been serving the community since 1851, please consider donating to their organization so they can have the resources to continue doing an exemplary job. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Increase Your Purchasing Power by $100,000!
ACT NOW! Contact our Sales Team immediately at (916) 409-5595 or send us an email at nicoleb@nextnewhomes.com to discover how Cresleigh Homes can supercharge your buying potential with a $100,000 boost!
Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity! https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-four/
Starring Eyes that Never Shut
Up to the present day there is much gossip about in Santa Clara Valley about a certain hidden treasure of Llanada Villa, for which my servants have often made search, though hitherto in vain. The story is that I, while yet in the vigour of life, concealed a very large quantity of gold, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, diamonds, and silver somewhere in the mansion. I was often asked where it was, and never disclosed their location. I also adorned much of the mansion with art-glass windows and beautiful carvings in marble. The object which the antiquary had before them was of tracing the whereabouts of my Medieval stained-glass windows of Llanada Villa. Shortly after the German Peasants’ War in 1525, a very large quantity of painted glass made it way from the dissolved abbeys of Germany and Belgium to the Winchester family, which I inherited after marrying William, and may now been seen adorning various rooms in the mansion. One of the main contributors was Cennino Cennini. However, once of my favourite pieces was a panel showing a King from a Tree of Jesse window. The work of art was created circa 1210. Another priceless antiquity I loved dearly was the 36-foot-tall stained-glass window, depicting 36 scenes from the same century, which tells the legend of the Antichrist. These clerestory windows made my home look like some capacious church. At intervals, I had been haunted by the recollection of the gossip about the hidden treasure, but the secret was to be found somewhere in the enigmatical windows of my home. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
One fine autumn morning, I had strolled out before breakfast, as far as the gate of my carriage-drive. The path was a little less than a quarter mile from the front door. All civilization is marked by the touch of the arts. The Victorian Garden not only keeps the blood in a healthy glow, and the brain active in its knowledge, but it also expresses a level of artistic ability. My picturesque garden was ablaze with roses, delphiniums, and hollyhocks. It sparked divinity within me, imagination, and harmony. The well-cut lawn, many fine trees, a shady background, and walks, shrubs, and flowers, were the perfect embellishments and finishing touches to the picture of Llanada Villa. Only the finishing touches—but what a charm of added expression and beauty there is in these perfecting strokes! A verdant gate-way arch frames the common walk into a picture view; the long opening of the lawn gives playroom for the sunlight to smile and hide among the shadows of bordering boxwood shrubs and trees; it is amazing how an opening here, in the shrubs, reveals a pretty vista of another angle of the mansion; a flowerbed there, brightens the lawn like a smile on the face of a beauty; a swing suspended from the strong, outstretched arm of the noble tree attracts the children, whose ever-changing groups engage the eye and interests the heart; a delicate foliaged tree, planted on yonder, glows with the light of the afternoon sun, with an airy undulation trembling against the twilight sky, till it seems neither of the Earth or the sky, but a spirit of life wavering between Earth and Heaven! The Decorative Planting of Llanada Villa is the art of picture making and picture framing, by varied forms of vegetation growth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
However, there was something peculiar about this day. The air was cool. The leaves of the giant monkey pine tree above me were not rustling as they usually do. Everything was still. Even the birds were quiet. A low thunder came from the west, warning of an autumn storm. I turned my head and looked up and studied my house as it towered over me. This house is more than just bricks and mortar and wood. It has a soul. Years of secrets are hidden within its walls. What would they be, if the house could tell me, if I could hear the words? There was also a gigantic barn and a carriage house and stables and pastures and orchards and, of course, this Grand Queen Anne Victorian Mansion. As I wandered through the rooms this day, looking at the ceilings and out the tall windows, and into the funny little cabinet that were built into the walls that is when I saw an apparition. I had gone up to my room, but was not yet in bed, when I heard someone at the door, and went to it, thinking that it might be the chambermaid. On opening the door, I saw no one; but on going a few steps along the passage, I saw the figure of a tall lady, dressed in black, standing at the head of the stairs. After a few moments she descended the stairs, and I followed her for a short distance, feeling curious about what it could be. I had only a small piece of candle, and it suddenly burnt itself out; and, being unable to see more, I went back to my room. The figure was that of a tall lady, dressed in black of a soft woollen material, judging from the slight sound in moving. The face was hidden by a handkerchief held in the right hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
This is all I noticed then; but on further occasion, when I was able to observe her more closely, I saw the upper part of the left side of the forehead, and a little of the hair above. Her left hand was nearly hidden by her sleeve and a fold of her dress. As she held it down a portion of a widow’s cuff was visible on both writs, so that the whole impression was that of a lady in a widow’s weeds. There was no cap on the head but a general effect of blackness suggested a bonnet, with a long veil or hood. She is seldom seen but the rustle of her dress is often heard by servants as she crosses several of the living rooms, apparently searching for her errant husband who seduced and ran off with his wife’s younger sister in the late 1880s, leaving Agnus and her baby girl to seek refuge and employment in my home before disappearing. It is suspected she and her daughter died of poisoning. My silver used to be stored one of the rooms she is seen, and a footman was employed to sleep here and guard it. One night, when the footman had turned in to sleep, he was approached by a very pale-looking lady in black who asked him for some water. Thinking it was one of the mansion guests, he turned to get her some when he remembered he was locked in and no visitor could have possibly entered. When he turned back, the apparition had disappeared. It is thought her longing for water suggest that he was poisoned. During the next two years—from 1888 to 1890—I aw the figure; at first at long intervals, and afterwards at shorter, but I only mentioned these appearances to one friend, who did not speak of them to anyone. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
During this period, as far as we know, there were only three appearances to anyone else. The first, in the summer of 1890, was to my niece Daisy, when the figure was thought to be a housemaid who had called at the house, and no further curiosity was aroused. My niece was coming down the stairs rather late for dinner at 6.30 pm, it then being quite light, when she saw the figure cross the hall in front of her. The apparition said, “You don’t think anything happened to her, do you?” Then she passed into the drawing room. Diasy then asked the rest of us, already seated at dinner, “Who was that chambermaid, whom I just saw going into the drawing room, looking for?” She was told that there was no such person, and a servant was sent to look; but the drawing room was empty, and she was sure no one had come in. Daisy persisted that she had seen a talk figure in black, with some white about it; but nothing was thought of the matter. The second appearance, in the autumn of 1890, was seen by the housemaid about 10 p.m., she declaring that someone had got into the house, her description agreeing fairly with what I had seen; but as on searching no one was found, her story received no credit. On or about December 15, 1890, it was seen in the drawing room by Mr. Hansen and his son. They were playing outside the terrace when they saw the figure in the drawing room close to the window, and ran in to see who it could be that was crying so bitterly. They found no one in the drawing room, and the parlour-maid told them that no one had come into the house. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
There was a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Certain spots in my home were almost forbidden territory, as many have learned at considerable cost. There were also hints of certain marvellous transformations leading to bodily immortality—of a sort—on this Earth. The halls of the east wind were reputedly connected by hidden tunnel, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. The room I entered was darkened against the afternoon sun, an errant breeze scampered through the lounge and was gone. I waited, alert, a grim, sad curve to my lips. There was a soft tread in the dining room, the whisper of cloth against cloth, the quiet squeak of a floorboard. The morning room, at an oblique angle to the foyer and separated from the lobby by an arc, was not touched by a single light that glowed from the front door, and the soft footfalls turned to the morning room from the dining room, seeking the haven of darkness. When the steps were halfway across the room, I snapped on the light. It was soft, dispelling little of the night around it, but to the black-cloaked figure revealed on the edge of its luminescence, it glowed bright as the heart of a star. The first time I spoke to this apparition was on 27 January 1891. I opened the drawing-room door softly and went in, standing just by it. She came in past me and walked to the sofa and stood still there, so I went up to her an asked if I could help her. She moved, and I thought she was going to speak, but she only gave a slight gasp and moved towards the door. Jut by the door I spoke to her again, but she seemed as if she were quite unable to speak. She walked into the hall, then by the side door she seemed to disappear as before. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
During the next few days, the only noises I heard were those of slight pushes against my bedroom door, accompanied by footsteps; and if I looked out on hearing these sounds, I invariably saw the figure. Her footstep was very light, you could hardly hear it, except on the wood floors, and then only like a person walking softly with thin boots on. One evening, I went into the drawing room where Diasy was sitting, about nine in the evening, and sat down on a couch close to the bow window. A few minutes later, as I sat reading, I saw the figure come in at the open door, cross the room and take up a position closed behind the couch where I was. I was astonished that no one else in the room saw her, as she was so very distinct to me. She stood behind the couch for about half an hour, and then as usual walked to the door. I went after her, on the excuse of getting a book, and saw her pass along the hall, until she came to the garden door, where she disappeared. I spoke to her as she passed the front of the stairs, but she did not answer, although as before she stopped and seemed as though about to speak. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in my hushed mansion, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly staring eyes that never shut. I shivered as the cracked stroke of the thirteen o’clock sounded from the belfry. The uncertain hall now before me was known to me haunted, but I took the risk and walked down the south hall where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal ghostly faces eyed me closely and curiously. And the shadows were so hideous and incredible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
The doctrines of Victorian Times promulgated with the notions of purgatory and its purging fires. However, if there is no such place, then ghost could hardly claim it as their home. That is why there is a strong tendency, among orthodox church people, to dispense with ghost altogether or to treat them as manifestations of the devil alone. Yet they cannot be banished from the Earth. Ghosts are effective in detecting the murderer, in disposing their estates, in rebuking injurious executors, in visiting and counselling wives and children, in forewarning them of such and such courses, with other matters of like sort. The late seventeenth and early eighteen centuries were the periods in which pamphlet were issues revealing the latest ghostly manifestation; they were generally entitled “Strange and Extraordinary News From…” and their content was attested by numerous witnesses. 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/
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
Going Beyond the Build means exceeding client expectations. Our team of professionals specialize in every aspect of a Design + Build experience.
The Millhaven Difference
- Unique approach, end to end services in-house
- Transparency, organization and communication
- Live and accurate budget monitoring, no financial surprises
- High standards of quality & proven trade partners
- Clearly defined systems of execution and expectations
- 8 person team of professionals assigned to each project
- Customized software for total project management
- Going BEYOND the BUILD in every way
A custom-built home by Millhaven Homes provides buyers with that exquisite living experience one is seeking. These homes have many windows that flood the space with natural light, allowing the owner to enjoy postcard picture views. Soaring ceilings make your new home look and feel more open and spacious. A custom-built home by Millhaven Homes provides buyers with that exquisite living experience one is seeking.
Some homes are even located on tree farms, allowing the homeowners to enjoy lush landscaping and a restort style estate which makes rest and relax a charm. Millhaven Homes offers uncompromising quality making a Millhaven Home a truly remarkable find.
The outdoor living spaces, and options like an outdoor fireplace, make al-fresco dining an option year-round. Get started today by telling us what you’re wanting and we can schedule an initial consultation. https://millhavenhomes.com/
Strange Stories of Haunting
In the late 19th century, the Santa Clara Valley presented sweeping vistas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for me to begin my building project, which I did with steadfast determination. I purchased an eighteen-room farm house, immediately hired carpenters to work in shifts around the clock, and within a few short years my farmhouse grew into a nine-story mansion! The estate eventually grew to 734 acres of farmland, which included orchards of apricots, plums, and walnut trees to supplement my income. I was at first happy in my residence, but soon became alarmed by the frequent opening and shutting of doors during the day and night. The house also seemed to echo a cry when it was sad or injured. However, usually by the next day, damages to the house would remarkable be repaired. I feared that there were “irregularities” on part of the servants, but having made the strictest enquiries I was disabused of that notion. Fearing that a stranger had obtained the keys of those house, I arranged for the key to the massive front door that was made of solid gold and the keys for the other 2,000 doors to be changed. However, the noise of closing, or slamming, door continued as before. There were other unusual events. I saw quite clearly for a moment a vision of a wide, dark expanse at night, with a fresh wind blowing, and in the midst lonely figure—how employed, I could not tell. Perhaps I would have seen more had not the picture been broken by the sudden surge of a gust of wind against my casement, so sudden that it made me look up, just in time to see the white glint of a seabird’s wing somewhere outside the dark panes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
“But what is this? Goodness! what force the wind can get up in a few minutes! What a tremendous gust! There! I knew that window-fastening was no use! Ah! I thought so—both candles out. It was enough to tear the room to pieces.” The first thing was to get that window shut. I was struggling with the small casement, and felt almost as if I were pushing back a sturdy burglar, so strong was the pressure. It slacked all at once, and the window banged to and latched itself. Now to relight the candles and see what damage, if any, had been done. No, nothing seemed amiss; no glass even was broken in the casement. The wind went on moaning and rushing past the house, at times rising to a cry so desolate that it might have made fanciful people feel quite uncomfortable; even the unimaginative, I thought after a quarter of an hour, might be happier without it. The light was obscure, conveying an impression of gathering storm, late winter evening, and slight cold rain. On this bleak stage at first no actor was visible. Then, in the distance, two guests reported seeing a bobbing black object appear; a moment more, and it was a man running and jumping, clambering over the floor, and every few seconds looking eagerly back. The nearer he came the more obvious it was that he was not only anxious, but even terribly frightened, though his face was not to be distinguished. He was, moreover, almost at the end of his strength. On he came; each successive obstacle seemed to cause him more difficulty than the last. “Will he get over this next one?” said one of the guests; “it seems a little higher than the others.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Yes; half climbing, half throwing himself, he did get over, and fell all in a heap on the other side (the side nearest to the spectators). There, as if really unable to get up again, he remained crouching under the t, table looking up in an attitude of painful anxiety. So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner had been shown; but now there began to be see, in the hall, a little flicker of something light-coloured moving to and fro with great swiftness and irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in a “snuff-coloured” coat; the figure had been glimpsed both inside and outside the house. In addition, the servants, assembled in the kitchen for a mean, observed a woman in a dark dress of silk rushing past them and going out into the yard. A handyman, coming through the door at the same time, had seen nothing. However, there was something about her motion which made the servants unwilling to see her close quarters. She would stop, raise arms, bow herself toward the floor, the float across the room and back again; and then, rising toward the ceiling, once more continue her course forward at a speed that was startling and terrifying. The moment came when the woman was hovering about from left to right only a few yards beyond the floor where the runner lay hiding. After two or three ineffectual castings hither and thither she came to a stop, stood on the floor, with arms raised high, and then started straight towards the ceiling. As the candles blew out, the servants went to relight them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
The scrapping of match on the box and the glare of light must have startled something of the night. The guests and servants her claws scurry across the floor from with much rustling. When I tried to question them, they had a kind of obscure suspiciousness, as if there were something amiss with anyone too much interested in the specters. However, they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour, I resolved to gather a brief explanation of the night’s disturbances. The descriptions of the events all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in Llanada Villa. I, then, knew that the rumours of devil-worship where partly justified by a peculiar secret cult which had gained force here and engulfed the servants and several of the orthodox churches. Waldemar Eberling, the cook, was numb, unable to walk or even talk. Everything that happened around him was impossible, the stuff of nightmares. The guests and other servants looked like Musselmanner, the walking dead. For days, they shuffled around, already dead in spirit, until they starved themselves to death. I lived with the pain. I imagined that a tiny fire was burning in my abdomen, slowly consuming me. I stared at the paining of a wheat field. Although the sky looked ominously dark, the wheat was brightly rendered in great broad strokes. A path cut through the fields and crows flew overheard. “I like Van Gogh,” I thought to myself, as I tried to detect a rhythm in the surges of abdominal pain. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
I liked the painting because it was so bright that it was almost frightening. And the road going through the field did not go anywhere. It ends in the field. And the crows are flying around like vultures. This painting, Wheatfields with Blackbirds was metaphorical. It held a special meaning for me. It is thirteen o’ clock and the mansion is death quiet. The sharp shadows seem to the hardest objects in the room. The gasoliers burn steadily in the hall outside. I looked out into the hallway, but I could only see the far green wall. Across the hall, someone begins to scream, and there is a shuffle of servants. The screaming turns into begging and whining. The parlormaid finally comes into the drawing room, says, “Mrs. Winchester, would you like a cup of tea?” “Why does the man across the hall scream so?” I ask, but the parlormaid is already edging out of the room. “It’s just the wind, Mrs. Winchester.” The incessant whining disgusted me. However, the screams of the “wind” recede as I hurtle through the dark corridors of my labyrinth. The huge mansion is cold and dark. Suddenly, I see two entrances before me. As the World melts behind me, I step into the coal-black doorway. In the darkness I hear an alarm, a bone-jarring clangour. A shadow crossed the moon. I reflected upon how so many people said my home was “interesting.” Shaking my head. I recalled how interesting is often another word for dangerous. There is an old Chinese curse to that effect. I stopped walking when I felt something nudge at my shoulder. I glared, but there was nothing there. “You do not know what it is like,” I said to myself darkly. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
While laying in the Crystal Bedroom, I plainly heard the footsteps of a man, with plodding step, walking towards the foot of my bed. I sprang out of the bed, thoroughly alarmed by the sound, and took refuge in the Daisy Bedroom; I returned to the Crystal Bedroom with a chambermaid, and a light, but nothing could be seen. The sound of plodding footsteps was subsequently heard in my room on more than one occasion; my maid’s room was similarly affected. Another abnormal sound also seemed to emanate from within the house. A hollow murmuring that seemed to possess the whole house; it was independent of wind, being equally heard on the calmest night. On a subsequent nigh I heard the front door being slammed with such a force that the walls of my bedroom—above the hall—shook perceptibly. On investigation, the front door was locked and bolted as usual. The unusual episodes increased in strength and frequency. The sounds began before I went to bed, and with intermissions were heard till after broad day in the morning. The noise now included that of human voices. A shrill female voice would begin, and then two others with deeper and manlike tones seemed to join in the discourse. I was laying on the bed one night, when I heard the most loud, deep, tremendous noise, which seemed to rush and fall with infinite velocity on the lobby floor. This was followed by a shrill and dreadful shriek and repeated three or four times. Still, I harboured doubts about any supernatural agency. For several nights the servants stayed up nights with their revolvers. They stationed themselves in different rooms, and waited. The noises, of shrieks and footsteps, began as before. Both men rushed out of their rooms, pistols at the ready, but nothing was visible. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Llanada Villa is a haunted mansion which is over 140 years old. Ghost here may be seen as a bridge of light between the past and the present, or between the living and the dead. They represent continuity, albeit of a spectral kind. These ghosts are uncanny. They move through walls, and cannot be touched by sword or spear. These ghosts in Llanada Villa are deemed to be the souls immured in purgatory, pleading for prayers to absolve them from punishment, or to protect the mansion. Some of these ghosts are the spirit of saints sent from God with news of a paradise. They can, in certain circumstances, be the machinations of the Devil. Devils many times appeare to humans and affright them out of their wits sometimes walking at noon day, sometimes at nights, counterfeiting dead men’s ghost. In any event, whatever their origin, they are part of the machinery of theology and of the supernatural; they are emanations from the eternal World of bliss and pain beyond the grave. They are an integral part of the communion of the living and the dead that The Winchester Mystery House represents.
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/
The New World Under Construction
Nazism is an economic and political issue, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds. The psychological aspect of Nazism, its human basis suggests two problems: the character structure of those people to whom it appealed, and the psychological characteristics of the ideology that made it such an effective instrument with regard to those people. In considering the psychological basis for the success of Nazism this differentiation has to be made at the outset: one part of the population bowed to the Nazi regime without any strong resistance, but also without becoming admirers of the Nazi ideology and political practice. Another part was deeply attracted to the new ideology and fanatically attached to the new ideology and fanatically attached to those who proclaimed it. The first group consisted mainly of the working class and the liberal and Catholic bourgeoisie. In spite of an excellent organization, especially among the working class, these groups, although continuously hostile to Nazism from its beginning up to 1933, did not show the inner resistance one might have expected as the outcome of their political convictions. Their will to resist collapsed quickly and since then they have caused little difficulty for the regime (excepting, of course, the small minority which has fought heroically against Nazism during all these years). Being a member of the SS in a society like Nazi Germany was a matter of considerable significance. In the Soviet Union, another revolutionary society, people who rose into the elite were called “new people.” They were people of the future, liberated from old norms, and distinct from the nobility of the old regime, who had attained their rank and privileges through birth or wealth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The SS were the new people of Nazi Germany. However, their distinction was based less on class (as in the USSR) than on the perception that they had especially good blood. This was their entrée into the elite of the new World under construction. Early in the war, Otto Meckelburg serves as an adjutant in the Death’s Head regiment, which oversaw the administration of Germany’s concentration camps. No “task was ever too much” for Mr. Mechelburg, his boss wrote in 1940; he was always “fresh and eager to work.” Mr. Meckelburg participated in the Germans’ early campaigns in Poland and the west, and later at the Eastern Front and in Yugoslavia. He was decorated a number of times during the war and moved up the ranks. In September 1942, he was made company commander in the notorious Prince Eugen Division, whose counterinsurgency operations involved numerous war crimes, many against civilians. Whatever the precise nature of his wartime deeds, Mr. Meckelburg would be repeatedly lauded by his superiors for “particularly successful leadership” and promoted. The officer urging his promotion to Sturmbannfuhrer in 1943 described him as “open, direct, and straight-as-an-arrow,” with an “impeccably SS attitude.” He had, another assessor observed in 1944, an “instinct for the possibilities of a given situation.” Psychologically, this readiness to submit to the Nazi regime seems to be due mainly to a state of inner tiredness and resignation, which, is characteristic of the individual in the present era even in democratic countries. In Germany one additional condition was present as far as the working class was concerned: the defeat it suffered after the first victories in the revolution of 1918. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The working class had entered the postwar period with strong hopes for the realization of socialism or last least for a definite rise in its political, economic, and social position; but, whatever the reasons, it had witnessed an unbroken succession of defeats, which brought about the complete disappointments of all its hopes. By the beginning of 1930 the fruits of its initial victories were almost completely destroyed and the result was a deep feeling of resignation, of disbelief in their leaders, of doubt about the value of any kind of political organization and political activity. They still remained members of their respective parties and, consciously, continued to believe in their political doctrines; but deep within themselves many had given up any hope in the effectiveness of political actions. An additional incentive for the loyalty of the majority of the population to the Nazi government because effect after Mr. Hitler came into power. For millions of people Mr. Hitler’s government then became identical with “Germany.” Once he held the power of the government, fighting him implied shutting oneself out of the community of Germans; when other political parties were abolished and the Nazi party “was” Germany, opposition to it meant opposition to Germany. It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group. However much a German citizen may be opposed to the principles of Nazim, if he has to choose between being alone and feeling that he belongs to Germany, most persons will choose the latter. It can be observed in many instances that persons who are not Nazis nevertheless defend Nazism against criticism of foreigners because they feel that an attack on Nazis is an attack on Germany. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The fear of isolation and the relative weakness of moral principles help any party to win the loyalty of a large sector of the population once that part has captured the power of the state. This consideration results in an axiom which is important for the problems of political propaganda: any attack on Germany as such, any defamatory propaganda concerning “the Germans” (such as the “Hun” symbol of the last war), only increases the loyalty to those who are not wholly identified with the Nazi system. This problem, however, cannot be solved basically by skillful propaganda but only by the victory in all countries of one fundamental truth: that ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief. In contrast to the negative or resigned attitude of the working class and of the liberal and Catholic bourgeoisie, the Nazi ideology was ardently greeted by the lower strata of the middle class, composed of small shopkeepers, artisans, and white-collar workers. In fact, 90 percents of doctors were connected to the Nazi Party. Members of the older generation among this class formed the more passive mass basis; their sons and daughters were the more active fighters. For them the Nazi ideology—its spirit of blind obedience to a leader and of hatred against racial and political minorities, its craving for conquest and domination, its exaltation of the German people and the “Nordic Race”—had a tremendous emotional appeal, and it was this appeal which won them over and made them into ardent believers in and fighters for the Nazi cause. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The answer to the question why the Nazi ideology was so appealing to the lower middle class has to be sought for in the social character of the lower middle class. Their social character was markedly different from that of the working class, of the higher strata of the middle class, and of the nobility and the upper classes. As a matter of fact, certain features were characteristic for this part of the middle class throughout its history: their love of the strong, hatred of the weak, their pettiness, hostility, thriftiness with feelings as well as with money, and essentially their asceticism. Their outlook on life was narrow, they suspected and hated the stranger, and they were curious and envious of their acquaintances, rationalizing their envy as moral indignation; their whole life was based on the principle of scarcity—economically as well as psychologically. To say that the social character of the lower middle class differed from that of the working class does not imply that this character structure was not present in the working class also. However, it was typical for the lower middle class, while only a minority of the working class exhibited the same character structure in a similarly clear-cut fashion; the one or the other trait, however, in a less intense form, like enhanced respect of authority or thrift, was to be found in most members of the working class too. On the other hand it seems that a great part of the white-collar workers—probably the majority—more closely resembled the character structure of the manual workers (especially those in big factories) than that of the “old middle class,” which did not participate in the rise of monopolistic capitalism but was essentially threatened by it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Although it is true that the social character of the lower middle class had been the same long before the war of 1914, it is also true that the events after the war intensified the very traits to which the Nazi ideology had its strong appeal: its craving for submission and its lust for power. There were, after all, times of spiritual malaise, of mistrust and heightened suspicion. In an atmosphere of determined, willful refusal to acknowledge basic facts, who could be blamed for imagining that evil was lurking about. It is precisely because reason is universal and transcends all nation borders, that the philosopher who follows reason is a citizen of the World; humans are their objects—not this or that person, or this or that nation. The World is one’s country, not the place where one was born. Humans fear thought more than they fear anything else on Earth—more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees a human being, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the Universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the World, and the chief glory of humans. However, if thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds humans back—fear lest their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear least they themselves should prove less worthy of respect than they have supposed themselves to be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
“Should the working human think freely about property? Then what will become of us, the rich? Should young men and women think freely about sex? Then what will become of morality? Should soldiers think freely about war? Then what will become of military discipline? Away with thought! Back into the shades of prejudice, lest property, morals, and war should be endangered! Better men should be stupid, slothful, and oppressive than that their thoughts should be free. For if their thoughts were free, they might not think as we do. And at all costs this disaster must be averted.” So the opponents of thought argue in the unconscious depths of their souls. And so they act in their churches, their schools, and their universities. For some philosophers, the capacity to disobey is rooted, not in some abstract principle, but in the most real experience there is—in the love of life. This love of life shines through their writings as well as through the persons. It is a rare quality today, and especially rare in the very countries where humans live in the midst of plenty. Many confuse thrill with joy, excitement with interest, consuming with being. The necrophilous slogan “Long live death,” while consciously used only by the fascists, fills the heats of many people living in the lands of plenty, although they are not aware of it in themselves. It seems that in this fact lies of one the reasons in which explain why the majority of people are resigned to accept nuclear war and the ensuing destruction of civilization and to take so few steps to prevent this catastrophe. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Some philosophers, on the contrary, fight against the threatening slaughter, not because they are pacifist or because some abstract principle is involved, but precisely because they are humans who love live. For the very same reason many have no use for those voices which love to harp on the evilness of humanity, in fact thus saying more about themselves and their only gloomy moods than about humans. While these steadfast individuals may not be sentimental romantics, they tend to be hard-headed, critical, caustic realist; they are aware of the depth of evil and stupidity to be found in the heart of humans, but they do not confuse this fact with an alleged innate corruption which serves to rationalize the outlook of those who are too gloomy to believe in man’s gift to create a World in those which they can feel themselves to be at home. Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. The Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. However, out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart. However, those who feel that life on this planet would be a life in prison if it were not for the windows onto a greater World beyond; for those to whom a belief in human’s omnipotence seems arrogant, who desire rather the Stoic freedom that comes of mastery over the passions than the Napoleonic domination that sees the kingdoms of this World at its feet—in a word, to humans who do not find Man an adequate object of their worship, the pragmatist’s World will seem narrow and petty, robbing life of all that gives it value, and making Man himself smaller by depriving the Universe which he contemplates of all its splendour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
With the increasing development of capitalism, not only economically but psychologically, the spiritual, humanistic aims of socialism were replaced by those of the victorious capitalist system—the aims of maximal economic efficiency, maximal production and consumption. This misinterpretation of socialism as a purely economic movement, along with an acceptance of the nationalization of the means of production as an aim in itself, occurred both in the right and left wings of the socialist movement. The primary aim of the reformist leaders of the socialist movement in Europe was the elevation of the economic status of the worker within the capitalist system. Their most radical measure in this effort was the nationalization of certain big industries. Only recently has it been realized that the nationalization of an enterprise is in itself not the realization of socialism, and that to be managed by a publicly appointed bureaucracy. The leaders of the Soviet Union evaluated socialism also by the standards of capitalism and their principal claim for the Soviet system is that “socialism” can produce more effectively and abundantly than “capitalism.” Both wings of socialism forget that Mr. Marx aimed at a humanly different society, not only at a more prosperous one. His concept of socialism, despite changes in the development of his own thinking, was principally that of an unalienated society in which every citizen would be an active and responsible member of the community, participating in the control of all social and economic arrangements and not, as the Soviet practice, a “number,” fed with ideologies and controlled by a small bureaucratic minority. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
For Mr. Marx, socialism was the control of society from below, by its members; not from above, by a bureaucracy. The Soviet Union may be called state capitalism, or anything else; one claim this managerial, bureaucratic system can not make is that of being “socialism” in Marx’s sense. No better answer can be given to this claim than Mr. Schumpeter’s statement that there is “between the true meaning of Marx’s message and Bolshevist practice and ideology at least as great a gulf as there was between the religion of humble Gallileans and the practice and ideology of the princes of the Church or the warlords of the Middle Ages.” While the Soviet system has borrowed the concept of the nationalization of the means of production and of over-all planning from Marxist socialism, it nonetheless shares many features with contemporary capitalism. The development of twentieth-century capitalism has led to an ever-growing centralization in industrial production. The big corporations are becoming increasingly the center of production in the steel, automobile, and chemical industries, in oil, food, banking, movies, and television. Only in certain branches of production, like the clothing industry, do we still find the nineteenth-century picture of a great number of small and highly competitive enterprises. Today’s big enterprises are directed by vast and hierarchically structured bureaucracies, which administer the enterprise according to the principles of profit maximization, yet are relatively independent of the millions of stockholders who are the legal owners. The same centralization has taken place in government, in the armed forces, and even in scientific research. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
While “private enterprises” decries ideologically all socialist tendencies, it is eager to accept large direct and indirect grants by the state. The same development has led to important changes with regard to free competition and free market. The free market and free competition in the nineteenth-century sense are phenomena of the past. Even though the Western system retain some measure of competition, overt and hidden price agreements between the big corporations, state grants, et cetera, have (in spite of anti-monopoly laws in the United States of America) greatly restricted competition and the function of the free market. Assuming, for a moment, that the tendency toward centralization develops further, and that there will eventually be only one big corporation producing, respectively, automobiles, steel, films, et cetera, the picture of “capitalist” economy would not be so drastically different from the Russian socialist economy. There is of course an increasing element in state planning in Western capitalism, not only through massive state intervention, but also in the sense that the Atomic Energy Commission is the largest industrial enterprise in the United States of America, and that the armament industry, although in private hands, produces a great mass of weapons according to plans made by the state. This, however, does not imply that there is over-all planning in the United States of America beyond arms production, or even a plan for the transition from an armament to a peace economy. The mode of production in contemporary capitalism is that of large conglomerations of workers and clerks who work under the orders of the managerial bureaucracies. They are part of a vast production machine which, in order to run at all, must run smoothly, without friction, without interruption. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The individual worker or clerk becomes a cog in this machine; one’s functions and activities are determined by the whole structure of the organization in which one works. In the large enterprises, legal ownership of the means of production has become separated from its management, and has lost importance. The managers do not have the qualities of the old owners—individual initiative, daring, risk-taking—but the qualities of the bureaucrat—lack of individuality and imagination, impersonality, caution. They administer things and persons, and relate to persons as to things. The giant corporations, which control the economic—and to a large degree the political—destiny of the country, constitute the very opposite of the democratic process; they represent power without control by those whom they rule. Aside from the industrial bureaucracy, the bast majority of the population is administered by still other bureaucracies. First, there is the governmental bureaucracy, (including that of the armed forces) which influences and direct the lives of many millions in one form or another. More and more, the industrial, military and governmental bureaucracies are becoming intertwined, both in their activities and, increasingly, in their personnel. With the development of ever greater enterprises, unions also have developed into big bureaucratic machines in which the individual member has very little to say. Many union chiefs are managerial bureaucrats, just as the industrial chiefs are. All these bureaucracies have little authentic vision; and, due to the very nature of bureaucratic administration, this has to be so. They function rather like electronic computers, into which all the data have been fed and which—according to certain principles—make the “decisions.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
When humans are transformed into things and managed like things, their managers themselves become things; and things have no will, no vision, no plan. With the bureaucratic management of people, the democratic process becomes transformed into a ritual. Whether it is a stockholders meeting, or a political election, or a union meeting, the individual has lost almost all power to participate actively in the making of decision. Especially in the political sphere, elections become more and more reduced to plebiscites in which the voter can express preference for one of two slates of professional politicians. The best that can be said for that is that he is governed with his consent. However, the means used to bring about this consent are those of suggestion and manipulation and, with all that, the most fundamental decisions—those of foreign policy which involve peace and war—are made by small groups, which the average citizen hardly even knows of. Not only is the individual managed and manipulated in the sphere of production, but also in the sphere of consumption, which allegedly is the one in which one can express one’s free choice. Whether it is the consumption of food, clothing, liquor, cigarettes, or of films and television programs, a powerful suggestion apparatus is employed for two purposes: first, to increase constantly the appetite for new commodities, and second, to direct these appetites into the channels most profitable for industry. The very size of the capital investment in the consumer goods industry and the competition between a few giant enterprises makes it necessary not to leave consumption to chance, nor to leave the consumer a free choice of whether one want to be more and what one wants to buy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
One’s appetites have to be constantly whetted; one’s tastes have to be manipulated, managed, and made predictable. Humans are transformed into the “consumer,” the eternal suckling whose one wish is to consumer more and “better” things. To maximize its own take, the kleptocratic government would ideally to drive everyone down to the subsistence or quiescence utility level. However, such a government, provided it is rational, will recognize the need to give the higher-skilled people sufficient marginal incentives to reveal their skills, because this increases its net extraction from the economy. Therefore, it will keep only the least-skilled person at the lowest utility level, and allow the successively higher-skilled people to enjoy successively higher utility levels. Casual observation confirms that predatory governments do indeed treat the poor harshly. (A benevolent government will also have to tolerate some inequality in the interests of revelation of high skills, but it will keep even the worst-off person above the subsistence level. In fact a government with an extremely egalitarian—so-called Rawlsian—objective function wants to maximize the utility of the least-well-off person, to the extent permitted by the information and resource constraints.) Lowering the marginal tax rate on any one person reduces the revenue that the government can get from all those with higher skills. This is costly to the government: directly so for the kleptocratic government, and indirectly for the benevolent government because that tightens its revenue constraint and makes it harder to deliver utilities to citizens. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The calculation of the optimal tax schedule balances, at each skill level, the incentive effect of lowering the marginal tax rate for people at that skill level and the revenue loss from the people with skill levels higher than that. However, the trade-off disappears at the highest skill level that exists in the population, because then there is no higher skill level and therefore no revenue loss. Therefore the incentive effect dominates at the top skill level, and the optimal marginal tax rate is zero there. Benevolent governments usually have regard for equality and fairness. Therefore they are reluctant to lower the marginal tax rates on the most well-off people. They will let the marginal rate go to zero only at the very end, or may even choose to disregard this aspect of optimality in the interests of fairness. However, a kleptocratic government does not care about equality or fairness. Therefore we should expect such a government to treat the richest people in society especially well. They will have to contribute to the government’s coffers, to be sure, but at the margin they will be allowed to earn more income and keep it. Again causal observation supports the result that predatory dictators are often best buddies with their richest citizens. In view of the fact that all human beings organize their experience and actions through the medium of verbal categories, and that social science concepts are usually as accessible to the ordinary citizen as to the social scientist, it probably should be expected that descriptive and analytical concepts would lead to revisions of self-conception and social distinction among the human beings to whom applied. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Account must be taken of the common implication of citizens and scientists alike, not only in the methods, findings, and concepts of social science, but also in the interests which motivate social studies. It is not as if a special class of beings called scientists withdrew from the rest of humanity, and became mere spectators of life, knowledge of which they gathered and stored for its own sake. Moreover, the extent of resources made available for social science in general tends to vary with importance accorded to social science in a community, as against the alternative uses to which the same resources might be put. The economics of research and teaching quite clearly reveal the relative values placed upon particular problems. The sociologists of knowledge have for some time been exploring the interests which have animated the work of certain scholars in various periods, places, and settings. Thus far, however, they have only begun to explore the implications which general adoption by their own community of a scientific interest toward itself would have for their own specialty. To recognize that social facts are the creation of the persons observed, that neither persons nor institutions are permanently given but are in constant process of reconstruction, and that the verbal categories by which self and others are construed are the materials of which social organization is constructed, leads to a conception of human nature and the social order which is less a substantive description than a methodology. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
This is the ultimate outcome of the interactional approach of social psychology, which was first developed in studies of personality in the family. The evolution of social science is not in the direction of permanently definitive statements about human nature and society, but toward the specification of the methods whereby human nature and society come to be what they are. Social theory thus becomes only suspended social action. The famous mot of Poincare, that natural scientists talk about their results while social scientists talk about their methods, is rendered pointless when it becomes evident that the methods of social science are, in this sense, its most valuable findings. Psychopathological offenders seek to create a counterfeit of the truth. If the self-actualized Christian is ignorant of the tactics of the enemy in this way, one lets go the true spirit-action (or allows it to sink into disuse) and follows the counterfeit spiritual feelings, thinking one is walking after the spirit of God all the time. When this true spirit-action ceases, the psychopathological offenders suggest that God now guides through the “renewed mind,” which is an attempt to hide their workings and the human’s disuse of one’s spirit. Upon the cessation of the spirit’s cooperation with the Holy Spirit, with counterfeit “spirit” feelings taking place in the body, what follows is counterfeit light to the mind, reasoning, judging, et cetera—the human thus walking after mind and body, and not after the spirit, with the true illumination of the mind which comes from the full operation of the Holy Spirit. To further interfere with the true spirit of life, the deceiving spirits seek to counterfeit the action of the spirit in burden and aguish. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The start is by giving a fictitious “divine love” to the person, the faculty receiving it being the affections. When these affections are grasped fully by the deceivers, the sense of love passes away, and the human thinks that one has lost God and all communion with God. Then follow feelings of constraint and restraint, which will develop into acute suffering—which the believer thinks is in the spirit, and of God. Now one goes by these feelings, calling them “anguish in the spirit,” “groaning in the spirit,” et cetera, while the deceiving spirits, through these sufferings given by them in the affections, compel the human to do their will. The sacramental element in Protestantism is important. For this element is the one essential element of every religion, namely, the presence of the divine before our acting and striving, in a “structure of grace” and in the symbols expressing it. The experience of the holy must be mediated in a concrete and, therefore, sacramental fashion, for the sacramental is nothing else than some reality becoming the bearer of the holy in a special way and under special circumstances. The largest sense of the term “sacramental” denotes everything in which the Spiritual Presence has been experience; in a narrower sense, it denotes particular objects and acts in which a Spiritual community experiences the Spiritual Presence; and in the narrowest sense, it merely refers to some “great” sacraments in the performance of which the Spiritual Community actualizes itself. Two factors are discernible in every sacrament: a relationship to nature, and a participation in salvation history. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Although, in principle, anything from the World of nature may covey the Spiritual Presence, certain elements are specially qualified to act as sacramental symbols. Symbols must participate in that which they symbolize, not merely by an arbitrary connection, but by their very nature. For instance, water has a special power which peculiarly fits it to become a sacramental material. Water, in one hand, is a symbol for the origin of life in the womb of the mother, which is a symbol for the creative source of all things, and on the other hand, it is a symbol of death—the return to the origin of things. Thus, by its very character, water has a necessary relation to baptism. Whatever the explanation of individual elements such as water, the sacramental principle asserts that nature is open to and, in fact, participates in the holy. All physical consciousness of supernatural things, and even undue consciousness of natural things, should be refused, as this diverts the mind from walking after the spirit and sets it upon the bodily sensations. Physical consciousness is also an obstacle to the continuous concentration of the mind, and in a spiritual believer an “attack” of physical “consciousness” made use of by the enemy make break concentration of the mind and bring a cloud upon the spirit. The body should be kept calm, and under full control; excessive laughter should be avoided, and all “rushing” which rouses the physical life to the extent of dominating mind and spirit. Believers who desire to be “spiritual” and “full age” in the life in God should avoid excess, extravagance, and extremes in all things. “Natural sacraments” swiftly fall prey to the demonic, and the only way they can escape demonization is by union with the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Nature has no true sacramental power apart from the history of salvation. Hence, sacraments cannot be manufactured; they “originate when the intrinsic power of a natural object becomes for faith the bearer of sacramental power.” Their origin is linked to the source of all faith, to the Spiritual Presence manifest in Jesus the Christ whose Cross offers the only sure guarantee against the forces of demonization. Since the sacramental principle embraces the whole World of nature and since faith is not restricted by time and places, the question arises: Is the Spiritual Presence bound to any definite sacramental media? Every sacramental act must be subject to the criterion of the New Being in Jesus as the Christ, or demonization would result. Furthermore, sacraments must somehow refer to the central historical and doctrinal symbols of Christianity which have emerged within the history of salvation. However, in the sense that the Spiritual Community may adopt new sacramental symbols, for its entirely possible that a symbol may gradually fade and die, that is, lost its sacramental power. It shall come to pass at the end of days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the top of the mountains; it shall be exalted above the hills; all the nations shall flow into it. And many peoples shall go and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.” God will teach us His ways, and we will walk in His paths; God shall judge between the nations; He shall decide for many peoples. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning forks. Nation shall not life up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. Please be sure to donate to the Sacramento Fire Department. They are not receiving all of their resources and have been proudly serving the community since 1851. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
MAGNOLIA STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA | low $600,000.00s
Now Selling!
Residence Four is a two-story, 3,489 square foot home features four bedrooms, including one suite on the first floor, three and one half bathroom, and a true three-car garage. The covered porch provided a warm entry and the dining room is located right off the entry way.
The Kitchen is connected through the Butler’s Pantry providing ample storage.
The great room and loft upstairs allow for various uses that will suit your family and lifestyle.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier.
Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini! https://cresleigh.com/magnolia-station/residence-4/
The Great Mystery of All is the Inexplicable Items Uncovered
It is truth that there are evil influences from the other World at work on the people in this World. Witchcraft is not easy to define, because it is not, like the major formal religions, a coherent body of belief. However, in Western civilization since prehistoric times there has been a loosely grouped body of magical lore—charms, spells, and so forth—having to do primarily with fertility and infertility, and with health and sickness, as well as a series of more marginal concerns, including foretelling of the future. Early Christians thought of the Devil as the most abominable of all pagan deities; they have him his attributes, his horns, and cloven hooves. That the Devil is an extraordinarily powerful god cannot be doubted. One night, I was sitting in the kitchen, my housemaid Erna, reveled that I was in the clutches of an evil force, and was being shadowed by it in the form of a person. That very night, Erna said, this evil character could not sleep, and would come around my mansion. Two male servants went outside to have a look. There was indeed someone there, who quickly took off Georg said later. The first degree of witchcraft is white magic—charms or spells used for benevolent purposes. Carrying a rabbit’s foot is white magic. Black magic is the second degree of witchcraft. It is used maliciously—and in the seventeenth century black magic was very serious indeed; it was an appeal to the Prince of Evil in order to accomplish evil. The third degree is pact, where the witch is no longer merely invoking the Devil’s assistants through charms and spells, but actually believes one has made a contract to serve him. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
The following day, I sat in a daze all the afternoon pondering recent events. The papers at my desk formed terrible conjectures. I neither could doubt that something hideously serious was closing in around me. Between the phantasms of nightmares and the realities of the objective World a monstrous and unthinkable dimension was roaring in the twilight abysses. I held back conspicuously from discussing the whole affair, as though I was afflicted by a certain fear. I was well aware that there were evil people who conspired to make their neighbours ill or keep them from getting well. These people were those whose wickedness marked them as “slaves to Satan.” Beliefs that neighbours might secretly conspire to do harm to other neighbour’s (or to those neighbours’ families or farms or livestock) could be found in the valley during these times. Witch beliefs have existed and do exist in many parts of the World, they can take quite different forms, and they often erupt in response to abrupt social change and unrest. What link them is their relationship to matter of intimacy and mistrust. Witchcraft conjures up the danger of treacherous attacks from close by and it warns that seeds of destruction are hidden inside human relationships. They prevail in situations where dramatic change has caused the familiar suddenly to appear strange, and even ordinary occurrences—illness, bad luck, accidents, injuries—to gain graver meaning. A death or injury, coming on the heels of other setback, can be perceived as having been not merely accidental but orchestrated by someone, or a conspiracy of someone’s, in secret, behind the scenes. To be sure, even in times of heightened calamity, not every misfortune will be perceived as resulting from witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
However, widespread mistrust may make it more likely. It seemed that someone in my home has been meeting with subterraneous demons, which fueled these attacks. Although, sometimes witchcraft fears can be seen as a cultural idiom of interpersonal and communal conflict, a way of seeing the World and interpreting what happens in it, a search for causes behind causes. Who caused my child to become ill and die? Who is responsible for the death of my husband? Who is responsible for my hogs dying, my cows not giving milk? Accusations of witchcraft are a language of logic for the misfortune cannot be otherwise clarified. While wondering through my mansion, I notice a rectangle of blinding white light. It looked like a doorway into an adjoining World of brightness. I have glimpsed it before. We should remember also that the seventeenth century firmly believed in a dualistic Universe: in a material or visible World, and a spiritual or invisible World. The screaming white abysses flashed before me, and I felt helpless. There was an acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. However, all this vanished withing seconds. I was again in my library, with cases of ancient books. I heard sounds of something veritably inhuman, and rushed to turn on the lights. On the sofa was a man who had been racked by some torment beyond description. He was withering under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the pillows. I scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. I started screaming when a large ghoul suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and fluttered across the room, through the wall. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
When doctors arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers, we discovered one of my carpenters Peter Geschiere was dead. It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had milled Mr. Geschiere. There was virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Besides his death, the worst thing for a while, was that the housemaids were constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things. In my time I had seen soldiers lay dying on the field, fire falling from the sky, and many crushed people. God tests people, to see if evil drags them down or if they are steadfast. God and the Devil are personified beings, dueling cosmic personalities. The Devil can come in through a keyhole. I can see when someone is evil. They are uneasy, and got up to mischief. Whole families, entire villages can be evil; evil people make up a kind of army of the Devil on Earth. Though, we could have Heaven on Earth if we all could just have compassion. However, I am sure if Jesus as the Christ were to come back, people would just crucify him again. In our century and in a country at our cultural standards, a person might appear suggesting that health and wellbeing, sickness and death, accidents and catastrophes occur not in accordance with natural laws but re instead determined by demonic, irrational forces, whose bearers are people in the service of the Devil. Still, often times, there is no evidence of any real mental illness in the sense of a psychosis nor is there any organic illness of the central nervous system. In many of these people who have been bewitched, the doctors have found no evidence of brain trauma or any mental damage, or any change in personality resulting from injury. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
It is not without great vexation that very many persons of both sexes have committed abuses with demons, they have no fear of using their incantations, chants and conjurations and other unspeakable superstitions and acts of sorcery, as well as excesses, crimes and misdeeds to afflict and tore my soul. Workmen found bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognizable as human in a room that had been sealed from all human access. Careful sifting of the debris also uncovered the mingled fragments of many ancient books from my private library and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest they date back to ancient Egypt. Though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purpose baffle all conjecture—found scattered about the room in diverse states of injury. One of these things—which greatly excited me profoundly—is a thin sheet of lead with text scratched on it in tiny letters. The tablet had a curse written on it from the Greco-Roman World. When other walls were torn out, the once sealed spaces between the partition and the house’s east wall were found to contain a ghastly layer of older materials which paralyzed the carpenters with horror. The floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design—above which the debris as piled. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
People around the estate and nearby muttered a great deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer World. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was now no need to exert pressure on them. I have been willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain, even thought I have an odd craving to whisper about those frightful details of Llanada Villa, after the evilly shadowed death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. As bleak and solemn as it is one of the farmers Egon Schmidt often worked at night. He believed that in the third quarter there is decreased gravitational pull and moonlight, and this is considered a resting period for planets. As a result, Mr. Schmidt used the night to fertilize, deeply water, prude, and harvest crops. However, he would often catch renegades and often times would execute them. It is rumoured that Mr. Schmidt, was a very skilled farmer, but as an executioner, he was inexperienced and that it once took him thirteen blows to sever a head with an axe. The ghost of one of his victims now haunts Llanada Villa, carrying his mutilated head. Every since the room was excavated, the ghost has been seen carrying his mangled head under his arm, his face bearing the pain and horror he suffered when the executioner delivered the final blow that took his life. As well, the ghost of a woman has also been reported drifting across the mansion’s grounds. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
According to Mr. Schmidt, this all started when he took a last look before starting homeward. A faint yellow light in the west showed the links, on which a few figures moving toward the mansion were visible, near the miniature Tower of Babel, the lights of the barn, and the fruit orchards. The wind was bitter from the north. One last look behind, to showed him the prospect of company converging on his walk. There was an appearance of them running after him. So, at least, Mr. Schmidt thought, and decided that he almost certainly did not know them and was in danger. In his own words, “Now I saw some very foul fiends coming over the field to meet me. What should I do not?” he thought, “when I looked back, I caught sight of three black figures, and saw that they had horns and wing. I wondered whether I should stand or run for it.” He decided to take a stand. However, it was with some considerable curiosity that he entombed them in my home. Mr. Schmidt had also been driving bargains with the devil and brining imps out of hell to help him with his farming, or had been involved in some Devil worship and awful sacrifices. In fact, a whole legion of devils is seen sometimes at night in the field—sprawled about, or darting in and out of my mansion. But there was talk of his dealing with daemons. It seems he got a queer crowd within these halls, for I have heard voices in other rooms—though most of them are empty—that gave me the shivers. It was foreign talk, but the voice sounded so unnatural—that I did not dare undress and go to sleep. Just waited up until the morning. The talk would usually go on all night. People are always seeking someone stranger than they are, so that they do not have to deal with their own fears or weaknesses. For several days afterward, I wandered about listlessly, oblivious to the stars and whispers that followed me. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
I conjure thee, O Guland, in the name of Satan, in the name of Beelzebuth, in the name of Astaroth, and in the name of other Spirits, to make haste and appear before me. Come, then in the name of Satan and in the names of all other demons. Come to me, I command thee, in the name of the Most Holy Trinity. Come without inflicting any harm upon me, without injury to my body or soul, without maltreating my books, or anything which I use. I command thee to appear without delay, or, that failing, to send me forthwith another Spirit having the same power as thou hast, who shall accomplish my commands and be submitted to my will, wanting which, he whom thou shalt send me, if needed thou comest not thyself, shall in no wise depart, nor until he hath in all things fulfilled my desire. I command you, O all ye demons dwelling in these parts, or in what part of the World soever ye may be, by whatsoever power may have been given you by God and our holy Angels over this place, and by the powerful Principality of the infernal abysses, as also by all your brethren, both general and special demons, whether dwelling in the East, West, South, or North, or in any side of the Earth, and, in like manner, by the power of God the Father, by the wisdom of God the Son, by the virtue of the Holy Ghost, any by the authority I derive from our Saviour Jesus Christ, the only Son of the Almighty and the Creator, who made us and all creatures from nothing, who also ordains that you do hereby abdicate all power to guard, habit, and abide in this place; by whom further I constrain and command you, nolens volens, without guile or deception, to open a gateway and act within this World according to my will and purpose! #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
If they really want to, it is proverbial that anyone can talk to the dead. The difficult part is getting the dead to talk back. Accomplishing that requires specialist skills, or the assistance of someone who has them—someone who can reach through the veil between the living and the dead, and draw the spirits of the departed back to this World. That someone is a necromancer. Necromancy was once a common form of divination in the ancient World, and if done the right way, by the right people, it was not particularly disreputable. Talking to the dead is not easy and even “respectable” rites become more difficult as the deceased becomes more distant in space and time; necromancy is easiest when the corpse is freshly dead and right in front of the practitioner. From the Greek and Roman point of view, being dead is actually the default condition of humanity. The spirits of the dead are worth talking to because they exist outside of time; to them, the future is as clear as the past, making spirits a useful contact for those seeking to know how their own lives on Earth will turn out. Humans, essentially, are like the gods—immortal and indestructible. The body might die (and it frequently does), but the spirit it contains cannot be destroyed. At any given time, most of the human race dwells among the shadows of the Underworld.
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/
Overcome the Panic Resulting from Such Loss of Identity
It is a general assumption that most men marry voluntarily. Certainly there are those cases of men consciously marrying on the basis of a feeling of duty or obligation. There are cases in which a man marries because “he” really wants to. However, there are also not a few cases in which a man (or a woman for that matter) consciously believes that he wants to marry a certain person while actually he finds himself caught in a sequence of events which leads to marriage and seems to block every escape. All the months leading up to his marriage he is firmly convinced that “he” wants to marry, and the first and rather belated indication that this may not be so is the fact that on the day of his marriage he suddenly gets panicky and feels an impulse to run away. If he is “sensible” this feeling last only for a few minutes, and he will answer the questions whether it is his intention to marry with the unshakable conviction that it is. We could go on quoting many more instances in daily life in which people seem to make decisions, seem to want something, but actually follow the internal or external pressure of “having” to want the thing they are doing to do. As a matter of fact, in watching the phenomenon of human decisions, one is struck by the extent to which people are mistaken in taking as “their” decision what in effect is submission to convention, duty, or simple pressure. It almost seems that “original” decision is a comparatively rare phenomenon in a society which supposedly makes individual decision the cornerstone of its existence. Pseudo willing can frequently be observed in the analysis of people who do not have any neurotic symptoms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
In conjunction with the operation of unconscious forces, there is an additional opportunity to become acquainted with this phenomenon. Moreover, this example that we are considering stresses one point which, though being implicitly made already, should be brought forward explicitly: the connection of repression with the problem of pseudo acts. Although one looks at repression mostly from the standpoint of the operation of the repressed force in neurotic behaviour, dreams, and so on, it seems important to stress the fact that every repression eliminates parts of one’s real self and enforces the substitution of a pseudo feeling for the one which has been repressed. The case I wish to present now is one of a twenty-two-year-old medical student. He is interested in his work and gets along with people pretty normally. He is not particularly unhappy, although he often feels slightly tired and has no particular zest for life. The reason why he wants to be analyzed is a theoretical one since he wants to become a psychiatrist. His only complaint is some sort of blockage in his medical work. He frequently cannot remember things he had read, gets inordinately tired during lectures, and makes a comparatively poor showing in examinations. He is puzzled by this since in other subjects he seems to have a much better memory. He has no doubts about wanting to study medicine, but often has very strong doubts as to whether he has the ability to do it. After a few weeks of analysis, he relates a dream in which he is on the top floor of a skyscraper he had built and looks out over the other buildings with a slight feeling of triumph. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Suddenly the skyscraper collapses and he finds himself buried under the ruins. He is aware of efforts being made to remove the debris in order to free him, and can hear someone say that he is badly injured and that the doctor will come very soon. However, he has to wait what seems to be an endless length of time before the doctor arrives. When he eventually gets there, the doctor discovers that he has forgotten to bring his instruments and can therefore do nothing to help him. An intense rage wells up in him against the doctor and he suddenly finds himself standing up, realizing that he is not hurt at all. He seers at the doctor, and at that moment he awakes. He does not have many associations in connection with the dream, but these are some of the more relevant ones. Thinking of the skyscraper he has built, he mentions in a casual way how much he was always interested in architecture. As a child his favourite pastime for many years consisted of playing with construction blocks, and when he was seventeen, he had considered becoming an architect. When he mentioned this to his father, the latter had responded in a friendly fashion that of course he was free to choose his career, but that he (the father) was sure that the idea was a residue of his childish wishes, that he really preferred to study medicine. The young man thought that his father was right and since then had never mentioned the problem to his father again, but had started to study medicine as a matter of course. His associations about the doctor being late and then forgetting his instruments were rather vague and scant. However, while talking about this part of the dream, it occurred to him that his analytic hour had been changed from its regular time and that while he had agreed to the change without any objection, he had really felt quite angry. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
He can feel his anger rising now while he is talking. He accuses the analyst of being arbitrary and eventually says, “Well, after all, I cannot do what I want anyway.” He is quite surprised at his anger and at this sentence, because so far he had never felt any antagonism toward the analyst or the analytic work. Some time afterwards he has another dream of which he only remembers a fragment: his father is wounded in an automobile accident. He himself is a doctor and is supposed to take care of the father. While he is trying to examine him, he feels completely paralyzed and cannot do anything. He is terror-stricken and wakes up. In his associations he reluctantly mentions that in the last few years he has had thoughts that his father might die suddenly, and these thoughts have frightened him. Sometimes he had even thought of the estate which would be left to him and of what he would do with the money. He had not proceeded very far with these phantasies, as he suppressed them as soon as they began to appear. In comparing this dream with the one mentioned before, it strikes him that in both cases the doctor is unable to render any efficient help. He realized more clearly than ever before that he feels that he can never be of any use as a doctor. When it is pointed out to him that in the first dream there is a definite feeling of anger and derision at the impotence of the doctor, he remembers that often when he hears or reads about cases in which a doctor has been unable to help the patient, he had a certain feeling of triumph of which he was not aware at the time. In the further course of the analysis other material which had been repressed comes up. He discovers to his own surprise a strong feeling of rage against his father, and furthermore that his feeling of impotence as a doctor is part of a more general feeling of powerlessness which pervades his whole life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Although on the surface he thought that he had arranged his life according to his own plans, he can feel now that deeper down he is filled with a sense of resignation. He realizes that he was convinced that he could not do what he wanted but had to conform with what was expected of him. He sees more and more clearly that he had never really wanted to become a physician and that the things which had impressed him as a lack of ability were nothing but the expression of passive resistance. This case is a typical example of the repression of a person’s real wishes and the adoption of expectations of others in a way that makes them appear to be his own wishes. We might say that the original wish is replaced by a pseudo wish. This substitution of pseudo acts for original acts of thinking, feeling, and willing, leads eventually to the replacement of the original self by a pseudo self. The original self is the self which is the originator of mental activities. The pseudo self is only an agent who actually represents the role a person is supposed to play but who does so under the name of the self. It is true that a person can play many roles what he believes he is expected to be, and for many people, if not most, the original self is completely suffocated by the pseudo self. Sometimes in a dream, in phantasies, or when a person is inebriated, some of the original self may appear, feelings and thoughts which the person has not experienced for years. Often they are bad ones which he has repressed because he is afraid or ashamed of them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Sometimes, however, they are the very best things in him, which he has repressed because of his fear of being ridiculed or attacked for having such feelings. The psychoanalytic procedure is essentially a process in which a person tries to uncover this original self. “Free association” means to express one’s original feelings and thoughts, telling the truth; but truth in this sense does not refer to the fact that one says what one thinks, but the thinking itself is original and not an adaptation to an expected thought. Dr. Freud has emphasized the repression of “bad” things; it seems that he has not sufficiently seen the extent to which the “good” things are subjected to repression also. The loss of the self and its substitution by a pseudo self leave the individual in an intense state of insecurity. He is obsessed by doubt since, being essentially a reflex of other people’s expectation of him, he had in a measure lost his identity. In order to overcome the panic resulting from such loss of identity, he is compelled to conform, to seek his identity by continuous approval and recognition by others. Since he does not know who he is, at least the others will know—if he acts according to their expectation; if they know, he will know too, if he only takes their word for it. The automatization of the individual in modern society has increased the helplessness and insecurity of the average individual. Thus, one is ready to submit to new authorities which offer one security and relief from doubt. Among the ideas which Bertrand Russell embodies in his life, perhaps the first one to be mentioned is human’s right and duty to disobedience. By disobedience I do not refer to disobedience of the “rebel without cause” who disobeys because one has no commitment to life except the one to say “no.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
This kind of rebellious disobedience is as blind and impotent as its opposite, the conformist obedience which is incapable of saying “no.” I am speaking of the human who can say “no” because one can affirm, who can disobey precisely because one can obey one’s conscience and the principles which one has chosen; I am speaking of the revolutionary, not the rebel. In most social systems obedience is the supreme virtue, disobedience the supreme sin. In fact, in our culture when most people feel “guilty,” they are actually feeling afraid because they have been disobedient. They are not really troubled by a moral issue, as they think they are, but by the fact of having disobeyed a command. This is not surprising; after all, Christian teaching has interpreted Adam’s disobedience as a deed which corrupted him and his seed so fundamentally that only the special act of God’s grace could save man from this corruption. This idea was, of course, in accord with the social function of the Church which supported the power of the rulers by teaching the sinfulness of disobedience. Only those humans who took seriously the Christian biblical teachings of humility, brotherliness, and justice rebelled against secular authority, with the result that the Church, more often than not, branded them as rebels and sinners against God. Mainstream Protestantism did not alter this. On the contrary, while the Catholic Church kept alive the awareness of the difference between secular and spiritual authority, Protestantism allied itself with secular power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Mr. Luther was only giving the first and drastic expression to this trend when he wrote about the revolutionary German peasants of the sixteenth century, “Therefore let us everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel.” In spite of the vanishing of religious terror, authoritarian political systems continued to make obedience the human cornerstone of their existence. The great revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fought against royal authority, but soon humans reverted to making a virtue of obedience to the king’s successors, whatever name they took. Where is authority today? In the totalitarian countries it is of respect for authority in the family and in the school. The Western democracies, on the other hand, feel proud at having overcome nineteenth-century authoritarianism. However, have they—or has only the character of the authority changed? This century is the century of the hierarchically organized bureaucracies in government, business, and labour unions. These bureaucracies administer things and humans as one; they follow certain principles, especially the economic principle of the balance sheet, quantification, maximal efficiency, and profit, and they function essentially as would an electronic computer that has been programmed with these principles. The individual becomes a number, transforms himself into a thing. However, just because there is no overt authority, because one is not “forced” to obey, the individual is under the illusion that one acts voluntarily, that one follows only “rational” authority. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Who can disobey the “reasonable”? Who can disobey the computer-bureaucracy? Who can disobey when one is not even aware of obeying? In the family and in education the same thing happens. The corruption of the theories of progressive education have led to a method where the child is not told what to do, not given orders, nor punished for failure to execute them. The child just “expressed himself.” However, from the first day of his life onward, he is filled with an unholy respect for conformity, with the fear of being “different,” with the fright of being away from the rest of the herd. The “organization man” thus reared in the family and in the school having one’s education completed in the big organization has opinions, but no convictions; one amuses oneself, but is unhappy; one is even willing to sacrifice one’s life and that of one’s children in voluntary obedience to impersonal and anonymous powers. One accepts the calculation of deaths which has become so fashionable in the discussions on thermonuclear war: half the population of a country dead—“quite acceptable”; two-thirds dead—“maybe not.” The question of disobedience is of vital importance today. While, according to the Christian Bible, human history began with an act of disobedience—Adam and Eve—while, according to Greek myth, civilization began with Prometheus’ act of disobedience, it is not unlikely that human history will be terminated by an act of obedience, by the obedience to authorities who themselves are obedient to archaic fetishes of “State sovereignty,” “national honour,” “military victory,” and who will give the orders to push the fatal buttons to those who are obedient to them and to their fetishes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see. To do so he does not need to be aggressive or rebellious; he needs to have his eyes open, to be fully awake, and willing to take the responsibility to open the eyes of those who are in danger of perishing because they are half asleep. Karl Marx once wrote that Prometheus, who said that he “would rather be chained to his rock than to be the obedient servant of the gods,” is the patron saint of all philosophers. This consists in renewing the Promethean functions of life itself. Mr. Marx’s statement points very clearly to this problem of the connection between philosophy and disobedience. Most philosophers were not disobedient to the authorities of their time. Mr. Socrates obeying by dying, Mr. Spinoza declined the position of a professor rather than to find himself in conflict with authority, Mr. Kant was a loyal citizen, Mr. Hegal exchanged his youthful revolutionary sympathies for the glorification of the State in his later years. Yet, in spite of this, Prometheus was their patron saint. It is true, they remained in their lecture halls and their studies and did not go to the marketplace, and there were many reasons for this. However, as philosophers they were disobedient to the authority of traditional thoughts and concepts, to the cliches which were believed and taught. They were bringing light to darkness, they were waking up those who were half asleep, they “dared to know.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Mr. Marx’s concepts are rooted in Prophetic Messianism, in Renaissance to individualism, and in enlightenment humanism. The philosophy underlying his concepts is that of the active, productive, related individual, a philosophy of which the names of Mr. Spinoza, and Mr. Goethe and Mr. Hegal are most representative. That Mr. Marx’s idea was deformed and corrupted into its very opposite, both by the communists and by the capitalist opponents of socialism, is a remarkable—though by no means unique example of human’s capacity for distortion and irrationality. However, in order to understand whether Russia and China represent Marxist socialism, and what might be expected from truly socialist societies, it is important that we have an idea of what Marxism means. That Mr. Marx himself would not have considered Russian or China a socialist state follows from the following statement: “This [vulgar] communism, which negates the personality of man in every sphere, is only the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which re-establishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way. The thoughts of every individual private property at least directed against any wealthier private property, in the form of envy and the desire to reduce everything to a common level; so that this envy and leveling fact constitutes the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and leveling-down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
How little this abolition of private property represents a genuine approbation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole World of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.” It was not Mr. Marx who believed in the negation of personality, and that socialism meant the leveling of all men. His errors are of a different kind, and have nothing to do with the underestimation of individuality. He underestimated the complexity and strength of human’s irrational passions and their readiness to accept systems that could relieve them of the responsibility and burden of freedom. Humans underestimated the resilience of capitalism and the many new forms into which this system could evolve and thus avoid the necessarily catastrophic results, as assumed by Mr. Marx, of its inner contradictions. Another error Mr. Marx was that he could not free himself sufficiently from the decisive importance nineteenth-century thought gave to legal property. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Legal ownership then was identical with management and social control. Hence Mr. Marx concluded that if legal ownership were taken away from the private capitalist and vested in society the workers would direct their own affairs. Little did he see that a change in ownership may only be a change in control, from the owners to bureaucracy acting in the name of the stockholders or of the state, and that this change may have little or no effect on the real situation of the worker within the system of production. Generations later nationalized industries in England, France, and Russia have shown this very clearly. Theoretically the Guild socialists in England and, both theoretically and practically, the Yugoslav Communists, have recognized the ambiguous character of the state ownership, and have built a system based on the ownership and control of factories by the workers, rather than by the state and its bureaucracy. The threat to property rights was assumed to come from other private individuals. However, in many countries, the supposed protectors of property rights, namely the government and its agents, are themselves the predators; Olson, Shleifer and Vishny, and others have emphasized this problem. If the state predators are short-lived “roving bandits,” the incentives to produce and invest may be destroyed completely. However, longer-lived “stationary bandits” will recognize that they stand to gain over the long run by committing themselves not to steal too much at any one time. If people perceive a threat to their property rights, whether from the government or form any other source, one of their responses will be to conceal their assets to the extent possible. They will hide tangible property. They will deny the existence of intangible property; for example, highly productive individuals will pretend to have low productivity because they know that if the truth is revealed, the government will simply force them to work harder. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
If they know that the government will take away most or even all of the output, another response will be to shrink in their efforts. The government, in turn, can spend resources to monitor and audit the people’s activities and abilities in its attempt to extract more from them. However, the cost of achieving perfect revelation by direct supervision or observation is likely to be prohibitive. Therefore the government will find it desirable to supplement direct auditing or monitoring policies with others that offer the people material incentives to expend effort and to reveal their assets and skills. Stated thus, the interaction between a predatory government and its public is simply another instance of the general problem of mechanism design that has been studied extensively in economic theory over the last six decades. The standard theory of optimal income taxation by a benevolent government comes from Mirrlees (1971). It fundamental and realistic assumption is an information constraint on the government. The population has a continuous distribution or skills or productivities. Each citizen knows one’s own skill, but the government cannot directly or costlessly observe the skill of any individual. If the government could not identify high-skilled individuals, it would try to extract more effort from them: a benevolent government would do this to increase its own take. The government will anticipate such behaviour, and will find it optimal to commit itself to giving the high-skilled people enough incentives to induce them to reveal the information. This means promising people of successively higher skills successively and sufficiently higher utility levels, by keeping the marginal tax rates sufficiently low. Of course the promise has to be credible, and in practice such credibility; in the case of a kleptocratic government this means assuming a stationary bandit. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Through periodic reports and appraisals, the reflexive thrust of self-analysis can potentially be intensified to a far higher degree than is usual in the community self-survey. Also, periodic self-appraisal can be varied and adjusted for maximum effect, as well as being handled in a less amateurish and more scientific manner, with each cycle of experience. As annal reports become more and more like the records of statistical and historical surveys and comparisons, research by a group upon itself becomes more and more an instrument of self-conscious self-change. Just as the conduct of social action has evolved in the direction of scientific procedure, so research in some of the social sciences—notably social psychology—has as the result of a series of important discoveries been approaching a model of social action. One of the most striking of these discoveries was what has been called by Mr. Dewey and others the Heisenberg effect in social science research. In physics, the Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy is the finding that in making minute measurements, the effect of the measuring instrument upon the phenomenon measured under certain conditions distorts the phenomenon so substantially that measurement is possible. In some cases this effect can be prevented by use of more delicate measuring instruments, but in other cases the dilemma is theoretically insoluble. In social science there are countless expressions of analogous dilemma. If a person is interviewed about one’s occupational aspirations, for example, these are quite frequently changed, or new ones are created, in the course of the interview. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Voters when canvassed on their political opinions often find these opinions altered by having attention directed to them—the alterations sometimes being differentially affected by the status of interviewers, even when the latter make every effort not to influence respondents. One of the writers early in the war had to interview diary farmers regarding their plans for increasing milk production, and despite a carefully followed sampling procedure decided that the answers were unrepresentative, because they were the only farmers in their counties who had been interviewed. The mere asking of questions, as Mr. Socrates found long ago, can have reorganizing and occasionally distressing consequences. Indeed, mere listening may have profound effects upon the person listened to, as psychotherapists have learned recently. A second kind of repercussion to social research is the oft noted episode in which people of some group or category react to predictions of their behaviour in such a way as to falsify the prediction or to knowledge of trends. A companion phenomenon—the way in which some attribution or prediction made known to a group by its attribution or prediction made known to a group by its author will cause them to behave in a way to validate it—as been called by Robert K. Merton “the self-fulfilling prophecy” and also was designated earlier by Gunner Myrdal as “the principle of cumulation.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The success of the technique of psychoanalysis may be taken as still another instance of the reflexive influence of inquiry upon the characteristic behaviour of the person studied, since in accomplished desirable changes in personal integration by causing the subjects to raise to conscious recollection the meaning of past acts and relations. The effects of books of history on the further course of history illustrates almost the identical phenomenon; rewriting history books is always a necessary instrument of any revolution. Though there is as yet no systematic review of this phenomenon, various other illustrations of it could be given, but these should suffice to demonstrate that the findings of social science have as definite impact upon the subjects of the research as do the methods employed. Are the concepts of social science to be included among its findings or its methods? If neither, their popular adoption may be added as a third channel through which social science alters the character of the phenomena it studies. For as long ago as 1927 Morris R. Cohen noted that “the invention of a technical term often creates facts for social science. Certain individuals become introverts when the term is invented, just as many persons begin to suffer from a disease the moment they read about it…” The burden of certain criticisms of the Warner scheme for analysis of social classes is that by becoming generally know his six-level concept tends to intensify or to create the phenomenon which it purports to describe. That is, the mere sociological concept of class—if widely employed—may have a normative effect upon popular behaviour, just as the Marxian concept of class struggle is said to encourage class struggle. And so there may be some genuine rather than sentimental justification for those professing equalitarians who do not want the existence of social classes to be discussed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Going Beyond the Build means exceeding client expectations. Our team of professionals specialize in every aspect of a Design + Build experience.
The Millhaven Difference:
- Unique approach, end to end services in-house
- Transparency, organization and communication
- Live and accurate budget monitoring, no financial surprises
- High standards of quality & proven trade partners
- Clearly defined systems of execution and expectations
- 8 person team of professionals assigned to each project
- Customized software for total project management
- Going BEYOND the BUILD in every way
- https://millhavenhomes.com/custom-homes/
These trophy properties are built in highly coveted communities that provide peace, security, and privacy. Get started today by telling us what you’re wanting and we can schedule an initial consultation. https://millhavenhomes.com/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 