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The Requirement is Emotional Maturity
There is one requirement that is absolute in money managing, as well as in life, and you have already learned it with the first Irregular Rule: If you do not know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out. The requirement is emotional maturity. You have to use your emotions in a useful way. Your emotions must support the goal you are after. You cannot have any conflict about what you are after, and your emotional needs must be gratified by succeeding at what you are doing. You have to be able to handle any situation without losing your cool, or letting your emotions take over. You must operate without anxiety. The crowd always loses because the crowd is always wrong. It is wrong because it behaves normally. What the crowd—or the public—or the market is up to is always a subject of speculation, for the crowd, according to investment mythology, must always be wrong. (The believers in this rule are numerous enough to constitute a crowd, but of course anyone speaking of the crowd believes oneself to be outside of it.) A crowd is not merely a number of people assembled in one place; it could be thousands of isolated individuals. This is called a psychological crowd, subject to the disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a different direction. Whoever be the individuals that compose the crowd, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were one in a state of isolation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
An individual in a crowd acquires—just from being in a crowd—a sentiment of invincible power which allows one to yield to instincts which, had one been alone, one would perforce have kept under restraint…the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely. Another element of the crowd is suggestibility—the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds oneself in the hands of the hypnotizer. Once we have dissolved responsibility, we are ripe for contagion and suggestibility and acts of “irresistible impetuosity.” A crowd is not something one should spend one’s time in; an individual, upon becoming a member of a crowd, descends several rungs in the order of civilization because the mind of the crowd is not an average but a new common denominator, mindless in the sense that it has surrendered to its own unconscious impulses. While the crowd would be intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, the crowd could be better or worse than an individual, depending on the nature of the suggestion to which it has been exposed. The crowd is suggestible to images, and what produce these images is the judicious employment of words and formulas. Handled with art, they possess in sober truth the mysterious power formerly attributed to them by the adepts of magic. A crowd can run a relationship, a business, and economy, or even a country much like in 1965 when Admiral, Motorola, Zenith and Magnavox collapsed like a souffle on which the oven door has been untimely slammed. All that is necessary is to recognize the magical power attached to those short syllables, as if they contained the solution of all problems. They synthesize the most diverse unconscious aspirations and the hope of their realization. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
We see the social engineering propaganda used on the masses to get them to accept illegal immigration, which is a threat to national and economic security, when people say, “This is a country of immigrants.” Okay, that may have been true at one time, but a lot of people have been here for generations and we are now a country of citizens and no longer a population building nation. We are also a nation of law and order, and no one is above the law. Also, is it not fascinating that even a president of a country could be charged with crimes, but we are willing to let people invade America and pay them to? People teach their children not to steal, but what kind of message are we sending them when we allow a group of people to break the law and support these law breakers by saying, “They are women and children looking for a better life.” When in fact that is not true. Since President Biden has been in office more than 11,000,000 undocumented people have come into this country. That is more people than the population of South Dakota. At least 200 of them were on the terror watch list, and many of those who are illegally entering America are young males of military age. If we are going to allow illegal immigration, why not just continue to allow Black Lives Matter to infiltrate businesses, break laws, embezzle and discriminate and terrorize people on the basis of their skin colour, in acts of revenge for the past? Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: it is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychological or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, maybe you have not heard the news. Crowds begin to stay from all our board room watchers, because here we need an organized structure within the crowd and maybe even a rival crowd. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The force in the crowd, not surprisingly, is libido, the energy of the instincts that go under the name of “love.” Love here is not only for valentines, it is all forms of love—Eros, the force that holds things in the World together, and hence can also include the devotion to concrete objects and abstract ideas. In Dr. Freud’s crowd, the individuals fasten on an object, substitute it for their ego ideal, and all those with the same ego ideal identify themselves with each other in their ego. Remove the object, and you get anxiety. The suggestion is that in the fusing of the ego and ego ideal, the person, in a mood of triumph and self-satisfaction, disturbed by no self-criticism, can enjoy the abolition of one’s inhibitions, one’s feelings of consideration for others, and self-reproaches. The primal crowd, with the hero leader, and the sons who skill the hero leader make it hard to make any neat application. The group is the inherited deposit from the phylogenesis of the human libido. No one, after these remarks, will ever want to be part of a crowd again, and yet the fact is that it is really quite comfy to be part of the crowd. (It has to do with individuals being part of a multicellular mass. And it is certainly better to be comfy, everybody will agree, than not be. When it comes to investment, eighty percent of the market is psychology. Investors whose actions are dominated by their emotions are most likely to get int trouble. However, that goes for any area of life. If a crowd is so fickle, feminine, and irrational, then does success follow from simply staying out of the crowd? Perhaps sticking to one’s knitting, the balanced following of rational choices? Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be; and this national weakness finds its nemesis in the propaganda in most TV news media. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
The power which impressed Mr. Hitler probably more than God, Providence, and Fate, is Nature. While it was the trend of the historical development of the last four hundred years to replace the domination over humans by the domination over Nature, Mr. Hitler insisted that one could and should rule over humans but that one could not rule over Nature. Mr. Hitler believed that the history of mankind probably did not start with the domestication of animals but with the domination over inferior people. He ridiculed the idea that human could conquer Nature and made fun of those who believed to become conquerors of Nature “whereas they have no other weapon at their disposal but an ‘idea.’” He says that man “does not dominate Nature, but that, based on the knowledge of a few laws and secrets of Nature, he has risen to the position of master of those other living beings lacking this knowledge.” There again we find the same idea: Nature is the great power we have to submit to, but living beings are the ones we should dominate. There are two trends that dominated Mr. Hitler, which are fundamental for the authoritarian character: the craving for power over men and the longing for submission to an overwhelmingly strong outside power. Workers and farmers went from being socialists in 1919 to becoming some of the earliest and most passionate Nazis. People watched the shadows descend as the red, black, and gold flags of Social Democracy that once fluttered in windows turned communist red and then Nazi black, and the clergy enthusiastically embraced fascism. Some were even locked up by the Gestapo, mostly for refusing to look the other way about local party machinations. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
The Nazi party seized power. All of a sudden, overnight, perfidy and malice rules and anyone who did not want to get in line became the subject of infamous intrigues and ore or less open threats. The popular terrors about witches and antisemitism were linked. People were looking for someone to blame when something went wrong. There was a sinister desire to blame someone for misfortune, rather than try to understand its true sources. Those who feared witchcraft feared hidden evil, murky conspiracies, and demonic alliances. Antisemites had similarly insisted that Jewish people were secretly behind every problem, every trauma, every loos. They believed that Jewish people had influence out of all proportion to the relative numbers in Germany society, derived from an international plot working remorselessly, in stealth, to control the levers of global power. Not only did witchcraft accusations and “Jew-bating” work the same way, by casting blame on “others”—who might appear outwardly innocuous, but were surreptitiously in league with nefarious, World-dominating forces—but the two beliefs also had structural similarities. Mr. Hitler’s ideas were more or less identical with the ideology of the Nazi party. The ideas expressed in his book are those which he expressed in the countless speeches by which he won mass following for his part. This ideology results from his personality which, with its inferiority feeling, hatred against life, asceticism, and envy of those who enjoy life, is the soil of sado-masochistic striving; it was addressed to people who, on account of their similar character structure, felt attracted and excited by these teachings and became ardent followers of the man who expressed what they felt. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
However, it was not only the Nazi ideology that satisfied the lower middle class; the political practice realized what the ideology promised. A hierarchy was created in which everyone has somebody above hum to submit to and somebody beneath him to feel power over; the man at the top, the leader, has Fate, History, Nature above him as the power in which to submerge himself. Thus the Nazi ideology and practice satisfies the desires springing from the character structure of one part of the population and gives direction and orientation to those who, though not enjoying domination and submission, were resigned and had given up faith in life, in their own decisions, in everything. Do these considerations give any clue for a prognosis with regard to the stability of Nazism in the future? I do not feel qualified to make any predictions. Yet a few points—such as those that follow from the psychological premises we have been discussing—would seem to be worth raising. Given the psychological conditions, does Nazism not fulfill the emotional needs of the population, and is this psychological function not one factor that makes for its growing stability? From all that has been said so far, it is evident that the answers to this question is in the negative. The fact of human individuation, of the destruction of all “primary bonds,” cannot be revered. The process of the destruction of the medieval World has taken nearly five hundred years and is being completed in our era. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Unless the whole industrial system, the whole mode of production, should be destroyed and changed to the preindustrial level, man will remain an individual who has completely emerged from the World surrounding one. We have seen that man cannot endure this negative freedom; that he tries to escape into new bondage which is to be a substitute for the primary bond which he has given up. However, these new bonds do not constitute real union with the World. One pays for the new security by giving up the integrity of one’s self. The factual dichotomy between one and these authorities does not disappear. They thwart and cripple one’s life even though consciously they may submit voluntarily. At the same time, one lives in a World in which one has not only developed into being an “atom” but which also provides one with every potentiality for becoming an individual. The modern industrial system has virtually a capacity to produce not only the means for an economically secure life for everybody but also to create the material basis for the full expression of man’s intellectual, sensuous, and emotional potentialities, while at the same time reducing considerably the hours of work. The function of an authoritarian ideology and practice can be compared to the function of neurotic symptoms. Such symptoms result from unbearable psychological conditions and at the same time offer a solution that makes life possible. Yet they are not a solution that leads to happiness or growth of personality. They leave unchanged the conditions that necessitate the neurotic solution. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
If there is a possibility of attaining them, the dynamism of man’s nature is an important factor that tends to seek for more satisfying solutions. The aloneness and powerlessness of the individual, one’s quest for the realization of potentialities which developed in one, the objective fact of the increasing productive capacity of modern industry, are dynamic factors, which constitute the basis for a growing quest for freedom and happiness. The escape into symbiosis can alleviate the suffering for a time but it does not eliminate it. The history of humankind is the history of growing individuation, but it is also the history of growing freedom. The quest for freedom is not a metaphysical force and cannot be explained by natural law; it is the necessary result of the process of individuation and of the growth of culture. The authoritarian system cannot do away with the basic conditions that make for the quest for freedom; neither can they exterminate the quest for freedom that springs from these conditions. In Russia, Mr. Stalin’s attempt to arrive at an anti-Nazi condition with the Wet were supported by new order to the foreign Communist Parties. They were told to take the line of co-operation with liberal and democratic elements in their respective countries, and to form a united front with all “anti-fascist” elements, including the Social Democrats. This policy was officially sanctioned at the VIII (and last) Comintern Congress, 1935. Mr. Stalin’s foreign policy did not succeed, in spite of the new Comintern line. “In many capitals, and not least in London, there were serious inhibitions about any policy of collaboration with Soviet Russia, even for the containment of fascism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
“The League of Nations, reflecting these inhibitions, proved a feeble and ineffective reed. The final language of the Franco-Soviet Pact was complicated and vague, and its operation was made extensively contingent on prior action by the League of Nations. It was not followed up (until 1939, when it was much too late) by any concrete military discussions. The French government, finally, delayed so long with its ratification, and exhibited so many hesitations in the process, that its value as a political demonstration was reduced to almost negligible proportions. The contempt of the Germans for its existence was clearly demonstrated by the reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936; and the failure of the western powers to react with any strong measures showed how ineffective was the Pact for the purposes Moscow had had in mind in concluding it.” The Spanish Civil War, in which the West helped in the defeat of the Republican government by an arms embargo while at the same time not seriously interfering with the military aid sent to Mr. Franco by Mr. Hitler and Mr. Mussolini, could not encourage Mr. Stalin’s hope. Yet even after his actions were far from revolutionary. After some hesitation at the beginning of the Franco rebellion, the Russians decided to intervene, since Mr. Franco’s victory “would have meant the encirclement of France by the fascists, the probable triumph of fascist tendencies within France herself, and the further weakening of Western resistance to Mr. Hitler. The way would then be clear for German aggression toward the East.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Russia sent military help, but reconciled herself to the Republic’s defeat when it became clear that only a much larger amount of Russian assistance could counteract the Italian-German support. While Soviet military aid began to taper off in 1937, Mr. Stalin continued to exterminate his socialist and anarchist rivals in Spain. When the destruction of his political rivals (who—against the Russian view—wanted to transform the civil war into a fight for socialism), conflicted with the demands of the war effort, “precedence was given quite ruthlessly by the Kremlin to the first of these two requirements, to the embitterment of the Spanish Republican leaders.” Most of these Communist generals and functionaries who had fought in Spain were executed in Russia soon after their return. Mr. Stalin wanted to eliminate all elements who by their acquaintance with Western revolutionary ideas stood in the way of the final liquidation of the revolutionary tradition which he undertook in those years of the purges. In short, Mr. Stalin’s attitude toward Mr. Franco was similar to his attitude toward Mr. Hitler. He would have preferred the downfall of Mr. Franco, but not at the price of a popular revolution in Spain, which might have become the signal for revolutionary uprisings in other European countries. When Mr. Stalin’s attempts to come to an arrangement with the West had failed (and it is not too far-fetched to speculate that his destruction of almost all of the leading Communist of the Lenin era was his final attempt to show the West that he was not encumbered by his revolutionary past), Mr. Stalin changed his course again, this time by concluding a pact with the Nazis. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Immediately, the Communist Parties followed suit. Mr. Molotov had given the cue with his statement that “Nazism was a matter of taste.” The Communists changed their anti-fascist line and began to attack the “Western imperialists.” As a gesture of friendship toward Nazism, German Communists refugees in Russia were delivered to Mr. Hitler’s Gestapo, if there were any doubts about their loyalty to the new party line. The Comintern took a line of neutrality toward the two camps. The core of this new Comintern policy between the Soviet-Nazi pact and the German attack on Russia has been described very succinctly by Deutscher: “Both belligerent camps, it was not said, pursued imperialist aims, and there was nothing to choose between them. The working classes were called upon to resist war and fight for peace. Outwardly these appeals resembled the policy of revolutionary defeatism which Mr. Lenin had pursed in the First World War. The resemblance was deceptive. In Mr. Lenin’s opposition to war there was revolutionary integrity and consistency, while the policy of the Comintern merely suited the temporary convenience of Mr. Stalin’s diplomacy and was as tortuous as that diplomacy. At times the opposition to war had an unmistakably pro-German twist as, for instance, in October 1939, when the Comintern echoed Mr. Molotov’s and Mr. von Ribbentrop’s call for a negotiated peace and blamed France and Britain for the war. The effect of that policy, especially in France, was merely defeatist, not revolutionary. It supplemented the defeatism that corroded the top of French society with a quasi-popular brand of defeatism coming from below. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
“Only after the harm had been done, when Moscow, alarmed by Mr. Hitler’s victories, bean to encourage resistance to Nazi occupation, did the French Communist Party switch over to a new policy. Less obvious, though not unimportant, was the effect of the von Ribbentrop-Molotov pact upon anti-Nazi elements in Germany; it made their confusion wore confounded, it deepened their senses of defeat and induced some of them to reconcile themselves to Hitler’s war.” When the medieval World was torn wide open, Western man seemed to be headed for the final fulfillment of his keenest dreams and visions. He freed himself from the authority of a totalitarian Church, the traditional thought, the geographical limitations of a half-discovered globe. He discovered nature and the individual. He became aware of his own strength, of his capacity to make himself the ruler over nature and over traditionally given circumstances. He believed that he would be capable of achieving a synthesis between his newborn sense of strength and rationality and the spiritual values of his humanistic-spiritual tradition, between the prophetic idea of the messianic time of peace and justice to be achieved by mankind in the historical process and the Greek tradition of theoretical thoughts. In the centuries following the Renaissance and the Reformation, he built a new science which eventually led to the release of hitherto unheard-of productive powers and to the complete transformation of the material World. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
He created political systems which seem to guarantee the free and productive development of the individual; he reduced the time of work to such an extent that Western man is free to enjoy hours of leisure to an extent his forefather had hardly dreamed of. The World is divided into two camps, the capitalist and the communist camp. Both camps believe that they have the key to the fulfillment of the human hopes of generations past; both maintain that, while they must coexist, their systems are incompatible. Are they right? Are they not both in the process of converging into a new industrial neo-feudalism, into industrial societies, led and manipulated by big, powerful bureaucracies—societies in which the individual becomes a well-fed and well-entertained automaton who loses one’s individuality, his independence and his humanity? Have we to resign ourselves to the fact that we can master nature and produce goods in an ever-increasing degree, but that we must give up the hope for a new World of solidarity and justice; tht this ideal will be lost in an empty technological concept of “progress”? Is there no other alternative than that between capitalist and communist managerial industrialism? Can we not build an industrial society in which the individual retains one’s role as an active, responsible member who controls circumstances, rather than being controlled by them? Are economic wealth and human fulfillment really incompatible? #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
These two camps not only compete economically and politically, they are both set against each other in deadly fear of an atomic attack which will wipe out both, if not all civilization. Indeed, man has created the atomic bomb; it is the result of one of his greatest intellectual achievements. However, he has lost the mastery over his own creation. The bomb has become his master, the forces of his own creation have become his most dangerous enemy. Is there still time to reverse this course? Can we succeed in changing it and becoming the masters of circumstances, rather than allowing circumstances to rule us? Can we overcome the deep-seated roots of barbarism which makes us try to solve problems in the only way in which they can never be solved—by force, violence, and killing? Can we close the gap between our great intellectual achievement and our emotional and moral backwardness? To most Americans the case for the success of our mode of industrial organization seems to be clear and overwhelming. New productive forces—steam, electricity, oil, and atomic energy—and new forms of organization of work—central planning, bureaucratization, increased division of labour, automation—have created a material wealth in the most advanced industrial countries which has done away with the extreme poverty in which the majority of their populations lived a hundred years ago. Working hours have been reduced from seventy to forty hours per week in the last hundred years, and with increasing automation an ever-shorter working day may give man an undreamed-of amount of leisure. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Basic education has been brought to every child; higher education to a considerable percentage of the total population. Movies, radio, television, sports, and hobbies fill out the many hours which humans now have for their leisure time. Indeed, it seems that for the first time in history the vast majority—and soon all human—in the Western World will be primarily concerned with living, rather than with the struggle to secure the material conditions for living. It seems that the fondest dreams of our forefathers are close to their realization, and that the Western World has found the answers to the question what the “good life” is. While the majority of humans in North America and western Europe still share this outlook, there are an increasing number of thoughtful and sensitive persons who see the flaws in this enticing picture. They notice, first of all, that even within the richest country in the World the U.S.A., about 20 percent of the population does not share in the good life of the majority, that a considerable number of our fellow citizens have not reached the material standard of living which is the basis for a dignified human existence. They are aware, furthermore, that more than 66 percent of the human race, those who for centuries were the object of Western colonialism, have a standard of living from ten to twenty times lower than ours, and have a life expectancy half that of the average human. They are truck by the irrational contradictions which beset our system. While there are millions in our own midst, and hundreds of millions abroad, who do not have enough to eat, we restrict agricultural production and, in addition, spend hundreds of millions each year in storing our surplus. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
We have affluence, but we do not have amenity. We are wealthier, but we have less freedom. We consume more, but we are emptier. We have more atomic weapons, but we are more defenseless. We have more education, but we have less critical judgment and conviction. We have more religion, but we become more materialistic. We speak of the America tradition which, in fact, is the spiritual tradition of radical humanism, as we call “un-American” those who want to apply the tradition to present-day society. However, even if we comfort ourselves, as many do, with the assumption that it is only a matter of a few generations until the West and eventually the whole World will have reached economic affluence, the question arises: If we continue on the road our industrial system has taken what will become of man and where is he going? The seeker of such truths seeks at bottom only the metamorphosis of the World into man; he strives for an understanding of the World as a human thing and gains, in the best case, the feeling of an assimilation. Like the astrologer who views the stars as in the service of human beings and as tied to their fortune and suffering, so, too, such a seeker views the entire World as bound to man, as the infinitely splintered echo of a primal sound, that of man, or as the reduplicated copy of a primal image, that of man. His procedure is to hold man up as the measure of all things, but in doing so he sets out from the error of believing that he has these things directly before him as pure objects. And so he forgets that the original metaphours of intuition were metaphours and takes them as the things themselves. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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Struggle for Survival
Like so many things, competition can be either good or bad, depending on how you approach it. It is bad if you define it as “seeking to humiliate and destroy others” or “obsessively comparing myself to others” or “placing winning above everything, including my character, integrity, love of others, and covenants with God.” However, it can be good if it is about coming together with others to bring out everyone’s best or have harmless fun. When it is done in the right spirit, it can make winning and losing less a matter of ego and can help you take joy in the accomplishment of others (as well as yourself). Whether it is sports, board games, a dance contest, or any other endeavour, healthy competition can sometimes enhance the experience for everyone. Unhealthy competition, on the other hand, can make everyone miserable. You can usually tell which is which by the spirit that accompanies it. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it,” reports 1 Corinthians 10.13. It is interesting to observe that in connection with this crude Darwinism the “socialist” Mr. Hitler champions the liberal principles of unrestricted competition. In a polemic against co-operation between different nationalistic groups he says: “By such a combination the free play of energies is tired up, the struggle for choosing the best is stopped, and accordingly the necessary and final victory of the healthier and stronger man is prevented forever.” Elsewhere he speaks of the free play of energies as the wisdom of life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
To be sure, Dr. Darwin’s theory as such was not an expression of the feelings of a sado-masochistic character. On the contrary, for many of its adherents it appealed to the hope of a further evolution of humankind to higher stages of culture. For Mr. Hitler, however, it was an expression of and simultaneously a justification for his own sadism. He reveals quite naively the psychological significance which the Darwinian theory had for him. When he lived in Munich, still an unknown man, he used to awake at 5 o’clock in the morning. He had “gotten into the habit of throwing pieces of bread or hard crusts to the little mice which spent their time in the small room, and then of watching these droll little animals romp and scuffle for these few delicacies.” This “game” was the Darwinian “struggle for life” on a small scale. For Mr. Hitler it was the petty bourgeois substitutes for the circuses of the Roman Caesars, and a preliminary for the historical circuses he was to produce. The last rationalization for his sadism, his justification of it as a defense against attacks of others, finds manifold expressions in Mr. Hitler’s writings. He and the German people are always the ones who are innocent and the enemies are sadistic brutes. A great deal of this propaganda consists of deliberate, conscious lies. Partly, however, it has the same emotional “sincerity” which paranoid accusations have. These accusations always have the function of a defense against being found out with regard to one’s own sadism or destructiveness. They run according to the formula: It I you who have sadistic intention. Therefore I am innocent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
With Mr. Hitler’s defensive mechanism is irrational to the extreme, since he accuses his enemies of the very thing he quite frankly admits to be his own aims. Thus he accuses the Jewish people, the Communists, and the French of the very things that he says are the most legitimate aims of his own actions. He scarcely bothers to cover this contradiction by rationalizations. He accuses the Jewish people of brining the French African troops to the Rhine with the intention to destroy, by the bastardization which would necessarily set in, the white race and thus “in turn to rise personally to the position of master.” Mr. Hitler must have detected the contradiction of condemning others for that which he claims to be the most noble aim of his race, and he tries to rationalize the contradiction by saying of the Jews people that their instinct for self-preservation lacks the idealistic character which is to be found in the Aryan drive for mastery. The same accusations are used against the French. He accuses them of wanting to strangle Germany and to rob it of its strength. While this accusation is used as an argument for the necessity of destroying “the French drive for European hegemony,” he confesses that he would have acted like Clemenceau had he been in his place. The Communists are accused of brutality and the success of Marxism is attributed to it political will and activistic brutality. At the same time, however, Mr. Hitler declares: “What Germany was lacking was a close co-operation of brutal power and ingenious political intention.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The Czech crisis in 1938 and this present war brought many examples of the same kind. There was no act of Nazi oppression which was not explained as a defense against oppression by others. One can assume that these accusations were mere falsifications and have not the paranoid “sincerity” which those against the Jewish people and the French might have been coloured by. They still have a definite propaganda value, and part of the population, in particular the lower middle class which is receptive to these paranoid accusations on account of its own character structure, believed them. Mr. Hitler’s contempt for the powerless ones becomes particularly apparent when he speaks of people whose political aims—the fight for national freedom—were similar to those which he himself professed to have. Perhaps nowhere is the insincerity of Mr. Hitler’s interest in national freedom more blatant than in his scorn for powerless revolutionaries. Thus he speaks in an ironical and contemptuous manner of the little group of National Socialists he had originally joined in Munich. This was his impression of the first meeting he went to: “Terrible, terrible; this was clubmaking of the worst kind and manner. And this club I now was to join? Then the new memberships were discussed, that means, my being caught.” He calls them “a ridiculous small foundation,” the only advantage of which was to offer “the chance for real personal activity.” Mr. Hitler says that he would never have joined one of the existing big parties and this attitude is very characteristic of him. He had to start in a group which he felt to be inferior and weak. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Mr. Hitler’s initiative and courage would not have been stimulated in a constellation where he had to fight existing power or to compete with his equals. He shows the same contempt for the powerless ones in what he writes about Indian revolutionaries. The same man who has used the slogan of national freedom for his own purposes more than anybody else, has nothing but contempt for such revolutionists who had no power and who dared to attack the powerful British Empire. He remembers, Mr. Hitler says, “some Asiatic fakir or other, perhaps, for all I care, some real Indian ‘fighters for freedom,’ who were then running around Europe, contrived to stuff even otherwise quite intelligent people with the fixed idea that the British Empire, whose keystone is in India, was on the verge of collapse right there…Indian rebels will, however, never achieve this…It is simply an impossibility for a coalition of cripples to storm a powerful State…I may not, simply because of my knowledge of their racial inferiority, link my own nation’s fate with that of these so-called ‘oppressed nations.’” The love for the powerful and the hatred for the powerless which is so typical for the sadomasochistic character explains a great deal of Mr. Hitler’s and His followers’ political actions. While the Republican government thought they could “appease” the Nazis by treating them leniently, they not only failed to appease them but aroused their hatred by the very lack of power and firmness they showed. Mr. Hitler hated the Weimar Republic because it was wea ad he admired the industrial and military leaders because they had power. He never fought against established strong power but always against groups which he thought to be essentially powerless. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Mr. Hitler’s—and for that matter, Mr. Mussolini’s—“revolution” happened under protection of existing power and their favourite objects were those who could not defend themselves. One might even venture to assume that Mr. Hitler’s attitude toward Great Britain was determined, among other factors, by this psychological complex. As long as he felt Britain to be powerful, he loved and admired her. His book gives expression to this love for Britian. When he recognized the weakness of the British position before and after Munich his love changed into hatred and the wish to destroy it. From this viewpoint “appeasement” was a policy which for a personality like Mr. Hitler was bound to arouse hatred, not friendship. So far we have spoken of the sadistic one. There is the wish to submit to an overwhelmingly strong power, to annihilate the self, besides the wish to have power over helpless beings. This masochistic side of the Nazi ideology and practice is most obvious with respect to the masses. They are told again and again: the individual is nothing and does not count. The individual should accept this personal insignificance, dissolve oneself in a higher power, and then feel proud in participating in the strength and glory of this higher power. Mr. Hitler expresses this idea clearly in his definition of idealism: “Idealism alone leads men to voluntary acknowledgement of the privilege of force and strength and thus makes them become a dust particle of that order which forms and shapes the entire Universe.” Mr. Goebbles gives a similar definition of what he calls Socialism: “To be a socialist,” he writes, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Sacrificing the individual and reducing it to a bit of dust, to an atom, implies, according to Mr. Hitler, the renunciation of the right to asset one’ individual opinion, interests and happiness. This renunciation is the essence of a political organization in which “the individual renounces representing his personal opinion and his interests…” He praises “unselfishness” and teaches that “in the hunt for their own happiness, people fall all the more out of Heaven into Hell.” It is the aim of education to teach the individua not to assert his self. Already the boy in school must learn “to be silent, not only when he is blamed justly but he has also to learn, if necessary, to bear injustice in silence.” Concerning his ultimate goal he writes: “In the folkish State the folkish view of life has finally to succeed in brining about that nobler era when men see their care no longer in the better breeding of dogs, horses, and cats, but rather in the uplifting of mankind itself, an era in which the one knowingly and silently renounces, and the other gladly gives and sacrifices.” This sentence is somewhat surprising. One would expect that after the description of the one type of individual, who “knowingly and silently renounces,” an opposite type would be described, perhaps the one who leads, takes responsibility, or something similar. However, instead of that, Mr. Hitler defines that “other” type also by his ability to sacrifice. It is difficult to understand the difference between “silently renounces,” and “gladly sacrifices.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Mr. Hitler recognizes clearly that his philosophy of self-denial and sacrifice is meant for those whose economic situation doe not allow them any happiness. He does not want to bring about a social order which would make personal happiness possible for every individual; he wants to exploit the very poverty of the masses in order to make them believe in hi evangelism of self-annihilation. Quite frankly he declares: “We turn to the great army of those who are so poor that their personal lives could not mean the highest fortune of this World…” This whole preaching of self-sacrifice has an obvious purpose: If the wish for power on the side of the leader and the “elite” is to be realized, the masses have to resign themselves and submit. However, this masochistic longing is also to be found in Mr. Hitler himself. For him the superior power to which he submits is God, Fate, Necessity, History, Nature. Actually all these terms have about the same meaning to him, that of symbols of an overwhelmingly strong power. He starts his autobiography with the remark that to him it was a “good fortune that Fate designated Braunau on the Inn as the place of my birth.” He then goes on to say that the whole German people must be united in one state because only then, when this state would be too small for them all, necessity would give them “the moral right to acquire soil and territory.” The defeat in the war of 1914-1918 to him is “a deserved punishment by eternal retribution.” Nations that mix themselves with other races “sin against the will of eternal Providence” or, as he puts it another time, “against the will of the Eternal Creator.” Germany’s mission is ordered by “the Creator of the Universe.” Heaven is superior to people, for luckily one can fool people but “Heaven could not be bribed.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In Russia, what happened by 1922 is clearer for the historian today than it was for the participants in those events. The hope for the revolution had failed. Just as Mr. Marx and Mr. Engles in the middle of the nineteenth century had underestimated the vitality of capitalism, so Mr. Lenin and Mr. Trotsky between 1917 and 1922 had failed to recognize that the majority of the workers in the West were not willing to give up the economic and social advantages the capitalist system had provided for them for the dangerous and insecure course of a socialist revolution. At first, in 1921 and 1922 the revolutionary retreat was made in good faith by Mr. Lenin and other leaders. They made a strategic retreat and hoped that some time in the future a new revolutionary situation would arise. However, with Mr. Lenin’s illness and death, Mr. Trosky’s slow elimination, and Mr. Stalin’s ascendancy, the retreat turned into a plain fraud. Although there is probably no single point at which this change could be said to have occurred, its development can be followed quite clearly in the sequence of events from the Rapallo pact in 1922 to the pact with Mr. Hitler in 1939. After the Putsch in Germany in 1923, through which “Communist prestige suffered a new and this tine an irreparable blow” Mr. Stalin’s view of the supremacy of Russia’s national interests over the revolutionary interests of the communist parities gained steady ascendency. He always had contempt for foreign Communist Parties and expressed this contempt many times. “The Comintern represents nothing. It exists only because of our support,” he said to Lominadze in the twenties. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The same attitude was expressed many years later when Mr. Stalin said to the Polish leader Mikolajczyk “communism fits Germany as a saddle fits a cow.” His personal contempt for the Chinese Communist was notorious. Under him, the relationship between Russian and the Communist movement changed drastically the might of Russian was the goal, and the Communist Parties had to serve this goal. For the first time Mr. Stalin acknowledged officially in 1925 that the acute revolutionary period after the First World War had passed and was being followed by a period of “relative stabilization.” Only in 1947 did he publish a speech to Communist students that he made in 1925, which throws a retrospective light on his attitude: “I suppose that the revolutionary forces of the West are great; that they grow; that they will grow, and that they may overthrow the bourgeoisie here of there. That is true. But it will be very difficult for them to hold their ground…The problem of our army, of its strength and readiness, will inevitably rise in connection with complications in the countries that surround us…This does not mean that in any such situation we are bound in duty to intervene actively against anybody.” This statement is a good example of the difference between ritualistic language and real policy which would from then on pervade all Russian statements. The expressions of hope in the growth of the revolutionary forces are the ritual, without which no Communist statement could be made, but the operative part of the statement lies in the point that Mr. Stalin evaded any commitment tht the Red Army would come out to help foreign revolutions hold their ground. He left this open, but insisted that the was not “bound in duty” to intervene. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Russia’s foreign policy seemed to be successful for a while in the attempt to open friendly relations with the West, especially with Great Britain. However, the British conservative government moved clearly toward a break with Russian between 1924 and 1927. The Soviet Trade Delegation in London was raided on May 12, 1927, and, although the raid apparently did not yield any very incriminating evidences, the British government nevertheless served all official relations with Russian on May 26, 1927. After this setback in it foreign policy, “the Soviet government turned its back even more resolutely than before on actual revolutionary activities abroad, retired into a semi-isolation, and devoted its efforts to the accomplishment of two great internal programs.” These two programs were the rapid industrialization of Russia, expressed in the first Five Year Plan, 1928-33, and the establishment of a tight control over Russian agriculture. Mr. Trotsky was expelled from the party, and Mr. Stalin began the construction of a Russian managerial industrialism. As George Kennan has pointed out, this new program demanded tremendous sacrifices from the Russian population, and Mr. Stalin, as a justification for these hardships, had to emphasize the appearance of an external danger. He also used radical phraseology to hide the final abandonment of the revolutionary ideas and, in addition, to show the Western powers the nuisance value of the Communist Parties as a response to their hostile reaction after 1924. These three motives explain the new militant course of the Comintern after 1927. Mr. Stalin declared in his report on 3 December 1927, that “the stabilization of capitalism is becoming more and more rotten and unstable.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The official Comintern line was changed to say that the capitalist World had now entered upon another “cycle of wars and revolutions.” This new “revolutionary” line has been often interpreted by America Sovietologists as a proof that Stalinism never relinquished its revolutionary plans. These observers do not see that this radical line was purely in the service of Russian foreign and internal policy, and not the expression of any genuine revolutionary plants. The best over-all judgment on the new revolutionary line is presented by Gustav Hilger, the Counselor of the Germany Embassy in Moscow at the time. “Thus a competent Moscow observer of that day,” writes Mr. Kennan, “was able later, in describing Soviet policy during the first Five Year Plan period, to say that the Soviet Union ‘concealed an ironclad isolationism behind a façade of intensified Comintern activity which was designed in part to detract attention from her internal troubles.’” It must be noted furthermore that in spite of all radical talk, the Comintern did not send out any directives that demanded the seizure of power, but demanded only the continued struggle against “the capitalist offensive.” With the consolidation of Mr. Stalin’s power over all opponents, Mr. Hitler’s accession to power, and the beginning of the Roosevelt era, Mr. Stalin ordered another switch. He did not try to mobilize the German workers against Mr. Hitler with the goals of establishing a leftist government in Germany. On the contrary, led by a Moscow stooge who was treated with the complete contempt by the Moscow bosses, the K.P.D. was told to follow a policy which was plainly suicidal. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Treating the socialists as their main enemies and making a tactical pact with the Nazis, the Communist Party did everything possible not to prevent a Nazi victory. It is unthinkable that Mr. Stalin would have demoralized and stultified the Germany Communist Part so completely had his aim been a revolution in Germany, or even the defeat of Mr. Hitler. This is not to imply that Mr. Stalin wished for Mr. Hitler’s victory. He certainly saw himself threatened by Mr. Hitler and tried his best to avert this threat. However, there are many good reasons—although no conclusive proof—to think that Mr. Stalin preferred the victory of Mr. Hitler to an authentic worker’s revolution in Germany. The German dictator was a military threat with which Mr. Stalin could hope to cope with diplomatic maneuvers and military preparation. A German workers’ revolution would have undermined the basis of his whole regime. As a society, we declare that the World’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing motor-car, its frame adorned with great pipes, like snakes with explosive breath…a roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on a shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We shall sing of the man at the steering wheel, whose ideal stem transfixed the Earth, rushing over the circuit of her orbit. Why should we look behind us, when we have to break in the mysterious portals of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. Already we live in the absolute, since we have already created speed, eternal and ever-present. We wish to glorify War—the only health-giver of the World—militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill, the contempt for women. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
We wish to destroy the museums, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian meanness. There is indeed no greater distinction among human beings than that between those who love life and those who love death. This love of death is typically human acquisition. Humans are the only beings that can be bored, they are the only beings that can love death. While the impotent human (not referring to sexual impotence) cannot create life, one can destroy it and thus transcend it. The love of death in the midst of living is the ultimate perversion. There are some who are the true necrophiles—and they salute war and promote it, even thought they are mostly not aware of their motivation and rationalize their desires as serving life, honour, or freedom. They are probably the minority; but there are many who never made the choice between life and death, and who have escaped in busy-ness in order to hide this. They do not salute destruction, but they also do not salute life. They lack the joy of life which would be necessary to oppose war vigorously. Mr. Goethe once said that the most profound distinction between various historical periods is that between belief and disbelief, and added that all epochs in which belief dominates are brilliant, uplifting, and fruitful, while those in which disbelief dominates vanish because nobody cares to devote oneself to the unfruitful. The “belief” Mr. Goethe spoke of is deeply rooted in the love of life. Culture which create the conditions for loving life are also cultures of belief’ those which cannot create this love also cannot create belief. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The historical future is already determined; there are certain limited and ascertainable alternatives. Our alternative is that between the end of the nuclear arms race—and destruction. Whether the voice of this prophet will win over the voices of doom and weariness depends on the degree of vitality the World and especially the younger generation has preserved. If we are to perish we cannot claim not to have been warned. Every word becomes a concept, not just when it is meant to serve as a kind of reminder of the single, absolutely individualized original experience to which it owes its emergence, but when it has to fit countless more or less similar—that is, strictly speaking, never equal, hence blatantly unequal—cases. Every concept arises by means of the equating of the unequal. Just as certain as it is that no one leaf is exactly the same as any other, so, too, it is certain that the concept leaf is formed by arbitrarily ignoring these individual differences, by forgetting what distinguishes one from the other, thus giving rise to the notion that there is in nature something other than leaves, something like “The Leaf,” a kind of prototype according to which all leaves were woven, drawn, delineated, coloured, crimped, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no specimen turned out correctly or reliably as a true copy of the prototype. We call a man honest. We ask, “Why did he act so honestly today?” Our answer is, usually, “Because of his honesty.” Honesty! Which is again like saying, “Leaf is the cause of leaves.” We really have no knowledge at all of an essential quality called Honesty, but we do know countless individualized, hence unequal, actions, which we equate by leaving aside the unequal and henceforth designate as honest actions; finally, from them we formulate a qualitas occulta with the name Honesty. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Overlooking the individual and the actual yields concepts, just as it yields forms, whereas nature know neither forms nor concepts, hence no species, but only what remains for us an inaccessible and indefinable X. For even the distinction we draw between the individual and the species is anthropomorphic and does not stem from the essence of things, though neither can we say that it does not correspond to the essence of things, for that would be a dogmatic assertion and as such just as indemonstrable as its counterpart. What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphours, metonymies, anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations that have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, translated, and embellished, and that after long use strike a people as fixed, canonical, and binging: truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphours that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal. We still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for we have hitherto heard only of the obligation to be truthful, which society imposes in order to exist-that is, the obligation to use the customary metaphours, hence morally expressed, the obligation to lie in accordance with a fixed convention, to lie in droves in a style binding for all. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Humans forget, of course, that his is how things are; one therefore lies in this way unconsciously and according to centuries-old habits—and precisely by means of this unconsciousness, precisely be means of this forgetting, one arrives at the feeling of truth. A moral impulse pertaining to truth is awoken out of this feeling of being obligated to designate one thing red, another cold, a third mute: in contrast to the liar, whom no one trusts, whom everyone shuns, man proves to himself how venerable, trustworthy, and useful truth is. As a rational being he now submits his actions to the rule of abstractions: no longer does he let himself be swept away by sudden impressions, by intuitions, one first generalizes all these impressions into paler, cooler concepts in order to hitch the wagon of one’s life and one’s action to them. Everything that distinguishes man from beast hinges on this capacity to dispel intuitive metaphours in a schema, hence to dissolve an image into a concept. For in the realm of those schemata something becomes possible that could never be achieved by intuitive first impressions, namely, the construction of a pyramidal order of castes and degrees, creating a new World of laws, privileges, subordinations, and boundary demarcations, which now stands over against the other intuitive World of first impressions as the more fixed, more universal, ore familiar, more human, hence something regulatory and imperative. Whereas every metaphour of intuition is individual and without equal and so always knows how to escape al classification, the great edifice of concepts exhibits the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and in logic exhales the severity and coolness proper to mathematics. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Whoever has felt that breath will scarcely believe that concepts, too, as bony and eight-cornered as dice, and just as moveable, are not the lingering residues of metaphours, and that the illusion of the artistic rendering of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then at least the grandmother of every concept. In this dice game of concepts, however, “truth” means using every die s it is marked, counting it dots precisely, establishing correct classifications, and never violating the order of castes and rankings of class. Just as the Romans and Etruscans carved up the sky with rigid mathematical lines, installing a god in each circumscribed space as in a templum, so, too, every people has above it just such a mathematically divided Heaven of concepts and understands the demand of truth to mean that each concept of god is to be found only in its own sphere. In this, one may well admire man as a great architectural genius who manages to erect an infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on shifting foundations and flowing water. Of course, in order to rest on such foundations, it must be a structure made as if of spiderwebs, delicate enough to be carried way by the waves, firm enough not to be blown apart by the wind. Measured thus, man as architectural genius far surpasses the bee: the latter builds with wax, which it gathers from nature; man builds with the much more delicate material of concepts, which he must first fabricate from out of himself. In this, he is to be admired—but not on account of his drive to truth, to the pure cognition of things. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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/
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The Most Delicious Morsel of Our Self Love?
Colleges such a University of Southern California—Los Angeles, Cornell, Duke and Chapman are now offering courses on how to be a social media influencer as part of their business and communications department. A social media is someone who has a platform on the Internet and vast amounts of fans. Some of these influencers have hundreds of thousands to millions of fans. A lot of them are even more popular than well-known celebrities. When these influencers get popular enough and gain the attention of a brand, the brand will usually sponsor them to market their goods and/or services for a profit. The goal is for the brand to gain more popularity and increase their revenue. Some popular social media influencers are people like Taylor Swift, who by just advocating voting or mentioning that she is attending a football game, can get millions of fans to vote and attend football games. There are of course other social media influencers who may or may not be major celebrities, but became famous by marketing their talents on the Internet and/or other forms of media. A great example is Jillian Harris, who starred on Love it or List it, Too, which is a HGTV program, which comes on television and focuses on renovating and decorating homes. Now Jillian Harris uses her social media platform to help support charities and market items that her followers love. She has over 1 million fans on social media. Austin Harris Mahone, who sang Justin Bieber songs, is also a social media influence. He was discovered and currently an American singer. Micro-influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 fans may earn anywhere between $40,000 and $100,000 per year. However, Cristiano Ronaldo, with over 570 million fans on social media charges around $2.4 million for a social media post. People are now seeing becoming a social media influencer as the great equalizer that education once used to be. With the desire of so many to become famous, it leaves many wondering if fame really just the most delicious morsel of our self-love? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Fame has, after all, attached itself to the most uncommon men and women, as an ambition, and in turn to their most uncommon moments. These are moments of sudden illumination in which a human stretches out a commanding arm, as if creating a World, light shining forth and spreading out around one. One is then filled with the deeply gratifying certainty that what enraptured and exalted one into the farthest regions, the height of this one sensation, can never be denied to posterity; in the eternal necessity of this rare illumination for all those to come humans see the necessity of their fame. Far into the future, human kind need man, and just as that moment of illumination is the embodiment and epitome of his innermost essence, so, too, he believes himself, as the man of this moment, to be immortal, dismissing all others as dross, rot, vanity, brutishness, or pleonasm, leaving them to perish. We view all disappearance and demise with discontent, often with astonishment, as if we experienced in it something at bottom impossible. We are disturbed when a Victorian mansion is torn down, and a crumbling tower aggrieves us. Every New Year’s Eve, we feel the mystery of the contradiction of being and becoming. What offends moral man above all, though, is that an instant of supreme universal perfection should vanish without a trace, like the Mansion of the Gilded Age, leaving nothing to posterity. Humans’ imperative reads instead: whatever once served more beautifully to propagate the concept “man” must continue to exist forever. That all the great moments form a chain; that, like mountain peaks, they unite humankind across the millennia; that the greatest things from a bygone age are also great for me; and that the prescient faith of the lust for fame will be fulfilled—that is the idea at the very foundation of culture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The terrible struggle of culture is ignited by the demand that what is great should be eternal; for everything else that continues to live cries out, No! The customary, the small, the common fills every nook and cranny of the World like an oppressive atmosphere we are all condemned to breathe, smoldering around what is great; hindering, choking, suffocating, deadening, smothering, dimming, deluding, it throws itself onto the road the great must travel on the way to immortality. The road goes through human brains! Through the brains of pitiful, short-lived creatures who, given over to their cramped needs, rise again and again to the same afflictions and, with great effort, manage to fend off ruin for a short time. They want to live, to live a bit—at any price. Who would discern among them that arduous torch race that only the great survive? And yet time and again some awaken who, seeing what is great, feel inspired, as if human life were a glorious thing, and as if the most beautiful fruit of this bitter plant were the assurance that someone once walked proudly and stoically through this existence, another with deep thoughts, a third with mercy, but all of them leaving behind a single lesson: that one who lives life most beautifully is one who does not hold it in great esteem. However, while the common man regards this bit of existence with such morbid seriousness, those on their journey to immortality knew how to respond to it with an Olympian laugh, or at least with sublime disdain; often they went to their graves with irony—for what did they have to bury? #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The boldest knights among those addicted to glory, those who believe they will find their coat of arms hanging on a constellation, must be sought among the philosophers. They address their efforts not to a “public,” to the agitation of the masses and the cheering applause of their contemporaries; it is in their nature to travel the road alone. Their talent is the rarest, and in a certain respect, the most unnatural in nature, shutting itself off from and hostile even to kindred talents. The wall of their self-sufficiency must be hard as diamond not to be shattered and destroyed, for everything is on the move against them, humans and nature. Their journey to immortality is more arduous and impeded than any other, and yet no one can be as sure as the philosopher about reaching one’s goal, since one knows not where to stand, if not on the wings of all ages; for a disregard of the present and the momentary is of the nature of philosophical contemplation. One has the truth; let the wheel of time roll where it will, it can never escape the truth. It is important to realize that such humans did indeed once live. One could never imagine as a mere idle possibility the pride of the wise Heraclitus, who may serve as our example. For all striving for knowledge seems in itself unsatisfied and unsatisfying, which is why, without having learned it from history, one could hardly believe in such regal self-esteem, such boundless confidence in being the one lucky suitor of truth. Such humans live in their own solar system; that is where one must look for them. Even a Pythagoras, an Empedocles treated himself with a superhuman esteem, indeed with an almost religious awe, though the bond of compassion, together with grand faith in the transmigration of souls and the unity of all living things, led them back again to other humans, and to their salvation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The World is not the way they tell you it is. Unconsciously we know this because we have al been immunized by growing up in the United States of America. The little girl watching television asks will she really get the part in the spring play if she uses Listerine, and her good mother says no, darling, that is just the commercial. It is not long before the moppets figure out that parents have commercials of their own—commercials to keep one quiet, commercials to get one to eat, and so on. However, parents—indeed all of us—are in turn being given a whole variety of commercials that do not seem to be commercials. Silver is in short supply, and the Treasury is running out and begins to fear a run. So the Treasury tells the New York Times that, what with one thing and another, there is enough silver for twenty years. Those who listened to the commercial sat quietly, expecting to get the part in the spring play, and the cynics went and ran all the silver out of the Treasury and the price went through the roof. Image and reality an identity and anxiety and money are all major concerns to us. If that does not scare you, nothing will. It is not really that serious and there is a message in here from Lord Keynes to that effect. You already know about image and reality, and you probably already know all about identity and anxiety, and everybody knows about money, so all we are doing is stirring them up together. Many are wondering, as Mr. Adam Smith did, the famous economist and moral philosopher, “To what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this World?” What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and preheminence?” he asked in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
We are taught—at least those of us who grew up without a great deal of it—that money is A Very Serious Business, that the stewardship of capital is holy, and that the handler of money must conduct oneself as a Prudent Human. It is all part of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of Capitalism and I suppose it all helped to make this country what it is. Penny saved, penny earned, waste not, want not, Summer Sale Save 10 Percent, and so on. The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and overexacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst one who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate told. Drs. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern developed, some years ago, a Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. This game theory has had a tremendous impact on our national life; it influences how our defense decisions are made and how the marketing strategies of great corporations are worked out. What is the game theory? You could say it is an attempt to quantify and work through the actions of players in a game, to measure their options continuously. Or, to be more formal, game theory is a branch of mathematics that aims to analyze problems of conflict by abstracting common strategic features for study in theoretical models. By stressing strategic aspects, id est, those controlled by the participants, it goes beyond the classic theory of probability, in which the treatment of games is limited to pure chance. Drs. Von Neumann and Morgenstern worked through systems that incorporated conflicting interests, incomplete information, and the interplay of free rational decisions and choice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
They started with dual games, zero sum two-person games, id est, those in which one player wins what the other loses. At the other end you have something like the stock market, an infinite, n-person game. (N is one of the letters economists use when they do not know something.) The stock market is probably temporarily too complex even for the Game Theoreticians, but I suppose some day even it will become a serious candidate for quantification and equations. The market is both a game and a Game, id est, both sport, frolic, fun, and play, and a subject for continuously measurable options. If it is a game, then we can relieve ourselves of some of the heavy and possibly crippling emotions that individuals carry into investing, because in a game the winning of the stake is clearly defined. Anything else becomes irrelevant. Is this so startling? “Eighty percent of investors are not really out to make money,” says one leading Wall Streeter. Investors not out to make money? It seems almost like a contradiction in terms. What are they doing then? That can be a subject for a whole discussion, and will be, a bit later. Let us go back to the illumine, that the investment game is intolerably boring save to those with a gambling instinct, while those with the instinct must pay to it “the appropriate toll.” This really does say it all. Active investors do not pursue bonds (except convertibles) and preferreds (except convertibles). It is not that one cannot make money with these instruments, it is that they lack romance enough to be part of the game; they are boring. It is very hard to get excited over a bond basis book, where your index finger traces along a column until it gets to the proper degree of safety and yield. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Sometime illusions are more comfortable than reality, but there is no reason to be discomfited by facing the gambling instinct that saves the stock market from being a bore. Once it is acknowledged, rather than buried, we can “pay to this propensity the appropriate toll” and proceed with reality. There is really no more than recognizing an instinct. Dr. Thomas Schelling, a Harvard economist and the author of a number of works on miliary strategy, foes a lot further. Writing on “Economics and Criminal Enterprise,” Dr. Schelling says: “The greatest gambling enterprise in the United States has not been significantly touched by organized crime. That is the stock market…The reason is that the market works too well, Federal control over the stock market, designed mainly to keep it honest and informative…makes it a hard market to tamper with.” Sentences like the first one in that excerpt must make the public-relations people at the New York Stock Exchange wake up screaming. For years the New York Stock Exchange and the securities industry have campaigned to correct the idea that buying stocks was gambling, and while there may be some dark corners of this country that persist in a Populist suspicion of Wall Street, by and large they have succeeded. Dr. Schelling’s phrasing has to be counted as unfortunate, and in no sense is the stock market a great gambling enterprise like a lottery. However, it is an exercise in mass psychology, in trying to guess better than the crowd how the masses will behave. Sometimes the literature which was produced in order to dispel the pre-1929 suspicions can get in the way of seeing things the way they are. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
If you are a player in the Game, or are thinking of becoming one, there is one irony of which you should be aware. The object of the game is to make money, hopefully a lot of it. All the players in the Game are getting rapidly more professional; the amount of sheer information poured out on what is going on has become almost too much to absorb. The true professionals in the Game—the professional portfolio managers—grow more skilled all the time. They are human and they make mistakes, but if you have your money managed by a truly alert mutual fund or even by one of the better banks, you will have a better job done for you than probably at any time in the past. However, if you have your money managed for you, then you are not really interested, or at least the Game element—with that propensity to be paid for—does not attract you. There are a lot of investors who came to the market to make money, and they told themselves that what they wanted was the money: security, a trip around the World, a new sloop, a country estate, an art collection, a Caribbean house for cold winters. And they succeeded. So they sat on the dock of the Caribbean home, chatting with their art dealers and gazing fondly at the new sloop, and after a while it was a bit flat. Something was missing. If you are a successful Game player, it can be a fascinating, consuming, totally absorbing experience, in fact it has to be. If it is not totally absorbing, you are not likely to be among the most successful, because you are competing with those who do find it so absorbing. The lads with the Caribbean houses and the new sloops did not, upon the discovery that something was missing, sell those trophies and acquire sackcloth and ashes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The sloops and the houses and the art are still there, but the players have gone back to the Game, and they do not have a great deal of time for their toys. The Game is more fun. It probably does not make you a better person, and I am not sure it does any good for humanity; the best you can say is what Samuel Johnson said, that no man is so harmlessly occupied when he is making money. The irony is that this is a money game and money is the way we keep score. However, the real object of the Game is not money, it is the playing of the Game itself. For the true players, you could take all the trophies away and substitute plastic beads or whale’s teeth; as long as there is a way to keep score, they will play. There are cases of a predatory government just as they are in cases of firms and agencies of a benevolent government. Modeling of dynamics seems essential for a more satisfactory treatment of the distinction between roving and stationary bandits than the simple ad hoc procedures. Hierarchical agencies are important in practice because a government has to use middle-level administrators to implement its policies, and these can have their own objectives and information advantages. Thus a top-level government may be more or less benevolent while its middle-level agents are predatory, or both may be predatory and the middle-level agents may be trying to keep some of the extorted sums for themselves. Agricultural reforms in China in the late 1970s eventually won the approval of the top-level government, overcoming initial resistance by local bureaucrats. There are especially harmful consequences when a citizen needs permission from several officials of a predatory government to conduct one’s productive activities, and each of them demand a bribe. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
If we continue in our present direction, the Soviet Union serves as a warning to Western industrialism of where we will arrive. In the West we have developed a managerial industrialism, with the concomitant “organization man”; Russia, having jumped over the intermediate stage in which we in the West still find ourselves, has carried this development to its logical end—under the names of Marxism and socialism. Nationalization (the abolition of private property in the means of production) is not an essential distinction between “socialism” and “capitalism.” It is merely a technical device for more efficient production and planning. The Soviet system is an efficient, completely centralized system, ruled by an industrial, political and military bureaucracy; it is the completed “managerial revolution,” rather than a socialist revolution. The Soviet system is not the opposite of the capitalist system, but rather the image into which capitalism will develop unless we return to the principles of the Western tradition of humanism and individualism. If concentrated ownership of property, bureaucratic management of the process of production, and manipulated consumption are essential elements of twenty-first century capitalism, the difference from Soviet communism seems to be one of degree rather than of quality. If capitalism, as Mr. Keynes said, can survive only with a considerable degree of socialization, it may be said with equal justification that Soviet communism has survived by incorporating a considerable amount of capitalism. In fact, the Soviet system and the Western system are both confronted with the same problems of industrialization and economic growth in a highly developed, centralized managerial society. They both use the methods of a managerial, bureaucratically ruled mass society characterized by an increasing degree of human alienation, adaptation to the group, and a prevalence of material over spiritual interests; they both produce the organization man who is ruled by the bureaucracies and the machines and yet believes himself to be following the lofty aim of humanistic ideals. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The similarities between the Soviet system and “capitalism” were strikingly demonstrated in the presentation of the class stratification and the educational goals of the Soviet Union, a comparison which shows that in many respects the Soviet system resembles the capitalist system of the nineteenth century while in some other it is more modern and “advanced” than that of the West. These similarities become even clearer if we consider one factors that, In Western opinion, is the cornerstone of capitalism: monetary incentives. What are the facts about incentives in Soviet Russia? As far as the workers in Russian are concerned the incentive is cash. The cash incentive operates in two ways. First, is the fact that wages are for the most part based on the piece-work principle. Wages “are fixed for the required output planned for the specific job. As the worker exceeds one’s quota, the incentive system sets up a rising scale to compensate one for increased production. For the labourer who raises one’s output from 1 to 10 percent, the commensurate increases in the piece rate is 100 percent.” If one consistently doubles one’s quota, one’s monthly pay will be almost double one’s regular wage. The second cash incentive for the worker is bonuses, which are paid out of the profit of the enterprise. “In many cases the bonus will make up the larger amount of a Russian worker’s annual wages.” As far as Soviet managers are concerned, the chief incentives is that of the bonus paid for the overfulfillment of targets. “The amount of income earned in the form of bonuses is substantial. The managerial personnel of the iron and steel industry earned bonuses averaging 51.4 percent of their basic income. In the food industry at the low end, the percentage was 21 percent. Since these are averages, many individual managers earned considerably more than this. Bonuses of this magnitude must be a potent incentive indeed.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Also the status symbol and the expense account have become, according to Javits, an important incentive for the Soviet manager. Summing up, Berliner states that “private gain has for the last 25 years been the keystone of the management incentive system” and “we are safe in saying that for the next several decades at least, private gain will be the central economic incentive in both [the America and the Russian] systems.” For the peasants too, cash is one of the main economic incentives. There is one incentive that is paradoxical insofar as it shows a relaxation of state incentive on the one had by the Soviet, and a continued experimentation on the other hand by the United States of America. It refers to the highly publicized incentive to agriculture offered by the United States of America at its expense for the private gain of the farmer. In the Soviet Union…after having sold the required crop to the government, the members of the collectives are permitted to market the excess to the public on a supply-and-demand basis. This area of Soviet economy is about the only one in which a free marker can be found. In the period before the German Revolution of 1918, the authority of the monarchy was undisputed, and by leaning on it and identifying with it the member of the lower middle class acquired a feeling of security and narcissistic pride. Also, the authority of religion and traditional morality was still firmly rooted. The family was still unshaken and a safe refuge in a hostile World. The individual felt that one belonged to a stable social and cultural system in which one had one’s definite place. One’s submission and loyalty to existing authorities were a satisfactory solution of one’s masochistic strivings; yet one did not go to the extreme of self-surrender and one retained a sense of the importance of one’s own personality. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
What one was lacking in security and aggressiveness as an individual, one was compensated for by the strength of the authorities to whom one submitted oneself. In brief one’s economic position was still solid enough to give one a feeling of self-pride and of relative security, and the authorities on whom one learned were strong enough to give one the additional security which one’s own individual position could not provide. The postwar period changed this situation considerably. In the first place, the economic decline of the old middle class went at a faster pace; this decline was accelerated by the inflation, culminating in 1923, which wiped out almost completely the savings of many years’ work. While the years between 1924 and 1928 brought economic improvement and new hopes to the lower middle class, squeezed in between the workers and the upper classes, was the most defenseless group and therefore the hardest hit. However, besides these economic factors there were psychological considerations that aggravated the situation. The defeat in the war and the downfall of the monarchy was one. While the monarchy and the state had been the solid rock on which, psychologically speaking, the petty bourgeois had built his existence, their failure and defeat shattered the basis of one’s own life. If the Kaiser could be publicly ridiculed, if officers could be attacked, if the state had to change its form and to accept “red agitators” as cabinet ministers and saddle-maker as president, what could the little human put one’s trust in? One had identified oneself in one’s subaltern manner with all these institutions; now, since they had gone, where was one to go? The inflation, too, played both an economic and a psychological role. It was a deadly blow against the principle of thrift as well as against the authority of the state. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
If the savings of many years, for which one had sacrificed so many little pleasures, could be lost through no fault of one’s own, what was the point in saving anyway? If the state could break its promises printed on its bank noted and loans, whose promises could one trust any longer? It was not only the economic position of the lower middle class that declined more rapidly after the war, but its social prestige as well. Before the war one could feel oneself as something better than a worker. After the revolution the social prestige of the working class rose considerably and in consequence the prestige of the lower middle class fell in relative terms. There was nobody to look down upon any more, a privilege that had always been one of the strongest assets in the life of small shopkeepers and their like. In addition to these factors the last stronghold of middle-class security had been shattered too: the family. The postwar development, in Germany perhaps more than in other countries, had shaken the authority of the father and the old middle-class morality. The younger generation acted as they pleased and cared no longer whether their actions were approved by their parents or not. The decline of the old social symbols of authority like monarchy and state affected the role of the individual authorities, the parents. If these authorities, which the younger generation has been taught by the parents to respect, proved to be weak, then the parents lost prestige and authority too. Another factor was that, under the changed conditions, especially the inflation, the older generation was bewildered and puzzled and much less adapted to the new conditions than the smarter, younger generation. Thus the younger generation felt superior to their elders and could not take them, and their teachings, quite seriously any more. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Furthermore, the economic decline of the middle class deprived the parents of their economic roles as backers of the economic future of their children. The older generation of the lower middle class grew more bitter and resentful, but in a passive way; the younger generation was driving for action. Children, after being limbs of Satan in traditional theology and mystically illuminated angels in the minds of educational reformers, have reverted to being little devils—not theological demons inspired by the Evil One, but scientific Freudian abominations inspired by the Unconscious. They are, it must be said, far more wicked than they were in the diatribes of the monks; they displayed, an ingenuity and persistence in sinful imaginings to which in the past there was nothing comparable except St. Anthony. Is all this the objective truth at least? Or is it merely an adult imaginative compensation for being no longer allowed to wallop the little pests? Germany’s economic position was aggravated by the fact that the basis for an independent economic existence, such as their parents had had, was lost; the professional market was saturated, and the chances of making a living as a physician or lawyer were slight. Those who had fought in the war felt that they had a claim for a better deal than they were actually getting. Especially the many young officers, who for years had been accustomed to command and exercise power quite naturally, could not reconcile themselves to becoming clerks or traveling salesmen. The increasing social frustration led to a projection which became an important source for National Socialism: instead of being aware of the economic and social fate of the old middle class, its members consciously thought of their fate in term of the nation. The nation defeat and the Treaty of Versailles became the symbols to which the actual frustration—the social one—was shifted. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Instead of denying or seeking to minimize the effects of social investigation on the behaviour of the people investigated, it is probable that social science has much to gain by making them the focus of greater attention. For if the reflexive consequences of social inquiry can be isolated and studied, it is possible that the precise condition under which they occur can be predicted, and ultimately utilized. This outcome is far form certain; it may be that with every cycle of self-examination new conditions are generated, so that prediction is always one move behind self-knowledge, and the concrete outcomes will always remain indeterminate. Abstractly, on the other hand, each increment of self-knowledge is likely to produce at least an enhanced sense of self-determination. If in all social research, furthermore, the subjects were systematically made party to the research, as well as to the findings—as the subjects’ curiosity and co-operation have always seemed in fairness to warrant—the result promises new techniques of self-expression and social planning. Suppose that a survey of all parents in a certain community reveals that 75 percent of those parents beat their children for defying commands and 25 percent do not. The mere interviewing of parents to find this out may have caused large numbers of them to reflect upon beating as a debatable practice, and to discuss it with other. Suppose that the figure found are then published for the information of the whole community. Some parent who beat their children may be encouraged by realizing how many other do likewise; other may be influenced by the fat that many parents et along without beating. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Some parents who do not go in for beating may be encouraged to learn that there are many others who do not; others may be discouraged to realize they are in a minority. However, since many parents do not fall neatly into one category or the other, and may resort to beating only under extreme circumstances, it is likely that the interviewing process will force them to clarify their conception of themselves as beaters or nonbeaters. Also, when the results are published, knowledge of how many endorse or condemn each practice is likely to send further waverers in one direction or the other. Human beings quickly lose patience with being studied—unless they are studying themselves. As people become more aware of what is taking place in their community, discussion will occur and opinion form. Instead of the findings remaining mere factual records objectively gathered by disinterested observers, they become indices of progress and achievement; the community commences to measure itself against itself, to accentuate a direction of change guided by a preferred self-characterization; goals of the “Let’s do better next year!” type are informally or formally set up for each period. The adoption of these goals releases the energy for their achievements; new values and motives are created. Human beings change their behaviour as a consequence of studying it. Planning becomes not a procedure for reducing freedom but for increasing the scope of self-determination. Social science becomes not a technique for manipulation but a means for everyone to explore new possibilities of self-development. Family life becomes a lifelong series of experiments in personality reorganization conducted by the persons involved, and family agencies become their sources of leadership. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
If the goal of family research and family agencies is to be the development of competent personalities, then this implies a good deal more than the acquisition and application of matter-of-fact knowledge. It requires above all the will to carry out these theoretical and practical programs. Not the least of the threats confronting western communities is a dangerous paralysis of the general will. There is compelling evidence in the volume of sales of religious books and self-help books for the existence of an almost universal desire for greater competence. As humans achieve a competence with respect to the social World comparable to their mastery over the material World, some old values may make way for new, but other are realized in higher degree. As some means become an ends in themselves, so some formers ends are reduced to the function of means. Perhaps the substitution of the pursuit of competence for the pursuit of wealth will be such instance. In the contemporary world, a parent is far better advised to endow one’s child with competence in the new sense than to leave one with “a competence” in the old sense. Democracies do not know what kind of citizen the want to create. It is likely, however, that a later generation will look back and observe that we were not trying to create a fixed type of person, as other ages and place have done. Instead, we were groping toward the creation of a person who, not conforming to a predetermine image, is unprecedently capable of determining oneself. The members of a family change and develop, and it is other family members who are the principal determinants of such development. If this is assumed to be true, then the reflexivity quotient of any participant experiment is maximized, the more the behaviour of the subjects resembles that of the members of the family. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The more each means to the others, and they do one, the greater the consequence of their interactions. Conversely, the influence of others upon the self sharply declines as they move outside one’s constellation of significant others. Family patterns are normally transferred to interpersonal relations in other institutions. It is the possibility of progressively reconstituting the family through experimentally establishing its preferred relations in the quasi-families which offers hope of raising the quality of family life and of making accessible to experimental research a subject previously almost inviolate to observation. It is clear that incompetence in marriage and parenthood are very common, and its consequences are difficult for millions to bear. The usual references to rates of divorce only crudely suggests how far families fall short of hopes they inspire when formed, since even families that last often fail to achieve the optimal development of their members, so much so that many writers incline to assume that marital and parental misfeasance are the normal human condition. A basic finding is that changes in certain components of competence can be produced through series of meetings of quasi-family groups of young adults, who role-play and discuss problematic family life situations. By over performance a member learns to exhibit greater competence within the sheltered forum of a small group of comparable others, before whom one is willing to expose oneself in challenging tasks of learning. They carry-over to actual life—in one’s real family and interpersonal relations—is a problem not only of competence but of identity-change. It can be accomplished by a process of identification and progressive involvement in one’s practice group from week to week. How stable such gains are is yet to be determine, but as other investigators have frequently found, the only permanent change is structural change. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Thus it is assumed that only as increments in competence are stabilized through changed conceptions of identity, and fortified through the actual growth of friendship, commitment, and obligation to other members of the practice group, is there reasonable chance of achieving the substantial results envisaged. And if the family as the cellular component of society can be reconstituted through participant experimentation—if the gap from quasi-family to real life situations can be steadily bridged through wider development of interpersonal competence in the next generation—then the family itself will gain in value and public honour. Because of the domination of the physical pat of the human, and the emphasis placed upon the supernatural experiences in the body, the body is made to do the work of the spirit and is forced into a prominence which hides the true spirit life. It feels the pressure, feels the conflict, and thus becomes the locus of the sense instead of it being the spirit. These believers do not perceive where they feel. If they are question as to where they “feel,” they cannot answer. They should learn to discriminate, and know how to discern the feelings of the spirit, which are neither emotional (soulish) nor physical. The spirit may be likened to an electric light. If the humans’ spirit is in contact with the Spirit of God, it is full of light; apart from Him it is in darkness. Indwelt by Him, “the spirit of the human is a lamp of the Lord,” reports Proverbs 20.27. The possibilities and potentialities of the human spirit are only known when the spirit is joined to Christ and, united to Him, is made strong to stand against the powers of darkness. The Lord will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the land; He will make the people lie down in safety. Violence shall no more be heard in your land, neither desolation nor destruction within your borders. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All. The Sacramento Fire Department has been serving the community since 1851, they are not receiving all their resources, please make donations to them. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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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.
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The New World Under Construction
Nazism is an economic and political issue, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds. The psychological aspect of Nazism, its human basis suggests two problems: the character structure of those people to whom it appealed, and the psychological characteristics of the ideology that made it such an effective instrument with regard to those people. In considering the psychological basis for the success of Nazism this differentiation has to be made at the outset: one part of the population bowed to the Nazi regime without any strong resistance, but also without becoming admirers of the Nazi ideology and political practice. Another part was deeply attracted to the new ideology and fanatically attached to the new ideology and fanatically attached to those who proclaimed it. The first group consisted mainly of the working class and the liberal and Catholic bourgeoisie. In spite of an excellent organization, especially among the working class, these groups, although continuously hostile to Nazism from its beginning up to 1933, did not show the inner resistance one might have expected as the outcome of their political convictions. Their will to resist collapsed quickly and since then they have caused little difficulty for the regime (excepting, of course, the small minority which has fought heroically against Nazism during all these years). Being a member of the SS in a society like Nazi Germany was a matter of considerable significance. In the Soviet Union, another revolutionary society, people who rose into the elite were called “new people.” They were people of the future, liberated from old norms, and distinct from the nobility of the old regime, who had attained their rank and privileges through birth or wealth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The SS were the new people of Nazi Germany. However, their distinction was based less on class (as in the USSR) than on the perception that they had especially good blood. This was their entrée into the elite of the new World under construction. Early in the war, Otto Meckelburg serves as an adjutant in the Death’s Head regiment, which oversaw the administration of Germany’s concentration camps. No “task was ever too much” for Mr. Mechelburg, his boss wrote in 1940; he was always “fresh and eager to work.” Mr. Meckelburg participated in the Germans’ early campaigns in Poland and the west, and later at the Eastern Front and in Yugoslavia. He was decorated a number of times during the war and moved up the ranks. In September 1942, he was made company commander in the notorious Prince Eugen Division, whose counterinsurgency operations involved numerous war crimes, many against civilians. Whatever the precise nature of his wartime deeds, Mr. Meckelburg would be repeatedly lauded by his superiors for “particularly successful leadership” and promoted. The officer urging his promotion to Sturmbannfuhrer in 1943 described him as “open, direct, and straight-as-an-arrow,” with an “impeccably SS attitude.” He had, another assessor observed in 1944, an “instinct for the possibilities of a given situation.” Psychologically, this readiness to submit to the Nazi regime seems to be due mainly to a state of inner tiredness and resignation, which, is characteristic of the individual in the present era even in democratic countries. In Germany one additional condition was present as far as the working class was concerned: the defeat it suffered after the first victories in the revolution of 1918. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The working class had entered the postwar period with strong hopes for the realization of socialism or last least for a definite rise in its political, economic, and social position; but, whatever the reasons, it had witnessed an unbroken succession of defeats, which brought about the complete disappointments of all its hopes. By the beginning of 1930 the fruits of its initial victories were almost completely destroyed and the result was a deep feeling of resignation, of disbelief in their leaders, of doubt about the value of any kind of political organization and political activity. They still remained members of their respective parties and, consciously, continued to believe in their political doctrines; but deep within themselves many had given up any hope in the effectiveness of political actions. An additional incentive for the loyalty of the majority of the population to the Nazi government because effect after Mr. Hitler came into power. For millions of people Mr. Hitler’s government then became identical with “Germany.” Once he held the power of the government, fighting him implied shutting oneself out of the community of Germans; when other political parties were abolished and the Nazi party “was” Germany, opposition to it meant opposition to Germany. It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group. However much a German citizen may be opposed to the principles of Nazim, if he has to choose between being alone and feeling that he belongs to Germany, most persons will choose the latter. It can be observed in many instances that persons who are not Nazis nevertheless defend Nazism against criticism of foreigners because they feel that an attack on Nazis is an attack on Germany. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The fear of isolation and the relative weakness of moral principles help any party to win the loyalty of a large sector of the population once that part has captured the power of the state. This consideration results in an axiom which is important for the problems of political propaganda: any attack on Germany as such, any defamatory propaganda concerning “the Germans” (such as the “Hun” symbol of the last war), only increases the loyalty to those who are not wholly identified with the Nazi system. This problem, however, cannot be solved basically by skillful propaganda but only by the victory in all countries of one fundamental truth: that ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief. In contrast to the negative or resigned attitude of the working class and of the liberal and Catholic bourgeoisie, the Nazi ideology was ardently greeted by the lower strata of the middle class, composed of small shopkeepers, artisans, and white-collar workers. In fact, 90 percents of doctors were connected to the Nazi Party. Members of the older generation among this class formed the more passive mass basis; their sons and daughters were the more active fighters. For them the Nazi ideology—its spirit of blind obedience to a leader and of hatred against racial and political minorities, its craving for conquest and domination, its exaltation of the German people and the “Nordic Race”—had a tremendous emotional appeal, and it was this appeal which won them over and made them into ardent believers in and fighters for the Nazi cause. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The answer to the question why the Nazi ideology was so appealing to the lower middle class has to be sought for in the social character of the lower middle class. Their social character was markedly different from that of the working class, of the higher strata of the middle class, and of the nobility and the upper classes. As a matter of fact, certain features were characteristic for this part of the middle class throughout its history: their love of the strong, hatred of the weak, their pettiness, hostility, thriftiness with feelings as well as with money, and essentially their asceticism. Their outlook on life was narrow, they suspected and hated the stranger, and they were curious and envious of their acquaintances, rationalizing their envy as moral indignation; their whole life was based on the principle of scarcity—economically as well as psychologically. To say that the social character of the lower middle class differed from that of the working class does not imply that this character structure was not present in the working class also. However, it was typical for the lower middle class, while only a minority of the working class exhibited the same character structure in a similarly clear-cut fashion; the one or the other trait, however, in a less intense form, like enhanced respect of authority or thrift, was to be found in most members of the working class too. On the other hand it seems that a great part of the white-collar workers—probably the majority—more closely resembled the character structure of the manual workers (especially those in big factories) than that of the “old middle class,” which did not participate in the rise of monopolistic capitalism but was essentially threatened by it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Although it is true that the social character of the lower middle class had been the same long before the war of 1914, it is also true that the events after the war intensified the very traits to which the Nazi ideology had its strong appeal: its craving for submission and its lust for power. There were, after all, times of spiritual malaise, of mistrust and heightened suspicion. In an atmosphere of determined, willful refusal to acknowledge basic facts, who could be blamed for imagining that evil was lurking about. It is precisely because reason is universal and transcends all nation borders, that the philosopher who follows reason is a citizen of the World; humans are their objects—not this or that person, or this or that nation. The World is one’s country, not the place where one was born. Humans fear thought more than they fear anything else on Earth—more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees a human being, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the Universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the World, and the chief glory of humans. However, if thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds humans back—fear lest their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear least they themselves should prove less worthy of respect than they have supposed themselves to be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
“Should the working human think freely about property? Then what will become of us, the rich? Should young men and women think freely about sex? Then what will become of morality? Should soldiers think freely about war? Then what will become of military discipline? Away with thought! Back into the shades of prejudice, lest property, morals, and war should be endangered! Better men should be stupid, slothful, and oppressive than that their thoughts should be free. For if their thoughts were free, they might not think as we do. And at all costs this disaster must be averted.” So the opponents of thought argue in the unconscious depths of their souls. And so they act in their churches, their schools, and their universities. For some philosophers, the capacity to disobey is rooted, not in some abstract principle, but in the most real experience there is—in the love of life. This love of life shines through their writings as well as through the persons. It is a rare quality today, and especially rare in the very countries where humans live in the midst of plenty. Many confuse thrill with joy, excitement with interest, consuming with being. The necrophilous slogan “Long live death,” while consciously used only by the fascists, fills the heats of many people living in the lands of plenty, although they are not aware of it in themselves. It seems that in this fact lies of one the reasons in which explain why the majority of people are resigned to accept nuclear war and the ensuing destruction of civilization and to take so few steps to prevent this catastrophe. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Some philosophers, on the contrary, fight against the threatening slaughter, not because they are pacifist or because some abstract principle is involved, but precisely because they are humans who love live. For the very same reason many have no use for those voices which love to harp on the evilness of humanity, in fact thus saying more about themselves and their only gloomy moods than about humans. While these steadfast individuals may not be sentimental romantics, they tend to be hard-headed, critical, caustic realist; they are aware of the depth of evil and stupidity to be found in the heart of humans, but they do not confuse this fact with an alleged innate corruption which serves to rationalize the outlook of those who are too gloomy to believe in man’s gift to create a World in those which they can feel themselves to be at home. Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered. The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the gravestones of abandoned hopes. The Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. However, out of the cavern the Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart. However, those who feel that life on this planet would be a life in prison if it were not for the windows onto a greater World beyond; for those to whom a belief in human’s omnipotence seems arrogant, who desire rather the Stoic freedom that comes of mastery over the passions than the Napoleonic domination that sees the kingdoms of this World at its feet—in a word, to humans who do not find Man an adequate object of their worship, the pragmatist’s World will seem narrow and petty, robbing life of all that gives it value, and making Man himself smaller by depriving the Universe which he contemplates of all its splendour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
With the increasing development of capitalism, not only economically but psychologically, the spiritual, humanistic aims of socialism were replaced by those of the victorious capitalist system—the aims of maximal economic efficiency, maximal production and consumption. This misinterpretation of socialism as a purely economic movement, along with an acceptance of the nationalization of the means of production as an aim in itself, occurred both in the right and left wings of the socialist movement. The primary aim of the reformist leaders of the socialist movement in Europe was the elevation of the economic status of the worker within the capitalist system. Their most radical measure in this effort was the nationalization of certain big industries. Only recently has it been realized that the nationalization of an enterprise is in itself not the realization of socialism, and that to be managed by a publicly appointed bureaucracy. The leaders of the Soviet Union evaluated socialism also by the standards of capitalism and their principal claim for the Soviet system is that “socialism” can produce more effectively and abundantly than “capitalism.” Both wings of socialism forget that Mr. Marx aimed at a humanly different society, not only at a more prosperous one. His concept of socialism, despite changes in the development of his own thinking, was principally that of an unalienated society in which every citizen would be an active and responsible member of the community, participating in the control of all social and economic arrangements and not, as the Soviet practice, a “number,” fed with ideologies and controlled by a small bureaucratic minority. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
For Mr. Marx, socialism was the control of society from below, by its members; not from above, by a bureaucracy. The Soviet Union may be called state capitalism, or anything else; one claim this managerial, bureaucratic system can not make is that of being “socialism” in Marx’s sense. No better answer can be given to this claim than Mr. Schumpeter’s statement that there is “between the true meaning of Marx’s message and Bolshevist practice and ideology at least as great a gulf as there was between the religion of humble Gallileans and the practice and ideology of the princes of the Church or the warlords of the Middle Ages.” While the Soviet system has borrowed the concept of the nationalization of the means of production and of over-all planning from Marxist socialism, it nonetheless shares many features with contemporary capitalism. The development of twentieth-century capitalism has led to an ever-growing centralization in industrial production. The big corporations are becoming increasingly the center of production in the steel, automobile, and chemical industries, in oil, food, banking, movies, and television. Only in certain branches of production, like the clothing industry, do we still find the nineteenth-century picture of a great number of small and highly competitive enterprises. Today’s big enterprises are directed by vast and hierarchically structured bureaucracies, which administer the enterprise according to the principles of profit maximization, yet are relatively independent of the millions of stockholders who are the legal owners. The same centralization has taken place in government, in the armed forces, and even in scientific research. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
While “private enterprises” decries ideologically all socialist tendencies, it is eager to accept large direct and indirect grants by the state. The same development has led to important changes with regard to free competition and free market. The free market and free competition in the nineteenth-century sense are phenomena of the past. Even though the Western system retain some measure of competition, overt and hidden price agreements between the big corporations, state grants, et cetera, have (in spite of anti-monopoly laws in the United States of America) greatly restricted competition and the function of the free market. Assuming, for a moment, that the tendency toward centralization develops further, and that there will eventually be only one big corporation producing, respectively, automobiles, steel, films, et cetera, the picture of “capitalist” economy would not be so drastically different from the Russian socialist economy. There is of course an increasing element in state planning in Western capitalism, not only through massive state intervention, but also in the sense that the Atomic Energy Commission is the largest industrial enterprise in the United States of America, and that the armament industry, although in private hands, produces a great mass of weapons according to plans made by the state. This, however, does not imply that there is over-all planning in the United States of America beyond arms production, or even a plan for the transition from an armament to a peace economy. The mode of production in contemporary capitalism is that of large conglomerations of workers and clerks who work under the orders of the managerial bureaucracies. They are part of a vast production machine which, in order to run at all, must run smoothly, without friction, without interruption. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The individual worker or clerk becomes a cog in this machine; one’s functions and activities are determined by the whole structure of the organization in which one works. In the large enterprises, legal ownership of the means of production has become separated from its management, and has lost importance. The managers do not have the qualities of the old owners—individual initiative, daring, risk-taking—but the qualities of the bureaucrat—lack of individuality and imagination, impersonality, caution. They administer things and persons, and relate to persons as to things. The giant corporations, which control the economic—and to a large degree the political—destiny of the country, constitute the very opposite of the democratic process; they represent power without control by those whom they rule. Aside from the industrial bureaucracy, the bast majority of the population is administered by still other bureaucracies. First, there is the governmental bureaucracy, (including that of the armed forces) which influences and direct the lives of many millions in one form or another. More and more, the industrial, military and governmental bureaucracies are becoming intertwined, both in their activities and, increasingly, in their personnel. With the development of ever greater enterprises, unions also have developed into big bureaucratic machines in which the individual member has very little to say. Many union chiefs are managerial bureaucrats, just as the industrial chiefs are. All these bureaucracies have little authentic vision; and, due to the very nature of bureaucratic administration, this has to be so. They function rather like electronic computers, into which all the data have been fed and which—according to certain principles—make the “decisions.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
When humans are transformed into things and managed like things, their managers themselves become things; and things have no will, no vision, no plan. With the bureaucratic management of people, the democratic process becomes transformed into a ritual. Whether it is a stockholders meeting, or a political election, or a union meeting, the individual has lost almost all power to participate actively in the making of decision. Especially in the political sphere, elections become more and more reduced to plebiscites in which the voter can express preference for one of two slates of professional politicians. The best that can be said for that is that he is governed with his consent. However, the means used to bring about this consent are those of suggestion and manipulation and, with all that, the most fundamental decisions—those of foreign policy which involve peace and war—are made by small groups, which the average citizen hardly even knows of. Not only is the individual managed and manipulated in the sphere of production, but also in the sphere of consumption, which allegedly is the one in which one can express one’s free choice. Whether it is the consumption of food, clothing, liquor, cigarettes, or of films and television programs, a powerful suggestion apparatus is employed for two purposes: first, to increase constantly the appetite for new commodities, and second, to direct these appetites into the channels most profitable for industry. The very size of the capital investment in the consumer goods industry and the competition between a few giant enterprises makes it necessary not to leave consumption to chance, nor to leave the consumer a free choice of whether one want to be more and what one wants to buy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
One’s appetites have to be constantly whetted; one’s tastes have to be manipulated, managed, and made predictable. Humans are transformed into the “consumer,” the eternal suckling whose one wish is to consumer more and “better” things. To maximize its own take, the kleptocratic government would ideally to drive everyone down to the subsistence or quiescence utility level. However, such a government, provided it is rational, will recognize the need to give the higher-skilled people sufficient marginal incentives to reveal their skills, because this increases its net extraction from the economy. Therefore, it will keep only the least-skilled person at the lowest utility level, and allow the successively higher-skilled people to enjoy successively higher utility levels. Casual observation confirms that predatory governments do indeed treat the poor harshly. (A benevolent government will also have to tolerate some inequality in the interests of revelation of high skills, but it will keep even the worst-off person above the subsistence level. In fact a government with an extremely egalitarian—so-called Rawlsian—objective function wants to maximize the utility of the least-well-off person, to the extent permitted by the information and resource constraints.) Lowering the marginal tax rate on any one person reduces the revenue that the government can get from all those with higher skills. This is costly to the government: directly so for the kleptocratic government, and indirectly for the benevolent government because that tightens its revenue constraint and makes it harder to deliver utilities to citizens. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The calculation of the optimal tax schedule balances, at each skill level, the incentive effect of lowering the marginal tax rate for people at that skill level and the revenue loss from the people with skill levels higher than that. However, the trade-off disappears at the highest skill level that exists in the population, because then there is no higher skill level and therefore no revenue loss. Therefore the incentive effect dominates at the top skill level, and the optimal marginal tax rate is zero there. Benevolent governments usually have regard for equality and fairness. Therefore they are reluctant to lower the marginal tax rates on the most well-off people. They will let the marginal rate go to zero only at the very end, or may even choose to disregard this aspect of optimality in the interests of fairness. However, a kleptocratic government does not care about equality or fairness. Therefore we should expect such a government to treat the richest people in society especially well. They will have to contribute to the government’s coffers, to be sure, but at the margin they will be allowed to earn more income and keep it. Again causal observation supports the result that predatory dictators are often best buddies with their richest citizens. In view of the fact that all human beings organize their experience and actions through the medium of verbal categories, and that social science concepts are usually as accessible to the ordinary citizen as to the social scientist, it probably should be expected that descriptive and analytical concepts would lead to revisions of self-conception and social distinction among the human beings to whom applied. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Account must be taken of the common implication of citizens and scientists alike, not only in the methods, findings, and concepts of social science, but also in the interests which motivate social studies. It is not as if a special class of beings called scientists withdrew from the rest of humanity, and became mere spectators of life, knowledge of which they gathered and stored for its own sake. Moreover, the extent of resources made available for social science in general tends to vary with importance accorded to social science in a community, as against the alternative uses to which the same resources might be put. The economics of research and teaching quite clearly reveal the relative values placed upon particular problems. The sociologists of knowledge have for some time been exploring the interests which have animated the work of certain scholars in various periods, places, and settings. Thus far, however, they have only begun to explore the implications which general adoption by their own community of a scientific interest toward itself would have for their own specialty. To recognize that social facts are the creation of the persons observed, that neither persons nor institutions are permanently given but are in constant process of reconstruction, and that the verbal categories by which self and others are construed are the materials of which social organization is constructed, leads to a conception of human nature and the social order which is less a substantive description than a methodology. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
This is the ultimate outcome of the interactional approach of social psychology, which was first developed in studies of personality in the family. The evolution of social science is not in the direction of permanently definitive statements about human nature and society, but toward the specification of the methods whereby human nature and society come to be what they are. Social theory thus becomes only suspended social action. The famous mot of Poincare, that natural scientists talk about their results while social scientists talk about their methods, is rendered pointless when it becomes evident that the methods of social science are, in this sense, its most valuable findings. Psychopathological offenders seek to create a counterfeit of the truth. If the self-actualized Christian is ignorant of the tactics of the enemy in this way, one lets go the true spirit-action (or allows it to sink into disuse) and follows the counterfeit spiritual feelings, thinking one is walking after the spirit of God all the time. When this true spirit-action ceases, the psychopathological offenders suggest that God now guides through the “renewed mind,” which is an attempt to hide their workings and the human’s disuse of one’s spirit. Upon the cessation of the spirit’s cooperation with the Holy Spirit, with counterfeit “spirit” feelings taking place in the body, what follows is counterfeit light to the mind, reasoning, judging, et cetera—the human thus walking after mind and body, and not after the spirit, with the true illumination of the mind which comes from the full operation of the Holy Spirit. To further interfere with the true spirit of life, the deceiving spirits seek to counterfeit the action of the spirit in burden and aguish. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The start is by giving a fictitious “divine love” to the person, the faculty receiving it being the affections. When these affections are grasped fully by the deceivers, the sense of love passes away, and the human thinks that one has lost God and all communion with God. Then follow feelings of constraint and restraint, which will develop into acute suffering—which the believer thinks is in the spirit, and of God. Now one goes by these feelings, calling them “anguish in the spirit,” “groaning in the spirit,” et cetera, while the deceiving spirits, through these sufferings given by them in the affections, compel the human to do their will. The sacramental element in Protestantism is important. For this element is the one essential element of every religion, namely, the presence of the divine before our acting and striving, in a “structure of grace” and in the symbols expressing it. The experience of the holy must be mediated in a concrete and, therefore, sacramental fashion, for the sacramental is nothing else than some reality becoming the bearer of the holy in a special way and under special circumstances. The largest sense of the term “sacramental” denotes everything in which the Spiritual Presence has been experience; in a narrower sense, it denotes particular objects and acts in which a Spiritual community experiences the Spiritual Presence; and in the narrowest sense, it merely refers to some “great” sacraments in the performance of which the Spiritual Community actualizes itself. Two factors are discernible in every sacrament: a relationship to nature, and a participation in salvation history. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Although, in principle, anything from the World of nature may covey the Spiritual Presence, certain elements are specially qualified to act as sacramental symbols. Symbols must participate in that which they symbolize, not merely by an arbitrary connection, but by their very nature. For instance, water has a special power which peculiarly fits it to become a sacramental material. Water, in one hand, is a symbol for the origin of life in the womb of the mother, which is a symbol for the creative source of all things, and on the other hand, it is a symbol of death—the return to the origin of things. Thus, by its very character, water has a necessary relation to baptism. Whatever the explanation of individual elements such as water, the sacramental principle asserts that nature is open to and, in fact, participates in the holy. All physical consciousness of supernatural things, and even undue consciousness of natural things, should be refused, as this diverts the mind from walking after the spirit and sets it upon the bodily sensations. Physical consciousness is also an obstacle to the continuous concentration of the mind, and in a spiritual believer an “attack” of physical “consciousness” made use of by the enemy make break concentration of the mind and bring a cloud upon the spirit. The body should be kept calm, and under full control; excessive laughter should be avoided, and all “rushing” which rouses the physical life to the extent of dominating mind and spirit. Believers who desire to be “spiritual” and “full age” in the life in God should avoid excess, extravagance, and extremes in all things. “Natural sacraments” swiftly fall prey to the demonic, and the only way they can escape demonization is by union with the New Being in Jesus as the Christ. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Nature has no true sacramental power apart from the history of salvation. Hence, sacraments cannot be manufactured; they “originate when the intrinsic power of a natural object becomes for faith the bearer of sacramental power.” Their origin is linked to the source of all faith, to the Spiritual Presence manifest in Jesus the Christ whose Cross offers the only sure guarantee against the forces of demonization. Since the sacramental principle embraces the whole World of nature and since faith is not restricted by time and places, the question arises: Is the Spiritual Presence bound to any definite sacramental media? Every sacramental act must be subject to the criterion of the New Being in Jesus as the Christ, or demonization would result. Furthermore, sacraments must somehow refer to the central historical and doctrinal symbols of Christianity which have emerged within the history of salvation. However, in the sense that the Spiritual Community may adopt new sacramental symbols, for its entirely possible that a symbol may gradually fade and die, that is, lost its sacramental power. It shall come to pass at the end of days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the top of the mountains; it shall be exalted above the hills; all the nations shall flow into it. And many peoples shall go and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.” God will teach us His ways, and we will walk in His paths; God shall judge between the nations; He shall decide for many peoples. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning forks. Nation shall not life up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. Please be sure to donate to the Sacramento Fire Department. They are not receiving all of their resources and have been proudly serving the community since 1851. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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.
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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/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 