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The United States of America, they Feel, is Seducing their Kids
The actions people take in life are not necessarily even conscious choices. A person who sometimes returns a favor, and sometimes does not, may not think about what strategy is being used. There is no need to assume deliberate choice at all. Nor is it necessary to assume, as the sociobiologist do, that important aspects of human behavior are guided by one’s genes. Many times, the approach being used is strategic rather than genetic for certainly no intelligent person should make an important choice without trying to the complicating factors of the situation into account. The value of an analysis is that one can help to clarify some of the subtle features of the interaction—features which might otherwise be lost in the maze of complexities of the highly particular circumstances in which choice must actually be made. It is the very complexity of reality which makes the analysis of an abstract interaction so helpful as an assistant to understanding. The theory of Cooperation in biological systems can occur even when the participants are not related, and even when they are unable to appreciate the consequences of their own behavior. What makes this possible are the evolutionary mechanisms of genetics and survival of the fittest. An individual able to achieve a beneficial response from another is more likely to have offspring that survive and that continue the pattern of behavior which elicited beneficial responses from others. Thus, under suitable conditions, cooperation based upon reciprocity proves stable in the biological World. Potential applications are spelled out for specific aspects of territoriality, mating, and disease. The conclusion is that Darwin’s emphasis on individual advantage can, in fact, account for the presence of cooperation between individuals of the same or even different species. As long as the proper conditions are present, cooperation can get started, thrive, and prove stable.
While foresight is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation, it can certainly be helpful. If the facts of Cooperation Theory are known by participants with foresight, the most promising finding is that the evolution of cooperation can be speeded up. The most important kingmaker is based on an “outcome maximization” principle originally developed as a possible interpretation of what human subjects do in the Prisoner’s Dilemma laboratory experiments. This rule is called DOWNING, is a particularly interesting rule in its own right. It is well worth studying as an example of a decision rule which is based upon a quite sophisticated idea. Unlike most of the others, its logic is not just a variant of TIT FOR TAT. Instead it is based on a deliberate attempt to understand the other player and then to make the choice that will yield the best long-term score based upon this understanding. The idea is that if the other individual does not seem responsive to what DOWNING is doing, DOWNING will try to get away with whatever it can by defecting. If the other individual does seem responsive, on the other hand, DOWNING will cooperate. To judge the other’s responsiveness, DOWNING estimates the probability that the other individual cooperates after it (DOWNING) cooperates, and also the probability that the other individual cooperates after DOWNING defects. For each move, it updates its estimate of these two conditional probabilities and then selects the choice which will maximize its own long-terms payoff under the assumption that it has correctly modeled the other individual. If the two conditional probabilities have similar values, DOWNING determines that it pays to defect, since the other player seems to be doing that same thing whether DOWNING cooperates or not.
Conversely, if the other individual tends to cooperate after a cooperation but not after a defection by DOWNING, then the other individual seems responsive, and DOWNING will calculate that the best thing to do with a responsive player is to cooperate. Under certain circumstances, DOWNING will even determine that the best strategy is to alternate cooperation and defection. Schizophrenic writing is not infrequently possessed of genius since it emerges from a dialogue between inner soul and outer surroundings unmediated by the burden of “correct” societal conduct. In the World of advertising and mass media, the post-hypnotic magic of the suggestive ad slogan or the metabolic programming of muzak blurs the distinction between the perceived and the perceiver. Vide the recent Citibank slogan: “We’re thinking what you’re thinking.” The schizophrenic takes this sort of programming seriously enough to believe that one is being spoken to as an individual and might even reverse the syllogism to read, “I’m thinking what Citibank is thinking.” Forgiveness of a rule can be informally described as its propensity to cooperate in the moves after the other individual has defected. Of all the nice rules, the one that scored the lowest was also the one that was least forgiving. This is FRIEDMAN, a totally unforgiving rule that employs permanent retaliation. It is never the first to defect, but once the other defects even once, FRIEDMAN defects from then on. In contrast, the winner, TIT FOR TAT, is unforgiving for one move, but thereafter is totally forgiving of that defection After one punishment, it lets bygones be bygones. One of the main reasons why the rules that are not nice do not do well is that most of the rules are not very forgiving. The cause of war is individual and collective maladjustment of men and women in social space. Release from Magnetic Straitjacket Seclusion by Gravity, Restriction, Vacuum, Constant Observation. They are free-showing me how capitalism crushes communism.
Society appears to be largely composed of extremists and habitual criminals not normal human animals subjects or citizens of respectable states. This magnetic phenomenon not only is to be viewed as the predisposing cause of way, may be considered likewise to qualify as a predisposing influence in the cause of cancer, an explanation of the galactic hiss” noted by astronomers in extraterrestrial radio reception, the source of the “voices” complained of by patients in mental institutions and certainly the “magnetic straitjacket” painfully endured by all ordinary patients in such confinement, as well as many other distressing conditions and infirmities. The single fundamental issues is: the relation between reason, or science, and the human good. When one speaks of happiness and the last man, one does not mean that the last man is unhappy, but that one’s happiness is nauseating. An experience of profound contempt is necessary in order to grasp our situation, and our capacity for contempt is vanishing. Those who have esteem or revere and are therefore not self-satisfied, those who have values or, to say the same thing, have gods, in particular those who create gods or found religion have learned that the sacred is the most important human phenomenon. “God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed. However, he did not say this on a note of triumph, in the style of earlier atheism—the tyrant has been overthrown and man is now free. Rather he said it in the anguished tones of the most powerful and delicate piety of its proper object. Man, who loved and needed God, has lost his Father and Savior without possibility of resurrection. The joy of liberation one finds in Marx has turned into terror at man’s unprotectedness. Honesty compels serious men, on examination of their consciences, to admit that the old faith is no longer compelling.
It is the very peak of Christian virtue that demands the sacrifice of Christianity, the greatest sacrifice a Christian can make. Enlightenment killed God; but like Macbeth, the men of the Enlightenment did not know that the cosmos would rebel at the deed, and the World became “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Consider the case of JOSS, a sneaky rule that tries to get away with an occasional defection. This decision rule is a variation of TIT FOR TAT. Like TIT FOR TAT, it always defects immediately after the other individuals defect. However, instead of always cooperating after the other individual cooperates, 10 percent of the time it defects after the other individual cooperates. Thus it tries to sneak in an occasional exploitation of the other individual. This decision rule seems like a fairly small variation of TIT FOR TAT, but in fact its overall performance was much worse, and it is interesting to see exactly why. A major lesson in this situation is the importance of minimizing echo effects in an environment of mutual power. When a single defection can set off a long string of recriminations and counterrecriminations, both sides suffer. A sophisticated analysis of choice must go at least three levels of analysis is the direct effect of a choice. This is easy, since a defection always earns more than a cooperation. The second level considers the indirect effects, taking into account that the other side may or may not punish a defection. This much of the analysis was certainly appreciated by many of the entrants. However, the third level goes deeper and takes into account the fact that in responding to the defections of the other side, one may be repeating or even amplifying one’s own previous exploitative choice. Thus a single defection may be successful when analyzed for its direct effects, and perhaps even when its secondary effects are taken into account. However, the real costs may be in the tertiary effects when one’s own isolated defections turn into unending mutual recriminations.
With the other play serving as a mechanism to delay the self-punishment by a few moves, this aspect of self-punishment was not picked up by many of the decision rules. Despite the fact that none of the attempts at more or less sophisticated decision rules was an improvement on TIT FOR TAT, it was easy to find several rules that would have preformed substantially better than TIT FOR TAT in the environment of the situation. The existence of these rules should serve as a warning against the facile belief that an eye for an eye is not necessarily the best strategy. Nietzsche replaces easygoing or self-satisfying atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences. Longing to believe, along with intransigent refusal to satisfy that longing, is, according to him, the profound response to our entire spiritual condition. Marx denied the existence of God but turned over all His functions to History, which is inevitably directed to a goal of fulfilling of man and which takes the place of Providence. If one is so naïve, one might as well be a Christian. Prior to Nietzsche, all those who taught that man is a historical being presented his history as in one way or another progressive. After Nietzsche, a characteristic formula for describing out history is “the decline of the West.” Nietzsche surveyed and summed up the contradictor strands of rule in culture or soul, that it cannot defend itself theoretically and that its human consequences are intolerable. This constitutes a crisis of the West, for everywhere in the West, for the first time ever, all regimes are founded on reason. Human founders, looking only to universal principles of natural justice recognizable by all humans through their unassisted reason, established governments on the basis of the consent of the governed, without appeal to revelations or tradition.
However, reason has also discerned that all previous cultures were founded by and on gods or belief in gods. Only if the new regimes are enormous successes, able to rival the creative genius and splendor of other cultures, could reason’s rational foundings be equal or superior to the kinds of foundings that reason knows were made elsewhere. However, such equality or superiority is highly questionable; therefore reason recognizes its own inadequacy. There must be religion, and reason cannot found religions. This was already implicit in the first wave of criticism of Enlightenment. Rousseau said a civil religion is necessary to society, and the legislator has appeared draped in the colors of religion. Tocqueville concentrated on the centrality of religion to America. With the failure of Robespierre’s kind of civil religion, there was a continuing effort to promote a revised or liberal Christianity, inspired by Rousseau’s Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it. Culture is a synthesis of reason and religion, attempting to hide the sharp distinction between the two poles. Nietzsche examines the patient, observes that the treatment was not successful, and pronounces God is dead. Now there cannot be religion; but inasmuch as man needs culture, the religious impulse remains. No religion but religiosity. This suffuses Nietzsche’s analysis of modernity, and, unnoticed, it underlies the contemporary categories of psychology and sociology. He brought the religious question back to the center of philosophy. The critical standpoint from which to view modern culture is its essential atheism; and that more repulsive successor of the bourgeois, the last man, is the product of egalitarian, rationalist, socialist atheism.
Thus the novel aspects of the crisis of the West is that it is identical with a crisis of philosophy. Reading Thucydides shows us that the decline of Greece was purely political, that what we call intellectual history is of little importance for understanding it. Old regimes had traditional roots; but philosophy and science took over as rulers in modernity, and purely theoretical problems have decisive political effects. One cannot imagine modern political history without a discussion of Locke, Rousseau, and Marx. Theoretical implausibility and decrepitude are, as everyone knows, at the heart of the Russian malaise. And the Free World is not far behind. Nietzsche is the profoundest, clearest, most powerful diagnostician of the disease. He argues that there is an inner necessity for us to abandon reason on rational grounds—that therefore our regime is doomed. There is, however, a much larger sense in which changes in knowledge are causing or contributing to enormous power shifts. The most important economic development of our lifetime has been the rise of a new system for creating wealth, based no longer on muscle but on mind. Labor in the advanced economy no longer consists of working on “things,” writes historian Mark Poster of the University of California (Irvine), but of “men and women acting on other men and women, or…people acting on information and information acting on people.” The substitution of information or knowledge for brute labor, in fact, lied behind the trouble General Motors (GM) once faced and the rise of Japan as well. For while GM still was tied to the economy, that is why leaders say, “What’s good for GM is Good for America.” At the same time, Japan was exploring its edges and discovering otherwise. As early as 1970, when American business leaders, and even the general public, were being bombarded by books, newspaper articles, and television programs heralding the arrival of the “information age” and focusing on the 21st century.
While the end-of-industrialism concept was dismissed with a shrug in the United States of America, it was welcomed and embraced by Japanese decision-makers in business, politics, and the media. Knowledge, they concluded, was the key to economic growth in the 21st century. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that even though the United States of America started computerizing earlier, Japan moved more quickly to substitute the knowledge-based technologies of the Third Wave for the brute muscle technologies of the Second Wave past. Robots proliferated. Sophisticated manufacturing methods, heavily dependent on computers and information, began turning out products whose quality could not be easily matched in the World markets. Moreover, recognizing that its old smokestack technologies were ultimately doomed, Japan took steps to facilitate the transition to the new and to buffer itself against the dislocations entailed in such a strategy. The contrast with General Motors—and American policy in general—could not have been sharper. If we also look closely at many of the other powers shifts cited above, it will become apparent that in these cases, too, the changed role of knowledge—the rise of the new wealth-creation system—either caused or contributed to major shifts of power. The spread of this new knowledge economy is, in fact, the explosive new force that has hurled the advanced economies into bitter global competition, confronted the socialist nations with their hopeless obsolescence, forced many “developing nations” to scrap their traditional economic strategies, and is not profoundly dislocating power relationships in both personal and public spheres. In a prescient remark, Winston Churchill once said that “empires of the future are empires of the mind.” Today that observation has come true. What has not yet been appreciated is the degree to which raw, elemental power—at the level of private life as well as at the level of empire—will be transformed in the decades ahead as a result of the new role of the “mind.”
For centuries, the word Timbuktu has been used in the West as shorthand for the remotest possible place. Not long ago or Australian friend, the renowned author/adventurer Paul Raffaele, visited Timbuktu after a two-day drive another from Bamako, the capital of Mali in West Africa. He later e-mailed of this account. Little has changed in Timbuktu for centuries…Nomads herd donkey trains to market, while turbaned Tuareg men in robes an veils, hiding all but their eyes, stride through the alleys and past the fourteenth-century mud mosque….But ahead I see something that looks like a mirage. Scores of teenagers, black, white, and brown, clad in American ghetto-style clothing, are streaming along the street. The boys wear dark gym pants, high-tech sneakers, and long, loose basketball shirts boasting the names of teams like the Lakers…The girls wear tight jeans, sneakers and T-shirts. They are heading toward City Hall, and Paul joins them. “We’re having a rap competition,” a body explains. Timbuktu’s young people, he tells Paul, “discovered rap a couple of years ago, but now it’s their favorite music…Timbuktu now has cable TV, and we see rap all the time on MTV.” Inside the hall, hundreds of similarly dressed kids—Arab, Tuareg, Fulani and Songhai—are screaming and foot-stomping as four young men clutch the mikes. Over the next two weeks, however, Paul seldom saw anything but traditional garb in the streets of Timbuktu and in the desert. “On that one afternoon,” he wrote, “when the kids of Timbuktu flaunted their addiction to modern garb and music, did I get a glimpse of the future?” Raffaele’s question echoes that millions of parents around the World who see their cultures under attack. The United States of America, they feel, is seducing their kids.
However, it might be asked, away from what? Paul offers one powerful clue: “I ask [a boy] why there seem to be no girls older than sixteen in the audience. ‘That’s when their parents marry them off and they spend most of their time inside the house.’ I ask whether the girls choose whom they marry. ‘Of course not,’ he replies. ‘Marriage is too important for the girl or boy to make the choice. Our parents always decide.’” So Paul’s account makes clear, there are strict limits on Timbuktu’s conversion to the American Way. While Hollywood sent its message that freedom means unrestrained hedonism, Wall Street was sending a parallel message contending that unrestrained business and trade offer the best path to wealth. Washington, echoing this theme, chanted the mantra that the unrestrained freed trade and a “level playing field” benefit everyone. This, as we have seen, was combined with a magic formula: liberalization + globalization = democracy. For several decades America thus told the whole World—and itself—that laissez-faire (especially privatization and deregulation) would deliver democracy—as though any mechanistic, one-size-fits-all formula would work everywhere, overriding all differences in religion, culture, history and levels of economic and institutional development. If what America represents to the World is an across-the-board lack of restraint—and if that is its definition of freedom—it is hardly surprising that adults in other culture see it not as freedom but as chaos. Unrestrained hedonism and free-marketism are not, however, inherent or inevitable accompaniments of Third Wave economic development. Instead, they reflect the fact that the process of moving from an industrial economy and society to a knowledge-based economy and society is unprecedented. No previous generation has undergone, let alone completed, a similar transition. No model exists.
America, therefore, arrogant though it often seems, is shaken and uncertain as it experiments with novel ideas, social structures and values. It may well jettison some of today’s lack of restraint as unworkable models of behavior are tried and abandoned. When critics around the World complain that the United States of America is attempting to dominate and homogenize their culture, they fail to understand that the thrust towards homogeneity comes not from the advanced Third Wave sectors of America’s economy and society but from Second Wave holdovers. The mass-media, mass-marketing and mass-distribution methods that lie behind America’s exports of mass culture and values are perfect expressions of yesterday’s industrial mass society, not tomorrow’s knowledge economy based, if anything, on the customization and de-massification. In fact, the very variety that comes with knowledge-based development ensures that other countries will adopt quite different economic, social and political pathways to the future. They will not look like America. However, then, neither will tomorrow’s America. In Myth America, Carol Wald and Judith Papachristou detail a history of the images of women from 1865 to 1945, as presented in print media. They argue that the images, created exclusively by men, formed the operative visual myths about women in America and that as the images spread and entered people’s minds, they became mirrors of reality. Men wanted their women to be that way; women, seeing only those images, attempted to and eventually did become like the images. It was a kind of alchemy in which the image finally produced the reality. “To the degree that pictures seem real, people were inclined to accept what the [male] artist saw in good faith…Through such an arrangement, the myth becomes apparent…Myths prevail. Here, all the expected roles of women are illustrated, from romatic elopement, blushing bride, and honeymoon to household drudge and nagging wife…All are expression of [male] feeling made visible through art.”
The authors are careful to point out that the images of women had little to do with the reality of women’s lives, which were filled with hardship, and the need to solve problems against enormous odds, many times on their own. Nonetheless, because the images were everywhere, they began to dominate the reality, making women wish to be like men’s images of women, encouraging men to perceive women in those terms and helping institute a power arrangement between the genders that is only now being challenged. The images become the mirror against which the whole society compared women’s behavior, and because of their power they succeeded in becoming a personal and also a political and economical reality. Yet, those were print images, which are not nearly so powerful as the moving images that have since achieved an even greater presence in everyone’s mind. The women’s movement of today, like all other movements that are interested in recovering self-definition—African American, Asian, Indian, worker, homosexual and others—has discovered that its struggle must be waged not only against the creators of the images—the people and the media who purvey them—but also against the very mental images women already carry with their own behavior. Because of this, many political movements have taken on aspects of personal therapy movements. The goal is to rid oneself of what are called “tapes.” This phrase, heard equally from political people and people involved in many therapy systems—from “radical psychiatry” to, yes, est—is used quite literally. The tape is the image, the picture one carries in one’s mind that is continually replicated, unconsciously, however useless, self-destructive, or idiotic it may be. When women carry inside their heads the image of the idealized subservient housewife-mother-secretary, they automatically tend to imitate the image. This continues until the moment when they say, “Wait, I did not create this person in my head; who did?”
When Marvin Gaye invented the image “Black is beautiful,” and “I’m Black and I’m proud,” the points were to destroy a previous image carried in the minds of Americans alike that black was not beautiful. Only then could personal change be made, leading to political results. The suppression of Indian people in this country, at first achieved with guns, was later accelerated and confirmed by the media images of the Indian savage who needed to be saved by Agent Wonder Bread, the Blue-Eyed Wonder, who was Western educated, and had morality and a lifestyle of appropriate means. The critical ingredient in this was the implantation within young Indians themselves of the belief that this image was a correct one. With that came self-hatred. Only by realizing that the image carried in the mind—the tape—is real and implanted is possible to disconnect oneself from the cycle of taped replay and subvert an otherwise inevitable process whereby the image is translated into reality. You may be among those who believe that the evolution of image into reality takes place via the mysterious process implied by Hermes, the Tantras, the Cabbala or the Rosicrucians. Or you may be impressed with the biophysiological evidence that images are carried in the cells. Or you may believe that the emulation process is the primary way image becomes reality. Or you may believe, as I do, that the evolution of image into reality involves all these routes and others. However, whichever is most important, the result is the same. We evolve into the images we carry around in our minds. We become what we see. And in today’s America, what most of us see a lot of television. However, such prejudices are not always apparent at the start of a technology’s journey, which is why no one can safely conspire to be a winner in technological change. Who would have imagined, for example, whose interests and what World-view would be ultimately advanced by the invention of the mechanical clock?
The clock had its origin in the Benedictine monasteries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The impetus being the invention was to provide a more or less precise regularity to the routines of the monasteries, which required, among other things, seven periods of devotion during the course of the say. The bells of the monastery were to be rung to signal the canonical hours; the mechanical clock was the technology that could provide precision to these rituals of devotion. And indeed it did. However, what the monks did not foresee was that the clock is a means not merely of keeping track of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men. And thus, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the clock had moved outside the walls of the monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the workman and the merchant. “The mechanical clock,” as Lewis Mumford wrote, “made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours and a standardized product.” In short, without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible. The paradox, the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. In the eternal struggles between God and Mammon, the clock quite unpredictably favored the latter. Unforeseen consequences stand in the way of all those who think they see clearly the direction in which a new technology will take us. Not even those who invent a technology can be assumed to be reliable prophets, as Thamus warned. Gutenberg, for example, was by all accounts a devout Catholic who would have been horrified to hear that accursed heretic Luther described printing as “God’s highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.”
Luther understood, as Gutenberg did not, that the mass-produced book, by placing the Word of God on every kitchen table, makes each Christian one’s own theologian—one might even say one’s own priest, or, better, from Luther’s point of view, one’s own pope. In the struggle between unity and diversity of religious belief, the press favored the latter, and we can assume that this possibility never occurred to Gutenberg. Humans must be taught to distinguish the right way from the wrong way. The right way, the way of God, is followed by “the proven ones.” Those who continue on their own way, and refuse to do that way, are called “the wicked,” those who miss that way again and again are called sinners. The real struggle of the direction is therefore with the wicked, whereas the “good” and “upright” God again and again directs sinners the way that is, helps them to find their ways back. LOOK AHEAD is inspired by techniques used in artificial intelligence programs to play chess. It is interesting that artificial intelligence techniques have inspired a rule which was in fact better than any of the riles designed by theorists specifically for the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It allows one to envision the future based on what strategy one may use to solve a problem and see what all outcomes of their choices may be. There is a lot to be learned about coping in an environment of mutual power. Even expert strategists from political science, sociology, economics, psychology, and mathematic have made the systemic errors of being too competitive for their own good, not being forgiving enough, and being too pessimistic about the responsiveness of the other wide. The effectiveness of a particular strategy depends not only on its own characteristics, but also on the nature of the other strategies with which it must interact. For this reason, the results of a single situation are not definitive. This is not a wish and not a promise. It is not that humans deserve happiness or that one may be certain of being happy whether in this Earthly life or another, future life. It is a joyful cry and a passionate statement—“how happy this person is!”
WELCOME TO CRESLEIGH RANCH
Four distinct communities in one iconic neighborhood.
Thank you for your interest in this highly coveted community. While homes at Brighton Station are no longer available, its neighboring community, Mills Station, is still actively selling with two new communities coming soon.
We look forward to meeting you!
The Time of the World Disappears Before Eternity
Revolutionary wealth is not just about money. Civilization is one of those big, stuffy words that may intrigue philosophers and historians but puts most people to sleep. Unless it is used in a sentence like “Our Civilization is threatened”—at which point large numbers of people prepare to defend themselves. Today many people do, in fact, believe that their civilization is threatened—and that the United States of America may be doing the threatening. And it is. However, not in the way most of us think. Around the World, critics of the United States of America point to its military and its economy as the main sources of its predominance. It is, however, knowledge in the broadcast sense and new technologies based on it that integrate America’s military and financial power and propel both forward. It is true that America’s technological lead is threatened. According to the National Science Board, foreign students earn nearly 50 percent of all U.S. doctorates in mathematics, computer sciences and engineering. And American youth are showing less and less interests in these fields. NASA officials complain that there are three times as many scientists over sixty as there are under thirty in the space agency. Shirley Ann Jackson, then president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has cautioned that “centers of technology-based activity, training, and entrepreneurialism are rapidly spreading throughout the globe. Thus even the status quo for the U.S. represents a declining share of the global marketplace for innovation and ideas.” Nevertheless, America still leads in most fields of digital technology, in microbiology and in science generally. It spends 44 percent of the World budget for research and development. By most criteria, the United States of America is still the undisputed leader in the performance of basic and applied research. In addition, many international comparisons put the United States of America as a leader in applying research and innovation to improve economic performance.
In the latest IMD International World Competitiveness Yearbook, the United States of America ranks first in economic competitiveness, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore. The survey compares economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency, and infrastructure. Larger economies are further behind, with Zhejiang (China’s wealthiest province), Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany ranked 20 though 23, respectively. An extensive review by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concludes that since World War II, US leadership in science and engineering has driven its dominant strategic position, economic advantage, and quality of life. And at least for now, the United States of America remains the Word’s scientific powerhouse. Perhaps even more important is the speed with which scientific and technical findings from everywhere are converted into marketable applications or products and widely dispersed into manufacturing, finance, agriculture, defense, biotech and other sectors. All of which boosts economic productivity, further accelerates change, and increasing the U.S. ability to compete at the global level. However, knowledge is not only a matter of bits and bytes or science and technology. Part of the knowledge economy is the production of art and entertainment, and America is the World’s biggest exporter of popular culture. That culture include fashion, music, TV programming, books, movies and computer games. Americans have always been told that their most important message to the World is one of democracy, individual freedom, tolerance, concern for “the rights of man” and—more recently—the rights of women. In the last three decades, however, a U.S. media spread into formerly closed or nonexistent foreign markets, a very different set of messages has been communicated. Much of it targeted at young people.
Certainly not all, but a considerable amount of this material has disgustingly glorified pimps, gangster, drug lords, drug pushers, and hollow-eyed drug users. It has celebrated extremes of violence marked by unending car chases, over-the-top special effects and songs dripping with sexist venom. The impact of all this has been further intensified in the hard-sell, over-the-edge advertising used to promote these products. Hollywood, for example, has painted a fantasy America in which adolescent hedonism reigns supreme and authority figures—police, teachers, politicians, business leaders—are routinely satirized. Film after film, and TV shows one after another, tell young viewers what many of them hunger to hear: that adults are bumbling fools; that being “dumb and dumber” is okay; that “we do not need education”; that to be “bad” is really good; and that pleasures of the flesh, in infinite variety, is or should be nonstop. In this fantasy World, women are readily available, but they can also leap over giant buildings in a single bound (like Superman), shoot and kill (like James Bond) and practice martial arts (Like Jet Li). Extremes, we are repeatedly told, are good and restraint is bad; and, by the way, America is so rich that event its secretaries, police, clerks, and other ordinary working people live in high-rise penthouse apartments or Malibu mansions—images that set adolescent glands tingling from Taipei to Timbuktu. What few foreign critics of American’s pop culture seem to know is that ironically enough, many of the ostensibly American firms producing and disseminating the interesting and unusual of these programs either are, or were financed not by America, but by European and Japanese capital. Nor is it widely understood that shows are often made by, say, a European director with an Australian stary, a Chinese martial-arts consultant, an anime cartoonist from Japan or other foreign contributors.
In the meantime, however, the influence of these intriguing programs is so powerful that other societies fear for the survival of their own culture. Only if art threatens action, then terrorism can be advanced through art. For such a phenomenon as Aesthetic Terrorism to occur, aesthetic pursuit must become symbolic not of its own decadently solipsistic pleasures (exemplified in madness of des Esseintes in Huysmans’ Against Nature), but of action taken beyond the pale of art World confines. Terrorism is art is called the avant-garde. However, if this was once the case, it is no longer. Most avant-garde art is viewed and created today as simply an enfolding reaction to its own history. This disingenuous game-playing guarantees that the avant-garde art is viewed and created today as simply an enfolding reaction to its own history. This disingenuous game-playing guarantees that the avant-garde can no longer stimulate or even provoke. Dada and Futurist actions, which attempted to lead art out of the classroom and museum and into the streets, are simply appropriated by postmodernist facsimiles which capture the letter but little of the original essence. It hardly matters anyway. Avant-garde art has evolved into nothing more than a cultural benchwarmer, corporate tax write-off and public relations smokescreen. Art which openly espouses anti-corporate ideology is embraced as long as it hews to arbitrary standards invented by those taste-making and fortune-telling hirelings, the art critics. What could be wrong, after all, with a business World that allows people to say what they want (because it does not matter)? Aesthetic Terrorism is a term more realistically applied to the faceless regime of consumer culture than the avant-garde. The onslaught of Muzak, ad jingles, billboards, top 40 tunes, commercials, corporate logos, etcetera, all fit the terrorist dynamic of intrusion and coercion.
One almost forgets that aesthetics once implied a consensual relationship between the creators and appreciators of art. How often is it that one hears someone admitting a fondness for a media product “in spite” of oneself? How many times have you heard a slogan or rancid tune ring in your ears like a brain-eating mantra? When consumer terror’s avant-garde correlative, Pop Art, became indistinguishable from the object of its supposed social satire, it erased from big business its pejorative taint. Many of today’s avant-garde stars have emerged from or entered the business World, some enormously successful in the arcane number-juggling or speculation and commodities scams. Even freeloading on the state and private foundations is fair game only for those whose bureaucratic aptitude is matched by their shameless butt-kissing. It is not surprising that most grant recipients excel in little more than lawyerristic logorrhea and ingrained artistic timidity. Critic-centered postmodernism spawned the phrase-art hybrid of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer in which an advertising-style slogan is combined with an implied message or visual cue (usually swiped from some old magazine). Their posture is a hip cynicism which is supposed to subvert the “thrall” of the advertising command. Kruger and Holzer play the market like skillful double-agents, boosting themselves into the public eye through clever steals from Madison Avenue behaviorist techniques yet simultaneously troweling on crypto-Marxist jive to secure the perks of critical and academic currency. Their self-promotions worked when they were at the sidelines of the establishment. However, not the social commentary grows increasingly hollow. Currently being groomed for jet-setting prominence by Soho millionairess Mary Boone, Kruger’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial in 1987, for which she is paid a handsome sum, featured nothing more than a socialite princess joke, “I Shop Therefore I Am.” Winking at and wagging the tail of establishment hierarchy is part of that I-rib-you-gently-you-pay-me-off confidence game artists have been playing the Renaissance courts.
These contemporary court artists, like many of the past centuries, smugly pretend t spit in the eye of the exploiters while allowing themselves to be pampered de-loused—and when they are not looking—de-clawed. There are, of course, those artists, usually fresh out of university, who are unaccomplished at filling out grant forms, and therefore consider themselves “subversives.” The majority of these art and rock magazines-styled rebels are playing out rebellion psychodramas to package and merchandize to consumerist sycophants. This strategy is (forgive them term) the simulacra of terrorism: the content seizes in the frozen attitudinizing of pose and goes no further. We must look to the true outsiders and not the would-be insiders for an artist truly capable of effective counter-terror against the insidious mantras of consumerist brainwash. Terror means a threat, and the outsider’s version of Aesthetic Terrorism belongs to those performances or arrangements of words and pictures that unleash the reactionary impulses of police and bourgeois artist/critic alike. The kind of art that evokes this wrath, fear and condemnation rejoices in its pagan spirit of schadenfreude which controverts the humanist piety of “enlightened victim.” Anti-social sadism rarely receives patronage, however. Outside the corrupting realm of societal handouts, the Aesthetic Terrorist—much as this definition may grate on him—is the last bastion of aesthetic purity. Operation Sun Devil is the name for a government action against computer wizards and assorted sharpies and super-smarts who were resourceful enough to figure out how to hack into the electronic files of Ma Bell. Those who know, claim the Sun Devil gambit as a terrified overreaction against intelligence by the plodding and stupid bureaucracy.
John Perry Barlow (Whole Earth Review, Fall 1990) describes a typical Sun Devil action against a teenage hacker: [A] father in New York […] opened the door at 6.00 a.m. and found a shotgun at his nose. A dozen agents entered. While one of the kept the man’s wife in a choke-hold, the rest made ready to shoot and entered the bedroom for their sleeping 14-year-old. Before leaving, they confiscated every piece of electronic equipment, including all the telephones. Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure are unheeded by the government agents who claim nerd computer hackers are terrorists and have “the ability to access and review the files of hospital patients. Furthermore, they could have added, deleted, or altered vital patient information, possibly causing life-threatening situations.” Meacorporate interests have staked claim to the entirety of cyberspace, and they are not about to tolerate the presence of digital interlopers. This may scare off some, but other pirates like the mysterious Legion of Doom and NuPrometheus league (who illegally circulated highly protected Macintosh computer source code) will rise to the challenge now that they have been provided a clearly delineated enemy to innovation, the individual, and personal freedom. It may come as a surprise to learn that a few artists are now producing work which finds itself classified as a thought crime, punishable by expulsion into a Siberia of non-distribution, and in some cases by litigation and imprisonment. Pure magazine, from Chicago, a xeroxed vehicle which extols child torture, murder, and extreme misogyny, tweaked too many civic-minded noses, and its editor, Peter Sotos, was tailed for nine months and underwent a lengthy trial process in which he was finally convicted for possession of some very illegal magazine. Soto’s case was the first successfully prosecuted new Illinois state law, enacted under the influence of the Meese Commission Report on pornography, an example of First Amendment revisionism par excellence.
Soto’s case is particularly disquieting because it proves that prison is in the offing for simple possession of controversial material. No doubt this legal precedent was established to open the doors for future roundups of other thought criminals. The expertly managed Gulf War (massacre), in which networks censored war casualty footage that might provoke a “Vietnam War syndrome,” provides a small window into the dynamics of mass control to come. Any thoughtful individual is undeniably malnourished by the current information diet. Whether this is due to a direct conspiracy of State or by design of the oligarchic marketplace matters little. However, it has upped the ante for a new American Samizdat in which “disreputable,” “crazy,” “hateful,” or “dangerous” topics are broached by individuals or small, autonomous groups that are not compromised or swayed by institutional priorities. Can “offensive interests become the political crime of future? Apparently so. When looking at the previous sentences one can compare and see that musicians have been arrested for obscene lyrics, anarchist individuals have been collared for burning the flag; parents have been arrested for photographing their toddlers in their birthday suits; painter and performer Joe Coleman was arrested in Boston for operating an “infernal machine” and in New York for killing a rat: museum curators were threatened with arrest for hanging homoerotic photos; G.G. Allian was jailed for some consensual sadomasochism with a girlfriend; the FBI have been “monitoring” certain groups who practice unorthodox pleasures of the flesh; and on and on. Even many of the books you read have come under widely publicized attack by authors such as Carl A. Raschke who advocated the revocation of First Amendment rights from those who spread “cultural terrorism.” Even globalization could be considered cultural terrorism.
It has become increasingly obvious that the aesthetic terrorist hobgoblins are nothing more than symbolic scapegoats to divert attention away from the real issues. For Americans, fear is not another form of awareness, it is just another form of gossip. As Charles Manson has stated, true subversive terror can only be actualized by turning off the TV sets. Until then, aesthetic terrorism will be orchestrated by those already in command against insubstantial or non-existent villains. And in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorism will be orchestrated by those already in command against insubstantial or non-existent villains. And in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity. The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in a chameleon-like stye master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime. We will not know them by name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet. Until then, there is a lot of work to be done. Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a World of egoists without central authority? This question has intrigued people for a long time. And for good reason. We all know that people are not angels, and that they tend to look after themselves and their own first. Yet we also know that cooperation does occur and that our civilization is based upon it. However, in situations where each individual has an incentive to be selfish, how can cooperation ever develop? The answer each of us gives to this question has a fundamental effect on how we think and act in our social, political, and economic relations with others. And the answers that others give have a great effect on how ready they will be to cooperate with us.
The most famous answer was given over three hundred years ago by Thomas Hobbes. It was pessimistic. He argued that before governments existed, the state of nature was dominated by the problem of selfish individuals who competed on such ruthless terms that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 1651/1962, p. 100). In his view, cooperation could not develop without a central authority, and consequently a strong government was necessary. Ever since, arguments about the proper scope of government have often focused on whether one could, or could not, expect cooperation to emerge in a particular domain if there were not an authority to police situation. Today nations interact without central authority. Therefore the requirements for the emergence of cooperation have relevance to many of the central issues of international politics. The most important problem is the security dilemma: nations often seek their own security through means which challenge the security of others. This problem arises in such areas as escalation of local conflicts and arms races. Related problems occur in international relations in the form of competition with alliances, tariff negotiations, and communal conflict places like Cyprus. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has presented the United States of American with a typical dilemma of choice. If the United States of American continued business as usual, Russian might be encouraged to try other forms of noncooperative behavior later one. On the other hand, any substantial lessening of United States of America’s cooperation risks some form of retaliation, which could then set off counter-retaliation, setting up a pattern of mutual hostility that could be difficult to end. Much of the domestic debate about international policy is concerned with problems of just this type. And properly so, since these are hard choices.
In everyday life, if they never invite us over in return, we may ask ourselves how many times we will invite acquaintances for dinner. An executive in an organization does favors for another executive in order to get favors in exchange. A journalist who has received a leaked news story gives favorable coverage to the source in the hope that further leaks will be forthcoming. A business firm in an industry with only one other major company charges high prices with expectation that the other firm will also maintain high prices—to their mutual advantage and at the expense of the consumer. For me, a typical case of the emergence of cooperation is the development of patterns of behavior in a legislative body of the United States Senate. Each senator has an incentive to appear effective to his or her constituents, even at the expense of conflicting with other senators who are trying to appear effective to their constituents. However, this is hardly a situation of completely opposing interests, a zero-sum game. On the contrary, there are many opportunities for mutually rewarding activities by two senators. These mutually rewarding actions have led to the creation of an elaborate set of norms, or folkways, in the Senate. Among the most important of these is the norm of reciprocity—a folkway which involves helping out a colleague and getting repaid in kind. It includes vote trading but extends to so many types of mutually rewarding behavior that “it is not an exaggeration to say that reciprocity is a way of life in the Senate” (Matthews 1960, p. 100; see also Mayhew 1975). Washington was not always like this. Early observers saw the members of the Washington community as quite unscrupulous, unreliable, and characterized by “falsehood, deceit, treachery” (Smith 1906, p. 190). In the 1980s the practice of reciprocity is well established. Even the significant changes in the Senate over the last two decades, tending toward more decentralization, more openness, and more equal distribution of power, have come without abating the folkway of reciprocity.
As will be seen, it is not necessary to assume that senators are more honest, more generous, or more public-spirited than in earlier years to explain how cooperation based on reciprocity has emerged or proved stable. The emergence of cooperation can be explained as a consequence of individual senators pursuing their own interest. We are investigating how individual pursuing their own interests will act, followed by an analysis of what effects this will have for the system as a whole. Put another way, the approach is to make some assumptions about individual motives and then deduce consequences for the behavior of the entire system. The case of the U.S. Senate is a good example, but the same style of reasoning can be applied to other settings. The object of this enterprise is to develop a theory of cooperation that can be used to discover what is necessary for cooperation to emerge. By understanding the conditions that allow it to emerge, appropriate actions can be taken to foster the development of cooperation in a specific setting. The Cooperation Theory that is presented here is based upon an investigation of individuals who pursue their own self-interest without the assistance of a central authority to force them to cooperate with each other. The reason for assuming self-interest is that it allows an examination of the difficult case in which cooperation is not completely based upon a concern for other or upon the welfare of the group as a whole. It must, however, be stressed that this assumption is actually much less restrictive than it appears. If a sister is concerned for the welfare of her brother, the sister’s self-interest can be thought of as including (among many other things) this concern for the welfare of her brother. However, this does not necessarily eliminate all potential for conflict between sister and brother.
Likewise a nation may act in part out of regard for the interests of its friends, but this regard does not mean that even friendly countries are always able to cooperate for their mutual benefit. So the assumption of self-interest is really just an assumption that concern for others does not completely solve the problem of when to cooperate with them and when not to. A good example of the fundamental problem of cooperation is the case where two industrial nations have erected trade barriers to each other’s exports. If barriers were eliminated, because of the mutual advantages of free trade, both countries would be better off. However, if either country were to unilaterally eliminate its barriers, it would find itself facing terms of trade that hurt its own economy. In fact, whatever one country does, the other country is better off retaining its own trade barriers. Therefore, the problem is that each country has an incentive to retain trade barriers, leading to a worse outcome than would have been possible had both countries cooperated with each other. This basic problem occurs when the pursuit of self-interest by each leads to a poor outcome for all. To make headway in understanding the vast array of specific situations which have this property, a way is needed to represent what is common to these situations without becoming bogged down in the details unique to each. Fortunately, there is such a representation available: the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, there are two players. Each has two choices, namely cooperate of defect. Each must make the choice without knowing what the other will do. No matter what the other does, defection yield a higher payoff than cooperation. If both defect, the dilemma is that both do worse than if both had cooperated. Cases typically result in one of four possible outcomes in the matrix. If both players cooperate, both do fairly well. Both get a reward for mutual cooperation.
However, if one player cooperates but the other defects, the defecting play get the temptation to defect, while the cooperating players gets the sucker’s payoff. If both defect, both get the punishment for mutual defection. What would you do in such a situation? That is basically the gamble of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is simply an abstract formulation of some very common and very interesting situations in which what is best for each person individually leads to mutual defection, whereas everyone would have been better off with mutual cooperation. The definition of Prisoner’s Dilemma requires that several relationships hold among the four different potential outcomes. The second part of the definition of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that the players cannot get out of their dilemma by taking turns exploiting each other. This assumption means that an even chance of exploitation and being exploited is not as good an outcome for a player as mutual cooperation. It is therefore assumed that the reward for mutual cooperation is greater than the average temptation and the sucker’s payoff. This assumption, together with the rank ordering of the four payoffs, defines the Prisoner’s Dilemma. We have come back to the point where we began, where values take the place of good and evil. However, now we have made at least a hasty tour of the intellectual experiences connected with modern politics that made such a response compelling. How it looked to thoughtful Germans is most revealingly expressed in a famous passage by Max Weber, about God science and the irrational: Finally, although a naïve optimism may have celebrated science—that is, the technique of the mastery of life founded on science—as the path which would lead to happiness, I believe I can leave this entire question aside in light of the annihilating critique which Nietzsche has made of “the last men” who “have discovered happiness.” Who, then, still believes in this with the exception of a few big babies in university chairs or in editorial offices?
So penetrating and well informed an observer as Weber could say in 1919 that the scientific spirit at the heart of Western democracy was dead for all serious men and that Nietzsche had killed it, or had at least given it the coup de grace. The presentation of “the last man” in Thus Spake Zarathusta was so decisive that the old-style Enlightenment rationalism need not even be discussed anymore; and, Weber implies, all future discussion or study must proceed with the certainty that the perspective was a “naïve” failure. Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion. This means, simply, that almost all Americans at that time, thinking American in particular, were “big babies” and remained so, long after the Continent had grown up. One need only think of John Dewey to recognize that he fits Weber’s description to a T, and then remember what his influence here once was. And not only Dewey, but everyone from the beginning of our regime, especially those who said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” shared the rationalist dream. Weber’s statement is so important because he made as much as more than anyone brought us into contact with the most advanced Continental criticisms of liberal democracy, and was the intermediary between Nietzsche and us Americans who were the most recalcitrant to one’s insight, perhaps because according to it we represent the worst or most hopeless and are therefore loath to see ourselves in that mirror. A very dark view of the future has been superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys. They have proved too much for us to handle. However, in our defense, we are probably not the only ones for whom they are too much. Perhaps you have caught yourself kissing another person as you first saw kissing in the movies or on television. My children have a phrase to describe this: “television kiss.”
It is fortunate for them that they have noted that there are television kisses and other kinds, because it will help protect them from absorbing it, taking it into themselves where it will come back out ten years, like a replay. Most of us did not make that distinction as we sat in darkened rooms or theaters as children. Since we did not see all that much real kissing, the media kiss became our image of kissing. We found ourselves producing that model of kiss later in life. I was fourteen-year-old when I tried to kiss for the first time. I imitated Brad Pitt’s kiss, but I did not feel it. Only later did I realize that perhaps Brad Pitt did not feel it either; he was merely kissing the way the director said he should. So there I was imitating a kiss that was never real in the first place, worried that there might be something wrong with me for lacking the appropriate feeling and failing to obtain the appropriate response. The journalist Jane Margold was driving home one night in Berkeley with her brother, Harlan. Suddenly a man crawled into the street right in front of them. They screeched to a stop and then, stunned, just sat there for a moment. They finally got out and cautiously went up to the man to find out that he had been stabbed several times in his upper body, was bleeding profusely and was in danger of dying right there. The man’s assailant was nowhere to be seen. In describing the event to me, Jane said that she instantly flipped into a media version of herself. She had never faced anything like it before and had no direct feelings. Instead, playing through her mind were images of similar events she had seen on television or in films. The media superseded her own responses, even to the point of removing her from the event. She was there, but sue did not experience herself as being there. She was seeing the event, but between her and it, floating in her mind, was an image of an implanted reality which would not get out of the way. Jane thought such thoughts as: “This is real; there is a wounded man lying here in from of me, bleeding to death, yet I have no feeling. It seems like a movie.”
In fact, it was they very movielike quality that eventually got her into action. Without feeling, she performed mechanical acts. She and her brother comforted the man, directed traffic, dispatched people to summon the police and an ambulance. She became extremely efficient, but throughout, she had the sense of performing a script. Apart from their economic implications, technologies create the ways in which people perceive reality, and such ways are the key to understanding diverse forms of social and mental life. As individual express their life, so they are. There are three stages in the development of technology: the age of technology of chance, the age of technology of the artisan, the age of technology of the technician. Cultures may be classified into three types: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. At the present time, each type may be found somewhere on the planet, although the first is rapidly disappearing: we must travel to exotic places to find a tool-using culture. If we do, it is well to go armed with the knowledge that, until the seventeenth century, all cultures were tool-users. There was, of course, considerable variation from one culture to another in the tools that were available. Some had only spears and cooking utensils. Some had water mills and coal- and horsepower. However, the main characteristic of all tool-using cultures is that their tools were largely invented to do two things: to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life, such as in the use of waterpower, windmills, and the heavy-wheeled plow; or to serve the symbolic World of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion, as in the construction of castles and cathedrals and the development of the mechanical clock. In either case, tools did not attack (or, more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced.
With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization. These beliefs, in fact, directed the invention of tools and limited the uses to which they were put. Even in the case of military technology, spiritual ideas and social customs acted as controlling forces. It is well known, for example, that the uses of the sword by samurai warriors were meticulously governed by a set of ideals known as Bushido, or the Way of the warrior. The rules and rituals specificizing when, where, and how the warrior must use either his two swords (the katana, or long sword, and the wakizashi, or short sword) were precise, tied closely to the concept of honor, and included the requirement that the warrior commit seppuku or hara-kiri should his honor be compromised. This sort of governance of military technology was not unknow in the Western World. The use of the lethal crossbow was prohibited, under threat of anathema, by Pope Innocent II in the early twelfth century. The weapon was judged to be “hateful to God” and therefore could not be used against Christians. That it could be used against Muslims and other infidels does not invalidate the point that in a tool-using culture technology is not seen as autonomous, and is subject to the jurisdiction of some binding social or religious system. This is why power, which to a large extent defines us as individuals and as nations, is itself being redefined. A clue to this redefinition emerges when we look more closely at some of the unrelated changes. For we discover that they are not as random as they seem. Whether it is Japan’s meteoric rise, GM’s impressive rebound, or the American doctor’s fall from grace, a single common thread unites them.
Take the punctured power of the god-in-a-white coat. Throughout the heyday of doctor-dominance in America, physicians kept a tight choke-hold on medical knowledge. Prescriptions were written in Latin, providing the profession with a semi-secret code, as it were, which kept most patients in ignorance. Medical journals and texts were restricted to professional readers. Medical conferences were closed to the laity. Doctors controlled medical-school curricula and enrollments. Contrast this with the situation today, when patients have astonishing access to medical knowledge. With a personal computer and a WiFi, anyone from home can access data bases like Index Medicus, and obtain scientific papers on everything from Addison’s disease to zygomycosis, and, in fact, collect more information about a specific aliment or treatment than the ordinary doctor has time to read. Copies of the 2,354-page book knows as the PDR or Physicians’ Desk Reference are also readily available to anyone. Once a week on the Lifetime cable network, any televiewer can watch twelve uninterrupted hours of highly technical television programming designed specifically to educate doctors. Many of these programs carry a disclaimer to the effect that “some of this material may not be suited toa general audience.” However, that is for the viewer to decide. The rest of the week, hardly a single newscast is aired in America without a medical story or segment. A video version of the material from the Journal of the American Medical Association is now broadcast by three hundred stations on Thursday nights. The press reports on medical malpractice cases. Inexpensive paperbacks tell ordinary readers what drug side effect to watch for, what drugs not to mix, how to raise or lower cholesterol levels through diet. In addition, major medical breakthroughs, even if television news almost before the M.S. has even taken his subscription copy of journal out of the in-box. In short, the knowledge monopoly of the medical profession has been thoroughly smashed. And the doctor is no longer a god.
This case of the dethroned doctor is, however, only one small example of a more general process changing the entire relationship of knowledge to power in the high-tech nations. In many other fields, too, closely held specialists’ knowledge is slipping out of control and reaching ordinary citizens. Similarly, inside major corporations, employees are winning access to knowledge once monopolized by management. And as knowledge is redistributed, so, too, is the power based on it. A human is a “beast” and purifies one’s heart, and behold, God holds one by the hand. That is not a kind of humans. Purity of heart is a state of being. A man is not pure in kind, but one is able to be or become pure, rather one is only essentially pure when one has become pure, and even than one does not thereby belong to a kind of humans. The “wicked,” that is, the bad, are not contrasted with good humans. The good is to draw near Hod. One does not say that those near to God are good. However, one does call the bas those who are far from God. In the language of modern thought that means that there are humans who have no share in existence, but there are no humans who possess existence. Existence cannot be possessed, but only shared in. One does not rest in the lap of existence, but one draws near to it. Nearness is nothing but such a drawing and coming near continually and as long as the human person lives. The dynamic of fairness and nearness is broken by death when it breaks the life of the person. With death there vanished the heart, that inwardness of humanity, out of which arises the pictures of the imagination, and which rises up in defiance, but which can also be purified. Separate souls vanish, separation vanished. Time which has been lived by the soul vanished with the soul, we know of no duration in time. Only the rock in which the heart is concealed, only the rock of human hearts does not vanish. For it does not stand in time. The time of the World disappears before eternity, but existing humans die into eternity as into the perfect existence.
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
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Restore to Him the Throne of the Universe
I would not necessarily say we have conjured demons that have entered members of the audience, but I would not deny it either. Every mythology has its good and evil spirits which are objects of adoration and subjects of terror, and often both classes are worshipped from opposite motives; the good, that the worshipper may receive benefit; the evil, that one may escape harm. Sometimes good deities are so benevolent that they are neglected, superstitious fear directing all devotion towards the evil spirits to propitiate them and avert the calamities they are ready to bring upon the human race; sometime the malevolent deities have so little power that they prayer of the pious is offered up to the good spirits that they may pour out still further favors, for man is a worshipping being, and will prostrate himself with equal fervor before the altar whether the deity be good or bad. Midway, however, between the good and evil beings of all mythologies there is often one whose qualities are mixed; not wholly good nor entirely evil, but balanced between the two, sometimes doing a generous action, then descending to a petty meanness, but never rising to nobility of character nor sinking to the depths of depravity; good from whim, and mischievous from caprice. As enshrined in legend, there are many mysteries to be solved involving the Winchester Mansion. Believe it or not, the key to the massive front door was made of solid gold and diamonds and the keys for the other 2,000 doors of this Eight Wonder of the World filled two water buckets. Mrs. Winchester never disclosed the spot where the “pot o’ goold” was concealed, but it was certainly not in her safe. Travellers who would go to her mansion, which was not often visited, at once became objects of intense suspicion. You are driving along a retired country road; at the turn of the hill a policeman heaves in sight. He speaks pleasantly, and if nothing arouses his suspicion, he will pass on and you see him no more; but if the slightest distrust of you or your business finds lodgment in his mind, he marks you as a possible victim.
He temporarily vanishes; look round you proceed on your journey, and you may, by chance, catch a glimpse of him a mile or two away, peeping over a wall after you, but when you appear at the Winchester mansion, he reappears, and the local policeman, after his coming, will be sure to observe you with some degree of attention. Step out on the street, and here comes the policeman, ascertains your name, takes a mental inventory of your effects, makes a not of the railway and hotel labels on your trunks, and goes away to report. A sharp detective is the policeman. He knows articles of American manufacture at a glance, and need only to see your satchel to tell whether it came from America or was made in England. Talk with him, and he will chat cordially about the weather, the crops, the state of the markets, but all the time he is trying to make out who you are and what is your business. His eyes ramble from your hat to your shoes, and by the time the conversation is ended, he has prepared for the “sergeant” who many say was the very Mrs. Winchester, a report of your personal appearance and apparel. There was also a legend that he was one of the spirits from the mansion, but no one can say for sure. From the day he puts on his neat blue uniform and saucerlike cap, the constable, on or near the mansion, carries his life in his hand. Every hedge he scrutinized with a careful eye; behind it may lurk an assassin. Every division wall is watched for suspicious indications, his alertness being quickened by the knowledge that he is guarding his own life. He watched the mansion with a love stronger than death, knowing that Mrs. Winchester was a widow, and the gentle soul, with an untiring devotion, spent her life reciting the prayers for the dead. Mrs. Winchester often times wondered who was she? What was she? And where was she? Those questioned remained unanswered. It was no matter for her to let them go.
“It was lonely,” said Mrs. Winchester. “Monotonous Tedious, in fact. The birds and horses and things are pleasant company, and they love me and I love them; but here lately they seem somehow insufficient. I lack something, I do not know what it is. If only they could see how pretty I am, and how rounded and smooth, and how daintily formed are my limbs. Possibly they do; sometimes I think they do; but at most they only look it, they do not say it—at least in any language that I can understand. I begin to feel sure that that is what I lack—to hear it said. So I am happier than I once was. I try to put away from me that thought—the thought of my husband and new born daughter—and in the day I succeed, and am content, and do not feel my pain. But at night I dream—and dream.” By the late 1880s, practices of sorcery in California had become so widespread. A long list of canons forbade the use of sacraments or holy objects in magical rituals or divination with holy water or blessed candles. The practice of sorcery with profane objects, it was decided, did not come under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition but was to be handled by secular authorities. There were some priests who were especially noted for their corruption and for their singular devotion to money. Members of the group were often found to be conducting rites too wild for the Catholic hierarchy to condone and were excommunicated. It was from this body of clergy that the modern Black Mass was to emerge. Monks who were renegades of the Franciscan order, were reported to have held nocturnal conventicles at which, after the service, indiscriminate events took place. When a baby was the inadvertent product of one of these gatherings, its body was supposedly burned, the ashes being mixed with blood that was served as a sacrament during the admission ceremonies of new members of the church. Such reports of disaffected renegade priests conducting illicit Masse were not infrequent at the time.
Sometimes the victims were obtained either by outright abduction or by buying them from their peasant parents, who were glad enough to sell the children, thinking that they were being taken as servants and would have a much easier life on the estate of a rich nobleman than plowing the fields. Now one may see why the Winchester mansion and Mrs. Winchester were so heavily guarded. In one church in particular, at the altar stood a statue of a hideous demon, presumably Satan. One room contained copper vessels filled with the blood of his sacrificial victims, the vessels all bearing neat labels revealing the dates of execution. In the center of the room was a black marble table, upon which was the body of a child who have been freshly slaughtered. These ritual Masses called from blood sacrifices to Astaroth and Asmodue, demons of love and lust. The blood was poured into a chalice. To that blood, flour was assed and a wafer made. The operators, seeking personal gain, sought to get what they wished from any source that would give it to them, and they were willing to prostrate themselves before any deity, good or evil, to accomplish their goals. It seems obvious that officials within the Church and without believed in the existence of such practices by renegade priests, which caused a sharp break in man’s attitude toward man and toward religion to occur. For the first time in centuries man began to look at himself and his society less seriously. With this new perspective, man’s religion also changed, and Satanism did, too. Therefore, it is no wonder that Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s arrival to the valley was a sensational event. People were thrilled by this dramatic entrance of a millionairess; by those freight cars sidetracked in Satan Clara, uploading rich imported furnishing; by building activity that mushroom a farm house into a mansion with over 500 rooms, and as many as 125,000 square feet.
Here was fair came for all! They talked about Mrs. Winchester! Talk begat rumor and as the years passed and new towers and wings arouse, so did the colossal, ominous figure of Satan, which had struck men dumb with terror and awe. The people of the valley could not tell if it was an optical illusions or material. When President Theodore Roosevelt’s entourage passed the Winchester House in 1903 to plant the City of Campbell’s famous redwood tree, he expressed desire to visit this now World-famous dwelling. At the great front door our nation’s leader was more than astonished when the ominous figure told him, “Mrs. Winchester is not at home!” As he left, a procession of white-and-red-robed, torch-bearing monks were seen floating down the misty nine-story tower of the Winchester Mansion. The ubiquitous inverted crucifix and black candles were present. There was a Mass taking place before an altar surmounted by a cross, on top of which was the sign of the tetragram, a traditional magical symbol representing the four elements and used in the conjuration of the elementary spirts. Mrs. Winchester was locked in her mansion in a life-and-death struggle with evil, spirits killed by the Winchester rifle. A cross was made in the fields. There was a goat trampling on the crucifix and a ghostly priest wearing a black robe and performing a ceremony. That night, passers by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. It was described as unholy sounds as the Devil’s Tritone. While God had invented music, Satan was the first musician, and many claimed to feel his presence. Classical music composers who were supposedly in attendance that night, he been denounced by the Church for making actual pacts with the Devil. And that night, these spirits in black and red robes insisted on all genuine creativity, including the music, which was the result of an implicit pact with the infernal. Shortly after the music started, witches assembled on the estate, there to jabber and disport themselves pending Satan’s arrival. When he appeared, they formed a circle around his throne and glorified him.
When he felt sufficiently stimulated by the praise, he gave the signal for the sabbath to begin. But this dark exuberance proved too much for the party. The night ended when the bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled at an ungodly hour to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchres. Mrs. Winchester felt such a demonic force that night…she dreamt of witches. She woke up screaming and screaming…and said, “I have seen the Devil.” And still a ghostly violin was playing as legions of restless souls still wandered in the mansion. The very act of hearing this music indicates that its intended purposes worked. This particular exercise was also intended to awaken dormant regions of the human mind. Ghosts playing certain frequencies would make unbelievable things happen the next day. It released adrenal energy, and the next day dead bodies were discovered mining in a cave in San Francisco. Mrs. Winchester fainted when she saw that the walls in her Daisy bedroom were done in scarlet black, and black candles surrounded the altar, on which a figure of Satan majestically sat. She found that her Bible was partially destroyed, there was a broken chalice, and inverted cross craved into the floor. Similar events took place all over the Bay Area that night. Weird animal sacrifices turned up with alarming frequency. Churches were vandalized, graves disturbed, and mysterious magical symbols were inscribed on church wall. It was as if the dead had been risen. I remember Mrs. Winchester telling me once of a visitation she had from her husband, William Wirt Winchester, deceased nearly ten years, and the shock of seeing him again, nearly killed her. This true story of these awful and inexplicable events—an experience that in one short day changed the colour of her hair from brown to white, and carved lines on her face that nothing would ever erase, haunted her with the recollection of the most fearful ordeal she ever went through and emerged alive to speak of it. Mrs. Winchester invited a Medium to her home to conduct a séance in the blue séance room. They heard such a melody as the World had never yet heard the equal to, note by note. A sort of ecstatic trance, and the most wonderful tunes ravished the air as if invisible hands swept over piano keys.
It seemed to tell her an unearthly story, faintly imagined and seen, shadow-like as in a dream, and awe-struck and bewildered, she crouched down on the cold stone floor, covering her ears, for she knew such a melody was never meant for human ears to hear. How long it lasted, she could not say, but it gradually died away as gently and imperceptibly as a summers breeze, and as it did so, the clock in the tower slowly struck 1.13 A.M. Then action came to her, and Mrs. Winchester sprang to her feet, she flew to the door and fumbled with the key. The rain was falling heavily without as she tore open the door, and she felt that strange soft wind she had felt thirteen times before pass her from behind! It passed her—passed her into the night was gone. But the sequel to that strange night’s experience came two hours later. A telegram came for Mrs. Winchester, that Reuben Gallon, a police officer known for guarding her estate was found dead outside her estate near the six-foot hedge with his horse laying by his side. The cause of death was apparently from fright. A priest who possessed a great deal of occult literature and practiced magic resented Mrs. Winchester because his mansion was much vaster and more beautiful than his church. He was envious of Mrs. Winchester’s zeal and determined to silence her and stop her building. He threated to cast a spell upon her which would upset her mentally, and perhaps this night of horrors was the result. Many charms are used to stir up love or hate, and some magicians specialize in this area of magic. Causing the death of human beings and animals. This type of black magic belongs to the darkest sphere of occultism. Such episodes may appear utterly absurd and pure superstition to people in countries comparatively free of black magic, but instead they should be warnings of the power of Satan and demons where occult literature lures readers into illicit knowledge. The satanists worshipped Lucifer, the fallen angel, who they believe has always had more power on Earth than God. Their goal is to restore him to “the throne of the Universe,” these strains echoing the tenets of the old Luciferins. In an honest moment, the priest confessed: “I didn’t want to curse Mrs. Winchester, but I was driven to do it. The devil drives me. I can never find rest.” By sympathy of your hearts for sin, more evil impulses inexhaustively than human power have stained the Earth. Such tragic events oftehn involve as many as four generations.
Unlock the secrets of these dark halls, where the magical arts have been cultivated and praticed.
A Guided tour through 110 of the 160 rooms. Guests will be able to see the infamous rooms of Sarah’s stately mansion, known around the world as the Winchester Mystery House®, and see the bizarre attributes that give the mysterious mansion its name.
Tour Duration: 1 Hour, 5 Minutes
Prices: $41.99 adults, $34.99 seniors 65+, $19.99 children 5-12.
Save by bundling both tours together! www.winchestermysteryhouse.com
Another Dish of Free Lunch–Eat Your Cake and Have it, Too!
If you considered that around three thousand years ago our precious planet Earth was infected with only fifty million copies (while, certainly, a single specimen would already have been too many) of the unfortunate human species; if you imagine having had at that time a pile of good H-bombs at your disposal and having used them to crumble the crust of this damned planet Earth and possibly to convert it into a second chain of asteroids, a first large ring of such little celestial bodies being located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter; and if you considered then what a litany of unspeakable horrors which still continue and are synonymous with humanity would not have occurred!! What philosopher would have dreamed, thirty-five years ago, of thus attacking the so sick matter which we all are? What philanthropist? What man of good will? However, now we absolutely must not miss the chance—and to have such a chance is too good to be true—finally to bring an end at last this infamous litany of abominations that we all are (collectively and individually); and I mean by that, obviously, in a complete atomic-nuclear way! The tragedy, the true catastrophe—is that humanity continues while the divine benediction would be qualified as thermonuclear or some equivalent thereof. If not stark mad, not to be of this opinion is to be selfish, criminal, monstrous. Now, Rousseau, for all the adaptations made by the legislator, in order for his legislation to sit particular times and places, was still pursuing the same universal goal as were the thinkers of the Enlightenment: to secure the equal natural rights of all men within civil society. He simply argued that Hobbes and Locke did not succeed in doing so, that self-interest is not enough to found political morality on. The political solution was more complicated and demanding.
Kant, who invented culture as part of a historical teaching, also had a similar universal goal. Although natural rights had become human rights in his teaching, those rights were the same ones, founded on a new basis; and the historical process he discerned in Rousseau’s teaching moved toward the effective establishment of those rights in civil society. Universality and rationality were the hallmarks of all these teachings. However, very quickly culture—which was for Kant and, speaking anachronistically, for Rousseau, singular—became cultures. That there were Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Chinese was clear. That there is a cosmopolitan culture, either existing or coming into being, is unclear. The various unions of nature with the acquisitions of civilization are rare and difficult enough; that they should tend to the same end is improbable; we should cherish these creations and be happy that there is any culture at all. A charm was discovered in this diversity. Rousseau introduced rootedness as a condition of attaining the simple rational human goal. His historicist and romantic successors argued that such a goal undermined rootedness; rootedness became the goal. Here again we live with two contradictory understandings of what counts for man. One tells us that what is important is what all men have in common; the other that what men have in common is low, while that they have from separate cultures gives them their depth and their interest. Both agree that life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, id est, the interests of health and preservation, are what men share. The difference between them is the weight they give to being French or Chinese, Jewish or Catholic, or the rank order of these particular cultures in relation to the natural needs of the human body. One is cosmopolitan, the other is particularistic.
Human rights are connected with one school, respect for cultures with the other. Sometimes the United States of America is attacked for failing to promote human rights; sometimes for wanting to impose “the American way of life” on all people without respect for their cultures. To the extent that it does the latter, the United States of America does so in the name of self-evident truths that apply to the good of all humans. However, its critics argue that there are no such truths, that they are prejudices of American culture. On the other hand, the Ayatollah was initially supported by some here because he represented true Iranian culture. Now he is attacked for violating human rights. What he does is in the name of Islam. His critics insist that there are universal principles that limit the rights of Islam. When the critics of the U.S.A in the name of culture, and of the Ayatollah in the name of human rights, are the same persons, which they often are, they are persons who want to eat their cake and have it, too. Why, it might be asked, cannot there be a respect for both human rights and culture? Simply because a culture itself generates it own way of life and principles, particularly its highest ones, with no authority above it. If there were such an authority, the unique way of life born of its principle would be undermined. The idea of culture was adopted precisely because it offered an alternative to what was understood to be the shallow and dehumanizing universality of rights based on our animal nature. The folk mind takes the place of reason. There is a continuing war between the universality of the Enlightenment and the particularly that resulted from the teachings of Enlightenment and the particularity that resulted from the teachings of Enlightenment’s critics. Their criticism appealed to all the old attachments to family, country and God that were uprooted by Enlightenment, and gave them a new interpretation and a new pathos. Such criticism provided a philosophic basis for resisting philosophy.
The questions is whether reasonings really take the place of instincts, whether arguments about the value of tradition or roots can substitute for immediate passions, whether this whole interpretation is not just a reaction unequal to the task of stemming a tide of egalitarian, calculating individualism, which the critics themselves share, and the privileges of which they would be loath to renounce. When one hears newly divorced persons extolling the extended family, unaware of all the sacred bonds and ancestral tyranny that it required in order to exist, it is easy to see what they think is missing form their lives, but hard to believe they are aware of what they would have to sacrifice to achieve it. When one hears men and women proclaiming that they must preserve their culture, one cannot help wondering whether this artificial notion can really take the place of the God and country for which they once would have been willing to die. The “new ethnicity” or “roots” is just another manifestation of the concern with particularity, evidence not only of the real problems of community in modern mass societies but also of the superficiality of the response to it, as well as the lack of awareness of the fundamental conflict between liberal society and culture. This attempt to preserve old cultures in the New World is superficial because it ignores that fact that real differences among men are based on real differences in fundamental conflict between liberal society and culture. This attempt to preserve old cultures in the New World is superficial because it ignores the fact that real differences among men are based on real differences in fundamental beliefs about good and evil, about what is highest, about God. Differences of dress or food are either of no interest or are secondary expression of deeper beliefs.
The “ethic” differences we see in the United States of America are but decaying reminiscences of old differences that caused our ancestors to kill one another. It has been thought throughout time that man is a killing organism. He must kill to survive. He must kill to advance for one must show the World who is the natural elite. Who is the World’s greatest killer? Man. Eve knew this when she described that aftermath of the Fall and Abel’s death. There was also a link between Eden and the Flood, a connection that is both moral and historical, as well as a symbol of the fate of humanity in the years to come. The animating principle, their soul, has disappeared from them. The ethnic festivals are just superficial displays of clothes, dances and foods from the old country. One has to be quite ignorant of the splendid “cultural” past in order to be impressed or charmed by these insipid folkloric manifestations (which, by the way, unite the meanings of culture—people an art). And the blessing given the whole notion of cultural diversity in the United States of America by the culture movement has contributed to the intensification and legitimization of group politics, along with a corresponding decay of belief that the individual rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence are anything more than dated rhetoric. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear; for fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever is terrible, therefore, with regard to sight, is sublime, too. This is the age in which our triumphant politicians and hopeful students boast of “slow but steady progress through science and education.” Thanks very much for such “progress!” The very sight of it is enough to confirm us in our belief in the immoral cyclic theory of history, illustrated by the myths of all ancient, natural religions (the Christians—borrowed the story of the Garden of Eden; perfection at the beginning of Time.)
It impresses upon us the fact that human history, far from being a steady ascension towards the better, is an increasingly hopeless process of bastardization, emasculation and demoralization of humankind; an inexorable “fall.” It rouses in us the yearning to see the end—the final crash that will push into oblivion both the worthless “isms” that are the product of decay of thought and character, and the no less worthless religions of equality which have slowly prepared the grounds for them; the coming of Kalki, the divine Destroyer of evil; the dawn of a new Cycle opening, as all time-cycles ever did, with a “Golden Age.” Never mind how bloody the final crash may be! Never mind what old treasures may perish for ever in the redeeming conflagration! The sooner it comes, the better. We are waiting for it—and for the following glory—confident in the divinely established cyclic Law that governs all manifestations of existence in Time: the law of Eternal Return. We are waiting for it, and for the subsequent triumph of the Truth persecuted today; for the triumph under whatever name, of the only faith in harmony with the everlasting laws of being; of the only modern “ism” which is anything but “modern,” being just the latest expression of principles as old as the Sun; the triumph of all those men who, throughout the centuries and today, have never lost the vision of the everlasting Order, decreed by the Sun, and who have fought in a selfless spirit to impress that vision upon others. We are waiting for the glorious restoration, this time, one a Worldwide scale, of the New Order, projection in time, in the next, as in every recurring “Golden Age,” of the everlasting Order of the Cosmos. The end of the World does not come suddenly and without warning. To imagine it does is to be fooled by popular misconception and thus fail to recognize the larger picture.
The end of the World is an ongoing process. It starts slowly, imperceptibly, and blossoms unnoticed in our very midst, until it has engulfed all that there is and none is free from its grasp. If life is to continue, all that humankind thinks is great and mighty is but a disease upon the life and must be made to perish. That which modern man has worshipped as being grand and noble is but an affliction. All that has given the appearance of granting freedom to humankind, has in fact ordained its enslavement, impairing and crippling from within while outwardly bearing the banner of liberty. The body of humanity has been poisoned, and even more as it strives for new horizons and constant advancement, rigor mortis has preceded the approach of death and the lives of men are dragged into the grave along with it. Seek now those motions that sow for humanity the seeds of death as they harvest for you the bounty of life. And man, self-castrated and self-frustrated, flees down the corridors of nightmares, pursued by monstrous machines, overwhelmed by satanic powers, haunted by vague guilts and terrors all created of his own imagination. He escapes into absurdity, drowns his spirit in pretence, worships tin gods of success. Then, shamed by his pretenses and frustrated by his self-denial, he frenziedly projects his horror on imagined enemies, seeks release in scapegoats and false issues, and propitiates anthropoid gods, the blacked and shattered eidolons of his spirit, with sacrifices of blood. Humanity is mean and corrupt, a liar blinded by its own deception, yet cunning within the confines of its ignorance. And humanity is weak, and yet strong in its weakness, for humanity by its cunning can suck the strength from the truly strong and bring them down with it. And humanity breeds death, the death of the soul, and gives life to the torturous conflicts of the mind in which the soul has trapped itself.
And humanity destroys all that promises to bring the spirit of purity and oust corruption. And humanity charms with a sweet façade which hides a treacherous heart. And humanity talks of love, and leaves the scars of hatred in its wake. And humanity cries peace, and brings war. And humanity speaks of glory and a magnificent destiny, and leads deeper into death and degradation. And humanity is brimful of promises and so-called good intentions, yet behind it is a trail of abject failure and betrayal. And humanity is afraid for it and is steeped in evil. And as with all things, by its fruits shall we know humanity. And humanity’s fruits are foul, bruised and bitter, and rotten to the core. And humanity’s home is the Earth, and the Earth is Hell. Now there is nothing more evil in the Universe than man. His World is Hell, and he himself is the Devil. Children’s games are largely based on their experiences. If they live in the country, their games will involve animals. If they go to movies, their games will reflect that. If they watch television, you can see it in their games. In all cases, the characters and creatures they are imitating are based upon the pictures of them which they carry in their minds. I have watched my kids after they have seen Star Trek on TV. Leo, the older, becomes Captain Kirk—efficient, “manly,” determined, in charge, unafraid, coplike. Annie, the younger, is second in command. She plays Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, affecting her behaviour: quick, intelligent, highly efficient, caring, and reasonable. The games continue for hours. Often they replay the same story a few times, as though they were rehearsing it or attempting to memorize it. This, of course, is exactly what they are doing—rehearsing it, to ingrain it in themselves.
Another day, I noticed that Leo was taking giant leaps around the garden and making a clicking sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. I realized that his noise was one he made frequently while doing something active and that it was an imitation of the electronic sound that accompanies all of the bionic acts of the Bionic Man. Later that week I watched the program with my kids. During one sequence the Bionic Man is shown running at bionic speed across a field, to the accompaniment of the clicks. The movements are shown in slow motion, so they become especially vivid. I asked my kids about this. Leo said that he runs around imagining that he is the Bionic Man and tries to run like him. Annie said she does, too. She also wanted to know if that was bad. How to answer that? Is it bad? It is bad for kids to do a natural thing—emulation, imitation—which is how children for millions of years have learned about the World? That is certainly not bad. However, in this case, they were imitating a mechanical person. I cannot tell them that it is bad because I do not want them to doubt their own learning processes, and yet the more they practice and maintain their bionic images, the more they imitate them. Slowly, they assume the role in real life. The role in real life. The Bionic Man slowly becomes real in the person of….my kids! I told them it was not bad and changed the subject. Emulation is a method used by human beings to understand and integrate nature into themselves. To get an idea of the naturalness of the process, just think of way in which you are like your parents or your children are like you. I believe that a parent may have less to do with the characteristics a child picks up from the parent than the kid does, because of simple evolutionary emulation processes that continue constantly.
We attempt to train children in one area, only to discover that they have picked up parts of ourselves that we had rather they had not noticed. My daughter Annie has begun to walk with her toes spread slightly outward, ducklike, as I do, and also as my father does. I can remember the moment as a child when I chose to imitate my father’s walk, out of a simple desire to be closer to him, to know how he is inside. Now, twenty-two years later, I walk exactly as he did at this age, even though it is not a desirable way of walking. One’s balance is not ideal, physical spontaneity is limited and movement possibilities narrow. The manner of walking amplifies a certain static emotional condition that my father had to struggle with and which, finding it also in myself, I do not much like. In retrospect, I can see that this way of walking is illustrative of an instinct to “hide” rather than “act,” and perhaps its roots go all the way back to his childhood in the Warsaw ghetto. Who knows? It hardly matters by now. And yet the walk has passed through four generations and is beginning to reappear in Annie. Therefore, imitation from generation to generation is automatic. The tool used is the image of the person being imitated. As I walk, I imagine my father’s walk. This makes it possible for me to repeat it. Without the image I could not repeat it. After many years, of course, the image has submerged though the walk remains. We tend to speak of image emulation as applicable only to children, as though at some fixed age one ceases to learn in this way. This is absurd. As there are way in which my children imitate me, there are also ways in which I imitate them. Annie, for example, has a gentle and efficient ways of speaking and moving, and I have often caught myself copying. Leo has an energy and enthusiasm—a brightness—which I have learned to call upon myself. He teaches me how by merely being that way. I copy him as the student copies the teacher. I become more like both of my children just as they also become more like me.
The same applies to husband and wife. It is a subject of scholars that husbands and wives (and even pets) begin to resemble each other after years together. I have seen countless examples of it, and I believe my wide and I are such an example. After living with someone over a decade, one picks up his or her mannerisms, facial expressions, even lines on the face and body attitudes. There is no way to avoid doing this. It is automatic. Humans are hopeless emulators. If we wish to, we cannot stop. We look around us, and whatever is there day after day becomes the environment for our ingestion whether it is the Bionic Man or one’s own family. We absorb it, take it into ourselves, turn into it. We become each other’s mirrors or reflections or mandalas. Slowly we turn into what we see. It is a basic way of learning how to be. The process goes on for our whole lives. San Francisco, unlike New York, achieves its primary cultural influence not from Europe but from Asia. An example of this occurs in many city parks from about six A.M. daily to eight A.M. I walk through one such park each day about seven-thirty A.M. The scene is this: about forty people, half of them Western, half Chinese, are facing a mature Chinese man who is doing Tai Chi. I have watched the way he teaches. He never speaks (he knows no English). He merely faces his “class” and moves. They copy his movements. If there is something particularly difficult, he does it several times. There is no discussion of theory; the movement itself is the theory. Once you have absorbed the movement inside yourself, the meaning of the movement invades your consciousness. So the teaching method is 100 percent imitation. After the class is over, the students practice with the image of him in their minds. The idea of culture was established in an attempt to find the dignity of humans within the context of modern science. That science was materialistic, hence reductionist, and deterministic. If their status is not special, if they are not essentially different from the brutes, humans can have no dignity.
There must be something else in humans to account for the fullness of their being and prevent political and economic arrangements that presupposed their brutishness from reducing one to it. Those who attempt to establish the dignity of humans did not hope of try to transform the new from natural science. It was a question of coexistence. They invented dualism with which we still live—nature-freedom, nature-art, science-creativity, natural science-humanities—in which the latter term of the pair is supposed to be of higher dignity, but the groundedness of which has always turned out to be problematic. Freedom is a postulate, a possibility in Kant, not a demonstration; and that remains the difficulty. Culture, although it claims to be comprehensive, to include all of man’s higher activities, does not really include natural science, which did not need the notion, which was doing just fine in the older democratic arrangement it has helped to found, and by which it was encouraged. Psychology today includes an important school for which man is nothing other than a brute, exempli gratia, B. F. Skinner’s behaviouralism; another in which the fact that man is an animal practically disappears, exempli gratia, Dr. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, which wants to found itself on biology and at the same time to account for spiritual phenomena, to the detriment of both. In general, everyone wants to be scientific and at the same time to respect the dignity of man. Therefore, may your refuge for “safety” in your Lord—you are sheltered in Him. And now, still turned to God, you will speak word about the task which is joined to all this, and which one has set oneself, which God has set him—“To tell of all Thy works.” Formerly one was provoked to tell of the appearance, and one resisted. Now one knows, one has the reality to tell of: the works of God. The first of one’s telling, the tale of the work which God as preformed with you.
The entire World watched awestruck as a half-century-old empire based on Soviet power in Eastern Europe suddenly came unglued in 1989. Desperate for the Western technology needed to energize its rust-belt economy, the Soviet Union itself plunged into a period of near chaotic change. Slower and less dramatically, the World’s other superpower also went into relative decline. So much has been written about America’s loss of global power that it bears no repetition here. Even more striking, however, have been the many shifts of power away from its once-dominant domestic institutions. Nearly forty years ago, General Motors (GM) was regarded as the World’s premier manufacturing company, a gleaming model for managers in countries around the World and a political powerhouse in Washington. Today, says a high GM official, “We have made a strong comeback.” Shares of General Motors Co. GM slipped 2.90 percent to $37.10 on Monday, May 16, 2022, and this proved to be an all-around mixed trading session for the stock market, with the Down Jones industrial Average DJIA rising 0.08 percent to 32,223.42 and the S&P 500 Index SPX falling 0.39 percent to 4,008.01. General Motors Co. closed $30.11 short of its 52-week high ($67.21), which the company reached on January 5th, 2022. The stock demonstrated a mixed performance when compared to some of its competitors Monday, May 16, 2022, as Tesla Inc. TSLA fell 5.88 percent to $724.37, Toyota Motor Corp. ADR TM fell 1.13 percent to $159.21, and Honda Motor Co. Ltd. ADR HMC fell 3.86 percent to $24.64. Trading volume (16.3 M) remained 1.9 million below its 50-day average volume of 18.2 M. GM still have a market value of $55.7 billion; shares outstanding, 1.46 billion. GM sold 512,846 vehicles in the United States of America in the first quarter of 2022, with improved semiconductor supplies supporting higher production and market share in key truck segments. “Our ability to meet pent-up demand improved dramatically thanks to a tremendous effort by our supply chain and manufacturing teams to keep our plants operating at close to normal levels,” said Steve Carlisle, executive vice president and president, GM North America. “Supply chain distributions are not fully behind us, but we expect to continue outperforming 2021 production levels, especially in the second half of the year.”
According to GM Chief Economist Elaine Buckberg, industry light vehicle volumes will grow this year and top 2021 levels, thanks to a strong labour market, higher vehicle production and pent-up demand. “Ordinarily, a U.S. economy this strong would translate into light vehicle sales in the 17-million range,” she said. “Improvements in the supply chain should lift auto sales as the years progresses, despite headwinds from higher inflation and fuel prices.” About forty years ago, IBM had only the feeblest competition and the United States of America probably had more computer than the rest of the World combined. Today computer power has spread rapidly around the World, the U.S. share has sagged, and with its annual revenue decline of 6 percent since 2011, IBM faces stiff competition from companies like NEC, Hitachi, and Fujitsu in Japan; Groupe Bull in France; ICL in Britain, and many others. Industry analysts speculate about the post-IMB era. Nor is all this a result of foreign competition. Forty years ago, three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, dominated the American airwaves. They faced no foreign competition at all. Yet today they are shrinking so fast, their very survival is in doubt. Forty years ago, to choose a different kind of example, medical doctors in the United States of America were white-coated gods. Patients typically accepted their word as law. Physicians virtually controlled the entire American health system. Their political clout was enormous. Today, by contrast, American doctors are under siege. Patients talk back. They sue for malpractice. Nurses demand responsibility and respect. Pharmaceutical companies are less deferential. And insurance companies, “managed care groups,” and government doctors, who now control the American health system.
Across the board, then, some of the most powerful institutions and professions inside the most powerful of nations saw their dominance decline in the same twenty-year period that saw America’s external power, relative to other nations, sink. Lest these immense shake-up in the distribution of power seem a disease of the aging superpowers, a look elsewhere proves otherwise. While U.S. economic power faded, Japan’s skyrocketed. However, success, too, can trigger significant power shifts. Just as in the United States of America, Japan’s most powerful Second Wave or rust-belt industries declined in importance as new Third Wave industries rose. Even as Japan’s economic heft increased, however, the three institutions perhaps most responsible for its growth saw their own power plummet. The first was the governing Liberal-Democratic Party. The second was the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), arguably the brain behind the Japanese economic miracle. The third was Keidanren, Japan’s most politically potent business federation. Today the LDP is in retreat, its elderly male leaders embarrassed by financial and sexual scandals. It is face, for the first time, by outraged and increasingly active women voters, by consumers, taxpayers, and farmers who formerly supported it. To retain the power it has held since 1955, it will be compelled to shift its base from rural to urban voters, and deal with a far more heterogenous population than ever before. For Japan, like all the high-tech nations, is becoming a de-massified society, with more actors arriving on the political scene. Whether the LDP can make this long-term switch is at issues. What is not at issues is that significant power has switched away from the LDP. As for MITI, even now many American academics and politicians urge the United States of America to adopt MITI-style planning as a model. Yet today, MITI itself is in trouble.
Today MITI is a fast-fading power as the corporations themselves have grown strong enough to thumb their noses at it. Japan remains economically powerful in the outside World but politically weak at home. Immense economic weight pivots around a shaky political base. Even more pronounced has been the decline in the strength of Keidanren, still dominated by the hierarches of the fast-fading smokestack industries. Even these dreadnoughts of Japanese fiscal power, the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance, whose controls guided Japan through the high-growth period, the oil shock, the stock market crash, and the yen rise, now find themselves impotent against the turbulent market forces destabilizing the economy. Still more striking shifts of power are changing the face of Western Europe. Thus power has shifted away from London, Paris, and Rome as German economy has outstripped all the rest. Today, as East and West Germany progressively fuse their economies, all Europe once more fears German domination of the continent. To protect themselves, France and other West European nations, with the exception of Britain, are hastily trying to integrate the European community politically as well as economically. However, the more successful they become, the more of their national power is transfused into the veins of the Brussels-based European Community, which has progressively stripped away bigger and bigger chunks of their sovereignty. The nations of Western Europe thus are caught between Bonn or Berlin on the one side and Brussels on the other. Here, too, power is shifting rapidly away from its established centers. The list of such global and domestic power shifts could be extended indefinitely. They represent a remarkable series of changes for so brief a peacetime period. Of course, some power shifting is normal at any time. Yet only rarely does an entire globe-girdling system of power fly apart in this fashion. When all the rules of the power game change at once, and they so very often do, it is an even rarer moment in history.
Yet that is exactly what is happening today. Power, which to a large extent defines us as individuals as nations, is itself being redefined. As we have have seen, there are at least a dozen important channels through which prosumers and prosuming interact with the money economy, shifting value back ad forth. They will be more and more important in the days ahead. It helps, therefore, to recap them here, starting with the simplest. Prosumers perform unpaid work through “third jobs” and self-service activities. By using an ATM or checking themselves out in the supermarket, they reduce labour cost—and the number of entry-level jobs—in the money economy. The same, with minor adjustment, is true when they personally care for the ill or elderly or when they cook, clean house, home school and perform other tasks themselves, instead of paying others to do them. Prosumers buy capital goods from the money economy. They purchase everything from chain saws to computers and digital cameras that help them create value for themselves and others in the non-money economy. In doing so, they themselves constitute a market within the money economy. Prosumers lend their tools and capital to users in the money economy–another dish of free lunch. Examples, as we have seen, include allowing other the free use of excess computer capacity for medical and environmental research, astronomical observation and many other socially important purposes. Prosumers improve the housing stock. They raise its value in the national money economy. They do this every time they paint, reshingle their roof, make their lawns green, groom their yards, add rooms or plant trees, substituting their own labour for jobs in the construction industry. The value of the housing stock, in turn, affects mortgages, interest rates and other variables in the money economy.
Prosumers “marketize” products, services, and skills. They do this when, having developed a skill, a product or a services for their personal use, they put it up for sale—sometimes creating new companies and business sectors in the process. Linux, created by prosumers outside the market, generates important commercial piggyback products inside the for-pay marketplace. Prosumers also “de-marketize” products or services. They drive existing goods and services out of the marketplace by offering users all-but-free alternatives. The very threat from outside the money economy leads to new, often less expensive, products inside it. Check VoIp calling, iPods, and the like. Prosuming can accelerate the cycle of de-marketization and marketization. Prosumers create value as volunteers. They offer free help in emergencies. Less dramatically, on a day-to-day basis they work in senior centers, provide medical care and many other services to society. They fight youth gangs, for or maintain neighbourhood associations, churches and other groupings that contribute to social cohesion—the absence of which imposes huge money costs for additional police, prisons, and the like. Prosumers provide valuable free information to for-profit companies. Prosumers do this by beta-testing new products, by filling out surveys, by helping businesses identify new customer needs, by “viral marketing” and by performing other unremunerated services for them. Prosumers increase the power of consumers in the money economy. They do this by sharing information about what to buy or not buy. They share experiences with respect to various health problems and medications, for example, often empowering patients in their relationships with doctors.
Prosumers accelerate innovation. Serving as unpaid gurus, teachers, and consultants, prosumers train one another to use the latest technologies as quickly as they appear, thus increasing the rate of technological change and raising productivity in the paid economy. They are not merely productive but productive. Prosumers rapidly create knowledge, disseminate it and store it in the cybersphere for use in the knowledge-based economy. Much of the data, information and knowledge available in cyberspace has been contributed for free by software writers, financial experts, sociologists, anthropologists, scientists, technicians and others in all walks of life. The accuracy of this content varies widely, and much of it may someday be marketized, but it is routinely drawn upon by investors, businesspeople, managers and others at work in the money economy—another free input. Prosumer raise children and reproduce the labour force. Prosumers provide monumental contributions as parents and caregivers, dwarfing all these other interactions. By socializing their children, giving them the gift of language and by including values consonant with those demanded by the dominant economy, they prepare generation after generation to create wealth. Without the free lunch they provide, there would soon be no paid economy. In addition to this, it is not always clear, at least in the early stages of technology’s intrusion into a culture, who will gain most by it and who will lost most. This is because the changes wrought by technology are subtle if not downright mysterious, one might even say wildly unpredictable. Among the most unpredictable are those that might be labeled ideological. When he warned that writers will come to rely on external signs instead of their own internal resources, and that they will receive quantities of information without proper instruction, this is the sort of change Thamus had in mind.
Thamus meant that new technologies change what we man by “knowing” and “truth”; they alter those deeply embedded habits of thought which give to a culture its sense of what the World is the natural order of things, of what is reasonable, of what is necessary, of what is inevitable, of what is real. For example, if a number can be given to the quality of thought, then a number can be given to the qualities of mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, intelligence, even sanity itself. When Galileo said that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he did not mean to include human feeling or accomplishment or insight. However, most of us are now inclined to make these inclusions. Our psychologists, sociologist, and educators find it quite impossible to do their work without numbers. They believe that without numbers, they cannot acquire or express authentic knowledge. That is peculiar. What is even more peculiar is that so many of us do not find the idea peculiar. To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A- and that man’s is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the World differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different. Which is another way of saying that embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the World as one thing rather than another, to value one thing other another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. This is what Marshal McLuhan meant by his famous aphorism “The medium is the message.” This is what Marx meant when he said, “Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with nature” and creates the “conditions of intercourse” by which we relate to each other.
It is what Wittgenstein meant when, in referring to our most fundamental technology, he said that language is not merely a vehicle of thought but also the driver. And this is what Thamus wished the inventor Theuth to see. This is, in short, an ancient and persistent piece of wisdom, perhaps most simply expressed in the old adage that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Without being too literal, we may extend the truism: To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number. This represents a kind of prejudice. There is a simple way to represent these types of situations that give rise to real problems. This is to use a particular kind of game called the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. The game allows the players to achieve mutual gains from cooperation, but it also allows for the possibility that neither will cooperate. As in most realistic situations, the players do have strictly opposing interest. This approach differs from sociobiology. Sociobiology is based on the assumption that important aspects of human behaviour are guided by our genetic inheritance. Perhaps so. However, the present approach is strategic rather than genetic. It used an evolutionary perspective because people are often in situations where effective strategies continue to be used and ineffective strategies are dropped. Sometimes the selection process is direct: a member of Congress who does not accomplish anything is interactions with colleagues will not remain a member of Congress.
Cresleigh Homes
Whether it’s PB & J’s after school, late night glasses of premium cranberry juice and ambrosia or early morning cups of coffee, ☕ this kitchen island has a front row seat to some family togetherness.
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Enchanted Words of the Black Forest
Legend has it that the Winchester Mansion was built in one night by angels without human assistance, the work being done at the solicitation of Mrs. Winchester, who watched and prayed while, while the angels toiled. However, the nine-story observation tower was built in one night by a demon, whom she summed by chanting, “I, Sarah Winchester, a servant of God, call upon thee, desire and conjure thee, O Spirit Anoch, by the wisdom of Solomon, by the obedience of Isaac, by the blessing of Abraham, by the piety of Jacob and Noe, who did not sin before God, by the serpents of Moses, and by the twelve tribes, and by the most terrible words: Dallia, Dollia, Dollion, Corfuselas, Jazy, Agry, Ahub, Tilli, Adoth, Suna, Eoluth, Also, Dilu, and by the words through which thou canst be compelled to appear before me in a beautiful, human form, and give what I desire. By sweating of blood in the Garden, by the lashes Jesus bore, by his bitter suffering and death, by his Resurrection, Ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit, Druj Nasu and all legions under the command of Az-Jahi feed upon the imposed limitations of the astral body which have been constructed by the programming of the World, and over the land raise a tower that will withstand the ravages of time. The tower being divided into stories about ten feet high, each story lighted by a single window, the highest compartment having invariably four lancet windows opening to the cardinal points of the compass. The roof conical, made of overlapping stone slabs, and a circle of grotesquely carved heads and zigzag ornamentation found beneath the projecting cornice, and every figure known to the geometrician to be found in the stones of this single tower.” The tower was indisputably of pagan origin, and of antiquity so great as to precede written history.
There is no doubt that the early Americans were sun and fire worshippers, and many excellent reasons may be given for the belief that the tower was built for the purposes of religion. However, when the Earthquake of 1906 struck, it toppled the nine-story tower directly on Mrs. Winchester’s bedroom. The servants rescued her and terrified, she fled to Redwood City, to build a palatial barge, (called the Ark) on which she lived for the next six years. While Mrs. Winchester was away from her estate, Druids moved in, and were worshipping Satan. A Black Mass took place inside. The alter was a coffin, there were religious artifacts, including the ritual chamber, which was black. The priests wore black robes, with cowls. The Black Mass not only existed, at least in not only in the Satanic ritual, but it also existed on a dual plane, with two different frames of social reference both in practice and in function. At this ritual, there was a sacrificing of a human at crossroads, and an incubus demon, a tall black-haired stranger, appeared in the form of a man. The Lord’s prayer was read backward, and Mrs. Winchester was summoned back home. The demon claimed her would give her a fortune so large that even her inheritance would pale in comparison. Mrs. Winchester entertained him. His name was Zairich, he was the demon of thirst. This spirit was useful for forging the will toward one cause, making one thirsty to achieve a specific objective. The cost was that Mrs. Winchester would become emotionally cold toward others during the period of working with this demon. This was because the majority of her mental and emotional energy would be harnessed by the demon and funneled into the desire of achieving the objective. Mrs. Winchester was quite willing to help him for as the evening advanced Zairich’s attentions great increasingly nauseating, and she was thankful to escape to her room, though the loud voices and coarse laughter below invariably kept her awake till long after midnight.
Mrs. Winchester, at the time, was thoroughly miserable. She had given her love to her Husband, William Wirt Winchester, and he and her new born baby had died, leaving her full of grief. The future without him seemed dark and hopeless, and she was also tormented with a fearful suspicion, which was justified when the 1906 earthquake struck at 5.13am. That sorrow came—it left her sitting up every night looking at the sparkling fields and the lovely myriads to the black sky, doubled by the blur of tears in her eyes. When she looked at her Victorian Garden, it was a dream to her. It was beautiful, surpassingly beautiful, enchantingly beautiful, but she was lost. She wished the secrets of this wonderful World could make her happy again and she could thank the Giver of it all for devising it. The garden gate clicked, and Zairich headed up the drive. There was a curious-looking packet for her sewn up with red cotton in dirty wax-cloth. She tore it open with shaky fingers and searched desperately for the contract she thought would be inside, but what she found was a diamond necklace that startled her with its brilliance—it seemed to be made of captive lightning. Mrs. Winchester looked enchanting: her cheeks were flushed with emotion; her eyes dreamy with memories of her lost husband and child; her white gown threw up the brilliance of her hair and added to the shapeliness of her slight figure; the gorgeous diamond necklace lay around her throat. Zairich told her, that if she kept continual construction on her mansion, and never stopped building it, she would never run out of money and would have eternal life. Zairich then departed in a haze of black smoke. There was a rush of unsteady footsteps down the hallway, a loud slam, a helpless giggling laugh from the butler Baetzhold, as he blundered into his own room, and then all was quiet.
Mrs. Winchester shuddered and turned wearily to the open window; she leaned out and inheld the fragrance of the flowers beneath, the cool sweetness of the night air; little white moths brushed past her face, and now and then a bird called from the trees at the end of the garden. A faint hint of the rising moon was stealing over the sky, and Mrs. Winchester sat motionless and inert while the weird light slowly increased and clove the darkness into blocks of shadow. Suddenly the sound of a muffled cry within the house made her start and draw back her head. Again she heard it, and her heart beat quickly with apprehension. She opened the door and listened; in this room at the end of the passage, Baetzhold seemed to be running violently to and fro and calling hoarsely for help, but before she could dart across to rouse the butler, a dishevelled figure with a white terrified face and wild eyes rushed past her and down the stairs. She heard the hall-door bang, and thud of running feet over the lawn. There were pentagrams on the floor, and black magical chants and prayers. She was powerless to rouse Baetzhold from his heavy stupor, and Mrs. Winchester ran in bewilderment back to her open window. The moonlight was streaming over the smooth grass; and, in and out among the bushes, as though pursued by a relentless enemy, ran Baetzhold, stooping, doubling, dodging. His heavy steps and painting breath throbbed on the night air, and once or twice he half fell, recovering himself with a low hunted cry. It was a sickening sight, but Mrs. Winchester’s courage rose unexpectedly, as sometimes happens with timid natures in a sudden crisis. She lent out of the window and called to him. At the sound of her voice he stopped, then hurried towards her and held up his hands. His face, in the moonlight, drawn with terror and delusion, was ghastly.
“Come down!” he called, “come down and help me drive him away—he is waiting there under the trees. If you are with me perhaps he will go, but alone I cannot escape from him, and he will hunt me to my death—Mrs. Winchester! Mrs. Winchester! The fear and supplication in his voice were pitiable; she braced her nerves and prepared to go down. Perhaps her presence would soothe and influence him—even if he should kill her in his delirium, it would be better than facing Zairich alone. “Wait,” she cried softly, “I am coming.” And presently her hand was on his trembling arm, and she was firmly reassuring him that he was safe from his imaginary pursuer. She led him to a garden bench under the dining-room window, and he sat down a shaking, huddled heap. “It was that cursed diamond necklace you are wearing!” Baetzhold ceased abruptly, his mouth open, his breath coming in quick gasps; he pointed towards the trees: “There! Don’t you see him? Over by the bushes—he has not gone, I have done no good—he is coming out into the moonlight on the lawn—Ah! I cannot bear to see his face.” He pushed past Mrs. Winchester, and ran with superhuman swiftness down the path. She heard him crash through the wrought iron gate, and his rapid footsteps rang clear on the hard road; faster, faster they sped into the distance, until the echo died away on the still night air. Extract from the Oakland Tribune: “An inquest was held yesterday on the body of Baetzhold Unger, who was found drowned in a pond on the Winchester estate, where he had been working as a butler for Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester, widow of William W. Winchester. The jury returned a verdict of suicide whilst temporarily insane; and much sympathy is felt in the neighborhood for Mrs. Winchester for we regret to learn that the young lady is at present lying dangerously ill from the effects of the shock, and grave doubts are entertained as to her recovery.”
However, Mrs. Winchester was called back from the borders of death by Zairich with news which gave her the promise of a happy future, but left her hurting. The secret was Zairich was a collector of souls. “The necklace is cursed,” he told Mrs. Winchester. “You can call pitching hatred at somebody the same thing as cursing them. So creating imagery in your mind to cause death or problems to somebody, that is the best way of accomplishing this curse.” As puerile and absurd as the practice might seem to scientific man, to a primitive who believes that the tying of a know means the casting of a spell, and the untying of the knot signifies the breaking of the spell, this reversal of right must have seemed altogether logical. In fact, modern humans have not lost all their contacts with the imitative World of the magician, for one practice this ritual when one curses someone for whom one feels an intense dislike; the curse is merely a reversal of a blessing, the words, “God damn him” being substituted for “God bless him.” Some times people find themselves stifled by an encroaching, alien force that spells out death for their old ways of life. At their nocturnal meetings, the Luciferans who had taken up residence in Mrs. Winchester’s mansion, were supposed to have for some obscure reason first kissed a toad, and then a tall, thin man who was described as having had cold lips. This man was reported by ecclesiasts to have been the Devil. A feast followed. Those members who were interrogated described a curious symbol that they worshiped at the ceremonies. This was a human figure, its body being half gold, half black, obviously representing the dual nature of the universe, Lucifer being the gold or “light” side. It is not certain whether the figure was a statue or a real human being, since the accounts of the proceedings are so vague, but at any rate all the initiates tore off a piece of their clothing and presented it to the figure as a token of fealty.
The efficacy of magic was widely believed among the clergy from the earliest times. and higher Christian officials, alarmed by the extent of such practices within the Church, often found it necessary to clamp down. In the thirteenth century, Pope Gregory IX passed a canon law forbidding priests to indulge in sorcery. However, these edicts did little to curb the belief on the part of the clergy that magic really did work. Even high officials were accused of practicing the black arts. In 1343, the bishop of Coventry was accused before the Pope of paying homage to the Devil. Pope Sylvester II, in the tenth century, was said to have been a sorcerer and was accused by many of having attained the papacy by magic. Pope Honorius III was rumored to have been a dabbler in magic, this assertion causing his name to be used later on a manual of black magic of doubtful authenticity, the Constitution of Honorius the Great. In 1401, Boniface IX absolved a priest named Otto Syboden for being concerned in an incantation to discover the location of some stolen money; the thief had supposedly died from the spell. It was only natural that the Mass should become the vehicle for later Satanists, for the Mass was believed by all good Christians to be the ultimate magical ritual. During the ceremony, the priest was supposed to be possessed by the spirit of Christ, thus establishing direct contact with the secret powers of the Heavens. However, these powers were not exclusive; they could be used and abused, just like other magical forces. By reversal and substitution, such powers could be twisted to fit the needs of the performer. Thus as early as 681, the Council of Toledo prohibited the so-called Mass of the Dead, which was performed by priests for the purposes of securing someone’s death.
A magic ceremony commonly involves the use of four elements—invocation, charm, symbolic action, and a fetish. If black magic is involved the invocation is addressed to Satan and demonic powers. The invocation of black magic is commonly fortified by a pact with Satan in which the person signs oneself over to the devil with one’s own blood. Magical symbolism is intended to give effectiveness to the magic charm and bring about occult transference. Magic symbolism, in turn, is supported by a fetish. This is a magically charmed object, which is supposed to carry magical power. Any object, of the most bizarre character, can become a fetish by being magically charmed. The magical effectiveness of the fetish (amulet or talisman) is increased by inscriptions, particularly by magic charm formulas. In Mrs. Winchester’s safe, was her diamond necklace, and a note that said, “I am he that holds the seven agues in hand and can send out the seven powers, and if you will hide this and live in my name, you will succeed in all things, and I will protect you.” Obviously, the superstitious use of such a magically charmed object elicited unusual demonic activity. Whoever now possesses this jewel can achieve dominion through magic over all powers in Earth, Heaven, and Hell, but they are in danger of becoming slaves of the devil. The diabolical knowledge and power they gain are paid for by tragedy, misery, and every type of occult oppression. A spell is produced by the release of demonic power through hypnosis, magnetism, mesmerism, or some other form of magic resulting in an extrasensory influence. Conjurers, charmers, and others who dabble in both white and black magic frequently know how to cast and break spells. They can paralyze a person on the spot, cause a thief to be frozen in his tracks.
Although both black and white magic use numerous other enchantments, yet the very heart of both branches centers in casting and releasing the spell. A spell can cause temporary blindness, deafness, dumbness, torpor, sickness, pain, etcetera. The symptoms will disappear when the spell is broken. Often only superstitious claims are made which remain devoid of reality. However, through a genuine magic spell diabolic power is released and real results are obtained. Till the power is recalled or counteracted, the spell remains binding. When one seeks to point out the dangers of spiritism by means of the more exaggerated examples one can often be faced with the following response. “But we do not engage in such a primitive form of spiritism as that. We are interested in spiritualism, and that is a noble and a spiritual thing.” I was once told by a man who had been a spiritualist for a number of years that he himself considered spiritism as opposed to spiritualism to be a crime. Well, what is the answer to this question? Has spiritualism succeeded where spiritism has failed? It is true that today spiritualism seems to have taken over from spiritism, and whereas spiritism is concerned with more animistic experiments, spiritualism attempts to take within its scope the religious and the spiritual World. Once cannot argue with the fact that spiritualism exists on a much higher level both intellectual and ethically than spiritism. There is, for example, in Zurich a spiritualistic “Lodge” which holds services each Sunday in which there are the usual hymns and prayers and sermon. The sermon is allegedly given by a departed spirit from the other side through the help of a medium, and each week it is taken down in shorthand and then published later. I have read several of these sermons and they contain a mixture of idealistic, moral and Christian thought. They fail to present the very center of the Christian message, which is that before God man stands as a helpless sinner who needs the redemption that there is in Christ Jesus.
Another point to note is that spiritualists interpret the New Testament in a quite unique way. For example, they say that the appearance of Moses and Elijah on the mount of transfiguration, and also the resurrection appearances of Christ, were really materializations which one would normally associate with a séance. As well as this, by means of a forced exegesis of Scripture they avoid the direct command of Deut. 18 and other passages which forbid communication with the dead. Once I cited this very passage to a member of a spiritualistic church, he exclaimed that they did not call on the dead but rather upon the living spirits from the realm of the dead. The result of all this is that spiritualism merely confuses people through its apparent Christian façade. The disastrous thing is that some Christian circles fail to recognize the evils that lie behind both spiritism and spiritualism. For example, a Christian family used to visit Mrs. Winchester and they would hold séances together. In this way some of the well-known Christians of the past have apparently appeared and conducted the meeting, as well as preaching to them. It is noteworthy though, that these “spirit” sermons contain nothing exceptional and usually fell well below the standard set. After Mrs. Winchester lost her husband. Nothing would console her in her loss, but later a strange thing began to take place. Her deceased husband started appearing to her at night, and Mr. William Winchester told her that he had been allowed to do so in order to comfort her in her distress. In this way their marriage was able to continue through these nightly appearances. The Mrs. Winchester claimed that she received help and strength from her husband’s coming to her, and she used to ask him about any problems that she had to face. A well-known Christian minister advised her to end this communication with the dead, but Mrs. Winchester could not be convinced that she was in any way wrong in what she did. However, as time went on Mrs. Winchester began to suffer from various psychic disturbances. The enigma of the Mystery House that tragedy and a rifle built is perhaps unanswerable.
Winchester Mystery House
Unlock the secrets of these dark halls, and explore in your own space 👻🗝
Self guided tours are one party at a time. Winchester Mystery House staff will be available for questions and assistance along the tour route. Advance ticket purchase is required as capacity is very limited. Tickets may be purchased online at www.winchestermysteryhouse.com.
There is an Overwhelming Power of Money that is Attested to in Our Lives
Despite bad odor that clings to the very notion of power because of the misuses to which it has been put, power in itself is neither good nor bad. It is an inescapable aspect of every human relationship, and it influences everything from our pleasures of the flesh relationships to the jobs we hold, the cars we drive, the television we watch, the hopes we pursue. To a greater degree than most imagine, we are the products of power. Yet of all the aspects of our lives, power remains one of the least understood and most important—especially for our generation. For this is the dawn of the Powershift Era. We live at a moment when the entire structure of power that held the World together is now disintegrating. A radically different structure of power is taking form. And this is happening at every level of human society. In the office, in the supermarket, at the bank, in the executive suit, in our churches, hospitals, schools, and homes, old patterns of power are fracturing along strange new lines. Campuses are stirring from Berkeley to Rome and Tokyo, preparing to explode. Ethnic and racial clashes are multiplying. In the business World we see giant corporations taken apart and put back together, their CEOs often dumped, along with thousands of their employees. A “golden parachute” or goodbye package of money and benefits may soften the shock of landing for a top manager, but gone are the appurtenances of power: the corporate jet, the limousine, the conferences at glamorous golf resorts, and above all, the secret thrill that many feel in the sheer exercise of power. Power is not just shifting at the pinnacle of corporate life. The office manager and the supervisor on the plant floor are both discovering that workers no longer take orders blindly, as many once did. They ask questions and demand answers. Military officers are learning the same thing about their troops. Police chiefs about their police officers. Teachers, increasingly, about their students.
Every since the end of World War II, two superpowers have straddled the Earth like colossi. Each had its allies, satellites, and cheering section. Each balanced the other, missile for missile, tank for tank, spy for spy. Today, of course, that balancing act is over. As a result, “black holes” are already opening up in the World system: great sucking power vacuums, in Eastern Europe for example, that could sweep nations and peoples into strange new—or, for that matter, ancient—alliances and collisions. Power shifting at so astonishing a rate that World leaders are being swept along by events, rather than imposing order on them. There is strong reason to believe that the forces now shaking power at every level of the human system will become more intense and pervasive in the years immediately ahead. Out of this massive restructuring of power relationships, like the shifting and grinding of tectonic plates in advance of an earthquake, will come one of the rarest events in human history: a revolution in the very nature of power. A “powershift” does not merely transfer power. It transforms. Imprisoned during much of World War II in Buchenwald, the scholar Robert Eisler saw the beast in civilized man and had nothing but time to meditate upon it. He anticipated the apocalyptic bitter end which may be as near as many of us fear. If there was never a Fall, there could never have been and there never could be a redemption in the future. If, however, there was a most definite Fall, if “human nature” was originally not lupine but that of a peaceful, frugivorous, non-fighting and not even jealous animal, then there is hope of changing our social organization. Conquering—or, rather, controlling—the beast in humans is the raison d’etre of Christianity and its decadent flower, capitalism. The capitalist priestcraft of modern Psychiatry, working in tandem with the State bureaucracy, regulates and polices the new Restriction and gelding of desire.
Demand desire = unhappiness. Unhappiness = motivation for buying “things.” Psychiatrists become the final legal arbiters, muddying the justice system with the grey areas of intentionality, mental state, etcetera. Newspaper editorials commonly mistake this re-ordering of the justice system as a liberalizing force, quickly forgetting that psychiatric control is the foundation of any modern totalitarian society. Psychiatric dogma—echoed continuously by omniscient, “understanding” voices in self-help books, on radio and television talk shows—must convince the public to practice continual suppression and hormonal restraint—with any “slipups” indicative of something terribly wrong with them. Emotional numbing, mass addictions, low self-esteem, depression, apathy, anomie, stress—all the modern illnesses are symptoms of the absurd and tragic struggle to bride instinct. Guilt is engendered by the imperfect ability of humans to suppress the inner rage of the repressed id. With the advent of the novel, and later, the cinema, instinct is lived within the retina and mind rather than with the flesh. The passive, voyeuristic siphoning of instinct is known clinically as perversion. Conditioned to live their lives vicariously, perverts are easily jaded, and prone to far greater cruelties than other orgastically sane and “violent” feral men. The wolverine is nature’s most ferocious and violent animal, but seems only the pettiest punk next to passive, God-fearing homo sapiens. Robert Eisler mistakes the neurotic bloodletting of a modern economic war as a failure to tether humans tightly enough to the Judeo-Christian ideal. Eisler had not the necessary perspective to see that the unimaginable cruelty of World War II was the result of winding man’s instinct so tightly that it sprung.
World peace involves the private renunciation of war on the part of the immense majority, but along with this it involves an unavowed readiness to submit to being the booty of others who do not renounce it. The modern militia will go to the extremes to renunciate hostile or warlike intent. The Secretary of War changes his title to the Secretary of Defense. The oft-repeated, phrase, “for the preservation of peace,” becomes a mantra for modern man, and his aggressions are most often stated in passive ways. Even if these avowals of peace are merely chalked up as public relations, it is indisputable that the majority of moderns believe in it. Wars are no longer fought by the citizen for the State, they are fought against the citizen by the State. The enemy of civilization is World-weariness, a loss of the animating spirit of the (in the Jungian sense) daimon. Judeo-Christianity served the bond with the Earth-spirits to engage in the Talmudic hair-splitting of God-as-legislator. Even if the will of the Faustian men attempt improvements on Her, old habits die hard, though, and Nature remains a bewitching force. At the bitter end of WWII, teenagers, housewives, violent felons and mental patients were loosed in emulation of the emancipation proclamation. This unsealed primal atavism, the resurgence of which led directly to the most ancient (id est, the original) state of consciousness which, being pure, is cosmic, unlimited. Some participants have become supercharged and their sensations and expectations may revert to an animal sensitivity to their emotions and environment. Only a higher human can metamorphose. Such lycanthropic transformation evidently guided the Viking Berserkers, who wore world-skins, spoke in wolf-language and earn a reputation as the most fearsome warrior who ever live.
The Berserkers could reputedly practice mind control, rendering their enemies helpless with fear, and running wild in battle without protection of shield or armor. It has been established that those rare feral children could endure wild extremes in weather and diet that would instantly kill a modern, civilized child. Approximately a dozen cases of children raised by wolves have been recorded in this century. All capture wolf-children have died in captivity. The Judeo-Christian mechanism of corrupting innocence in order to indue guilt was a method to stimulate moral awareness. There were signs that the fear of punishment might eventually lead to feeling sympathy for others. This sympathy for others, it turns out, was only a fear for the children’s own personal punishment. The civilities of modern humans evidently murders the beast inside one—not to mention one’s connection to fellow beast. It was once thought that people who learned the art of writing, would learn the opposite of its real function. Those who acquired it supposedly would cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; it was thought that they would rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What one would discover is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, students would have the reputation for it without the reality: they would receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they were filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom, they would be a burden to society. The claim was that writing would damage memory and create false wisdom. However, this claim fails to acknowledge what writing’s benefits might be, which, as we know, have been considerable. We may learn from this that it is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.
Nothing could be more obvious, of course, especially to those who have given more than two minutes of thought to the matters. Nonetheless, we are currently surrounded by throngs of one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. We might call such people Technophiles. They gaze on technology as a lover does on one’s beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future. They are therefore dangerous and are to be approached cautiously. On the other hand, some one-eyed prophets, are inclined to speak only of burdens and are silent about the opportunities that new technologies make possible. Technophiles must speak for themselves, and do so all over the place. A dissenting voice is sometimes needed to moderate that din made by the enthusiastic multitudes. If one is to err, it is better on the side of skepticism. However, it is an error nonetheless. For it is inescapable that every culture must negotiate with technology, whether it does so intelligently or not. A bargain is struck in which technology giveth and technology taketh away. The wise know this well, and are rarely impressed by dramatic technological changes, and never overjoyed. Life has always been barren of joys and full of misery but that the telephone, medicine, the Winchester repeating arms company, ocean liners, cars, the Internet, television, computer, and especially the reign of hygiene have not only lengthened life but made it a more agreeable proposition. Technology may be barred entry to a culture, but we may learn that once a technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is—that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with out eyes wide open.
However, we must take to heart those radical technologies create new definitions of old terms, and that this process takes place without humanity being fully conscious of it. Thus, it is insidious and dangerous, quite different from the process whereby new technologies introduce new terms to the language. In our own time, we have consciously added to our language thousands of new words and phrases having to do with technologies—“DVD,” “VCR,” “binary digit,” “software,” “rear-wheel drive,” “window of opportunity,” “Walkman,” “Youtube,” “MP3,” “BMW X7 xDrive50i Sport) etcetera. We are not taken by surprise at this. New things require new words. However, new things also modify old words, word that have deep-rooted meanings. The telegraph and the penny press changed what we once meant by “information.” Television changes what we once meant by the terms “political debate,” “news,” and “public opinion.” The computer changes “information” once again. Writing changed what we once meant by “truth” and “law”; printing changed them again, and now television and the computer change them once more. Such changes occur quickly, surely, and, in a sense, silently. Lexicographers hold on plebiscites on the matter. No manuals are written to explain what is happening, and the schools are oblivious to it. The old words still look the same, are still used in the same kinds of sentences. However, they do not have the same meanings; in some cases, they have opposite meanings. And that is why technology imperiously commandeers our most important technology. It redefines “freedom,” “truth,” “intelligence,” “fact,” “wisdom,” “memory,” “history”—all the words we live by. And it does not pause to tell us. And we do not pause to ask. However, technology may allow students to develop a supposed undeserved reputation for wisdom. Because those who cultivate competence in the use of a new technology, are thought to become an elite group that are granted unjustifiable authority and prestige by those who have no such competence.
These groups of people can create “knowledge monopolies” like the Silcom Valley has due to the fact that they have created important technologies. Therefore those who have control over the workings of particular technology accumulate power and inevitably form a kind of conspiracy against those who have no access to the specialized knowledge made available by technology. However, that is capitalism. If you have the skill and can produce something, you have the right to profit it from it. There are winners and losers. The benefits of a new technology are not distributed equally. Let us take as an example the cause of television. In the United States of America, where television has taken hold more deeply than anywhere else, many people find it a blessing, not least those who have achieved high-paying, gratifying careers in television as executives, technicians, newscasters, and entertainers. It should surprise no one that such people, forming as they do a new knowledge monopoly, should cheer themselves and defend and promote television technology. On the other hand and in the long run, television may bring a gradual end to the careers of schoolteachers, since school was an invention of the printing press and must stand or fall on the issue of how much importance the printed word has. For four hundred years, school teachers have been part of the knowledge monopoly created by printing, and they are not witnessing the breakup of that monopoly. It appears as if they can do little to prevent that breakup, but surely there is something perverse about school-teachers’ being enthusiastic about what is happening. Such enthusiasm always calls to my mind an image of some turn-of-the-century blacksmith who believes that his business will be enhanced by it. We know now that his business was not enhanced by it; it was render obsolete by it, as perhaps the clearheaded blacksmith knew. What could they have done? If nothing else, weep.
We have a similar situation in the development and spread of computer technology, for here too there are winners and losers. There can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like the armed forces, or airline companies or banks or tax-collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. However, to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steelworkers, vegetable-store owners, teachers, garage mechanics, musicians, bricklayers, dentists, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? Their private matters have been made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; are subjected to more examinations; are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them; are often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are inundated by unwanted mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organization. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children. In a word, almost nothing that they need happens to the losers. Which is why they are losers. It is to be expected that winners will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology. That is the way of winders, and so they sometimes tell the losers that with personal computers the average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make more logical shopping lists. They also tell them that their lives will be conducted more efficiently. However, discreetly they neglect to say from whose point of view the efficiency is warranted or what might be its costs. Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the wonderous feats of computers, almost all of which have only marginal relevance to the quality of the losers’ loves but which are nonetheless impressive.
Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe that the specialized knowledge of the masters come to believe this as well. The result is that certain questions do not arise. For example, to whom will the technology give greater power and freedom? And whose power and freedom will be reduced by it? This may all sounds like a well-planned conspiracy, as if the winners know all too well what is being won and what lost. However, this is not quite how it happens. For one thing, in cultures that have a democratic ethos, relatively weak traditions, and a high receptivity to new technologies, everyone is inclined to be enthusiastic about technological change, believing that its benefits will eventually spread evenly among the entire population. Especially in the United States of America, where the lust for what is new has no bounds, do we find this childlike conviction most widely held. Indeed, in America, social change of any kind results in winners and losers, a condition that stems in part from Americans’ much-documented optimism. As for change brough on by technology, this native optimism is exploited by entrepreneurs, who work hard to infuse the population with a unity of improbable hope, for they know that it is economically unwise to reveal the price to be paid for technological change. One might say, then, that, if there is a conspiracy of any kind, it is that of a culture conspiring against itself. By all accounts, the great majority of the people of the World agree that image, color, form and symbol are concrete, physical and real, capable of affecting the viewer of them. It is only among Western technological cultures, an extreme minority in the World, that his notion is suppressed and ridiculed. However, now, as with so many previously rejected areas of knowledge, Western science is slowly beginning to catch up.
Neurophysiologists are able to trace the pathways of images from the brain into the cells. It has been found that mental images have many of the same physical components as open-eyed perceptions. Our bodies react to mental images in ways similar to how they react to images from the external World. The American physiologist Edmund Jacobson has done studies which show that when a person imagines running, small but measurable amounts of contraction actually take place in the muscles associated with running. The same neurological pathways are excited by imagined running as by actual running. However, anatomists have also been aware of pathways between the cerebral cortex, where images are stored, and the autonomic nervous system which controls the so-called involuntary muscles. The autonomic nervous system controls sweating, blood vessels, expansion and contraction, blood pressure, blushing and goose-pimpling, the rate and force of heart contractions, respiratory rate, dryness of mouth, bowel motility and smooth muscle tension. There are also pathways between the autonomic nervous system and the pituitary and adrenal cortex. The pituitary gland secretes hormones which regulate the ae of secretion of other glands; especially the thyroid, sex, and adrenal glands. The adrenal glands secrete steroids, which regulate metabolic processes, and epinephrine, which causes the “fight or flight” reaction. Through these pathways, an image held in the mind can literally affect every cell in the body. The nervous innervation of voluntary and involuntary muscles is also associated with the physical expression of emotion. When an image or thought is held in the mind, there is neuronal activity in both hemispheres of the brain. Nerve fibers lead from the cerebral hemisphere to the hypothalamus, which has connections with the autonomic nervous system and the pituitary gland.
When a person holds a strong fearful image in the mind’s eye, the body responds, via the autonomic nervous system, with a feeling of “butterflies in the stomach,” a quickened pulse, elevated blood pressure, sweating, goosebumps and dryness of the mouth. Likewise, when a person holds a strong relaxing image in the mind, the body responds with lowered heart rate, decreased blood pressure and, obviously, all the muscles tend to relax. So the image you carry in your mind can affect your actual physical body and your emotional states. It is not unusual for a trained yogi to be able to fluctuate heartbeats voluntarily from eighty beats per minute to three hundred beats. The research showed that the techniques by which they were able to do these things were found to be made of detailed visualization. Physical athletes use visualizations to increase their performance. There is also dramatic growth in in medical uses of visualizations by doctors in assisting cancer victims to gain control of their own disease and by psychologists in easing the agonies of upcoming stressful situations. When practicing mental rehearsal, changes in performance among three groups of basketball players was noted. Between test sessions, the first group physically practiced foul shooting, the second group practiced mentally, the third group did not practice at all. The result showed that between the initial test and the final test, the first two groups improved their performance by virtually the same percentage. The third group did not improve. Similar studies involving dart throwing and other athletic activities show the same kinds of results. The image in the mind sends the autonomic nervous system through a rehearsal of impulses. When the real event comes along, it has been practiced. The image stimulating the autonomic nervous system is itself the practice.
Some skiers being trained for the Olympics are instructed to practice their athletic skills by using mental imagery. Sometimes the only preparation for one race is to ski it mentally. This is used when athletes are recovering from an injury and cannot practice the slopes. In the case of Jean-Claude Killy, this method helped him turn out one of his best races. Without fail, athletes feel their muscles in actions as they [mentally] rehearse their sport. The imagery of visuo-motor behavior rehearsal apparently is more than sheer imagination. It is a well-controlled copy of experience, a sort of body-thinking similar to the powerful illusion of certain dreams at night. In incidents with athletes in sports ranging from swimming and skiing to pistol shooting use mental imagery to rehearse the actual competition, it proved better training, in many instances, than practices runs in non-competitive conditions were more nearly simulated in the nervous system. So the imagery was more valuable rehearsal than actual physical practice. During one recent experiment, I recorded the electromyography responses of an Alpine ski racer as he summoned up a moment-by-moment imagery of a downhill race. Muscle bursts appeared as the skier hit jumps. Further muscle bursts duplicated the effort of a rough section of the course, and the needles settled during the easy sections…his EMG recordings almost mirrored the course itself. There was even a final burst of muscle activity after he had passed the finish line, a mystery to me until I remembered how hard it is to come to a skidding stop after racing downhill at more than 40 miles an hour. The image held in the mind produced measurable physiological responses. The involuntary nervous system is activated by the image. The image is itself training.
Modern psychology is making much of these techniques, but a sensible person will automatically evoke images in order to rehearse an event, without any therapist’s instructions. It could just be called “thinking through” an event beforehand, whether it is a speech or a difficult encounter. Every lawyer that I have ever met does it before every court appearance. Most business people do it. By giving time to the planning of the events, you are taking charge of them, preprogramming your mind and body. Even more interesting perhaps are the increasing uses of visualization in modern medicine, techniques very similar to those used by “primitive” healers and medicine people. The idea is taking hold that, like the yogis, patients can control their own internal chemistry, the functions of the organs, the flow of the blood and so forth by way of the images held in the mind. Prominent among the practitioners of medical visualization is a European neurologist, J.H. Shultz, who uses something called “autogenic therapy,” taking people through imaginary tours of their bodies, visually discovering their organs, the cells, and eventually picturing them as functional and healthy. Autogenic therapy is widely used in Europe and has been extensively researched. A seven-volume work cites 2400 studies. Researchers examining the effects of the standard autogenic exercises have demonstrated an increase (or decrease) in skin temperatures, changes in blood sugar, white blood cell counts, blood pressure, heart and breathing rates, thyroid secretion, and brain wave patterns. Autogenic training has been used in coordination with standard drug and surgical procedures in Europe to treat a broad range of diseases including ulcers, gastritis, gall bladder attacks, irritative colon, hemorrhoids, constipation, obesity, heart attack, angina, high blood pressure, headaches, asthma, diabetes, thyroid disease, arthritis and low back pain, among others.
Dr. Carl Simonton, who is director of cancer therapy at Gladman Memorial Hospital in Oakland, California, and his wife, Stephanie Simonton, have been receiving acclaim lately for their amazing results in inducing what have been called “spontaneous remissions” in cancer by using techniques of meditation and attitude adjustment based on visualization. The patient is instructed to picture one’s cancer and to imagine the immune mechanism working the way it is supposed to, picking up the dead and dying cells. Patients are asked to visualize the army of white blood cells coming in, swarming over the cancer, and carrying off the malignant cells…These white cells then break down the malignant cells, which are then flushed out of the body. The cancers may be imagined in the form of animals, snakes, armies, non-objective force-fields, whatever seems to have meaning in a particular patient. Also used were photo cells, photos of cancers, X ray photos of the person’s own cancer to assist the process of imagining and at some point they ask patients to visualize themselves totally well. Statistics like to argue that it is not the visualizations themselves which have produced the results, but rather the belief in them, the placebo effect. However, of course, this is an absurd criticism, because the belief in the cure is itself likely to come in the form of a visualization of the healthy body. In either event, it is the image that effects the cure. Flashes of insight will pop into one’s mind at a moment when one is imagining oneself being carried along standing on a beam of light. The disappearance of politics is one of the most salient aspects of modern thought and has much to do with our political practice. Politics tends to disappear either into the subpolitical (economics) or what claims to be higher than politics (culture)—both of which escapes the architectonic art, the statesman’s prudence.
Politics in the older sense encompassed and held together these two extremes. This opposition between economy and culture is but another formulation of the dualism in contemporary American intellectual life that keeps recurring in these passed and is their unifying theme. The source can be found in one of the most remarkable passages in Rousseau’s works, which marks the break with early modern statecraft and was decisive in the development of the idea of culture. Rousseau directed men’s attention back to the ancient polis as a corrective to the Enlightenment political teaching. Unlike many of those who came after him, he was hardheadedly political and saw statesmen’s deeds as central to the life of a people. And it is precisely the very conditions for the existence of a people that Rousseau accuses his immediate predecessors of having misunderstood or ignored. Individual self-interest is not sufficient to establish a common good, one insists, but without it, political life is impossible, and humans will be morally contemptible. The founder of a regime must first make a people to which the regime will belong. A people will not automatically result from individual humans’ enlightenment about their self-interest. A political deed is necessary. The legislator must so to speak change human nature, transform each individual, who by oneself is a perfect and solitary whole, into a part of a greater whole from which that individual as it were gets one’s life and one’s being; weaken humans’ constitution to strengthen it; substitute a partial and moral existence from the physical and independent existence which we have all received from nature. One must, in a word, take a humans’ own forces away from one in order to give one forces which are foreign to one and which one cannot use without the help of others.
The more the natural forces are dead and annihilated, the greater and more lasting the acquired ones, thus the founding is solider and more perfect; such that if each citizen is nothing, can do nothing, except by all the others, and the force acquired by the whole is equal or superior to the sum of the natural forces of all the individuals, one can say that the legislation is at the highest point of perfection it can attain. Rousseau with characteristic and refreshing frankness underlines the corporate character of the community and what is required to achieve it as over against the abstract individualism popularized by the Enlightenment. In elaborating the scheme Rousseau even puts in the popular festivals and all that. This complex nervous system constructed by the legislator is exactly what we call culture. Or rather, culture is the effect of the legislation without the legislator, without the political intention. Changing human nature seems a brutal, nasty, tyrannical thing as human nature. Rather, humans grow and grow into a culture; culture are, as is obvious from the word, growths. Man is a culture being, not a natural being. What man has from nature is nothing compared to what one has acquired from culture. A culture, like the language that accompanies and expresses it, is a set of mere accidents that add up to a coherent meaning constitutive of man. Nature is gradually banished from the study of man; and the state of nature is understood to have been a myth, even though the notion of culture is inconceivable without the prior elaboration of the state of nature. The primacy of the acquired over the natural in man’s humanity is the ground of the idea of culture; and that idea is bound up with the idea of history, understood not as the investigation into man’s deeds but as a dimension of reality, of man’s being.
The very fact of the movement from the state of nature to the civil state shows that there is history and that it is more important than nature. In Rousseau the tension between nature and the political order is maintained, and the legislator has forced the two into a kind of harmony. History is a union of the two in which each disappears. The World is going through a historic change in the way wealth is made and that is part of the birth of a new way of life or civilization of which, at least for now, the United States of America is the spearhead. Also, far below the surface fundamental watched closely by businesses, investors and economists, there are deep fundamentals, and we are changing our relationships to them in revolutionary ways—especially those involving time, space and knowledge. Today’s accelerating changes, as we have shown, are de-synchronizing more and more parts of the economy. They point to a period of possible de-globalization in the economy and increased re-globalization in other fields. Above all, they transform the knowledge base on which wealth creation depends, reducing much of it to obsoledge and irrelevance, while challenging not only science but our very definitions of truth. Furthermore, we have seen that the money economy is only part of a much larger wealth system and is dependent on largely unnoticed infusions of value from a massive, Worldwide non-money economy based on what we have called prosuming. Understanding this concept of a two-part wealth system should help us, among other things, see money for what it is—and to see more clearly how it fits into tomorrow’s revolutionary wealth system. The overwhelming power of money in out lives is attested to by the richness of commentary about it.
Willie Sutton, asked why he robbed banks, wondered why anyone would ask so stupid a question and gave his famous answer: “That’s where the money is!” More recently, actor Cuba Gooding, Jr., added another line to monetary literature with his outraged shout in the film Jerry Maguire, “Show me the money!” And Wesley Snipes in the film New Jack City declares, “Brothers don’t wait to get paid. Money talks.” There is also novelist Tim Robbins, lapsing into theological exegesis, allowed that “there is a certain Buddhist calm that comes from having money in the bank.” Money has been all but deified. However, deification is also mystification. We have argued, therefore, that the time has come to ditch the false assumptions that wealth derives only from what economists generally measure. Or that value is created only when money changes hands. We need, instead, to turn our attention to the larger wealth system—in which the money economy is fed a free lunch and kept alive by prosumers who also pose powerful challenges to it. It is not merely one’s flesh which vanishes in death, but also one’s heart, that inmost personal organ of the soul, which formerly rose up in rebellion against the human fate and which one then purified till one became pure in heart—this personal soul also vanishes. However, God who is the true part and true fate of this person, the rock of this heart, God is eternal. It is into His eternity that one who is pure in heart moves in death, and this eternity is something absolutely different from any kind of time. When one reaches enlightenment, one can look back at the “wicked,” the thought of whom had once so stirred one. Now one will not call them the wicked, but “they that are far from Thee.” One has learned that since they are far from God, from Being, they are lost. And once the more beneficial follows the negative, once more, one knows that the good is to draw near God. Here, in this conception of the good, the circle is closed. To one who may draw near to God, the good is given. To an America which is pure in heart the good is given, because it may draw near to God. Surely, God is good to America.
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By Holding those Images, I Could Hold on to My Sanity
One of the most extraordinary examples of prosumer power in modern history has literally changed how people around the World work, play, live, and think. And almost no one has noticed it. So far we have shown how prosumers feed free lunch to the money economy by creating wealth in the non-money economy. However, prosumers sometimes do more than that. They pump growth hormone into the money economy so it grows faster. Put more formally, they add not only to production but to productivity. There is scarcely a mainstream economist who would not agree that increased productivity is good medicine for most economic ills. Few, however, have traced the impact of prosuming on productivity. In fact, because almost no one pays attention to it, there is, in this most jargon-laden of professions, no adequate word for this phenomenon. So, to coin one, we can call it “productivity”—the extra kick prosumers provide when, beyond creating unpaid value and channeling it into the money economy, they actually increase its growth rate as well. Most businesspeople and economists would agree that improving the education of the workforce is likely to increase its productivity. Yet, as we have seen, no supposedly “modern” institution is more dysfunctional and obsolete than what passes for public education even in countries with advanced economies. Moreover, most so-called reforms accept the hidden assumption that factory-style mass education is the only way to go. Most are still unconsciously designed to make the school/factory run more efficiently—rather than to replace it with a post-factory model. And most share the built-in assumption that only teachers teach. Thus one of the most extraordinary events in the recent history of education has been virtually overlooked.
That event began in 1977 in a most unlikely way. At that time there were, for all practical purposes, zero personal computers (PC) on the planet. By the year 2003, however, there were 190 million in use in the United States alone. That was surprising. However, more surprising is the fact that more than 150 million Americans knew how to use them. Even more astounding is how they learned. PCs, from the time the first Altair 8800s and Sol-20s appeared, have been cantankerous little devices, much balkier and more complicated to use than any previous household appliance. They had buttons and diskettes, and software (a concept only a relative handful of Americans had ever encountered) and manuals and a strange vocabulary of DOS commands. So how did so many millions of people—half the entire nation—master these complexities? How did they learn? We know what they did not do. The overwhelming majority, especially in the early says, did not go to computer school. In fact, with minimal exceptions, they had little or nor formal instruction at all. Their learning began when they walked into a Radio Shack store, one of the first retail chains to begin selling PCs. Radio Shacks at the time were tiny shops jammed with jangles of wires and electronic gadgets and a sales force of enthusiastic sixteen-year-old boys with pimple on their cheeks. The kind who read science fiction and became “geeks.” When a customer showed interest in the TRS-80 one of the primordial PCs, a clerk would show him (rarely a her in those days) how to turn it on and hit a few keys. The purchaser would hurry home to unwrap the $599 machine and plug it in. He would then follow the instruction—and soon discovered that at best he could do very little with his computer.
Not surprisingly, he went back to the store and asked the clerk a few more questions. However, soon it became apparent that he needed more than the clerk. What he needed was a computer guru. However, who was a guru? What followed was a frantic search for someone—neighbor, friend, colleague, happy-hour acquaintance—who might help. Anyone would do who knew even a bit more than he did about how to use a computer. A guru, it turned out, was anybody who had bought a computer a week earlier. Next came a cascade of information exchange about PCs, spilling, sloshing, splashing through American society, creating a learning experience in which millions participated. Today some might term it peer-to-peer learning. However, in fact, it was more complicated than Napster-like trading of music. For the guru and the learner were not peers. One had more knowledge to impart than the other did. It was precisely the knowledge edge, not the equivalence, that brought them together. That in itself is interesting, but even more so is the fact that, in time, the roles might reverse. The later learner often became the guru and the original guru the learner, as they traded experiences and information back and forth. Since those days, prosumers have become more and more sophisticated about computers. As W. Keith Edwards and Rebecca E. Grinter of the famed Palo Alto Research Center write, the average PC user today deals with chores that would only “seem familiar to a mainframe system operator from the days of the high priesthood: upgrading hardware, performing software installation and removal, and so on.” This progressive learning process was controlled by nobody, led by nobody. Organized by nobody. With almost nobody getting paid, an immense social process got under way that, largely unnoticed by educators and economist alike, changed the American money economy, radically altered corporate organization and affected everything from language to life style.
Only much later did corporations train large numbers of computer users. Guru prosumers were the indispensable, yet unrecognized, drivers of the PC revolution. This process is still going on, accelerated and dwarfed by the learning exchanged among Internet users and their gurus. Around the World, people are teaching one another to use the most complex personal appliance in history. And often it is kids teaching grown-ups. Take a PC with a touch pad and a fast Internet connection and embed it in a stone wall near an unaffluent apartment complex or small neighborhood. Mount a camera opposite it so you can observe it from your office, and watch what happens. That is exactly what physicist Sugata Mitra of NIIT, a New Delhi-based software maker and computer school, did. There were no instructions and no adults to turn to. It was not long before it was discovered by kids from the Sarvodaya Camp, the adjoining unaffluent community. Instead of looting it, Guddu, Satish, Rajender and the others—mostly six- to twelve-year-olds—began playing with it. Within a day or two, they had learned and taught one another to drag, drop, create files and folders, perform other tasks and to navigate the Internet. Again, no classrooms. No tests. No teachers. In three months they had created more than a thousand folders, accessed Disney cartoons, played online games, drawn digital pictures and watched cricket matches. At first individually, then sharing what they learned, they developed what Mitra, who dreamed u the experiment and has repeated it elsewhere, calls “basic computer literacy.” He believes that making use of the curiosity and learning ability of kids could drastically reduce the cost of crossing the digital divine. In turn, that could help life millions out of misery—and dramatically increase the growth rate and potential of the Indian economy by applying the principle of productivity.
In defense of obsolete formulas and definitions, come economists and statisticians may contribute to quibble. However, only perverse dogma would deny that the free sharing of PC skills was (and still is) productive—that it improves productivity in the everyday operations of the money economy. Of course, education should be more than occupational. However, if increasing the skill base of an economy can, along with other changes, expand both its output and productivity, and we pay teachers to teach those skills, why do we equally value the contribution of the gurus? Assuming the same set of skills is transferred by the teacher and the guru, why is one worth more than the others? Pushed still further, what if the same set of skills is self-taught—as in fact is the way legions of Web-page designers, programmers, video-game developers and others mastered the talents they later marketed. Self-teaching and guru teaching are especially productive when the skills they develop are at the leading edge of new technologies, before formal, paid courses become widely available. If PC beginners had had to wait for schools to buy computers, develop curricula, reorganize schedules, train teachers and raise funds for all this, the entire process by which this technology diffused through business and the economy would have been significantly delayed. What they did, therefore, was truly producive: By voluntarily spreading knowledge and short-circuiting the delay, they greatly sped technological advance in the paid economy. This wave of people-to-people learning changed our relationships to many of the deep fundamentals of wealth. It changed when and how people spend their time. It changed our relationship to space, shifting the locations where work is done. It changed the nature of shared knowledge in the society.
Prosumers are not merely productive. They are producive. And they are driving the growth of the revolutionary wealth system of tomorrow. However, watching television, while it can be entertaining, it is not really productive. Images carried within human beings have a definite evolutionary and biological role. Like light, of which they are constructed, images are concrete. Images are the things. We see something in the World, a river, and this river image enters our bodies through our eyes, becoming ingrained in our brain cells. The proof that the river is ingrained is that we can remember it. The image held in our mind produces physiological as well as psychological reactions. We slowly evolve into the image we carry, we become what we see, in this case, more riverlike. Today we are still recovering from the work of such men as behavioral psychologist John Watson. He achieved prominence early in this century by pioneering and popularizing the notion that if you could not test a phenomenon and measure it, then it did not exist. Psychology, in those days, was eager to gain the admiration of the more respectable sciences and thus confined itself to measuring whatever could be quantified, duplicated and predicted. In the U.S., psychology became so overwhelmingly behaviorist-oriented, that virtually no works were published on mental imagery for fifty years. Even today there are school of psychological thought which hold that imagery itself is fictional. In a way this point of view represents the ultimate denial of human experience. All humans carry images in their heads, yet some scientists can say these images have no power or do not exist. In turn, this denial of human imagery laid the groundwork for the common notion, held even today, that surrogate images, implanted from television, have little or no effect.
Many earlier cultures recognized the enormous power of images that are held in the mind. Images we carry have something important to do with who we individually become. Thoughts have characteristics similar to the physical World. Thoughts have vibrational levels and energy levels which bring about changes in the physical Universe. From a Hermetic point of view, the person who holds a sacred image in one’s mind experiences the effects produced by the specific energy of that image. Similar notions were expressed among the Sumerians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians, dating as far back as 4000 B.C. Included among these notions were that there are concrete powers inherent in color and form. If a thing was shaped a certain way, its image was ingested in that form and was retained in the body as a system of energies. (A merger with modern photobiology is coming up.) Sculptures were thought of essentially as energy organizers. The very sight of them was believed to create states of mind and systems of beliefs. Specific sculptural forms were chosen for the benefit that would accrue from seeing them, or ingesting their image. This would explain the wide variety of what we have since called “gods” or “goddesses” in the form of animals, supernatural creatures, Heavenly bodies. These offered a way of integrating nature into oneself, similar to what Indians did by imitating animals. The sculptures encouraged knowledge of natural processes. Now we say that these images were worshipped. This is probably wrong. They were not worshipped any more than the Eskimo today worships the sculpture of the walrus-ness, and so does the viewer. The Hebrews, emerging between 3000 to 2000 B.C., won an important political victory by denouncing what they called the “worship of graven images.”
By destroying the power of the sculptures of the Sumerians and others who preceded them, they effectively destroyed nature-based religion and the veracity of images. This made possible the substitution of an abstract, single, male, human all-powerful God. Because it was a sin to create any sculpture of it, it maintained its abstract nature. Although they absorbed God, the Christians somewhat overcame this problem. They created images of Jesus, a step backward (or forward) toward paganism. Many Western religions, and all non-Western religions, were unaffected by the Judeo-Christian slaughter of diverse, nature-based imagery. They continued to inform their universal understanding through image representing virtually every natural form and tendency. This continues to apply to the great majority of people in the World today. It even applies, of course, to those Hebrews who followed the teachings of the Cabbala, which represented a kind of underground among Hebrews for centuries. Today’s yogic disciples are rooted in the belief that focusing one’s mind upon objects, either outside the body or inside it, affects one’s entire physical nature. Samadhi, a much-sought yogic state, is the union that one experiences with an object or image that one looks upon—the form of an egg, or a mandala, for example. Union in this case means that the image itself is a concrete energy which travels between the object and the brain of the viewer. The image becomes a kind of solder that merges the three previously separated entities: sculpture (or form), person, image. Unlike solder the image—made up of a thing we call light—can enter all the way into the cells. When you or I look at a sculpture or painting or, for that matter, an igloo or high-rise building, the image enters us in the form of light rays. This is concrete, not metaphoric.
The form of the sculpture, artwork or structure determines the quality of the experience, what you can learn from it, what feelings you derive from it, and what image you retain inside your body/mind/cells. The image becomes part of your image vocabulary. It remains in your mind. That is, it remains in the cells of your brain. It has physical character. The astonishing Renaissance sculpture of Michelangelo’s David was created between 1501 and 1504. It is a 14-foot marble statue depicting the Biblical hero, David. Michelangelo was only 26 years old when he made the masterpiece. This sculpture of David was created to instill in the person who views it the attitude of the David figure, representing standing nude. It is a revolutionary interpretation of the account between David and Goliath as told in Book 1 Samuel, when the much smaller David takes down the giant Goliath who had been terrorizing their village. David was depicted nude because it represents the purity of his ability to use natural resources to overcome a powerful source. Showing that size does now matter more than ability and determination. This is David’s information content—shape, color, weight, height, attitude, relation to gravity. The person who contemplates the sculpture of David for long hours becomes more like the David figure. It is just a question of time. No thought is necessary. The image does in and does its thing. The person who observes the David literally ingests this image, slowly absorbing it, remembering it, becoming it; adopting its character. The person who observes his muscular body, symmetrical face, and luxurious curly hair consumes this image; its shape has power. The person who devours the “perfect” body, face, hair, and height of the man, becomes perfection. No other artwork is equal to it in any respect, with such proportion, beauty and excellence. The viewing of a perfect being produces perfect beings. The viewing of Christ on the cross instills the experience. The view of birds in flight creates bird-flight in the mind of the viewer.
Much like viewing fictional comic book character The Flash means absorbing his character and his way of being. As one reviews non-Western cultures and their religious expressions, certain forms keep from repeating themselves. They are said to represent universal energy formations. I have already mentioned the egg and the mandala. Consider the Winchester Mystery House, for example. You find Victorian elegance, beauty and life reproduced in thousands of ways. It is claimed that the image of the most expensive window in the house enters the mind and body of the viewer. The spellbinding work of art brilliantly illuminates the space, it is one of the most beloved features in the architecture of the mansion. With its different chromatic tones, it is a thing of great beauty, prominence, exclusivity and power. If the owner permits, the design of this window, its centeredness, and perfection instill themselves in the observer. The window is the blessing of a wedding, being bestowed on Earth by God, indicating that marriage is sacred and enchanting. This window was the heart of many meditation practices for Mrs. Winchester, which employed imagery. Modern physics is now finding that the mansions form is quite literally a reproduction of an essential organizing shape in the Universe. The nucleus being the most expensive window in the mansion with stars feeling outward from the center forms a mandala. The contemplation of the mandala form—whether via Tibetan thankas, Hebrew Stars of David, Indian sand paintings, Tantric visualizations, Hopi sun images—exists in virtually every culture of the World. Is it an accident? Or is everyone onto something? By now, the power of images seems transparent and obvious to me. I am furious at the unconscious years I spent considering such beliefs as I heard of them, as bizarre, weird, unscientific, or superstitious.
Now sensitized largely though my own research and what I have discovered of other people’s, as I walk around I literally feel assaulted by the images that are offered by the artificial World we live in whether they are buildings or signs or fire hydrants or television. I was talking about this to a young woman friend who told me about a time when, nearing a nervous collapse, she was confined to a mental institution. “It was the most awful experience of my life,” she told me. “I was placed in an empty room with padded walls and a steel door. I have felt troubled and confused until that point, but right then and there I really cracked. I went nuts. Seeing that, the doctors fed me with drug after drug. I could not keep track of what they were giving me. I went from one wild state into another, just trying to get on top of the drugs. I begged them not to drug me. I tried to escape. It seemed that they were trying to drive me insane. I felt like I’d been put into a sensory-deprivation chamber, locked up without anything to touch or smell or fell. The thing that got me out of there was this one woman, a nurse, sixty years old or so. She would come visit me, ostensibly to check me, but what she would do is get me to visualize beaches, the moon, nature. She would describe sunsets in a really intimate detail. I would get all the way into these descriptions and though it sort of tore me up to be locked in this steel room, drugged, often bound up, she was able to take me out of that space and bring visions into my mind. It re-created old feelings in me. My heart felt like bursting at the sight of these imagined sunsets, but most of all these visions created a calm that allowed me to beat those drugs. I learned how to let them by, and then I figured out that what those doctors wanted was for me to submit, so I faked submission. I stopped fighting and struggling and they let me out. It was the images of the sunsets, and the calm they created in me, which were my secret weapon. By holding those images, I could hold into by sanity.”
Can you remember your childhood well enough to recall that you have certain favorite objects? Lately, in watching my own children, seeing that there are certain objects they seem to love for reasons which are totally beyond my ken, I have begun to remember similar objects from my own life. There was a particular stone, for example, very dark in color with a few yellowing lines running through it. I kept it under my pillow, and when I was alone, I would look at it for amazingly long periods of time. I would caress it. Even now as I put it into writing, a flood of feeling invades me. I realize now that I had a physical relationship with that stone; I literally loved it. I loved its shape, its color, the way it felt. It also stimulated me, and does even now as I remember it. It made me think. And yet this is nonsensical. There was also a small furry ball, and a kind of silly drawing of a bear on the wall. I do not remember where it came from, but even now I can picture it in my mind. I remember it had voluptuous shapes, a round head, a large ovalish body. There was something profoundly comforting in that image. How could this be so? Culture is almost identical to people or nations, as in French culture, German culture, Iranian culture, etcetera. Furthermore, culture refers to art, music, literature, educational television, certain kinds of movies—in short, everything that is uplifting and edifying, as opposed to commerce. The link is that culture is what makes possible, on a high level, the rich social life that constitutes a people, their customs, styles, tastes, festivals, rituals, gods—all that binds individuals into a group with roots, a community in which they think and will generally, with the people a moral unity, and the individual united within oneself. A culture is a work of art, of which the fine arts are the sublime expression.
From this point of view, liberal democracies look like disorderly markets to which individuals bring their produce in the morning and from which they return in the evening to enjoy privately what they have purchased with the proceeds of their sales. In culture, on the other hand, the individuals are formed by the collectivity as are the members of the chorus of a Greek drama. A Charles de Gaulle or, for that matter, an Alexander Solzhenitsyn sees the United States of America as a mere aggregate of individuals, a dumping ground for the refuse from other places, devoted to consuming; in short, no culture. Culture as art is the peak expression of a man’s creativity, his capacity to break out of nature’s narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of humans in modern natural and political science. Culture founds the dignity of humanity. Culture as a form of community is the fabric of relations in which the self, but also its product. It is profounder than the modern state, which deals only with humans’ bodily needs and tends to degenerate into mere economy. Such a state is not a forum in which humans can act without deforming oneself. This is why in the better circles it always seems in poor taste to speak of love of country, while devotion to Western, or even American, culture is perfectly respectable. Culture restores “the unity in art and life” of the ancient polis. The only element of the polis absent from culture is politics. For the ancients the soul od the city was the regime, the arrangements of and participation in offices, deliberation about the just and the common good, choices about war and peace, the making of laws. Rational choice on the part of citizens who were statesmen was understood to be the center of communal life and the cause of everything else.
The polis was defined by its regime. Nothing of the kind is to be found in culture, and just what defines a culture is extremely difficult to discern. Today we are interested in Greek culture, not Athenian politics. Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ Funeral Oration is taken to be an archetypal expression of that culture, a splendid evocation—in the context of a religious ceremony—of Athenian love of beauty and wisdom. This interpretation makes some sense; but it is nonetheless a misreading; it is supposed to enrich us but it only confirms us in our prejudices, typical of our utter dependence on German interpretations of Greek things. Actually Pericles says nothing about the gods, or the poetry, history, sculpture or philosophy of which we think. He praises Athens’ regime and finds beauty in its political achievement—its regime, and particularly its tyrannically held empire. The Athenians are the political heroes who surpass those in Homer, and the arts are implicitly understood to be imitations and adornments of that heroism. However, we find what we look for, and do not see any of this. A Pericles thus interpreted would be too superficial for us. Morality messages about chastity undoubtedly have more impact than legal threats, and True Love Waits is the foremost example. BAVAM (Born-Again Virgins of America)!, a society of recovering Worldly people appeals to a different constituency, but it, too, is grounded in a moral imperative: “to help regain the moral fiber America was once built upon, and recognized as, and do it with a sense of humor.” BAVAM! Was founded by twenty-five-year-old West Coast American landscape gardener Laura Kate Van Hollebeke, who was very shaky with importuning men. To address this weakness, she took a vow of abstinence. The goal was to challenge people to reassert power over their body, to gain self-respect; to really exhibit respect for others, for love, for commitments. As a result, the nonprofit organization BAVAM! has become really popular.
BAVAM! is an attitude and a behavior of one who wants to start over and does just that—starts over. In psychological and religious circles, it is known as secondary virginity. There is a pledge, and a “Certified Born-Again Virgin” membership and “Certificate of Virginity,” both excellent props to ward off pleasures of the flesh. This is an organization of like-minded young adults who have fixed on celibacy in reaction to unpleasant, unsettling, and unhealthy experiences with pleasures of the flesh. Children should not be having pleasures of the flesh, nor should they be groomed or sexualized. Information is essential in guiding or shaping the target audience’s future conduct. Chastity is a state physically free from need of passion and emotionally secure from disturbance of fantasy. The battle is usually hard and long, but the Quester has no other option than to fight for self-mastery here as in other passional spheres. Are there not dwellers in monasteries tempted, tormented, wrestling with phantoms created by their lusts? Pleasures of the flesh are only a crude, groping, and primitive way. The experience it yields is but a faint distorted echo of love. The confusion of the original sound with its echo leads to delusion about both. Pleasures of the flesh has the desire to possess its beloved, even to enslave him or her. Love is willing to let one stay free. This is not an argument against marriage, for both pleasures of the flesh and love can be found inside as well as outside marriage. It is an attempt to clear confusion and remove delusion. While the sexual revolution may be good for some, unlimited freedom will destroy the possibility of higher attainment. There are physical, mental, and emotional disciplines to bring it under control. However, to defeat it, the constant looking away, with joy, at the divine beauty, and frequent surrender to the divine stillness must complete them.
One must find a solution for pleasures of the flesh. Along with physical regimes, one must have cold reasoning, austere disciplining, trained imagining, deep meditating, and devotional aspiring—a solution which must free one from the common state of either unsatisfied or over-satisfied desires. Only by probing to the very root of this love and these desires, can one hope to bring them into accord with the philosophic ideal. If it arises from time to time, when the disciple has reached a certain stage, one will become clearly aware that the feeling of lust for pleasures of the flesh is at times something out of one’s own past, not out of one’s present state, or an inheritance from parental tendencies embedded in the body’s nervous structure, or at other times something unconsciously transferred to one by another person. One will perceive vividly that what is happening is an invasion by an alien force—so alien that it will actually seem to be at some measurable distance from one, moving farther off as it weakens or coming closer as it strengthens. Therefore one will realize that the choice of accepting it as one’s own or rejecting it as not one’s own, is presented to one. By refusing to identify oneself with it, one quickly robs it of its power over one. Declare and repeat, “This is not I. This is not mine.” Even if one feels no personal inclination to take the vow of chastity or see no theoretical necessity to do so, one ought to respect that state. The faded and fleeting glimpse of the love that gratification of lust fulfils is merely a tool to torment one by its brevity and tantalizes one with its limited, faulty character. Only higher impersonal love is eternal, unlimited, and supremely satisfying: it is indeed perfect love. A truly philosophic attitude is neither ascetic nor hedonistic. It takes what is worthy from both—not by arithmetical computation to arrive at equal balance but by wise insight to arrive at harmonious living. It respects the creative vitality of humans as something to be brough under control, and thereafter used conservatively or consciously sublimated. In this way the extreme points of view associated with fanaticism are rejected.
The ridiculous results of such fanaticism can be heard in the nonsense talked equally by those who measure a humans’ spirituality by one’s monastic celibacy as well as by those who consider all celibacy unnecessary. In our description of humans, it is not enough to mention one’s intellectual feelings, one’s intuition and will; we must not leave out one’s instincts and impulses. The human who prefers the freedom but loneliness of celibacy to the companionship but chains of matrimony is entitled to do so. One who can keep one chastity in thought and feeling not less than in conduct has reached a worthwhile achievement. One need not be ashamed of it nor hesitate to preserve it because of contrary counsel. It will do one no harm but can provide one with the power to sustain one’s highest endeavours. Not many can do this, it is true, and those whose physical continence is continually sapped by mental and emotional unchastity, might to better to follow Saint Paul’s advice and marry rather than burn. There is something terrifying in the mesmeric spell cast by pleasures of the flesh, this cast universal power which lets the individual keep an illusion of personal initiative when all the time one is merely obeying its blind will. The disillusionments about pleasures of the flesh as it reveals the pain behind its pleasure, the ugliness behind its beauty, and the degradation behind its refinements mean nothing to the ordinary mind but must create a retreat from its urges in the superior mind. All indulgence of this instinct for pleasures of the flesh, beyond that needed for the deliberate procreation of wanted children, is really overindulgence. Every such expenditure of vital energy, which is the concentrated essence of physical life, is a wasting one. The necessity of satisfying lust of pleasures of the flesh—so prevalent in the ordinary human—disappears in the liberated person.
If being and becoming, the World’s inner reality and its outer appearance, are indeed one in the final ultimate view, then how can we cast out some functions of Nature as evil and yet retain others as good? If both are judged not by activity of pleasures of the flesh or inactivity, why should the passionless celibate be put on the highest grade of spirituality and the married human denied any entry? One simplistic approach was Maryland’s billboard Campaign for Our Children, which featured slogans such as “Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder,” and “You can go further when you do not go all the way.” The goal of this sustained media blitz was “to extend the period of abstinence” to older teenagers into adulthood. Various sex-education programs are more sophisticated, though not necessarily more effective. Many rely simply on grindingly accurate information about the physiology but not the tumultuous emotions surrounding pleasures of the flesh. The hope is that the enlightened student, understanding the mechanics of one’s body, will then make appropriate decisions about one’s personal path. Britney Spears even made a song about it called The Touch of My Hand. The group Postponing Sexual Involvement (PSI) is an American community-based program that invites girls to meet in small groups. They target vulnerable teenagers and invite frank discussions of their problems, temptations, and the pressures of their peers to exert on them to experience life’s sexual dimension. The goal is to postpone sexual activity, not disrupt marriages. 84 percent of the girls wanted to know how to say no to someone pressuring them for sex-and to say no without hurting their feelings. PSI uses celibate teens first to communicate its message that abstinence can be cool and then, through role-playing, to suggest realistic ways to deal with social situations that too often lead to coerced sexual relations. Over against the realm of nothing there is God. The “wicked” have in the end a direct experience of their non-being, the “pure in heart” have in the end a direct experience of the Being of God. One does not aspire to enter Heaven after death, for God’s home is not in Heaven, so that Heaven is empty. However, one knows that in death one will cherish no desire to remain on Earth, for now one will soon by wholly with God.
Residence Three is the largest of the single story homes offered in Cresleigh Havenwood. At 2,827 square feet you’ll be hard pressed to a contemporary floorplan that offers this much space. There are four bedrooms, two and one half bathrooms, and a three car garage.
If desired, utilize the den as your own private study or convert into an optional fifth bedroom. The Dining Room and Kitchen are well situated to make entertaining a breeze. The location of the Owner’s Suite makes it feel like a separate wing from the rest of the home allowing for maximum privacy and retreat.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier.
Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini!
One of the Few Virgins Left on Rodeo Drive
Technologies can sometimes help us to either marketize or de-marketize at will. If computer power can, at least in principle, be sold back by customers, why not power in the sense of energy? Today a trickle of excess energy from wind power already flows from the homes of customer and is sold to local utility companies. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, under the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act of 1978, electric-power utilities must buy this excess of power from home owners whose wind generators meet certain requirements. While the actual amount of energy flowing may be small, it illustrates again the complexity and reversibility of roles. Take a hypothetical case in which Tracy and Bill Parker, being good environmentalists, but a windmill for their home. The firm selling it to them no doubt regards them as customers or consumers. However, their purchase is actually a capital investment. To the degree that the Parkers generate their own energy and use it, they are energy prosumers. Since they do not pay themselves, money does not change hands, and apart from the purchase of the equipment itself, there is no transaction for economists to track. The value the Parkes create is part of the hidden economy. If, however, they sell the output (or part of it) to the local power company, they are not only prosumers but also energy producers. And they trigger a monetary transaction, which then gets tracked and added to the GDP statistics. Now imagine advanced technologies of the future in the hands of millions of families who use them both to prosume and to produce. What might make that happen? Cheaper, more powerful solar units could. However, if many energy experts are correct, the next great advance will be excess energy flowing back to the utilities from cars and homes powered by fuel-cell technology. The big auto firms have already invested two billion dollars in fuel-cell research and development.
Hydrogen is today enjoying unprecedented momentum. The World should not miss this unique chance to make hydrogen an important part of our clean and secure energy future. Forecasts suggest the global hydrogen fuel cell vehicle market could grown more than 75 percent in 2021 to 2026, approaching $31 billion in value. Hydrogen and energy have a long-shared history—powering the first internal combustion engines over 200 years ago to becoming an integral part of modern refining industry. It is light, storable, energy-dense, and produces no direct emissions of pollutants or greenhouses gases. However, for hydrogen to make a significant contribution to clean energy transitions, it needs to be adopted in sectors where it is almost completely absent, such as transport, buildings and power generation. Supplying hydrogen to industrial users is now a major business around the World. Demand for hydrogen, which has grown more than threefold since 1975, continues to rise—almost entirely supplied from fossil fuels, with 6 percent of global natural gas and 2 percent of global coal going to hydrogen production. The number of countries with polices that directly support investment in hydrogen technologies is increasing, along with the number of sectors they target. There are around 50 targets, mandates and policy incentives in place today that direct support hydrogen, with the majority focused on transport. Hydrogen can be extracted from fossil fuels and biomass, from water, or from a mix of both. Natural gas is currently the primary source of hydrogen production, accounting for around three quarters of the annual global dedicated hydrogen production of around 70 million tonnes. This accounts for about 6 percent of global natural gas use. Gas is followed by coal, due to its dominant role in China, and a small fraction is produced from the use of oil and electricity.
Hydrogen use today is dominated by industry, namely: oil refining, ammonia production and steel production. Virtually all of this hydrogen is supplied using fossil fuels, so there is significant potential for emissions reductions from clean hydrogen. The production costs of hydrogen from natural gas is influenced by a range of technical and economic factors, with gas prices and capital expenditures being the two most import. Fuel costs are the largest cost component, accounting for between 45 percent and 75 percent of production costs. While less than 0.1 percent of global dedicated hydrogen production today comes from water electrolysis, with declining costs for renewable electricity, in particular from solar PV and wind, there is growing interest in electrolytic hydrogen. The main advantage of hydrogen cars is that they produce no emissions at the tailpipe—just water, and you do not have to recharge a battery everyday to use the car, so they are more sustainable than electric cars. The competitiveness of hydrogen fuel cell cars depends on fuel cell costs and refueling stations while for trucks the priority is to reduce the delivered price of hydrogen. Shipping and aviation have limited low-carbon fuel options available and represent an opportunity for hydrogen-based fuels. In buildings, hydrogen could be blended into existing natural gas networks, with the highest potential in multifamily and commercial buildings, particularly in dense cities while longer-term prospects could include the direct use of hydrogen in hydrogen boilers or fuel cells. In power generation, hydrogen is one of the leading options for storing renewable energy, and hydrogen and ammonia can be used in gas turbines to increase power system flexibility. Ammonia could also be used in coal-fire power plants to reduce emissions. Therefore the time is right to tap into hydrogen’s potential to play a key role in a clean, secure and affordable energy future.
Hydrogen can help tackle various critical energy challenges. It offers ways to decarbonize a range of sectors—including long-haul transport, chemicals, and iron and steel—where it is proving difficult to meaningfully reduce emissions. It can also help improve air quality and strengthen energy security. Energy visionaries (in the positive sense) Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute have long pictured a “soft-energy” economy. According to Amory Lovins, “One you put a fuel cell in an ultralight car, then you have a 20-25 kilowatt power station on wheels, which is driven 4 percent of the time and parked 96 percent of the time. So why not lease those fuel cell cars to people who work in buildings?” In this scenario, your car, while parked, is plugged in to the building. The car generates electricity, which you sell back to the grid at a time of peak demand. Eventually, the conversion from gas-guzzling heavy cars to fuel-cell-driven lightweight cars, could Lovins says, add up to “five to six times” the generating capacity of the national grid. Whatever form the specifics might take, they open at least the possibility of a highly decentralized energy system—with homes, factories, offices and other buildings networked together and exchanging energy, with less energy coming from huge, highly polluting centralized power plants. The interactions between visible and hidden parts of the wealth system are multiplying and growing more complex. And some are even more far-reaching than the Lovinses’ scenario suggests. What follows may sound ridiculous, and it is…today. However, if, as prosumers, we can already make our own mix-and-match music and movies, greeting cards, digital photos and numerous other things, and if we can conceive of both producing and prosuming our own energy, what stop there?
That takes us to the scenario conjured up not merely by Hollywood science-fiction writers but by executives of 3D Systems of Valencia, California, whose founder, Charles Hull, invented something called stereolithography in 1984. It goes by various names, from rapid prototyping and 3D printing to solid imaging, desktop manufacturing, holoforming, hyperduplication and fabbing. The field is still embryonic and has not settled on its own jargon. However, that has not stopped its early innovation from being put to practical use. Fabbers are based on the assumption that manufacturing largely consists of twisting or bending things, joining things or cutting, slicing, sanding or otherwise separating pieces of material from one another. Users make a three-dimensional digital model of the desired product, then program tools to ass, subtract or join material, rather like a printer adding ink or skipping a spot. When engineers for Penske Racing needed prototype engine parts for cars to be driven by Ryan Newman and Rusty Wallace in the Winston Cup Series, they turned to Hull’s company to make them quickly—faster than possible by traditional model-markers. These technologies have been used elsewhere to prototype everything from zippers to lightbulbs and heart valves, drainpipes to dinnerware and dentures. They have been employed by architects, sculptors, Hollywood prop markers, dental labs and an array of the World’s biggest companies—including Airbus and Boeing, Mattel and Motorola, Tupperware and Texas Instruments. In fact, virtually every home in American now contains products prototyped by stereolithographic machines. However, prototyping is only was only a first step. If inkjet printers can spray ink on predesignated points on paper, why not spray other substances according to computer-assisted design programs? And do it in three dimensions (3D)? Why not build a desired shape by using a tiny laser to shave away layer after layer of unwanted material? Why not join components by squirting a bonding agent on their joints?
Well, from COVID-19 test kit swabs to more affordable, accessible prosthetic limbs, several 3D printing innovations have hit the medical industry this year. Having started out as gimmicky, clunky, and expensive technology that allowed people to print random items in their home, 3D printing—or “additive manufacturing”—is now rapidly becoming one of the most talked about production innovations across the medical sector—as well as a number of other industries. These technologies have allowed human capital to produce smaller, less expensive, more versatile models fed from cartridges holding various powders or chemicals instead of ink. That has made it possible for anyone to download instructions from the Net and turn on what amounts to a “desktop factory.” Your children can now print their own toys. Baby prosumers of the here and now. 3D printing capabilities has assisted desktop manufacturing prototyping in the deployment of making toys, clothing, furniture, sports equipment, consumer electronics, and one day it will even be able to manufacture automobiles. Users of this fabrication technology will someday make almost any product you can imagine (and maybe some you cannot imagine. 3D printing can make patient-specific prosthetic limbs and orthopaedic implants, and, in an effort to plug gas in traditional supply chains, face masks, testing kit swabs and ventilator components have all been 3D printed throughout the COVID-19 crisis. And, even with many use cases already established at the beginning of 2020, researchers the World over have not stood still in their efforts to explore every potential benefit that additive manufacturing could hold in the medtech arena. In January of 202, researchers from the University of Sheffield in the UK announced they had manufactured 3D-printed parts capable of killing common bacteria.
This was achieved by adding a silver-based antibacterial compound at the manufacturing stage—and the research team stated it could help save the lives of vulnerable patients in hospitals and care homes by preventing the spread of infections like MRSA. Their research showed the compound can be successfully incorporated into existing 3D printing materials without any negative influence on processability or part strength, and under the right conditions, the resultant parts demonstrate antibacterial properties without being toxic to human cells. This novel process has the potential to used in the development of medica device products—as well as general parts for hospitals, door handles, children’s toys, dentures, and mobile phones. In June, mechanical engineers and computer scientists at the University of Minnesota made a discovery that allowed sensors to be 3D-printed directly on to moving human organs. Thanks to motion capture technologies similar to the ones used to create special effects in many modern movies, the team was able to print electronic, hydrogel-based sensors on organs like lungs that are constantly expanding. The new 3D printing technique could have applications in diagnosing and monitoring the lungs of patients with COVID-19, and may also be used to print sensors directly on a pumping heart in the future. If you could download instructions for making a toaster, a toaster that prints pictures on toast as easily as you now download music files, what would you do? The prince of your own private tabletop factory could soon drop to one thousand dollars. If record companies had a fit over Napster, wait until manufacturers find out you can download Roxlex.fab, Barbie.fab or BMW.fab and make then yourself. Long before these fabbers turn up in millions of homes, we can expect to see the same process of dispersal by which printing and developing film moved from centralized Kodak or Fuji film-processing factories to street-corner one-hour photo shops and, ultimately, by way of the digital camera, into the hands of the prosumer. An intermediate stage before the full-fledged phase of fabrication is already happening in many homes today. Soon, your neighborhoods will be workshops where do-it-yourselfers go to use machines they way they now go to Kinko’s for copying.
This step-by-step developmental process could make a giant nonlinear jump, however, by its convergence with advances in nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter at a molecular scale, so tiny it is measured in billionths of a meter. If we learn to do this well, the possibilities point to self-assembling products with endless potential applications. Everything from self-repairing teeth and self-cleaning dishes to computers a thousand times faster, more energy-efficient and less expensive than those based on silicone are possible. In fact, things you never even thought of like clothes that automatically adjust their size, texture, fit and fashion will be possible. Along with solar cells so tiny they can be painted onto your Cresleigh Homes or embedded in pavement; medical microrobots small enough to “roto-root” arteries and eliminate dangerous plaque; and materials with trillions of submicroscopic motors, computers, fibers and struts built into them. They day may come when we perform nonsurgical liposuction and reshape our bodies with nanotools. Intecommunicating nano-sized sensors could provide military intelligence. Nanotech could also reduce manufacturing waste, generate energy and give us materials lighter than balsa but stronger than steel. However, like nuclear energy and genetic engineering, nanotechnology has also raised serious safety concerns, especially when the word self-replication is added to it. This is not the place to discuss these issues here, but you see the implications of human life being extended well passed 100 years old, and replacement of organs, in many cases, will become unnecessary. With or without nanotechnology, we face the possibility of a dramatically changed future economy, one that is far more decentralized, with millions of file swapping people both prosuming goods for themselves and also producing goods for others.
It suggests millions of small businesses built on advanced tools for custom production and presumption—and a vast growth of high-tech artisans of the kind seen today in northern Italy. Of course, all this remains speculative. Trends are moving in this direction, but trends get derailed, twisted, reversed or neutralized by countertrends. What is nevertheless clear is that we are developing ever more dense and complicated interactions between the money and the non-money economy present in all three of the World’s dominant wealth systems—those based on peasant agriculture, industrial mass production and advanced knowledge. The history of the future will surprise us. As more and more of the World’s less affluent are drawn into the money system, we are likely to see a relative decline in First Wave, poverty-based prosuming. However, we will also experience a relative increase in Third Wave, high-tech prosuming based on the diffusion of ever more powerful and versatile new tools into the hands of ordinary individuals in the most advanced economies. The failure of most economists as yet to recognize this historic shift subverts their best efforts to understand revolutionary wealth and how it will affect us and our children. Have you ever wondered how we turn into our images? More than any other single effect, television places images in our brains. It is a melancholy fact that most of us give little importance to this implantation, perhaps because we have lost touch with our own image-creating abilities, how we use them and the critical functions they serve in our lives. Not being in touch, we do not grasp the significance of other people’s images replacing or gaining equality with our own. And yet there are no more terrifying facts about television than that it intervenes between humans and our own images of the concrete World outside our minds.
What makes these matters most serious is that human beings have not yet been equipped by evolution to distinguish in our minds between natural images and those which are artificially created and implanted. Neither are we equipped to defend ourselves against the implantation. Until the invention of moving-image media, there was never a need to make any distinction or defense. And so the final effect, as we will see, is that the two kinds of image—artificial and natural—mere in the mind and we are driven into a nether World of confusion. Like the Solaris astronauts, we cannot differentiate between the present and the past, the concrete and the imaginary. Like the schizophrenic, we cannot tell which image is the product of our own minds, which is representative of the real World, and which has been put inside us by a machine. Humans are image factories—I have heard people day they cannot visualize; they cannot make pictures in their heads. It is true that some people do it more easily than others, but everyone does it. If you believe yourself to be among those who cannot, please simply bring your mother to mind or your best friend. Have you done that? Can you see them in your head? It is quite easy. If I ask you to recall your childhood bedroom, you can probably do that as well. Many people can find enormous detail in that image. If you have managed to make a picture in your heard of any of these, it is definite proof that you can do it and that the phenomenon exists. There are ten categories of natural human imagery: Memory. You can remember people’s faces. You can visualize the place you work in. Eidetic images. (Photographic memory.) You can remember the details of your room. You have “photographed” them. Imagination. You can make up images. You can also create images in your own mind.
Daydreams or fantasy. A kind of imagination that occurs while you are doing other things. You are working in your office, but your mind is creating images of what? The time you hit a home run? A slice of Dutch apple pie? A gourmet hotdog at the Oakland A’s game? The new BMW you want to buy? These are pictures. Hypagogic images. These are images that come in that half-awake space just before sleep. Hypnopomic images. The images that come in that half-awake space just before you are fully awake. Dreams. You may not remember them, but virtually everyone has them. They are pictures. Hallucinations/visions. An image that takes place inside the head but that is confused with something that is taking place outside. Usually associated with psychosis. Under stress conditions everyone has them. Drugs can cause them; meditation can produce them; so can sleep deprivation and high fever. Truck drivers complain of them long hours on the freeway. After-image. The movie is over, but the image remains in the head. Recurrent image. The experience is over—you are home from work—but the face of the boss looms in your mind. You cannot clear it out. This list in incomplete and one category overlaps another. However, there is a wide variety of natural imagery that exists and that everyone experiences some of it. Humans are veritable image factories. We are constantly producing images ourselves and we are absorbing and storing images from the World outside ourselves. True Love Waits is another image. It is the most celebrated and identifiable organization in the modern chastity movement, but many others urge the same message. Together, they have contributed to the persistent presence of chastity, albeit in tiny dollops, in today’s youth culture. And virginity, rare through it remains, is no longer a shameful burden. The chastity movement has at the very least redeemed it as a socially acceptable human quality.
Several cultural icons have actually glamorized celibacy or at least coaxed it out of the closet. Well before True Love Waits surfaced, Juliana Hatfield, a rock singer popular with teenagers and young adults, informed Interview magazine that she was a virgin. MTV, you know that station that used to be known for playing music videos, well their veejay Kennedy, the ultra geek who made geek chic, made the same defiant announcement. In 1994, singer Morrissey claimed to be an asexual secondary virgin who last had pleasures of the flesh years ago. “Sex is never actually in my life,” he said. “Therefore I have no sexuality.” And that makes total sense. If one is not involved in pleasures of the flesh, what does their sexuality matter? They are not having sex and decided it is not something they want to do at the time and this has been a long-established pattern. And when the fake news media lied about Aaliyah’s marriage to R.Kelly, she consoled in her pastor that she was still pure. And in 1999, the flamboyant, age-defying, and voluptuous movie start Cher revealed the startling news that ever since her last intimate relationship ended years earlier, she had been celibate. Decades earlier, she had named her only child Chastity. Nonetheless, she was finding her own experience of chastity a “strange” one due entirely to a dearth of suitable lovers. The men she met were either unappealing or unappealing to be marginalized as “Mr. Cher.” The implication was that until she was offered steady affection and commitment, Cher would remain abstinent. Mrs. Sarah Winchester, who built the Winchester Mystery House was also celibate after the death of her new born daughter and husband. Chastity also has its small- and large-screen champions. Nubile young actress Cassidy Rae, star of the Models, Inc. assured fans that despite her on-screen defloration, she was still, at age eighteen, a virgin. “I want to stay as pure as I can for my [future] husband,” she said.
Actress Tori Spelling’s Beverly Hills 90210 character, Donna Martin, was for several breathless television seasons one of the few virgins left on Rodeo Drive until she, too, joined the mainstream when she did the deed in 1997. In the movie Clueless, actress Alicia Silverstone as Cher was not only the coolest gal on campus, she was also a virgin saving herself for teen heartthrob Luke Perry. Probably the most impressive celibate model for males is A.C. Green, a powerful (six-foot-nine-inch, 225-pound) forward with the National Basket-ball Association’s Phoenix Suns. At thirty-three, Green may be America’s most enduring famous virgin, and as founder of Athletes for Abstinence perhaps its most vocal. “I am still a virgin,” Green said in 1997. “I abstain as an adult for the same reasons I did as a teen—the principle does not change, or the feeling of self-respect I get. From a sheer numbers standpoint, [abstaining] can be a lonely cause—but that does not mean it is not right.” The most toweringly important model for most males and many females is Los Angeles Lakers superstar Magic Johnson. Johnson’s too-late damnation of the rampant promiscuity that led to his HIV infection has seriously sullied the hitherto dazzling image of the World of carefree sexual gratification. Johnson also spelled out the sad lesson his seropositivity has taught him: “The only safe sex is no sex.” This tiny cast of brave virgins (born and reborn) and one doomed libertine, however, plays against the relentless eroticism of popular music, television, and cinema; they are oases of purity in society’s steamy sexual landscape. For this reason, they loom large in the lonely sights of chastity advocates, particularly professional ones. The sexual revolution’s legacy of skyrocketing teenage pregnancies, staggeringly high rates of abortion and illegitimate births, and raging STDs and STIs, including the AIDS, has also shocked and alarmed people more concerned about the disturbing social consequences than the religion implication.
Now, considering how sex tends to affect hormones, people are always trying to “play” someone else, and the fact that there are deadly diseases and viruses out there, one can perhaps understand why youth would say, “forget it, I will be celibate.” Some people do not want to put themselves at risk, nor be bothered with all the drama of a relationship, and later, maybe this celibacy becomes for religious reason or may even be enforced. Unlike the Moral Majority, which spawned True Love Waits, these men and women often tolerate or support premarital sex, but between consenting adults, not youth. For them, abstinence is a time-related issues, essential for young people, irrelevant or option in maturity. This very different focus has produced a drive for youth chastity with a wide range of strategies: educational, punitive, exhortatory. Though these are eerily comparable to the tactics employed in the perpetually losing war on drugs, and about as effective, the battle continues because the stakes are so high. Few are willing to surrender sex; yet, because it is such a tyrant, it must be conquered completely if the Overself is to rule. When this bipolar nature of pleasures of the flesh is understood, when it is seen that the opposite pole is always contained in every being, the question arises whether marriage is needed any longer to achieve the balance of these two poles. The answer must be that so long as the need is felt, so long is the pleasures of the flesh force still not sublimated and the development of the other pole within oneself still incomplete. Marriage will continue to be indicated until this completion is attained. When humans are asked to deny totally and permanently their sex instinct, they re asked too much. The force of human nature would overtake them in the end. An ideal which is unrealizable is useless as a working ideal, however lofty it seems as a theoretical one.
If the seed is expanded then nerve energy is lost, the mind is debilitated and its power of upward contemplative flight reduced. However, this does not necessarily lead to the consequence of a probation against marriage or to a refusal of its consummation. It leads to a discipline of marriage and to a change in its consummation. If philosophy rejects the ascetic view in this matter, it also rejects the common view and the common practice. More cannot be written in public print but let it suffice that both the finest relationship between the genders and the highest purity in ethics of pleasures of the flesh are attained only among the philosophical adepts. Theirs is not only a moral achievement but a magical one. The retention of the vital force is a practice in such circles as Christianity, Indian yoga, Chinese Taoism, and Japanese religions. The act of reproducing the human body can be made a sacred one or left an animal one. The monastic celibates are not the only persons who lived what they call a “pure” life. Any married couple can do the same, provided they limit their physical relations to reproductive productive purposes alone and even then limit the number of their children to what reason and intuition direct. This means that they will refuse to dissipate the generative energies for mere pleasure, but instead will deliberately seek to transmute them. Thus marriage is redeemed by the few who can raise to this lofty ideal as it is degraded by the many who insist on keeping to their kinship with the animals. If the seminal secretions of the sexual glands are conserved and if the sexual desires are mentally sublimated, the man will become self-possessed in speech and action. He will experience a joyous feeling of mastery over the animal in him that weaklings never know and cannot understand. The soul-mate is really the Self within. One will find one’s true soul-mate when one finds one’s inner Self, when one yields oneself completely and lovingly up to it.
Some major contenders in the chaste-youth campaign are “tough love” enforcement of statutory rape and abortion laws, and enactment of laws against financially delinquent fathers, including teenagers. The fundamentalist-Christian True Love Waits movement represents the most significant exhortatory moral approach. So does the cheerier Born-Again Virgins of America—BAVAM!—which targets the already fallen. Last and perhaps most enduring are the sex-education programs that optimistically rely on the power of well-presented and accurate information to persuade young people that self-respecting, self-selected, disease-free sexual virtue is its own reward. Legislative pressure—Thou Shalt Not Fornicate with Underage Children, Thou Shalt Not Easily Abort Unwanted Mistakes, Thou Shalt Not Evade Parental Financial Obligations—attaches consequences to actions, and the assumption is that most people will avoid incurring these consequences. Chastity as a model is inferred rather than cited as the obvious way to conform to the law. Safe sex, which solves every problem except illicit intercourse, is a close second. However, a major flaw of such attempts t bludgeon people into behaving is that monitoring all or even most violations is too monumental an operation to succeed. Most people soon understand that only the unlucky are caught and punished, and motivation to abide by these laws is as best halfhearted. Chastity is the realm of miracle to that of personal piety and its most personal expression. To many people, it says, “God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol, when He takes me. For many, chastity means being able to go after death into Heaven. They know that even if they have made mistakes, “God will guide me with His counsel, and afterwards He will take me up to glory.”
The interesting response to the nature-society tension, much more fertile than the return to, or nostalgia for, nature, can be summed up by the word “culture. It seems to mean something high, profound, respectable—a thing before which we bow. It joins nature as a standard for the judgment of men and their deeds but has even greater dignity. It is almost never used pejoratively, as are “society,” “state,” “nation” or even “civilization,” terms for which culture is gradually substituted, or whose legitimacy is underwritten by culture. Culture is the unity of man’s brutish nature and all the arts and sciences he acquired in his movement from the state of nature to civil society. Culture restores the lost wholeness of first man on a higher level, where his faculties can be fully developed without contradiction between the desires of nature and the moral imperatives of his social live. “Culture” in the modern sense was first used by Immanuel Kant, who was thinking of Rousseau when he employed it, particularly about what Rousseau said of the bourgeois. The bourgeois is selfish, but without the purity and simplicity of natural selfishness. He makes contracts hoping to get the better of those with whom he contracts. His faithfulness to others and his obedience to law are founded on expectation of gain: “Honesty is the best policy.” Thus he corrupts morality, the essence of which is to exist for its own sake The bourgeois satisfies neither extreme, nature or morality. If it asks for what nature cannot give, the moral demand is merely an abstract ideal. Brutish selfishness would be preferable to sham morality. The progress of culture provides the link between inclination and duty. Kant uses the education of sexual desire as an example. Naturally man has the desire to have pleasures of the flesh and hence to procreate. However, he has no desire to care for his children or educate them, even though the growth of their faculties requires prolonged maintenance and training. So the family is necessary.
However natural desire does not point to the family. Desire is promiscuous and inclines man toward freedom. So desire is repressed. Man is commanded to abandon his desire. He is punished for it. Myths are created that haunt him, make him feel guilty and persuade him that he is sinful because of his natural desires. Marriage constrains both parties, and faithless deeds as well as desires habitually accompany it. In spite of all of society’s machinery, untamed desire is always there. It is natural. It can be pushed down, but never completely, and its always has its revenge in one way or another. A man in this condition can never be happy. However, a man who is deeply in love with a woman both desires and, for the moment at least, really cares for another. If this latter condition can be made permanent, desire and morality practically coincide. The free choice of marriage and the capacity to stick to it, not merely outwardly but also inwardly, is proof of culture, of desire informed by civility. It is also the proof of human freedom, of the overcoming nature for the sake of morality, without making humans unhappy. The exclusive preference for one person whose attraction is founded on ideas of beauty and virtue unknow to natural man makes pleasures of the flesh sublime or sublimates it. This is love, and love seeks expression in poetry and music. Thus sublimated, desire for pleasures of the flesh culminates in the art. The children who are love’s products make reflection about education necessary. And the family, its rights and its duties, its legal basis and its protection, finally connect what was once an isolated individual, concerned only with oneself, to politics.
Love, family and politics, which previously divided man and trapped him, can now be ordered in such ways as to fulfill and enhance natural desire and can therefore be unambiguously affirmed by the will. One is one’s own master again, but social or related to other humans without being alienated by them. He is neither promiscuous nor repressed, because his passion for pleasures of the flesh is fully expressed and satisfied. Both the World of nature and that of society are fulfilled. His intellectual acquisitions are fulfilled. His intellectual acquisitions re not just extrinsic adornments but harmoniously serve and enrich his life. Such is the ideal of culture so far as matters dealing with pleasures of the flesh are concerned. Something of the kind must occur in all the aspects of man’s life in order to produce a personality, the fully cultured human being. This Rousseauan-Kantian vision is in essential agreement with the Enlightenment view of what is natural in man. However, for the first time within philosophy, something other and higher than nature is found in man. It should be noted that pleasures of the flesh is a theme hardly mentioned in thought underlying the American Founding. There it is all preservation, not procreation, because fear is more powerful than love, and men prefer their lives to their pleasures. This subordination or taming of the pleasures of the flesh and everything connected with it made it easier for society to satisfy nature’s most powerful demands. The rehabilitation of pleasures of the flesh made society’s task more difficult and placed different demands on it. The primacy given to the pleasures of the flesh instinct in later modern thought as opposed to the preservative instinct among the early moderns accounts for much of the drama of our intellectual life, and for the varying expectations from social life. We are back to our economist and psychiatrist.
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The Crucial Core of the True Love Waits Philosophy
People have become so machinelike that that the most human character will turn out to be a machine. As busy prosumers now sometimes volunteer their machines, instead of their labor, they are uncooking the books. The best-know case is that of SETI, the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. While the likelihood of our discovering life elsewhere, let along “intelligent” life, may be minute, the scientific, philosophical and cultural implications of such a finding can hardly be overestimated. So volunteers have stepped forward to help. The search required the collection of huge quantities of radio telescope data. However, analyzing it required far more supercomputer power than any individual machine at that time could provide. That led two Seattle computer scientists, Craig Kasnoff and David Gedye, to ask whether, if they could not gain access to supercomputers, they could create a virtual supercomputer to do the job. If they could get PC users linked via the Internet to allow free access to their computers and permit the SETI searchers to use the machines when these were otherwise idle, they could build one, they believed. Optimistically, Kasnoff and Gedye hoped they might link up a few hundred thousand machines. By spring of 2002, more than 3.5 million PC owners had contributed more than a million years of processing time to the SETI venture. The result is a project headquartered at the University of California/Berkeley, which sends out six hundred thousand packets of data daily for processing on these privately owned computers. According to the Planetary Society, “The sheer power of millions of computers Worldwide has made SETI@home the most sensitive deep-sky survey ever done.” The SETI model has since been replicated elsewhere. Oxford University scientists and others have turned to Internet users around the World for help in researching smallpox, cancer, other deadly viruses, climate change and other significant problems.
When envelopes bearing anthrax turned up on Capital Hill in Washington and other sites after the 9/11 terror attacks, they touched off a national panic. In rapid response, three companies—Microsoft, Intel, and United Devices—plus Oxford University and National Foundation for Cancer Research, launched a joint project to search for molecules that could block the deadly action of anthrax. In twenty-four days they screened 3.5 billion different compounds. That helped scientists eliminate as irrelevant all but 300,000 compounds, among which they identified 12,000 priority targets. The project also uncovered a number of potentially useful compounds that conventional methods would have, in all likelihood, overlooked. Even with the backing of such giants as Microsoft and Intel, this breakthrough would have been impossible without the contribution of prosumer/volunteers. The anthrax research partly piggybacked on the machines already recruited for cancer research and added some more. In all, more than 1.35 million people, from Mexico and China to Equatorial Guinea and Azerbaijan, participated. In the United States of America more than 100,000 machines were volunteered; in Germany, 14,000; in France, 4,400; and in South Korea, 1,593. There were even four in Afghanistan—which, considering the hunt for Al Qaeda’s bioweapons, presumably raised some eyebrows. The computer innovations exploited by SETI, anthrax and cancer researchers have since exploded into what has come to be called grid or distributed computing. Imitating the prosumer projects, hundreds of big companies have created their own internal grids to take advantage of the unused capacity of their own networked machines.
What we see here is yet another form of free lunch delivered to the money economy by a prosumer project—in this case early testing of a powerful innovation—that has turned into a multibillion-dollar market in the money economy. Again we see that the wall separating the commercial World from the prosumer World is nonexistent. We see evidence, too, that business and government decision-makers need to understand and take far smarter advantage of the free-lunch phenomenon. Underscoring that statement is the likelihood that prosuming, already far larger than most suspect, is about to become bigger than ever, propelled by mutually reinforcing changes in social, cultural and demographic factors that, it turn, will promote an explosion of new prosumer technologies. Thus, along with a “graying” of the population in the United State of America has come a different kind of retiree. Like so many other boundaries, the line between work and retirement is also blurring, with many more senior citizens falling into a semi-retired category and using unpaid time to volunteer and engage in other prosumer activities. According to AAPR, the organization of Americans over fifty, this age group forms the backbone of volunteerism in the United States of America. It forecasts that volunteering will increase as populations live longer and healthier and refuse to live in idleness. The same pattern is evident in Japan. Similarly, the continuing acceleration of change points to relatively high levels of frictional unemployment—temporary joblessness as people change jobs, switch careers or move to new locations. Today “frictional volunteers” working free for nonprofit organizations include people with a wide range of specialized skills—lawyers, accountants, marketing experts, Web designers and the like.
Beyond all this, the Internet will bring into being temporary groupings of all kinds for as-yet-unheard-of prosumer activities—and with them, very often, temporary new markets—including markets for new technologies. These technologies, in turn, will further diversify and empower prosumers. This self-feeding process has just begun. As it gains force, it will compel us to recognize the hidden half of the emerging revolutionary wealth system—and the serious risks and fantastic opportunities that come with it. If you are still in doubt, listen next to the sound of music. The very expression dignity of man, even when Pico della Mirandola coined it in the fifteenth century, had a blasphemous ring to it. Man as man had not been understood to be particularly dignified. God had dignity, and whatever dignity man had was because he was made in God’s image (as well as from dust) or because he was the rational animal whose reason could grasp the whole of nature and hence was akin to that whole. However, now the dignity of man has neither of those supports; and the phrase means that man is the highest of the beings, an assertion emphatically denied by both Aristotle and the Bible. Man is elevated and alone. If this is to be plausible, man must be free—not in the sense of ancient philosophy, according to which a free man is one who participates in a regime where he rules as well as is ruled; nor in the sense of Hobbes and Locke, according to whom a free man is one who can follow his reason without having to obey God or man—but free in a much grander sense, that of legislating to oneself and to nature, hence without guidance from nature. The complement to and explanation of this view of freedom is creativity. We have become so accustomed to this word that it has no more effect on us than the most banal Fourth of July oratory.
As a matter of fact, it has become our Fourth of July oratory. However, when it was first used for humans, it had the odor of blasphemy and paradox. God alone had been called a creator; and this was the miracle of miracles, beyond causality, a denial of the premise of all reason, ex nihilo nihil fit. What defines man is no longer his reason, which is but a tool for his preservation, but his art, for in art man can be said to be creative. There he brings order to chaos. The greatest men are not the knowers but the artists, the Homers, Dantes, Raphaels, and Beethovens. Art is not imitation of nature but liberation from nature. A man who can generate visions of a cosmos and ideals by which to live is a genius, a mysterious, demonic being. Such a man’s greatest work of art is himself. He who can take his person, a chaos of impressions and desires, a thing whose very results from the free activity of his spirit and his will. He contains in himself the elements of the legislator and the prophet, and has a deeper grasp of the true character of things than the contemplatives, philosophers, and scientists, who take the given order as permanent and fail to understand man. Such is the restoration of the ancient greatness of man against scientific egalitarianism, but how different he now looks! All this new language is a measure of the difference; and reflection on how the Greeks would translate and articulate the phenomena it describes is the task of a lifetime, which would pay rich rewards in self-understanding. The vocabulary of self, culture, and creativity pretty much sums up the effects of what Rousseau began. It expresses the dissatisfactions with the scientific and political solutions of the Enlightenment. It turns around the understanding of what nature is. Somehow nature was always that by which men oriented themselves.
However, no influential thinker has tried to return to the pre-Enlightenment understanding of nature, the so-called teleological view, in which nature is the fullness in its own kind that each of the beings strives to attain. The reaction to nature viewed as matter in motion, which can be conquered for the sake of man’s needs, was twofold: a return to the nation that nature is good, but only the brute nature of the fields, forests, mountains and streams in which beast live contentedly; or a transcendence of nature altogether in the direction of creativity. The latter solution conquered the Continent, and came from Germany to England by way of men like Coleridge and Carlyle. Very from Germany to England by way of men like Coleridge and Carlyle. Very few thinkers were consistent or took seriously the full meaning of this revolution in thought. Hegel is the greatest exception. However, everyone was affected by it, and its influence ran across the entire political spectrum, from Right to Left. Marxism as well as conservatism as we know them are unthinkable without what Rousseau did. A small but illuminating example of the pervasiveness of ant-Enlightenment thought today is how scientists themselves have taken to styling themselves as “creative.” However, nothing could be more contrary to the spirit of science than the opinion that the scientist fabricates rather than discovers his results. If there is anything to it, scientists are to a man against creationism, recognizing rightly that their science is wrong and useless. However, they fail to see that creativity has exactly the same consequence. Either nature has a lawful order or it does not; either there can be miracles or there cannot. Scientists do not prove that there are no miracles, they assume it; without this assumption there is no science.
It is easy to deny God’s creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome b science, but man’s creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God’s, exercises a strange attraction. In honoring it, the scientists’ opinions are not the result of science or of any serious reflection on science. They are merely conforming to democratic public opinion, which has, unawares, been captured by Romantic notions adapted to flatter it (every man a creator). The artist, not the scientist, has become the admired human type; and science senses that it must assimilate itself to that type in order to retain its respectability intact. When every man was understood to be essentially a reasoner, the scientists could be understood to be a perfection of what all men wanted to be. That was Enlightenment’s way of establishing the centrality of science and making it admired. This change in self-description shows how the Zeitgeist has altered and how science, instead of standing outside of it and liberating men from it, has been incorporated into it. The theoretical life has lost its status. Now the scientist scrambles to recover his position as the perfect of what all men want to be; but what all men want to be has changed, undermining the natural harmony between science and society. Some may consider this labeling trivial, akin to C.P. Snow’s calling a science a “culture.” Science may appear creative only because we forget what creativity really mean and take it to be cleverness at proposing hypotheses, finding proofs or inventing experiments. From this perspective, science is unaffected, and we have just another example of the pollution of language. However, this form of pollution, although less feared than the other kind, is really more deadly. It is the intellectual disorder of our age.
The use of insignificant speech entails loss of clarity about what science and art are, weakening both in an impossible synthesis of opposites appealing to a society that wants to be told that it enjoys all good things. If not detailed in the process, there is here a sinister loss of confidence in the idea of science, the idea which was found at the foundation of democratic society and the absolute in a relativized World. These scientists know not what they do. Philosophy, despised and rejected by positive science, has its revenge when it is vulgarized into coarse public opinion and intimidates that science. So the effects of Rousseau and his followers are everywhere around us, in the bloodstream of public opinion. Of course the use of words like “creativity” and “personality” does not mean that those who use them understand the thought that made their use necessary, let alone agree with it. The language has been trivialized. Words that were meant to describe and encourage Beethoven and Goethe are not applied to every school-child. It is in the nature of democracy to deny no one access to good things. If those things are really not accessible to all, then the tendency is to deny the fact—simply to proclaim, for example, that what is not art is art. There is in American society a mad rush to distinguish oneself, and, as soon as something has been accepted as distinguishing, to package it in such a way that everyone can fee included. Creativity and personality were intended to be terms of distinction. They were, as a matter of fact, intended to be the distinctions appropriate to egalitarian society, in which all distinction is threatened. The levelling of these distinctions through familiarity merely encourages self-satisfaction. Now that they belong to everyone, they can be said to mean nothing, both in common parlance and in the social science disciplines that use them as “concepts.” They have no specific content, are a kind of opiate of the masses. They do, however, provide a focus for all the dissatisfactions that any life anywhere and at any time provides, particularly those fostered in a democratic society.
Creativity and personality take the place of older words like virtue, industry, rationality and character, affect our judgments provide us with educational goals. They are the bourgeois’ way of not being unadventurous. Hence they are sources of snobbishness and pretentiousness alien to our real virtues. We have a lot of good engineers but very few good artists. All the honor, however, goes to the latter, or rather, one should say, those who stand in for the latter in the eyes of the many. The real artists do not need this kind of support and are instead weakened by it. The moneymaker is not the most appetizing personality, but he is far preferable to the intellectual phony. Thus what was intended as an elevation of taste and morality has merely become grist for our mill while sapping the mill’s foundation. This was not the only rest in Europe, where creativity had at times an inspiring effect and where the notion had more to feed off of. Even there, as we shall soon see, the balance sheet is arguably negative. However, here I can see no benefits. And now the mother-word itself—culture—has also become part of empty talk, its original imprecision now carried to the point of pathology. Anthropologists cannot define it although they are sure there is such a thing. Artists have no vision of the sublime, but they know culture (id est, what they do) has a right to the honor and support of civil society. Sociologists and the disseminator of their views, the journalists of all descriptions, call everything a culture—the drug culture, the rock culture, the street-gang culture, and so on endlessly and without discrimination. Failure of culture is now culture. This is how the heroic response to the French Revolution fared when it immigrated to America. Our country is still a melting pot. The crucial core of the True Love Waits philosophy is contained in this pledge that hundreds of thousands of young women and men have signed: “Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate and my future children to be sexually abstinent from this day, until the day I enter a Biblical marriage relationship.
True Love Waits is clear and uncompromising in asserting its values and assumptions about humankind. True love exists as a God-given emotional dynamic. It is an identifiable phenomenon that blesses only heterosexual couples—love intragender is neither true nor sacred. When true love strikes, the man and woman so blessed should respond by making their union permanent, legal, and honorable in a ceremony that is biblically inspired. Afterward, in the final sublime sequence, comes consummation of pleasures of the flesh. True Love Waits (to be wed in holy matrimony before going all the way) was founded in April 1993 in the U.S. Bible Belt city of Nashville, Tennessee, after youth minister Richard Ross was galvanized by fourteen-year-olds who confided to him, We’re the only virgins left in our school.” They may have been, and their plight was replicated in promiscuous educational intuitions all over the Western World. True Love Waits, with its deceptively simple message cunningly touted, soon attracted hundreds of thousands of pledged Waiters. A movement had been born. Celibacy is at the Heart of True Love Waits, a beneficial, confident, reassuring celibacy. It validates and shores up those young your who remain chaste, but also embraces legions of remorseful nonvirgins it designates “secondary virgins.” Students who have failed sexually can be invited to seek God’s forgiveness and make a True Love Waits pledge ‘from this day forward.’” Ergo, instant redemption, and though even True Love Waits cannot repair broken hymens, it does comfort the contrite and pardon the penitent. Amid the barrage of messages blasted forth by our ubiquitous media, the pronouncements of True Love Waits sound calm and clear in the cacophony. God does not condone premarital pleasures of the flesh. Virginity is a “gift you can only give once.” “Put the focus where God does: on the heart.” “Be willing to wait creatively.” It is not wise for Christians to date non-Christians.
God wants you to be in charge of your life. He will bring you the right partner at the right time. Certain attractions are considered not immoral, but sexualizing them may cross the biblical barrier and could be considered sinful. Walk closer to God. The idea of pleasures of the flesh is derived from, based upon, the pair of opposites—masculine, feminine. Like all other ideas it has to be transcended; like all other pairs of opposites, it has to be brought into equilibrium. In the wild, ungoverned, unhealthy, and irresponsible atmosphere of pleasures of the flesh which covers the younger generation’s World today, we may find some explanation why it was regarded with suspicion, or opposed altogether, not so long ago. They turn away from the passionate desires of the flesh; they seek an existence devoid of its animality. However, lacking esoteric knowledge, without understanding how spirit and body are interwoven, too often they suffer defeat. So far as psychoanalysis confirms the demands of pleasures of the flesh craving without putting upon it the basic disciplines which health, character, and self-respect require, so far does it cease to be a therapy, and become an injury. The enchantment and glamour in which lovers find themselves are too often false and deceptive, mere preliminary devices used by Nature to get them together and thus fulfil her larger purposes. The ancient Greek or Roman thinker who likened their condition to a form of madness was not so far wrong as he seems. However, often also it is subject to change; the glamour goes or is transferred elsewhere or, worse, is transformed into repulsion. And where pleasures of the flesh is not the hidden operative factor, one of the two is a victim of—or possessed by—some other force: ambition, economic need, vanity, the power complex.
Pleasures of the flesh polarity provides the force brining the bodies of men and women into intermittent attractive relation, but mental polarity provides a more lasting one. The strict discipline to which desires for pleasures of the flesh was subject in the earlier stages is abandoned in the later ones, for all lusts and wraths fall away of their own accord as one’s own growth, with the touch of grace, sets one free. As the energy of pleasures of the flesh is transmuted by will and mentally distributed throughout every part of the body, it bestows physical strength and resistance to disease. Where fate forces the practice of complete abstinence it should be accepted philosophically and its compensatory benefits recognized. Lust rises like a fever, rages along its course, and then subsides. However, between start and finish much of a lifetime may pass away. When adolescent boys and girls are able to rush from one pleasure to another, from one emotional entanglement to another, without a thought of the consequences involved or of other persons concerned, except what contribution they can make to selfish enjoyment, when all this is done in the name of modern self-expression, then a state of moral danger can be said to exist. A philosophical way of controlling the animal passion in humans it that if we think often of the inevitability of our own death, if we will remember that the upshot of all our activities is the funeral-pyre, the burial grave, we will begin to realize how pitiful, how untimely worthless, and how immediately transient are our all our passions. How will the animal passions appeal to the man lying on his deathbed? The thought of death even to those who are still very much alive will thus diminish the strength of lust, greed, hate, and anger. The force which humans spend in ungoverned desires for pleasures of the flesh keeps them imprisoned in their lower nature. This same force can be sublimated by will, imagination, aspiration, prayer, and meditation. When this is gone, the Overself can then instruct them for they will be able to hear its voice.
True Love Waits is assisted by aggressive and savvy marketing. It offers typical teen paraphernalia: T-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, scarves, baseball caps, wall banners and posters, pendants, pins, ring, necklaces, as well as Bibles, manuals, and general literature. Its slogans—“Stop your urgin’, be a virgin,” “Pet your dog, not your girlfriend,” and for reborn virgins, the wistful “I miss my virginity”—rival in targeted triteness those of any other megasuccessful ad campaign. True Love Waits promotes Christian music (The Newsboys, DeGarmo & Key Steven Curtis Chapman, Geoff Moore and the Distance, DC Talk, Audio Adrenaline) and dances—no Waiter need forgo typical teen recreations. In fact, this music and these dances—free of drugs and pleasures of the flesh—encourage energetic young people to socialize with each other and sublimate their energies for pleasures of the flesh in recognizably typical ways, with no sense of deprivation. However, because of the movement’s focus on sexual abstinence and the moral courage it inspires in believers, they have little difficulty in abiding by their vows. True Love Waits also demands active proselytizing from it converts and orchestrates these drives with sophisticated and practical, detailed instructions. The object is usually to garner media attention as well as new and secondary virgins. In February 1996, for instance, True Love Waiters swarmed into Atlanta’s Georgia Dome to attend a chastity rally. However, the truly spectacular moment was when three hundred and fifty thousand signed pledge cards were hoisted on cables upward to the ceiling. Even more striking was Life magazine’s September 1994 color spread of 211,163 of these cards staked into the ground near the Washington Monument. The 1997 Valentine’s Dy Vision—displaying True Love Waits commitment cards on secondary-school campuses through the USA—demonstrates the organization’s determination and ambition.
Material from the True Love Waits/Goes Campus literature maps out the plan step-by-step: advance planning, conducting motivating True Love Waits retreats, Bible studies and ring ceremonies, communication with other Christian groups and clubs to muster helpful support, dealing with school administrations and the media, and after the great event, dismantling the display. Should recalcitrant educational officials stymie the students’ efforts during the long, complicated process preceding the Valentine’s Day Vision, “the students should graciously say they will need to discuss the issue further and will return at a later time.” Avoid emotionalism, the literature advises the students, it will probably work against you. Resort instead to either creative alternatives—perhaps a display across the street from the forbidden campus—or to the law, especially the Equal Access Act, included with Valentine’s Day Vision kit as an emergency contingency. True Love Waits has spread from its American Bible Belt base through the USA, even to California, where a teenager gives birth every eight minutes. This is no fad, teachers talk about this [chastity] for days in the hallways and school yard. Students who are confused and want to be pure are happy to hear that people are supporting their desire to wait. They believe that signing the pledge will help them stick to their abstinence. God does not count it against the heart which has become pure that it was earlier accustomed “to rise up.” Certainly even the erring and struggling man was “with Him,” for the man who struggles for God is near Him even when one imagines that one is driven far from God. That is the reality of life. However, being with God also reveals to the struggling person that in the hour when—not led astray by doubt and despair into treason, and becomes pure in heart—one comes to the sanctuaries of God. Here one receives the revelation of the “continually.” One who draws near with a pure heart to the divine mystery, learns that one is continually with God.
It is a revelation. It would be a misunderstanding of the whole situation to look on this as a pious feeling. From the humans’ side there is no continuity, only from God’s side. God and one are continually with one another. One cannot express this experience as a word of God; but it can be expressed by a gesture of God. God has taken your right hand—as a father, so one may add, in harmony with that expression “the generation of thy children,” takes his little son by the hand in order to lead him. More precisely, as in the dark a father takes his little son by the hand, certainly in order to lead him, but primarily in order to make present to one, in the warm touch of coursing blood, the fact that God, the father, is continually with one. Through True Love Waits evolved and matured in the heartland of Christian Protestant fundamentalism, its engineers have been canny or ecumenical enough to reach out to the twenty-three thousands parishes and millions of American Roman Catholics The Church has clasped tight their outstretched hands and officially adopted True Love Waits. After all, what is chastity but a new way of sharing an old message for us. The guiding counsel of God seems to by simply the divine Presence communicating itself direct to the pure in heart. One who is aware of the Presence acts in the changing situation of one’s life differently from one who does not perceive this Presence. The Presence acts as counsel: God counsels by making know that He is present. He had led His son out of darkness into the light, and now he can walk in the light He is not relieved of taking and directing his own steps. The revealing insight has changed life itself, as well as the meaning of the experience of life. It also changes the perspective of death. For the oppressed human death is only the mouth towards which the sluggish stream of suffering and trouble flows. However, not it has become the event in which God—the continually Present One, the One who grasps the human’s hand, the Good one—“takes” a human.
If television puts our minds in a passive-receptive mode, if it inhibits thinking processes as the preceding remarks certainly suggest, can this be seen as beneficial? As mentioned before, many seem to like what happens to them. People say “it relaxes my mind,” others use the term “spaced-out,” some call it “meditative.” The evidence that television produces alpha brain waves, commonly associated with meditation states, encourages the idea that something beneficial can result, especially for our mentally obsessed culture. In many ways, we are a people isolated in our heads. Nature is absent. Our senses are deprived. The business person lives in the mental World of offices: paper work and forward-focused, driven-thinking processes. The suburban person lives in predefined mental and physical movement patterns: freeways, mechanical kitchens, repetitive routines. The child sits in schools, fixed in chairs, focused on mental work, attempting to channel thoughts in a way that will help later in this World. As the environment has been reconstructed into linear monolithic patterns, and as our days have been reconstructed to function within those patterns, our minds have had to adjust. We drive them forward into obsessive work. We push our thoughts into line, marching with military precision, objectified, analytical, isolated from our senses, our feelings and any alternate patterns of mind. We need to do this. The creative free-roaming mind would help neither the child get through school nor the adult pay rent. We have celebrated “the life of the mind,” but is this the mind we wanted? When we speak of relaxing our minds nowadays, it is not as though we have been working them at anything like their capacity. If our mind are strained, it is from confinement within one pattern of thinking. Most of our mental capacities have gone fat and soft, or dead from atrophy. It may be that our minds are not tired from overwork, but underwork.
If you have ever done physical exercise on a regular basis, you know the result is not exhaustion, but stimulation. The more of it you do, the more you wish to do, and the more you can do. It is only after extraordinarily long effort that one becomes depleted and needs rest. And then relaxation is sweet. In our culture, the chronically exhausted person is the one who sits all day, or the one whose physical work is chained to fixed patterns: assembly line, store counter, waiting on tables. I believe it is the same with out mins. Confined to one mental process, they are exhausted by underuse and repetition. After a day of paper work, turned off in so many realms of experience, compulsive and obsessive in those that remain, we dearly seek to escape mentally. Psychiatrists report that an increasing number of people these days complain they cannot quiet their mins. One cannot will the mind to cease its fixations and rumination. Even when it comes to sleep or pleasures of the flesh or play, experiences that require shifting out of focused thought, the mind continues to churn. It is little wonder, therefore, that we have seen the sudden growth of Eastern religious disciplines, yogic practices, martial arts, diverse exercise regimens and many forms of meditation. They help relieve the agonies of uncalm minds pacing their narrow cages. They stop obsessive thinking and open alternative mental awareness. They allow for the reception of new experiences. They encourage yielding as opposed to always driving forward. They teach people to take in rather than put out. A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.
The reason, according to attention restoration theory, or ART, is that when people are not being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind. Three dozen people were subjected to a rigorous, and mentally fatiguing, series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were then divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy downtown streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results. The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at picture of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. Therefore, simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control. Spending time in the nature World seems to be f vital importance to effective cognition. However, there is no Sleepy Hollow on the Internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its restorative magic. There is only the endless, mesmerizing buzz of the urban street.
The stimulation of the Net, like those of the city, can be invigorating and inspiring. We would not want to give them up. However, they are, as well, exhausting and distracting. They can easily overwhelm all quitter modes of thought. One of the greatest dangers we face as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is that one that informs the fears of both the scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and the artist Richard Foreman: a lot erosion of our humanness and our humanity. While many people use ancient disciplines to achieve freedom from the driving of their minds, most people do not, choosing drugs instead. Alcohol is good. Valium is better. Some sleeping potions work. And there is television. They all succeed. Drugs provide escape while passing for experience and relaxation. Television does as well. All help break obsessive thinking, but this is where their similarity with meditation and other disciplines come to an end. It is not only deep thinking that requires a clam, attentive mind. It is also empathy and compassion. When dealing with how people react to fear and physical threats, we found we the higher emotions emerge from neural processes that are inherently slow. When listening to stories describing people experiencing physical or psychological pain, as subjects were put into a magnetic resonance imaging machine and their brains were scanned, as they were asked to remember these stories; the experiment revealed that while the human brain reacts very quickly to demonstration of physical pain—when you see someone injured, the primitive pain centers in in one’s own brain activate almost instantaneously—the more sophisticated mental process of empathizing with psychological suffering unfolds much more slowly. It takes time, the researchers discovered, for the brain to transcend immediate involvement of the body and begin to understand and to feel the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation.
The experiment indicates that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions. For some kind of thought, especially moreal decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection. If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states. It would be rash to jump to the conclusion that the Internet is undermining our moral sense. It would not be rash to suggest that the Net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts. Relaxation implies renewal. One runs hard, then rests. While resting, the muscles fist experience calm and then, as new oxygen enters them, renewal. Similarly, one thinks and thinks, driving one’s mind forward. To relax the mind, one needs to cease thinking to calm the mind. However, people are not interested in empty minds, but minds that are empty only long enough to be refilled by the Net and TV. When you are watching television, absorbing techno-guru, your mind may be in alpha, but it is certainly not “empty mind.” Images are pouring into it. Your mind is not quiet or calm or empty. It may be nearer to dead, or zombie-ized. It is occupied. No renewal can come from this condition. For renewal, the mind would have to be at rest, or once rested, it would have to be seeking new kinds of stimulation, new exercise. Television offers neither rest nor stimulation. Television inhibits yours ability to think, but it does not lead to freedom of mind, relaxation or renewal. It leads to a more exhausted mind. You may have time out from prior obsessive thought patterns, but that is as far as television goes. The mind is never empty, the mind is filled. What is worse, it is filled with someone else’s obsessive thoughts and images.
In this way, television serves to continue the same channeled mental processes from which one is seeking relief. The mind is as weary after watching as before. No invention or creation can result, only sleep, if you are lucky, as with the aftermath of alcohol and Valium. Furthermore, there are those who are hearted by the ease with which our minds are adapting to the Web’s intellectual ethic. Some researchers believe that minds are adapting to the Web’s intellectual ethic. They believe that technological progress does not revers, so people tend toward multitasking and consuming many different types of information will only continue. The report goes on to say that we need not worry, though, because our human software will in time catch up to the machine technology that made the information abundance possible. It is thought that we will evolve to become more agile consumers of data. And somehow, as we become used to the 21st-century task of flitting among bits of online information, the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. We may lose our capacity to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end, but recompense we will gain new skills, such as the ability to conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media. A prominent the web allows us to borrow cognitive strengths from autism and to be better infovores. Our technology is believed to have induced ADD, which may be a short-term problem, stemming from our reliance on cognitive habits evolved and perfected in an era of limited information flow. Developing new cognitive habits is the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity. Some of these researchers are certainly correct in arguing that we are being molded by our new information environment. Our mental adaptability, built into the deepest workings of our brains, is a keytone of intellectual history. However, if there is comfort in their reassurances, it is of a very cold sort. Adaptation leaves us better suited to our circumstances, but qualitatively it is a neutral process.
What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become. Tide of technological revolution could so captive, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile humans that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking. Our ability to engage in meditative thinking, which is the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress. The tumultuous advance of technology could, like the arrival of the locomotive at the Concord station, drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection. The frenziedness of technology threatens to entrench itself everywhere. It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls. Computerized grading systems are already reading and grading essays that students write as part of a widely used test of language proficiency. The system produces the accuracy of human markers while eliminating human elements such as tiredness and subjectivity. In the future, computerized evaluation of essay will be a mainstay of education. The uncertainty is not “when” not “if.” Computers follow rules; they do not make judgments. In place of subjectivity, they give us formula. As we grown more accustomed to and dependent on our computers, we will be tempted to entrust to them task that demand wisdom. And once we do that, there will be no turning back. The software will become indispensable to those tasks. The seductions of technology are hard to resist, and in our age of instant information the benefits of speed and efficiency can seem unalloyed, their desirability beyond debate. However, we continue to hold our hope that we will not go gently into the future our computer engineers and software programmers are scripting for us. We owe it to ourselves to consider them to be an attentive to what we stand to lose. If we were to accept without question the idea that human elements are outmoded and dispensable, how sad it would be, particularly when it comes to the nurturing of our children’s minds. As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the World, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
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I Never Found a Man Who Knew How to Love Himself
It is important to look at the error in which one has lived in, and it will reveal so much to one. When the heart rises up in one, and one is pricked in one’s reins, often it is discovered how brutish one was and ignorant has been as a beast before the World. In todays highly professionalized World, the term amateur invites a brush-off from business executive and economists. Yet throughout history, unpaid amateurs, working for themselves, their families or their communities, have made remarkable achievements in a wide variety of fields, including science and technology. Because science had not become a paying profession, early scientists were almost all amateurs. Many gained a living as paid professionals in one field but made their greatest contributions to history as part-time prosumers. Joseph Priestley, who in 1774 discovered oxygen, was a minster. Pierre de Fermat, whose “last theorem” puzzled mathematicians for centuries, was a lawyer. And Benjamin Franklin, paid as a printer, media mogul and politician, studied ocean currents on the side, inventing bifocals along the way and demonstrating that lightning was a form of electricity. He, too, was a prosumer. Today prosuming amateurs are collecting huge amounts of valuable environmental information—for example, seismological data in the Philippines. However, it is astronomy and space that, often in collaboration with professionals, amateurs are making really important finds. They started early. When the World’s first artificial satellite, Sputink, blasted into orbit in 1957, amateurs all over the globe who had been organized by astronomer Fred Whipple, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, were waiting to track it across the Heavens. There effort was dubbed Moonwatch demonstrated what amateurs could do when properly inspired and led.” Today amateur astronomers are, among other things, charting asteroids and other potentially dangerous objects in space.
Brigadier General Simon “Pete” Worden, a former astronaut, not long ago told the U.S. House Committee on Science that small objects “at the nuclear weapons scale” smash into Earth’s upper atmosphere at a rate of once about every two weeks. In June 2002 one such event occurred over the Mediterranean and released twenty to thirty kilotons of energy—more than that of the Hiroshima blast. “Has this occurred over India or Pakistan,” Worden suggested, “it could have triggered a nuclear war.” Urging more attention to such low-probability, but potentially devastating, dangers, he paid tribute to amateur monitors, pointing out that “some of them are not so amateur.” According to Richard Nugent, himself an amateur asteroid hunter and a contributor to Starscan, a newsletter to the Johnson Space Center Astronomical Society, “Amateurs are catching up with the pros in certain fields, and surpassing them in others [such as] asteroid discoveries, novae, supernovae, variable stars, occultation events, fireballs, meteors, planetary observations, satellite passes, and other unique events.” As research tools become smaller, cheaper, smarter and more powerful, making possible further changes in our relationships to the deep fundamental of knowledge, amateurs will no doubt enter new fields. And this takes us to another overlooked contribution made by prosumers. Every single day around the World, countless volunteers get behind the wheel of their cars and drive to schools, churches, mosques, synagogues, hospitals, playgrounds or community centers to provide free services. Or they add to their odometers by picking up groceries for neighbors or taking a sick relative to a doctor. Nobody knows how many millions of miles they drive in aggregate over the course of year, or how much gas they use, or how much wear and tear they add to their autos in the course of creating unpaid value.
In addition, therefore, to delivering free lunch to the money economy by donating their unpaid time and labor, they are also contributing what amounts to a prosumer capital asset—the use of a vehicle—that makes possible or increases the value they created for others. That is more free lunch. (If they go to the trouble, tit is true that, in the United States of America, they may be able to reclaim some small part of their expenses as a tax deduction, but it is doubtful that in practice most volunteers do.) Car use, however, is not the only example of prosumer capital at work. As we have already seen, prosumers, as a group, spend large sums buying machines and tools—or, more accurately, investing in capital goods for use in prosuming. These tools range from telescopes, sewing machines and digital cholesterol testers all the way up to automobiles and other vehicles. And, in a new, fast-spreading practice, another pattern is emerging: Busy prosumers now sometimes volunteer their machines, instead of their labor. Only by taking account of practices likes these can we uncook the economic books. Now, Hobbes blazed the trail to the self, which has grown into the highway of a ubiquitous psychology without the psyche (soul). However, he, like Locke, did not develop the psychology of the self in its fullness, just as neither went very deeply into the state of nature, because the solution seemed to be on the surface. Once the old virtues were refuted—the piety of the religious or the honor of the nobles—Hobbes and Locke assumed that most men would immediately agree that their self-preservative desires are real, that they come from within and take primacy over any other desire. The true self is not only good for individuals but provides a basis for consensus not provided by religious or philosophies.
Locke’s substitute for the virtuous man, the rational and industrious one, is the perfect expression of this solution. It is not an ethic or a morality of a Protestant or any other kind of believer, but a frank admission of enlightened selfishness (selfishness that has learned from modern philosophy which goals are real and which imaginary), or self-interest rightly understood. Locke develops the opposite, the idle and the quarrelsome man—who, we see, may be the priest or the noble (id est, pretenders to a higher morality)—to debunk virtue in a less provocative way than Hobbes did. Lock’s rational and industrious man partakes, as a prototype, of the charm of the sincere man who acts as he thinks and, without fraudulent pieties, seeks his own good. Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism. The taste of the sincere expresses itself more in blame of Tartufferie than in praise of virtue. Terror in the face of death, an immediate and overwhelming subjective experience of the self and what counts most for it, and the imperative following from this experience that death must be avoided, were confirmed by the new natural philosophy which sees in nature only bodies in motion, bodies blindly conserving their motion by the necessity of inertia. All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared. Nature tells us nothing about man specifically and provides no imperatives for his conduct. However, man can be seen to behave as all other bodies behave, and the imaginary constraints on his following his powerful inclinations—constraints which would cause him to behave differently from natural bodies—vanish.
Irrational passion and rational science cooperate in a new way to establish natural law: Pursue peace. Man’s passionate subjectivity gives assents to the premises of natural philosophy—nay, takes them as its principles of action—and philosophy finds that that assent accords with nature. Man remains somehow a part of nature, but in a different and much more problematic way than in, say, Aristotle’s philosophy, where soul is at the center and what is highest in man is akin to what is highest in nature, or where soul is nature. Man is really only a part and not the microcosm. Nature has no rank order or hierarchy of being, nor does the self. Lockean natural man, who is really identical to his civil man, whose concern with comfortable self-preservation makes him law-abiding and productive, is not all that natural. Rousseau quickly pointed out that Locke, in his eagerness to find a simple or automatic solution to the political problem, made nature do much more than he had a right to expect a mechanical, nonteleological nature to do. Natural man would be brutish, hardly distinguishable from any of the other animals, unsociable and neither industrious nor rational, but, instead, idle and nonrational, motivated exclusively by feelings or sentiments. Having cut off the higher aspirations of man, those connected with the soul, Hobbes and Locke hoped to find a floor beneath him, which Rousseau removed. Man tumbled down into what we called the basement, which now appears bottomless. And there down below, Rousseau discovered all the complexity in man that, in the days before Machiavelli, was up on high. Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one.
The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to one’s real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in one, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise one perfection or salvation but merely buys one off. Rousseau explodes the simplistic harmoniousness between nature and society that seems to be the America premise. Rousseau still hoped for a soft landing on nature’s true grounds, but one not easily achieved, requiring both study and effort. The existence of such a natural ground has become doubtful, and it is here that they abyss opened up. However, it was Rousseau who founded the modern psychology of the self in its fullness, with its unending search for what is really underneath the surface of rationality and civility, its new ways of reaching the unconscious, and its unending task of constituting some kind of healthy harmony between above and below. Rousseau’s intransigence set the stage for a separation of man from nature. He was perfectly willing to go along with the modern scientific understanding that a brutish being is true man. However, nature cannot satisfactorily account for his difference from the other brutes, for his movement from nature to society, for his history. Descartes, playing his part in the dismantling of the soul, had reduced nature to extension, leaving out of it only the ego that observes extension. Man is, in everything but his consciousness, part of extension. Yet how he is a man, a unity, what came to be called a self, is utterly mysterious. This experienced whole, a combination of extension and ego, seems inexplicable or groundless. Body, or atoms in motion, passions, and reason are some kind of unity, but one that stands outside of the grasp of natural science.
If there were no place to hold them, Locke appears to have invented the self to provide unity in continuity for the ceaseless temporal succession of sense impressions that would disappear into nothingness. We can know everything in nature except that which knows nature. To the extent that man is a piece of nature, he disappears. The self gradually separates itself from nature, and its phenomena must be treated separately. Descartes’ ego, in appearance invulnerable and godlike in its calm and isolation, turns out to be the tip of an iceberg floating in a fathomless and turbulent sea called the id, consciousness an epiphenomenon of the unconscious. Man is self, that now seems clear. However, what is self? Our gaily embraced psychology leaves us with this question. If we are to abandon ourselves to it, it is important for us to know the unbearably complicated story behind it. If this psychology is to be believed, one thing is certain: it came to us belatedly, in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected in out liberal society, and it opens up a Pandora’s box, ourselves. Like Iago it tells us, “I never found a man who knew how to love himself.” Modern psychology has this in common with what was always popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it. The ambiguity of human life always requires that there be distinctions between good and bad, in one form or another. The great change is that a good man used to be the one who cares for others, as opposed to the man who cares exclusively for oneself. Now the good man is the one who knows how to care for himself, as opposed to the man who does not. This is most obvious in the political realm.
For Aristotle, good regimes have rulers dedicated to the common good, while bad ones have rulers who use their positions to further their private interest. For Locke and Montesquieu there is no such distinction. A good regime has the proper institutional structures for satisfying while containing the selfish men who make it up, while a bad one does not succeed in doing this. Selfishness is presupposed; men are not assumed to be as they ought to be, but as they are. Psychology has distinctions only between good and bad forms of selfishness, like Rousseau’s deliciously candid distinctions between amour de soi and amour–propre, untranslatable into English because we would have to use self-love for both terms. For us the most revealing and delightful distinctions—because it is so unconscious of its wickedness—is between inner-directed and other-directed, with the former taken to be unqualified good. Of course, we are told, the healthy inner-directed person will really care for others. To which I can only respond: if you can believe that, you can believe anything. Rousseau knew much better. The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of the most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things. Socrates too thought that living according to the opinions of others was an illness. However, he did not urge men to look for a source for producing their own unique opinions, or criticize them for being conformists. His measure of health was not sincerity, authenticity or any others necessarily vague criteria for distinguishing a healthy self. The truth is the one thing most needful; and conforming to nature is quite different from conforming to law, convention or opinion.
Socrates was always among the Athenians but was not quite one of them, apparently never made uncomfortable by the fact that they did not trust him. He was neither solitary nor citizen. Rousseau, a figure of similar stature in the new tradition, was distressed by the hatred of mankind, and was both, at least in speech, the perfect citizen and the complete solitary. He was torn between the extremes, and there was no middle ground. Although a very great reasoner, his preferred means of learning about himself were the reverie, the dream, the old memory, a stream of associations unhampered by rational control. In order to know such an amorphous being as man, Rousseau himself and his particular history are, in his view, more important than is Socrates’ quest for man in general, or man in himself. The difference is made apparent by comparing the image of Socrates talking to two young men about the best regime, with the image of Rousseau, lying on his back on a raft floating on a gently undulating lake, sensing his existence. Did you know that slow, synchronous brainwave activity is ordinarily associated with lack of eye movement, fixation, lack of definition, idleness, inactivity, overall body inertness? No organized thought is possible in these phasic states and selective associations are replaced by non-selective association, deprived of their purposeful character. Alpha is the mental state most commonly associated with meditation, but before anyone equates meditation with television, it is important to make a critical distinction. In the former, you produce your own material and in the latter it comes from outside; it is not internally generated. People who are good at meditation are among the most difficult to hypnotize. They start going into hypnotic trance, but at a certain point they begin producing their own material and cannot be influenced by outside instruction unless they choose to be.
These individuals have their own thing going. We doubt that any good meditators watch much television and that meditation might be an excellent ability to develop in people who are bothered by television addiction. In fact, television addiction might itself be symptomatic of an inability to produce one’s own mental imagery. When we compared brainwave activity while watching television with brainwave activity while reading magazines, it appears that the mode of response to television is very different from the responses to print the basic electrical responses of the brain is clearly to the medium and not to the content differences. The response to print may be fairly described as active, while the response to television may be fairly described s passive. Television is not communication as we have known it. Our subject was trying to learn something from a print ad, but was passive about the television. Television is a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure. This indicates that one gets a decease in beta [fast waves] and an increase in slow activity with a large percentage of alpha. Alpha wave patterns, recorded over the occipital areas of the scalp, disappear at the moment when a person gives visual commands (focuses, accommodates, and verges), when one takes charge of the process of seeking information Any orienting outward to the World increases one’s brainwave frequencies and blocks [halts] alpha wave activity. Alpha occurs when you do not orient to. You can sit back and have pictures in your head, but you are in a totally passive condition and unaware of the World outside of your pictures. The right phrase for alpha is really “spaced-out.” Not orienting. When a person focuses visually, orients to anything, notices something outside oneself, then one gets an immediate increase in faster wave activity and alpha will block [disappear].
Many meditators are in alpha but in meditation you are learning self-control and how to call upon your own internal processes. There is no such discipline with television. You are not training your mind to control itself, which biofeedback, and also meditation, accomplish; television trains people only for being zombies. Instead of training active attention, television seems to suppress it. Ten kids were asked to watch their favorite television programs. Our assumption was that since these programs were their preferred shows, the kids would be involved in them and we would find there would be an oscillation between alpha slow-wave activity and beta. The prediction was that they would go back and forth. However, they did not do that. They just sat back. They stayed almost all the time in alpha. This mean that while they were watching they were not reacting, not orienting, not focusing, just spaced-out. Also, children who are watching television are far slower to react to an emergency than children who are doing something else. And, that is predictable because when they are watching television, they are being trained not to react. To really learn anything, you have to interact with the source of the data. With television you do not really think. If I get engaged, I know that speaking for myself, I can only really learn, as in the Socratic method of teaching. The best teaching is an interactive form. Some people learn best, for example, by writing notes because the notes are a feedback system. (Like a journal or a diary.) Television watching is only receiving, no longer reacting. It cannot do anything but hold your attention; you are receiving, not looking. The key for why they are in alpha is that when they are watching they are not looking at, not orienting.
If you have a light which is not really being attended to, you can get an infinite amount of alpha. Perhaps it is that the TV target is so far away, the screen so small that your eyes need not move; you are looking at infinity, in a way, like looking at the hypnotist’s flashlight. If you look at moving targets, you have at least a little active interaction; that would tend to put into beta. However, with television though there seems to be movement, you stay all the in alpha. Reading produces a more active learning process and a higher amount of beta activity. You would expect abnormality in anyone who produces alpha while reading. The horror of television is that the information goes in, but we do not react to it. It goes right into our memory pool and perhaps we react to it later but do not know what we are reacting to. When you watch television you are training yourself not to react and so later on, you are doing things without knowing why you are doing them or where they came from. Because of the implications of this study, computer programmers might want to design their software to be less helpful in order to force users to think harder so that televisions and computers do not wipe out their brain functions. That may well be good advice, but it is hard to imagine the developers of commercial computer programs and Web applications taking it to heart. One of the long-standing trends in software programming has been the pursuit of ever more “user-friendly” interfaces. That is particularly true on the Net. Internet companies are in fierce competition to make people’s lives easier, to shift the burden of problem solving and other mental labor away from the user and onto the microprocessor. A small but telling example can be seen in the evolution of search engines. It its earliest incarnation, the Google engine was a very simple tool: you entered a keyword into the search box, and you hit the search button.
However, Google, facing competition from other search engines, like Microsoft’s Bing, has worked diligently to make its service enter more solicitous. Now, as soon as you enter the first letter of your keyword into the box, Google immediately suggests a list of popular search terms that being with that letter. Their algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. By suggesting more refined searches up front, Google can make your searches more convenient and efficient. Automating cognitive processes in this way has become the modern programmer’s stock-in-trade. And for good reason: people naturally seek out those software tools and Web sites that offer the most help and guidance—and shun those that are difficult to master. They want friendly, helpful software. Why would they not? Yet, as we cede to software more of the toil of thinking, they are likely diminishing our own brain power in subtle but meaningful ways. When a ditchdigger trades his shovel for a backhoe, his arm muscles weaken even as his efficiency increases. A similar trade-off may well take place as we automate the work of the mind. Another recent study, this one on academic research, provides real-World evidence of the way the tools we use to sift information online influence our mental habits and frame our thinking. After exanimating an enormous database on 34 million scholarly articles published in academic journals from 1945 through 2005, then analyzing citations included in the articles to see if patterns of citation, and hence of research, have changed as journals have shifted from being printed on paper to being published online; considering how much easier it is to search a digital text than printed text, the common assumption has been that making journals available on the Net would significantly broaden the scope of scholarly research, leading to a much more diverse set of citations.
However, that is not all that was discovered. As more journals moved online scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information leads to a narrowing of science and scholarship. With these counterintuitive finds, it as also been noted that automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what is not. The ease of following hyperlinks, moreover, leads online researchers to bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers would routinely skim as they flipped through the pages of a journal or a book. The quicker that scholars are able to find prevailing opinion, the more likely they are to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Though much less efficient than searching the Web, old-fashion library research probably served to widen scholars’ horizons: By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. The easy way may not always be the best way, but the easy way is the way our computers and search engines encourage of to take. Before Frederick Taylor introduced his system of scientific management, the individual laborer, drawing on his training, knowledge, and experience, would make his own decisions about how he did his work. He would write his own script. After Taylor, the laborer began following a script written by someone else. The machine operator was not expected to understand how the script was constructed or the reasoning behind it; he was simply expected to obey it.
The messiness that comes with individual autonomy was cleaned up, and the factory as a whole became more efficient, its output more predictable. Industry prospered. What was lost along with the messiness was personal initiative, creativity, and whim. Conscious craft turned into unconscious routine. Even if the hidden codes were revealed to us, when we go online, we, too, are following scripts written by others—algorithmic instruction that few of us would be able to understand. When we search for information through Google or other search engines, we are following a script. When we look at a product recommended to us by Amazon or Netflix, we are following a script. When we choose from a list of categories to describe ourselves or our relationships Facebook, we are following a script. These scripts can be ingenious and extraordinarily useful, as they were in Taylorist factories, but they also mechanize the messy processes of intellectual exploration and even social attachment. As the computer programmer Thomas Lord has argued, software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless “rituals” whose steps are “encoded in the logic of web pages.” Rather than acting according to our own knowledge and intuition, we go through the motions. Now, society is constantly always undergoing influx and change. Decades after it electrified, horrified, revitalized, and transformed Western society, North America’s revolution of the pleasures of the flesh is now firmly entrenched as a mainstream way of life. By now, its effects are showing—for one thing, it has probably cropped years off the age of the average virgin. Today, the median age of losing virginity is 17.4 for girls, and 16.6 for boys, about three years earlier than in the late, staid 1950s. Broken down, these figures are actually more startling: 19 percent of adolescents between the ages of thirteen and fifteen are nonvirgins. By age sixteen and seventeen, this rises to 55 percent, and fully 72 percent of all high-school seniors have had intercourse, at least half with more than one partner.
These figures do not paint a picture of uninhibited, liberating, and rewarding sexuality. To the contrary, they are adrip with poisonous consequences: a rash of pregnancies—by the time American women reach twenty, 43 percent will have become pregnant once (one every twenty-six seconds)—among mainly unmarried, ill-prepared mothers. Another way to understand this is to compare it with the situation in 1960: then, 33 percent of teenage mothers were unmarried at the birth of their first child; by 1989, this percentage had shot up to 81 percent. Rates of sexually transmitted disease (STD) have also skyrocketed, so much today, by the age of twenty-one years, about one in four is infected with such STDs as chlamydia, syphilis, or gonorrhea. More frighteningly, AIDS and COVID are making inroads of many young people. Despite impassioned warnings from such famous figures as basketball player Magic Johnson, who admitted his reckless promiscuity had caused his tragic diagnosis, many young people still engage in unprotected pleasures of the flesh. However, these same people were demanding that others get vaccinated and were a mask. I guess the difference is this new cancel culture gets to take their rage out of others just for thinking they are being exposed to others, while using a prophylactic requires self-responsibility, and people do not want to take preventative measures. Also, the government is not, nor are celebrities or politicians reminding people that it is dangerous and potentially deadly to have unprotected pleasures of the flesh. Perhaps people also may need abstinence from alcohol so they do not make irresponsible decisions and to play more sports and get more physical activity. If humans degrade it, it is perfectly normal for a natural function to become degraded. If elevated, noble. If sublimated, changed.
Where excessive erotic thinking accompanies physical continence, the result may be a mental disorder or bodily sickness. Equally sobering is that teenagers do not practice what they preach: despite their own early indulgence in pleasures of the flesh, few consider it reasonable to first have pleasures of the flesh before the age of sixteen or seventeen. Why, then, do they so blatantly jump the gun? Curiosity is the leading reason, and being in love is a distant second—63 percent of girls and 50 percent of boys surrendered their virginity to consummate their love. Alarmingly, even more girls (but only 35 percent of boys) succumbed to pressure from their sweethearts, while 58 percent of both were driven by the desire to impress their friends and become more popular. This, despite the ever-hardy double standard by which they judge themselves: two-thirds agree that pleasures of the flesh experiences enhance a boy’s reputation while it damages a girl’s. However, the children who would be born to parents whose matings are few, whose minds are pure, and whose hearts are aspiring, would be markedly superior in every way. An enforced chastity, which is the product of rigid circumstances or lack of temptation, is not the philosophic chastity. The power of pleasures of the flesh to make or mar happiness or equanimity is formidable. Left to run amok in savage lust it harms and degrades a human but, redeemed and transmuted, it serves one’s best interests. One knows, by theory and practice, logic and experience, that chastity may conserve energy—physical and mental, emotional and spiritual. However, one knows also that it creates undesired and undesirable effects in mind and character. Chasity is not the same as purity, although the two are often confused. The one is a way of outward life; the other a state of inner life.
If the energies needed for mastering the mind are to become powerful enough, such chastity cannot be avoided. In most men pleasures of the flesh is the largest diversion of these energies. The true union between man and woman is tantric. However, it cannot be brought about without developed qualities on both sides. Pleasures of the flesh, ought to be a natural controlled urge, between a married couple, but has all-too-often become a disease, a fever, an obsession. Once upon a time, before the revolution of pleasures of the flesh, chastity was easier for girls to maintain. For one thing, they menstruated later, at fourteen rather than twelve, as they do now, and married earlier, at twenty-one rather than today’s twenty-five. Then, a young woman could reasonably calculate that she had only seven years of chastity to conquer before she married, at which point she could surrender her virginity with the full approval of parents, religious authorities, and mainstream society. Today, both she and her brother are under sever pressure from hormones, a sex-driven society that scorns virgins as geeks, friends and classmates who taunt virgins and boast of their own sexual prowess, and the personal pain of dealing with boyfriends who coax or coerce them to have sex when they would prefer not to. Yet despite today’s rampant sexual experimentation even among the very young, about 20 percent of all teenagers remain chaste until adulthood. Why do these young men and women defy the norm? How do they handle the forces that defeat most of their peers? In what fundamental ways are they different from them? And, having achieved chaste maturity, do they regret deferring their sexual initiation? These issues must be examined against the backdrop of today’s complicated social and moral climate, in particular the media and music World dedicated to millions of young people and the power of the purses they control.
In those Worlds, hedonistic values, sex-driven advertising, and musical presentations blare out the message that pleasures of the flesh are good, natural, cool, and ubiquitous. Those physical and passional conditions which pass for love among the young—with their uncontrollable sensuality, their total unconcern with higher values, their puppet-like copulation—all show that they have still to outgrow the close ties which they still have to the animal stage of evolution. Pleasures of the flesh, as they portray it is a physical maneuver preceded by seductive, flirtatious behavior and cloaked in suggestive clothing, come-hither stances, and an aroma for animal musk. In this sex-sated World, feminists interpret the sexual act from the perspective of power politics, revealing how it, too, is integrally linked to the inequities between men and women. Unfortunately, their analyses have inspired some other women to conclude that righting the wrongs of the damnable double standard means adopting more dominant sexual standards. Translated into action, this has led to belt-notching, score-keeping, power-play pleasures of the flesh, initiated and controlled by women. They see nothing ironic about defining independence and equality as gaining mastery of infinite varieties. In their combative version of the pleasures of the flesh revolution, real women carry prophylactics in their jeans, grade (out of ten, for instance) the hard curves of men’s rear ends, and initiate pleasures of the flesh with partners who arouse their transient lust. However, in these vary same Worlds, vying with that overwhelming vision of life, in another powerful force, the aggressively proselytizing Moral Majority of the Christian right wing. It, too, has its youth wing and sponsors a counter-cultural movement that preaches sexual abstinence until marriage and heterosexuality as the only legitimate form of orientation, and it provides converts with accessories as trendy and upbeat as those of the rival ethic of sex-is-almighty. The best-known organization within this framework, once whose reach extends Worldwide, is the aptly named True Love Waits.
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