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What are the Fact and the Realistic Possibilities?
The Western powers, like the communists, talk in terms of choice between capitalism and communism. This alternative is almost the one thing the two camps agree on. The facts are, however, more complex. Capitalism in the middle of the twentieth century is not the capitalism of individual initiative, minimal state activity, et cetera, that it was in the nineteenth century. Both the Russian and the Chinese types of communism—different from the Marxist socialism they pretend to resemble. What are the facts and the realistic possibilities? First, we must recognize that the underdeveloped countries, in the long run, will not choose capitalism for both economic and psychological reasons. They cannot choose a system that was developed in Europe over several hundreds of years, in response to the particular historical conditions of that continent. These underdeveloped countries need a system which fulfills these conditions: first, economic power must be taken from the small cliques who use it only for their own interests and without regard for the needs of the majority of the population; second, the economy must follow a plan that allocates resources in the interest of, and for the optimal development of the entire economy. The cardinal point is that the alternative in the underdeveloped countries is precisely not that between capitalism and communism, an alternative which Russia, China and the Democratic party are fond of proposing, but that the alternative is which kind of socialism will they choose: the Russian state managerialism, the Chinese anti-individualistic communist, or a humanistic, democratic socialism, which attempts to combine the necessary minimum of bureaucratic centralization with the optimum of individual initiative, participation and responsibility. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
If the West insist on the communist-capitalist alternative, if it allies itself with outmoded reactionary regimes which are doomed by history, then it will help Russian—or more likely China—to grain the leadership of two-thirds—and within a generation, almost four-fifths of the human race. The less affluent people of the World will believe that they must choose the way which is allowing China to develop at twice the rate of India, provided there is no other alternative. However, in spite of all China’s propaganda, there is plenty of evidence that the Chinese way of complete and ruthless regimentation is not what most of these people prefer. The wish for freedom and independence is not—as it is sometimes alleged—a relatively recent Western discovery; it is a deep-rooted need in the very existence of man, but it is not the only one. If it has to compete with hunger, fear, and hopelessness, most people—in the East and in the West—will be willing to sell out their desire for freedom. The question is whether such a choice can be avoided. Furthermore, even if millions of unaffluent people in all these countries have lived, thus far, under such abysmal conditions of hunger and hopelessness that at the moment they cannot be fully interested in freedom, this has less political significance than many people believe. The history of the underdeveloped countries is being made by relatively small groups of an educated, middle-class elite, who do appreciate the danger and the evils of totalitarianism. It is in fact quite remarkable how well India and other parts of Asia as well as of Latin America and Africa have stood up against the seduction of communism. However, if the necessary fundamental reforms are not made, it is also clear that the younger generation will become increasingly impatient. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
It is thought by some that the only solution for the underdeveloped countries is democratic-socialist systems, adapted to the needs of each country, and varying accordingly just as Yugoslavia varies from India, is by no means a theoretical construction. The fact is that, as Mr. Barnett puts it, “Marxism has had a deep and widespread influence among intellectuals in many countries in the area [South and Southeast Asia]. Most of the leaders in South and Southeast Asia subscribe to ‘socialism’ of one kind or another. Many hope to create societies which can best be described as ‘socialism’ democracies,’ combining free and representative government with varying degrees of state economic planning. For the most part, they still look primarily to the West for their models, and they are attempting to adapt Western experience to their own needs, but few accept any specific Western model without qualification, and they have encountered great difficulties in attempting to transplant Western institutions in their countries. Many, while rejecting communism as a system of power, have felt that the Communists’ experience in Russia and China has considerable relevance to their own problems.” The problem is whether these leaders can eventually find a democratic-socialist pattern which will show achievements comparable to those of China, or whether they will have to accept the Communist solution which they would prefer to avoid. Their decision depends at least as much on the attitude of the West as it does on Communist propaganda. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
So far, the West has been the most effective propagandist for the Communists, by insisting that the Communists, by insisting that the Communist are the true heirs of Marx, and that there is no alternative other than capitalism. The United States of America has made this error more than Europe, because Europe is at least familiar with democratic socialist ideas and parties, which up to 1960 have ruled at one time or another, since 1918, in Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. In many of these countries the socialists were defeated in recent years because the conservative parties adopted part of the socialist program, and because the socialists themselves stagnated in the midst of plenty. However, it would be a serious mistake to believe that socialism in the underdeveloped countries is finished because it is at the moment on the defensive in the rich countries. In fact it may be considered one of the most important tasks of democratic socialism in the underdeveloped countries and to interpret it to the West. There is an objection to the idea suggested here which is serious enough to warrant immediate attention. This objection runs along the following lines: if it is the aim of the underdeveloped countries to achieve economic well-being within a few generations, if they want to build an industry of their own and provide the majority of their inhabitants with a standard of living that can at least be compared with the less affluent European countries, how can they do it except in the way China does: totalitarian organization, persuasion, and mass suggestion? #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Are their leaders not forced to create a spirit of fanaticism and fear in order to sustain voluntary underconsumption and currency manipulation? This is not necessarily so. There is, of course, the problem of mobilizing the human energy to achieve a far higher economic productivity than these countries have now. The West officially claims that the hope of monetary gain is the most important way, and no doubt, this motive is effective within a certain frame of reference. (The Russians also agree—in practice.) However, there are other ways of mobilizing human energy. There is the Chinese way of total mobilization of brain, heart, and brawn by force and suggestion; and this way seems to work, although at the expense of fundamental human values. There is still another way, which democratic, humanist socialism offers: an appeal to the sense of self-respect, individual initiative, social responsibility, and pride of the individual. If such an appeal were merely ideological and fictious it would have no real and lasting effect. However, if it is based on the real possibilities the system offers for these qualities to develop; if furthermore, such an appeal is made in a system that has a plan and in which individual effort contributes to the progress of the society as a whole, then, I believe, that human energy can be mobilized to an extent comparable to totalitarian systems. Yugoslavia does not have a two-party system or elections in the Western sense, it has no political terror and its system furthers individual activity and responsibility and encourages decentralization. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Not only the psychic needs and desires of the broad masses matter, but also the character structure of the educated middle-class elite. What is their motivation? It is necessarily that of material wealth, the Western businessman’s motivation in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries? If this is so, the only possible outcome can be that of corrupt government bureaucracies. For if it is wealth the leaders of underdeveloped countries are after, they will have to enrich themselves at the expense of the masses—possible only through deceit and oppression. However, there are many examples that wealth is by no means the only motivating force for the new elites, and, in fact, for some old ones. The governing groups in Yugoslavia and Egypt, the very top leadership in India, and the leadership in China, according to all reports, are not corrupt. (Their privileges are definitely limited, and not arrived at through theft and bribery.) What is apparently a strong motivation among these new leaders is a pride in their skill in administration and organization. In contrast to the traditional monetary motivation of the entrepreneur, the new elites are motivated by the same factors that motivate many professional men and women in our system: the satisfaction of applying an acquired skill and of obtaining useful results. We in the West often forget that satisfaction in workmanship, in the successful application of one’s skills, can be at least as strong an incentive as profit. In addition to the individual satisfaction rooted in skillful performance, the new elites need and often have another potent satisfaction—that of a sense of social obligation and solidarity with the broad masses of their respective countries. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
This usually takes the form of national pride; whether we think of China, or of Egypt, or of any one of the newly awakened countries, they are led by men and women with a genuine national feeling, often bordering on an irrational nationalism. Professional and national pride, together with a sense of social justice and responsibility, may be said to be the most important motivations of the new leaders of many of the underdeveloped countries. From a psychological standpoint, these motivations are just as potent and as real as the desire for money and the lust for power; they are just as much a part of human nature as the latter ones. What matters is which kind of motivation a given society encourages and furthers, or, to put it differently, what kind of personality will rise to the top. The question arises whether the new elite is more prone to accept the Russian, the Chinese, or a democratic form of socialism. This is difficult to answer. However, one thing seems certain: which course the new elite will take depends on two factors, one psychological and one economic. These new leaders are proud and sensitive; they resent the treatment they have been given by the Western powers for more than a century. (The Russians leaders showed the same kind of sensitivity, especially before they had achieved their present success.) They have not forgotten the humiliation of the opium war, the slave trade, the American “banana policy,” and the American aid to Ukraine. They react in a perfectly normal way, being sensitive and even sometimes supersensitive and thus prone to take an aggressive anti-Western posture when the West continues to treat them with overt or slightly hidden arrogance. The tone of moral superiority toward the underdeveloped countries, which permeates many of our statements, serves only to create a deep antagonism toward the West, and to increase their tendency to unite with the Communist bloc. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Which are the conditions that are responsible for necrophilia? From the standpoint of Dr. Freud’s theory one must expect that the strength of the life and death instincts (respectively) remain constant, and that for the death instinct there is only the alternative of its being turned either outward or inward. Hence environmental factors can account only for the direction which the death instinct takes, not for its intensity. If, on the other hand, one follows the hypothesis presented here, one must ask this question: Which factors make for the development of the necrophilous and the biophilous orientations in general; and more specifically, for the greater or lesser intensity of the death-loving orientation in a given individual or group? The most important condition for the development of love of life in the child is for one to be with people who love life. Love of life is just as contagious as love of death. It communicates itself without words, explanations, and certainly without any preaching that one ought to love life. It is expressed in gestures more than ideas, in the tone of voice more than in words. It can be observed in the whole atmosphere of a person or group, rather than in the explicit principles and rules according to which they organize their lives. Among the specific conditions necessary for the development of biophilia, here are a few of the following ones: warm, affectionate contact with others during infancy; freedom, and absence of threats; teaching—by example rather than by preaching—of the principles conducive to inner harmony and strength; guidance in the “art of living”; stimulating influence of and response to others; a way of life that is genuinely interests. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The very opposite of these conditions furthers the development of necrophilia: growing up among death-loving people; lack of stimulation; fright; condition which make life routinized and uninteresting; mechanical order instead of one determined by direct and human relations among people. As to the social conditions for the development of biophilia, it is evident that they are the very conditions which promote the trends mentioned above with regard to individual development. It is possible, however, speculate further and include a fraction of these other factors. Perhaps the most obvious factor is that of a situation of abundance versus scarcity, both economically and psychologically. As long as most of man’s energy is taken up by the defense of one’s life against attacks, or to ward off starvation, love of life must be stunted, and necrophilia fostered. Another important social condition for the development of biophilia lies in the abolition of injustice. This refers to a social situation in which one social class exploits another, and imposes conditions on it which do not permit the unfolding of a rich and dignified life; or in other words, were one social class is not permitted to share with others in the same basic experience of living; in the last analysis, by injustice I refer to a social situation in which a human is not an end in oneself, but becomes a means for the ends of another human. Finally, a significant condition for the development of biophilia is freedom. However, “freedom from” political shackles is not a sufficient condition. If love for life is to develop, there must be freedom “to”; freedom to create and to construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Love of life will develop most in a society where there is: security in the sense that the basic material condition for a dignified life are not threatened, justice in the sense that nobody can be an end for the purposes of another, and freedom in the sense that each human has the possibility to be an active and responsible member of society. A point of particular importance is even a society in which security and justice are present might not be conducive to love of life if the creative self-activity of the individual is not furthered. It is not enough that humans are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love, but love of death. Theoretically, Dr. Freud’s disbelief in a wish for self-development is linked up with his postulate that the “ego” is a weak agency tossed about among the claims of instinctual drive, of the outside World and of the forbidding conscience. Ultimately, however, I believe that the two formulations of analytical goals are expressions of different philosophical beliefs as to the nature of humans. The deepest source of a man’s or woman’s philosophy, the one that shapes and nourishes it, is faith or lack of faith in humankind. If one has confidence in human beings and believes , that something fine can be achieved through them, one will acquire ideas about life and about the World which are in harmony with one’s confidence. Lack of confidence will generate corresponding ideas. Dr. Freud recognized that some degree of self-analysis is possible, for he did also analyze his own dreams. However, even if we grant that there is sufficient incentive for self-analysis there is still the question whether it can be undertaken by a “layman” who has not the necessary knowledge, training, and experience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
With all due respect for the role of specialization in cultural development, too much awe of specialization can paralyze initiative. We are all too inclined to believe that only a politician can understand politics, that only an auto science engineer can repair an Ultimate Driving Machine, that only a trained gardener can prune trees. Of course, a trained person can perform more quickly and more efficiently than an untrained person, and in many instances the latter will fail entirely. However, the gap between a trained and an untrained person is often regarded as wider than it is. Faith in specialization can easily turn into blind awe and stifle any attempt at new activity. General considerations of this kind are encouraging. However, in order to arrive at a proper evaluation of the technical possibility of self-analysis we must visualize in concrete detail what constitutes the equipment of a professional analyst. In the first place, the analysis of others demands an extensive psychological knowledge of the nature of unconscious forces, the forms of their manifestation, the reasons responsible for their power, the influence wielded by them, the ways of unearthing them. In the second place, it demands definite skills, which must be developed by training and experience: the analyst must understand how to deal with the patient; one must know with a reasonable degree of certainty which factors in the maze of material presented should be tackled and which left out for the time being; one must have acquired a highly developed ability to “feel into” the patient, a sensitivity to psychic undercurrents that is almost a sixth sense. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Finally, the analysis of others demands a thorough self-knowledge. In working with a patient the analyst has t project oneself into a strange World, with its own peculiarities and its own laws. And there is considerable danger that one will misconstrue, mislead, perhaps even inflict positive injury—not through bad will but through the carelessness, ignorance, or conceit. Therefore not only must one have a thorough familiarity with one’s tools, and skill in using them, but equally important, one must be straightened out in one’s relations to self and others. Since all three of these requirements are indispensable, nobody who does not fulfill them should assume the responsibility involved in analyzing others. These requirements cannot be automatically attributed to self-analysis as well, because analyzing ourselves is in certain essential points different from analyzing others. The difference most pertinent here is the fact that the World that each of us represents is not strange to ourselves; it is, in fact, the only one we really know. True enough, a neurotic person has become estranged from large parts of this World and has an impelling interest not to see parts of it. Also there is always the danger that in one’s familiarity with oneself that one will take certain significant factors too much for granted. However, the fact remains that it is one’s World, that all the knowledge about it is there somehow, that on need only observe and make use of one’s observation in order to gain access to it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
If one is interested in recognizing the sources of one’s difficulties, if one can overcome one’s resistances to recognizing them, one can in some respect observe oneself better than an outsider can. After all, one lives with oneself day and night. In one’s chances to make self-observations one might be compared with an intelligent nurse who is constantly with a patient; and analyst, however, sees the patient at best only for an hour each day. The analyst has better methods for observation, and clearer viewpoints from which to observe and to make inferences, but the nurse has opportunities for a wide range of observation. This fact constitutes an important asset in self-analysis. Indeed, it reduced the first of the requirements demanded of a professional analyst and eliminates the second: in self-analysis less psychological knowledge is demanded than in the analysis of others, and we do not need at all the strategical skill that is necessary in dealing with any other person. The crucial difficulty in self-analysis lies not in these field but in the emotional factors that blind us to unconscious forces. That the main difficulty is emotional rather than intellectual is confirmed by the fact that when analysts analyze themselves they have not such a great advantage over the layman as we would be inclined to believe. On theoretical grounds, then, I see no stringent reason why self-analysis should not be feasible. Granted that many people are too deeply entangled in their own problems to be able to analyze themselves; granted that self-analysis can never approximate the speed and accuracy of analytical treatment by an expert; granted that there are certain resistances that can be surmounted only with outside help—still, all of this is no proof that in principle the job cannot be done. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The patients who may be readily counted, whose illness is of such nature as to lead to hospitalization, are not the ones under primary consideration here. Rather, it is the unnumbered mass of lesser sufferers, the partial cripples, with whom we are concerned. These are the individuals who are emotionally maladjusted and psychologically disordered but whose mental illness permits them to lead a tortuous existence outside the hospital walls. Only a very rough approximation of their total number is possible. They are partially enumerable as those chronic visitors to physician’s offices with complains that are vague, anatomically and physiologically irrational, and unsupported by any findings of actual organic defect. These are the recalcitrant 50 to 70 percent of the general practitioner’s case load who are sooner or later labeled “neurotic.” Included also in the extramural population of psychiatric cases are those persons who are seen on an outpatient basis in public mental hygiene clinics of social agencies and by private psychiatrists and psychologists. These too are countable. Most present-day authorities are not content to let the realm of mental illness be bounded by these recordable patients. They practice the delicate art of extrapolation and arrive at estimates of the “real sum” of mentally sick persons in the total population. In such activity they are not out of step with general practice in the field of public health which recognizes that there are multiple factors determining whether a given case of a specific disease ever comes to formal diagnosis. Thus, it is logically descriptive to speak of the person known to carry the active tubercle bacillus in his or her lungs as having had tuberculosis even before one was X-rayed, visited a physician, or had a formal diagnosis of one’s symptoms. After such a diagnosis, it is appropriate to recognize that the individual has been ill. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The disease does not begin its existence, except in a very arbitrary and formal sense, with the occurrence of diagnosis. Accordingly, it is not at all fictional to think of the total incidence of a disease such as tuberculosis, which William Writ Winchester had a fatal encounter with, as composed of those recorded, diagnosed cases plus an additional estimated number of undiagnosed cases. Biometric experts have developed methods for rather exact estimating of the number of such putative cases, utilizing among other factors data on the number of cases that come to diagnosis per period of time and the prior duration of the illness as indicated by the stage of symptoms at the time of diagnosis. Similarly, it is appropriate to conceive of the total number of mentally ill at any given time as composed of those institutionalized and otherwise recorded cases plus an estimated number of individuals who carry the “germs” of mental illness and have manifest symptoms, but have not yet come to diagnosis. Recent surveys of probability samples of urban and rural populations presented some degree of psychic symptomatology and to the equally startling finding that less than 20 percent were free of any sign of emotional distress. The ultimate negative is a hinderer: “We would fain have come unto you…but the ultimate negative hindered us” reports 1 Thessalonians 2.18, wrote Pual, who was able to discern between the hindering of the ultimate negative and the restraining of the Holy Spirit of the ultimate concern (Acts 16.6). This again means knowledge, and power to discern the ultimate negative’s workings and schemings and the obstacles which it places in the paths of the children of the ultimate concern—obstacles which look so “natural” and so like “providence” that numbers meekly bow their heads and allow the Hinderer to prevail. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Power to discern comes by knowledge that the ultimate negative can hinder; by observing the objective of the hindrances, and by close observations of its methods along this line. For example, is it the ultimate concern or the ultimate negative withholding money from missionaries preaching the gospel of Calvary, and giving abundance to those who preach error and teachings which are the outcome of the spirit of antichrist? Is it the ultimate concern or the ultimate negative urging a family to move their residence, without reasonable grounds, to another neighbourhood, when it involves the removal of another member from a strategic vantage-ground of service to the ultimate concern, with no other worker to take one’s place? Is it the ultimate concern or the ultimate negative leading Christians to put first their health, comfort, social position in their decisions, rather than the needs and the exigencies of the kingdom of the ultimate concern? Is it the ultimate concern or the ultimate negative who hinders service for the ultimate concern through members of a family making objections, or through troubles in business which give no time for such service, or through property losses, et cetera? Knowledge of the Hinderer means victory by prayer over one’s schemes and workings. The believer should therefore know one’s wiles. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Up to now we have examined the fact of the manifestation of the Kingdom of God through the appearance of the Christ in a moment of Kairos. Since the reception of Christian revelation constitutes the manifest churches, they are the representatives of the Kingdom of God within history and thereby play a twofold role: they actively contribute to the pursuit of the aim of history, and they struggle against the forces of profanization and demonization which seek to frustrate this purpose. To accomplish this task, to create the new in history and to withstand the profane and the demonic, the churches draw upon the power of the New Being which is their foundation. The churches as the embodiments of the Spiritual Community comprise only persons, but as representatives of the Kingdom of God they stand for all dimensions of life, including the animate and inanimate World of nature. This wider representative function is fulfilled through the sacraments: To the degree in which a church emphasizes the sacramental presence of the divine, it draws the realm’s preceding spirit and history, the inorganic and organic universe, into itself. For the Kingdom of God symbolizes not only society, but also the multidimensional life of the whole universe. The churches have a history, but instead of speaking “the history of the churches,” we prefer the phrase “the history of the church” in order to emphasize that the many churches are embodiments of the one Spiritual Community, despite their paradoxical ambiguities. In the light of this fact, one must admit that church history is at no point identical with the Kingdom of God and at no point without manifestation of the Kingdom of God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Although the church is the representative of the Kingdom of God, the two cannot be simply identified because the riddle of the church history, namely, the ambiguity of the church as spelled out in its historical dimension. The riddle of church history can be expressed in a series of questions. Why is the church, in principle universal, effectively restricted to a particular civilization? How account for the rise within Christianity itself of secular movements, such as humanism and communism? Why has the unity of the church been splintered? How explain so much profanization of the holy in church history both by Roman Catholic ritualization and Protestant secularization? What is the cause of the history of demonization in the church, from the early persecution of heretics, through the religious wars, through the fanatical stubbornness of fundamentalism, through the tyranny of Protestant orthodoxy, to the infallibility of the pope? In the face of this riddle, this scandal, one must ask: What does church history mean? Two statements can be made in reply. First, church history cannot be identified with the history of salvation or sacred history. “Sacred history is in church history but is not limited to it, and scared history is not only manifest in but also hidden by church history. It is the everlasting paradox of the church that it conceals the Kingdom of God as well as reveals it. Secondly, church history has one quality which shines through even its most distorted phases: “…it has in itself the ultimate criterion against itself—the New Being in Jesus as the Christ.” Consequently, “the presence of this criterion elevates the churches above any other religious group, not because they are ‘better’ than others, but because they have a better criterion against themselves and, implicitly, also against other groups.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The struggle of the Kingdom of God within history is above all a struggle within the bosom of its own representatives, for the reformation of a profanized and demonized church is never ended. Church history, however, judges not only itself, but also non-church history or World history. The influence of church history upon World history is seen where it produces an uneasy conscience in those who have received the impact of the New Being but follow the ways of the old being. Church history is not the Kingdom of God, but the Christian civilization which it begets is a continual reminder of it. Must not all philosophy in the end bring to light the presupposition upon which the movement of reason rests: our belief in the “I” as substance, as the sole reality according to which we attribute reality to things generally? The oldest “realism” finally comes to light—at the same time as the entire religious history of humankind is recognized as the history of the soul superstition. There is a limit here: our thinking itself involves that belief (with its distinction between substance and accident, deed and doer, et cetera); letting go of it means no longer being allowed to think. That a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a creature, has nothing to do with truth, one can see, for example, in the fact that we have to believe in time, space, and motion, but without feeling constrained to grant them absolute reality. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. Nations that defy Thy law of justice and of love, that stir up hate against the weak, estranging human from human, that crush the stranger in their midst and shed one’s blood for gain, and follow their unrighteous ways that lead to strife and war, such nations still to evil are enslaved, but Thou, through us, shalt bring to judgement all their wicked ways. Please keep the Sacramento Fire Depart and your hearts and prayers this season, for they are not receiving all of their resources. If it is possible, please make a donation. It will be much appreciated. #RandolpHarris 19 of 19
The greatest contributor among the health-food pioneers in the Victorian Ear was Gail Borden. City people were being poisoned by tainted milk every day. Mr. Borden discovered that by evaporating much of the water from milk and canning the result, the milk did not have to be refrigerated. The cows could live a healthy, country life while the consumers could stay far away in the city, hence Mr. Borden’s famous slogan for Carnation milk: “from contented cows.”
The other strong influences on late nineteenth-century eating was the home-economics movement. Well-educated, middle-class nonimmigrant women not only created a profession of their own, but also sought to Americanize the less affluent. Home economists and social workers tried to teach immigrant women about nutrition and tried to wean them away from the “hot,” spicy cuisine of their homelands. The favourite foods of the home economics movement were gelatin salads and boiled dressings. A blanket of white cause covering a slab of boneless protein was the ideal dish. Salads were orderly, encased, cool, and controllable rather than hot, sloppy, and sensuous.
Jello, after all, is a Victorian product invented during the 1890s by the Genesee Pure Food Company of Leroy, New York. This change in cuisine was not all one-way bullying. Cookbooks like Fannie Farmer’s and Mrs. Beeton’s as well as manners books like Emily Post’s, were eagerly bought by immigrant women who wanted to fit into American culture. These books gave advice on food, eating, and household management to Europeans who wanted to know how things were “done” in America.
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Joy is Virtuous and Sadness is Sinful
A leader is someone who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. If it is true that the policy of the arms race (controlled or not) will most likely result in thermonuclear war, and that, and if the “stable deterrent” could prevent such a war, the arms race will result in militarized, frightened, dictatorial societies, then the first condition for the possibility of peace and democracy supposedly is universal controlled disarmament. Even if the United States of American, India, Britain, France, Germany, China, and Japan were the only owners of nuclear weapons, this is believed by some to hold true. However, it is a lot like law enforcement making an agreement with known offenders that they both will disarm and so will everyone else. How likely is it that everyone involved will keep this agreement and what if someone who once had no use for arms or could not previously afford them decided to stock up? Well, someday Mexico and Africa, for instance, will have the capability and/or need to produce thermonuclear weapons and this will still further reduce the possibilities for peace. In discussing this danger of the “nth country” having nuclear weapons, small countries like Israel or Sweden could, of course, explode their thermonuclear bombs either by accident or because of the irrationality of their leaders, but they can hardly make their nuclear power part of their policy. The much greater danger lies in the extension of nuclear armament to other great powers, especially African and Mexico since those countries, like present members of the “atomic club,” would use their military power as an adjunct to their political ambitions. Thus the chance of nuclear war as a result of mutual threats in the context of such overall political strategy would be considerably enhanced. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
How then can these powers like Africa and Mexico be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons? It is possible that even though these countries have made agreements not to produce nuclear weapons, if they decided that they would like the capabilities to produce them or deem them necessary, the United States of America and Russia could prevent these countries by economic or even military pressure from acquiring nuclear arms. However, this would mean a Russo-American alliance, directed against China (and Germany), which is most unlikely. It seems that the only way to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to the other great countries is by global disarmament, in which all the great countries would participate. However, Western reaction to the disarmament proposal has been lukewarm. The West had not declined universal disarmament outright, but it has also never fully accepted it as a practical goal. The Russians, in their turn, are not willing to accept inspection by which they would lose one of their military advantages, namely the factor of secrecy, in exchanged for a limited “arms control” which would only be another form of prolonging the arms race. It is important under these circumstances to ask oneself why the West so far has not been willing to consider universal disarmament seriously. One stock answer which is usually given is that the Russian do not permit inspection. However, this answer is not tenable in view of the fact that they have repeatedly declared that they are willing to permit any kind of inspection provided the West accepts universal disarmament as the concrete and immediate goal; at least we must negotiate in order to find out if they are serious about inspection. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Furthermore, we must be aware of the fact that there is no foolproof system of inspection, but that the risks of an inspection system are smaller than those of the armament race. In considering the pros and cons of the inspection system, we must also give some weight to their contribution to an atmosphere of legality. In leading the Russians, Chinese, Germanys, Japanese and other members of the atomic club into the formal observance of agreed-upon rules—even if it is only a symbolic observance—we make it harder for either side to break the rules thereafter and flout the hopes for peace and legality that have been generated on all sides. Is it that we see less clearly than others the dangers of an atomically armed World, or is it that we are so caught in our picture of their “wish for World domination” that we can not believe that they mean what they say? Or is it that we are afraid that we could not cope with the economic consequences disarmament would have for our system? Or is it that the armed services, being opposed to disarmament, have already such power that they can prevent even a serious consideration of disarmament? Since this is a matter of life or death for the United States of America and the rest of the World, it would seem to be of the utmost importance to examine not only, as we usually do, the possible flaws in the other members of the atomic club’s posture, but also the possible reasons for our refusal to consider disarmament more seriously. However, keep in mind the Taiwan actually a secret nuclear program and after it was discovered, they abandoned it. Iran and Iraq also had secret nuclear programs at one time. Saudi Arabia has openly threatened to develop nuclear weapons if Iran successfully tests one and is rumoured to have a secret nuclear purchasing deal with Pakistan. Therefore, it is possible that one or more countries secretly have nuclear bombs already. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
There is no way of victory over falsehood but by truth. To have victory over the ultimate negative as a liar, and over his lies, the believer must be determined always to know the truth and speak the truth about everything—in oneself, in others, and all around one. The ultimate negative the liar, through his lying spirits, persistently pours lies on the believer all day long: lies into one’s thoughts about oneself, one’s feelings, one’s condition, one’s environment; lies misinterpreting everything in oneself, and around one—about others with whom one is in contact; lies about the past and the future; lies about the ultimate concern; and lies about the ultimate negative himself, magnifying one’s power and one’s authority. To have victory over this persistent stream of lies from the father of lies, the believer must stand one’s ground with the weapon of God’s truth in the written Word, and with truth about facts in oneself, others, and circumstances. As the believer increasingly triumphs over the ultimate negative as a liar, one grows better able to discern one’s lies, and is equipped to strip away the covering for others. The interpretation of history necessarily leads to Christology and, conversely, this Christology must yield the interpretation of history. The interpretation of history is a search for meaning, and in Jesus the Christ is found the victory over meaninglessness. That Jesus as the Christ is the source of the meaning of history is expressed by the metaphour “center.” The center of history is the place where the meaning-given principle of history is seen. Since, according to its subject-object structure, history is not a purely objective temporal process, the center of history is not a point between a temporal beginning and end. Nor is the center of history the culmination point of a progressivistic development. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
There is, however, a progressive element in the sense that the center of history is a moment in history for which everything before and after is both preparation and reception. The manifestation of the Kingdom of God is revelation, and this revelatory moment is prepared for by a movement from immaturity to maturity, for humankind had to mature to a point in which the center of history could appear and be received as the center. The Old Testament is the record of the maturing process which led to the final revelation in Jesus the Christ. The point to note, however, is that what happened once the process of original revelation happens again and again whenever the Christ is received as the center of history, regardless of time and place. The maturing or preparatory process toward the central manifestation of the Kingdom of God in history is, therefore not restricted to the pre-Christian epoch; it continues after the center’s appearance and is going on here and now. And just as there is an original history of preparation for the central revelation, so too there is an original history of reception which is the history of the church. The reception of revelation by the manifest church is clearly documented, but it must be borne in mind that the church is also latent, and the latent church receives revelation only by anticipation of the center. The historical dimension of Christology demonstrates that the appearance of Jesus as the Christ is the historical event in which history becomes aware of itself and its meaning. In determining the center of history, this allows history to be created. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces. Joy is virtuous and sadness is sinful. Thus it is from the standpoint of biophilic ethics that the Christian Bible mentions as the central sin of the Hebrews: “Because thou didst not serve thy Lord with joy and gladness of heart in the abundance of all things” (Deuteronomy 28.47). The conscience of the biophilous person is not one of forcing oneself to refrain from evil and to do good. It is not the superego described by Dr. Freud, which is a strict taskmaster, employing sadism against oneself for the sake of virtue. The biophilous conscience is motivated by its attraction to life and joy; the moral effort consists in strengthening the life-loving side in oneself. For this reason the biophile does not dwell in remorse and guilt which are, after all, only aspects of self-loathing and sadness. One turns quickly to life and attempts to do good. Mr. Spinoza’s Ethic is a striking example of biophilic morality. “Pleasure,” he says, “in itself is not bad but good; contrariwise, pain in itself is bad.” And in the same spirit: “A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.” Love of life underlies the various versions of humanistic philosophy. In various conceptual forms these philosophies are in the same vein as Mr. Spinoza’s; they express the principle that the sane man loves life, that sadness is sin and joy is virtue, that man’s aim in life is to be attracted by all that is alive and to separate himself from all that is dead and mechanical. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The pure forms of the necrophilic and the biophilic orientations are, of course, rare. The pure necrophile is insane; the pure biophile is saintly. Most people are a particular blend of the necrophilous and the biophilous orientations, and what matters is which two trends is dominant. Those in whom the necrophilous orientation gains dominance will slowly kill the biophilic ide in themselves; usually they are not aware of their death-loving orientation; they will harden their hearts; they will act in such a way that their love of death seems to be the logical and rational response to what they experience. On the other hand, those in whom love for life still dominates, will be shocked when they discover how close they are to the “valley of the shadow of death,” and this shock might awaken them to life. Hence it is very important to understand not only how strong the necrophilic tendency is in a person, but also how aware one is of it. If one believes that one dwells in the land of life when in reality one lives in the land of death, one is lost to life since one has no chance to return. Dr. Freud discovered that certain circumscribed disorders that have no discernible organic basis—such as hysterical convulsions, phobias, depression, drug addictions, functional stomach upsets—can be cured by uncovering the unconscious factors that underlie them. In the course of time disturbances of this kind were summarily called neurotic. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Psychiatrist realized that neurotic people not only suffer from these manifest symptoms but also are considerably disturbed in all their dealings with life. And they also recognized the fact that many people have personality disorders without showing any of the definite symptoms that had previously been regarded as characteristic of neuroses. In other words, it gradually became more apparent that in neuroses symptoms may or may not be present but personality difficulties are never lacking. The conclusion was thus inevitable that these less specific difficulties constitute the essential core of neuroses. The recognition of this fact was exceedingly constructive in the development of psychoanalytical science, not only increasing its efficacy but also enlarging its scope. Manifest character disorders, such as a compulsive indecision, a repeated wrong choice of friends or lovers, gross inhibitions toward work, became as much an object of analysis as the gross clinical symptoms. If factors within an individual bar one from expression, the composer is flatly unable to work; one is unproductive. Similarly, a patient, despite one’s best intensions to be cooperative, becomes unproductive as soon as one’s efforts meet some “resistance.” However, the more frequent the period in which one is able to express oneself freely, the more one can tackle one’s own problems and the more significant is the common work of the patient and analyst. I have often told my patients that it would be ideal if the analyst merely played the part of a guide on a difficult mountain tour, indicating which way would be profitable to take or avoid. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
To be accurate one should add that the analyst is a guide who is not too certain of the way oneself, because though experienced in mountain climbing he has not yet climbed this particular mountain. And this fact makes the patient’s mental activity and productivity all the more desirable. It is scarcely an overstatement that, apart from the analyst’s competence, it is the patient’s constructive activity that determines the length and outcome of analysis. The significance of the patient’s mental activity in analytical therapy is often revealed when an analysis has to be interrupted or terminated for some reason or other while the patient is still in a bad condition. Both patient and analyst are dissatisfied with the progress attained, but after some time has elapsed without further analysis, they may find themselves pleasantly surprised by the patient’s considerable and lasting improvement. If careful examination does not show any change in one’s circumstances that might account for the improvement, one may be justified in regarding it as a belated effect of analysis. Such an aftereffect, however, is not easy to account for. Various factors may contribute to it. The previous work may have enabled the patient to make such accurate self-observation that is convinced more deeply than before of the existence of certain disturbing trends, or is even able to discover new factors within oneself. Or it may be that one had regarded any suggestion made by the analyst as a foreign intrusion and that one can take hold of insights more easily when they re-emerge as one’s own findings. Or, if one’s trouble was a rigid need to be superior to others and to defeat them, one may have been incapable of giving the analyst the satisfaction of doing successful work, and thus be able to recover only when the analyst is out of the picture. Finally, it must be remembered that delayed reactions occur also in many other situations: only much later may we grasp the real meaning of a joke or a remark made in a conversation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Different as these explanations are they all point in one direction: they suggest that some mental activity must have gone on in the patient without one being aware of it, or at least without consciously determined effort. That such mental activities, and even meaningful directed activities, do occur without awareness we know from the existence of meaningful dreams and from such experiences as being balked by a task in the evening and knowing the solution after awakening from sleep. Not only is there the famous mathematical problem, of which the solution presents itself in the morning, but a decision befogged in the evening may be clarified after having “slept” over it. A resentment not even perceived in daytime may have worked itself though to awareness so keenly that we awake suddenly at five o’clock in the morning, clearly recognizing provocation and reaction. As a matter of fact, every analyst relies on the operation of these underground mental activities. Such reliance is implicit in the doctrine that an analysis will proceed satisfactorily if the “resistances” are removed. I should like to stress also the positive aspect: the stronger and the less hampered a patient’s incentive toward liberation, the more productive activity will one display. However, whether one emphasize the negative aspect (resistance) or the positive one (incentive), the underlying principle is the same: by removing obstacles or by eliciting sufficient incentive the patient’s mental energy will be set to work and one will produce the material that will eventually lead to some further insight. If the analyst relies on the patient’s unconscious mental activity, if the patient has the faculty to work alone toward the solution of some problem, could this faculty be utilized in a more deliberate fashion? Could the patient scrutinize one’s self-observations or one’s associations with one’s own critical intelligence? #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Usually there is a division of labour between patient and analyst. By and large, the patient lets one’s thoughts, feelings, and impulses emerge, and the analyst uses one’s critical intelligence to recognize what the patient is driving at. One questions the validity of statements, one put together seemingly disconnected material, one makes suggestions as to possible meanings. I said “by and large” because the analyst uses also one’s intuition and the patient, too, may tie things together. However, on the whole such a division of labour exists, and it has definite advantages for the analytical session. It enables the patient to relax and merely express or register whatever emerges. However, what about the day or the days between the analytical sessions? What about longer interruptions that occur for various reasons? Why leave it to accident that some problem will inadvertently clarify itself? Would it not be possible to encourage the patient not only to make deliberate and accurate self-observations but also to arrive at some insight by using one’s power of reasoning? Granted it would be a hard job fraught with hazards and limitations—which will be discussed later—these difficulties should not prevent us from raising the question: is it impossible to analyze oneself? We know, particularly since Dr. Freud’s basic findings, that the task is infinitely more intricate and difficult than the ancients ever imagined—so difficult, indeed, that it is like an adventure into the unknown merely to raise the question seriously. All suggestions that say it is an easy matter to recognize oneself are an illusion. These suggestions are beliefs built on wishing thinking, and a positively harmful illusion at that. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
People who embark on that promised easy road will either acquire a false smugness, believing they know all about themselves, or will become discouraged when they are blocked by the first serious obstacle and will tend to relinquish the search for truth as a bad job. Neither result will happen so easily if one is aware that self-analysis is a strenuous, slow process, bound to be painful and upsetting at times and requiring all available constructive energies. One can free oneself from one’s difficulties only when re-experiencing one’s infantile desires, fears, and attachments in relation to the analyst; left to one’s own devices the patient could at best reach ineffective, “merely intellectual” insights. If arguments such as this were scrutinized in detail, they would ultimately boil down to a disbelief that the patient’s incentive is strong enough to enable one to overcome by oneself the obstacles littering the road to self-recognition. The patient’s incentive to arrive at some goal is an important factor in every analysis. One may safely say that an analyst cannot bring the patient any further than the patient oneself wants to go. In an analysis, however, the patient has the advantage of the analyst’s help, one’s encouragement, one’s guidance. If the patient is left to one’s own resources the matter of incentive becomes crucial—so crucial, indeed, that the feasibility of self-analysis hinges on its strength. Dr. Freud, of course, recognized that manifest gross suffering under neurotic problems may provide such an incentive. However, apparently he felt at a loss to account for an incentive if gross suffering has never existed or has disappeared during treatment. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Dr. Freud suggested that the patient’s “love” for the analyst might provide an additional incentive, provided this “love” does not aim at a concrete sexual satisfaction but is contented with receiving and utilizing the analyst’s help. This sounds plausible. We must not forget, however, that in every neurosis the ability to love is greatly impaired, and that what appears as such is mostly the result of the patient’s excessive need for affection and approval. It is true that there are patients—and I supposed Dr. Freud has them in mind—who go to considerable lengths to please the analyst, including a willingness to accept interpretations more or less uncritically and including also an attempt to show improvement. Effort of this type, however, are not prompted by “love” for the analyst, but represent the patient’s means of allaying one’s lurking fear of people and in a broader sense of one’s way of coping with life, for one feels helpless to do it in a more self-reliant manner. In consequence, this motivation to do good work depend entirely on the relation with the analyst. A soon as the patient feels rejected or criticized—as this type does easily—one will lose sight of one’s own interest, and psychoanalytical work then then becomes the battlefield for the patient’s spite and vengeance. Almost more important than the unreliability of this incentive: the analyst has to discourage it. The tendency to do things merely because someone else expects it, regardless of one’s wishes, is a considerable source of trouble to the patient; therefore it has to be analyzed, not utilized. Thus the only effective incentive that Dr. Freud rightly asserted, does not carry far because it is bound to diminish in exact proportion with a decrease of symptoms. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Still, this incentive might suffice if a removal of symptoms were the only goal of analysis. However, is it? Dr. Freud never expressed unambiguously his view of these goals. To say that a patient should become capable of work and enjoyment is not meaningful without a qualification of both capacities. Capable of routine work or of creative work? Capable of enjoying pleasures of the flesh or life in general? To say that analysis should constitute a re-education is likewise vague without an answer to the question, education for what? Probably Dr. Freud did not give this question much thought because from his earliest to his latest writings he was primarily interested in the removal of neurotic symptoms; he cared about change of personality only in so far as it would guarantee a permanent cure of symptoms. Dr. Freud’s goal is this essentially to be defined in a negative manner: gaining “freedom from.” Other authors, however, including myself, would formulate the goal of analysis in a positive way: by rendering a person free from inner bondages make one free for the development of one’s best potentialities. This may sound like a mere difference in emphasis, but, even if it were nothing but that, the different emphasis suffices to alter the matter of incentive entirely. To set the goal in the positive fashion has a realistic value if there is in the patient an incentive, sufficiently powerful to be reckoned with, to develop whatever faculties one has, to realize given potentialities, to come to grips with oneself despite all the ordeals one may have to go through at times; to put it in the simplest way possible, if there is an incentive to grow. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
When the issue is stated thus plainly it is clear that there is more involved here than a difference in emphasis, because Dr. Freud emphatically denied that such a wish exists. He even scoffed at it, as if the positing of such a wish were a sort of hollow idealism. He pointed out that urges toward self-development emanate from “narcissistic” desires, that is, they represent a tendency toward self-inflation and toward excelling others. Dr. Freud rarely made a postulate merely for the love of theoretical considerations. At bottom there was almost always some astute observation. In this instance it is the observation that tendencies toward self-aggrandizement are sometimes a forceful element in the wish for self-development. What Dr. Freud refused to recognize is that fact that this “narcissistic” element is a contributing factor only. If the need for self-aggrandizement has been analyzed and abandoned, the wish to develop still remains, yes, it emerges more clearly and powerfully than before. The “narcissistic” elements, while they have kindled the wish to grow, have at the same time hampered its realization. To use the words of a patient: “The ‘narcissistic’ impulse is toward the development of a phony self.” The fostering of this phony self is always at the expense of the real self, the latter being treated with disdain, at best like a poor relation. My experience is that the more the phony self evaporates, the more the real self becomes invested with interest and the more unbridled an incentive emerges to unfold by becoming free from internal bondage, to live as full a life as given circumstances permit. It seems to me that the wish for developing one’s energies belongs among those striving that defy further analysis. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Hospitals and clinics are stretched well beyond their capacity to treat patients who need mental health care, according to new federal data—utilizing 144 percent of impatient beds designated for psychotic treatment. How many psychiatric patients are there in the United State of America? 60 million. There are at least 1 million patients housed in public and private mental hospitals at any given time. There are approximately 350,000 new admissions annually to public institutions for custodial care of psychiatrically ill persons. Of the total number of patients admitted to state hospitals each year, nearly one third are patients who are entering such hospitals for at least the second time. Some people believe that in addition to more affordably housing units, that there also need to be assisted living units for people with severe mental disabilities because traditional employees are not trained to deal with people with mental issues as rental apartments are for self-sustained adults, it is not supposed to be an outflow for mental hospitals or jails. For some people, these affordable housing apartments could be a trap. Due to the fact that some of the staff and administrators are mentally ill and criminals, and there are deadly code violations that are ignored, this could be the first and last home for some people. Then the administrators are given an indefinite timeline to fix the danger in these apartments, and they will have the media highlight the homeless crisis, as if they are saying, “at least we got them off of the streets.” However, not all of these people came from bad situations, some came from good homes and are just starting out and did not want to make a career out of living in low-income housing. Some of these places literally abuse tenant and threaten them. Such facts impress upon us the size of the problem in respect to the sheer number of persons who require hospitalization. They imply to us the tremendous economic costs that are involved—in terms of the expense of the custody and care of the patients, and in terms of the loss to our economy entailed in their incapacitation as productive citizens. These data state clearly the position of mental illness as our nation’s paramount health problem. The facts do not and cannot convey in themselves, to even the most sensitive and imaginative of persons, the true dimensions of hurt and loss experienced by these thousands upon thousands of psychological invalids. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Statistics which are intended to bring precision to descriptive communication fail utterly when the essential subject is suffering. Human misery does not yield to quantification. One can make a census of the bodies of patients, but the psychic pain and emotional torment of one patient is not additive to that of another. When men and women are bereft of reason, tyrannized by emotion, or reduced to vegetative automatism, their summering does not permit of numeration. Really to know such suffering at all, short of experiencing it ourselves, we must see it directly. We must visit a mental hospital; we must see the faces of patient after patient; we must observe the daily routine of their mechanical existence; we must ask where they came from, how long they have been here, what tomorrow promises for them; and then, we must think that these are but a very few. These lives of monotonous melancholy and empty euphoria are multiplied one million-fold. Perhaps then we approach the true magnitude of the pathology. And if we succeed in capturing a full vision of the suffering stemming from mental disorder, it is for a brief instant only. Protective forgetting guards us from the distress of constant awareness of these isolated mentally ill ones. At home again, surrounded by the small pleasure and large pursuits of our existence, we do not remind ourselves of what we saw or thought; we do not bring up painful images of the human deprivation we observed. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television carry programs designed to inform the public with regard to the massive enigma of mental illness and to exhort our interests and efforts in campaigns to increase funds or improve facilities. Our attention may be momentarily arrested by a statement that one out of every 30 individuals who live to be 85 years of age will have spent some period of one’s life in a mental hospital, but such a statement does not nourish the persistent questioning attitude that comes through personal acquaintance with a single patient. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Suppose that an embodied will to contradiction and counternature is brough to philosophize—on what will it unleash its inner willfulness? On whatever it experiences most certainly as true, as real: it will seek error precisely where the real vital instinct finds truth most unconditionally. It will, for example, like the ascetics of Vedanta philosophy, disparage bodily being as illusion, likewise pain, plurality, the entire conceptual opposition of “subject” and “object”—errors, nothing but errors! Renouncing belief in its I, denying its own “reality”: what a triumph!—and not just over the senses, over appearances, but a far greater kind of triumph, a violation and a cruelty to reason: this lustfulness reaches its peak when the ascetic self-contempt, self-ridicule of reason decrees, “There is a realm of truth and being, but reason is barred from it!” (Incidentally, even in the Kantian concept of the “intelligible character of things” there is still a remnant of this lascivious ascetic discord that loves to turn reason against reason: “intelligible character” in Mr. Kant means a kind of constitution of things of which the intellect comprehends just this much, that it is for the intellect—utterly incomprehensible.) Finally, let us not be ungrateful we knowers, for such resolute reversals of customary perspectives and valuations with which the spirit has so wickedly and so uselessly ravaged itself for so long: to see differently like this for once, to want to see differently, is no small cultivation and preparation of the intellect for its eventual “objectivity”—the latter understood not as “disinterested contemplation” (which is incoherent and nonsense) but as the ability to hinge and unhinge and to hold sway over its pro and con, so that one knows how to make the very diversity of perspective and affective interpretations useful for knowledge. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirit,” “knowledge in itself”; for this always demands thinking of an eye that would have no direction at all, in which the active and interpretive forces—through which, after all, seeing first becomes seeing something—are to be disabled, are to be lacking; here, what is demanded of the eye is always something nonsensical and incoherent. There is only perspectival seeing, only perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we bring to expression about any one thing, the more eyes—different eyes—we know how to bring to bear on the same thing, the more complete will be our “concept” of that thing, our “objectivity.” To eliminate will altogether, though, to suspend the affects, one and all, supposing we could do it—what would that not mean castrating the intellect? May the day soon dawn, we pray, that day of liberty, when every shackle forged by man is loosed to set one free, when serfdom’s yoke is broken, every politician and TV news media person is humbled low, when humans shall take their brother’s hand and lovingkindness show, and all are free to worship Thee and to Thy Law adhere. Then nevermore the wanderer’s staff, and nevermore the sowrd, o may we never weary grown and may we never cease to work for such a blessed World where humans shall be at peace. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation under God with liberty and justice for all. May we always know the sweet delights of liberty. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Dining rooms are perhaps the best evidence of the revolution that took place in society in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution not only made all the furniture, dishes, and silver plate possible, but also created a new class of people to use them. Early in the nineteenth century, the existence of a dining room at all was the mark of gentry. Ordinary folk cooked and ate and lived in all-purpose rooms. The landed gentry of the South and the merchant shippers of the North might boast a separate room just for eating, but they represented only a very call part of the population. By 1860, a separate dining room was considered de rigueur for even a cottage, and eating “in the kitchen” was thought of as rustic and rude. Middle-class people could even aspire to a sideboard in the dining room, by far the most expensive piece of furniture in the house.
In the Venetian Dining Room at the Winchester Mystery House, there have been reports of an unusual figure. It is described as resembling a tall man in a hat, and his presence was attested by numerous letters written to the estate complimenting them on the authentic ghost. Here are some of the extracts from a range of correspondence: “My husband spotted a most unusual form about a year ago. It just seemed to glide across the floor. I am glad someone else has spotted it.” “To my understanding the ghost always takes the form of a pale figure and has been appearing for several years.” “Suddenly from the corner of my eye, I saw something move which seemed to be walking towards us from the table, and sent us running into the gift shop as fast as we could.” “My advice is to avoid the Winchester Mystery House during dark evenings, if at all possible.”
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A Voice from Other Epochs Belongs in a Graveyard of Other Epochs
The journey to Llanada Villa was most pleasant, the sky overhead stacked with high white clouds and the plains themselves covered with beautiful woodland and fine colonial dwellings, many surrounded by flowers, and the evergreen trees which grow here in abundance. I do not think you can imagine the lushness of this landscape, for the tenderest blooms grow here in wild profusion all year round. Great forests of redwood trees rise up everywhere. And so do giant yellow daisies upon the trunks which grow as high as the trees. No less enchanting were the sudden glimpses of the distant green mountains. If there are any mountains in Ireland as green as these, I have never beheld them, and when it is seen at twilight, it is most spectacular. On the road I also passed two Victorian Houses, very pleasing structures, set back from the road behind great gardens. And also, just beside a small pond, a graveyard laid out with fine marble monuments inscribed with German names. My senses were lulled by the beauties I saw on this journey, and by the heavy moist twilight, and by the long stretch of tended fields and the sudden spectacle of Llanada Villa, grander than any one could behold. Llanada Villa is a Grand Queen Anne Victorian mansion, and by that I mean it has a great pitched roof, with several towers, and many domers, and beneath there are proches stretching the length of it, supported by wooden columns. My mansion has more windows than the tallest high buildings in New York and are decorated with gorgeous wooden shutters which can be bolted both against enemy attack and against storms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
A heady profusion of light came from my home as we approached. The stables and other offices were concealed by trees The mature couple who had been engaged to act at butler and cook-housekeeper were waiting inside the front door, and opened at I approached. Their name was Strauch; they gave a very favourable impression. The large rooms on the ground floor of Llanada Villa were satisfactory, especially the library, which was as large as The Venetian Dining-Room, and three tall windows facing east. The guests often contemplated and enjoyed the shiny portrait of my husband William which adorned the drawing-room. Some ancient sepulchral reliefs were built into the wall, and about it all was a pleasant flavour of the grand tour. While the Sun was bright, I went merrily on, and without any difficulty reached the heart of the Labyrinth and got the jewel William had left for me, and set out on my way back rejoicing: but as the night fell, wherein all the beast of the mansion do move, I begun to be sensible of some creature keeping pace with me and, as thought, peering and looking upon me from the next hallway; and when I should stop, this companion would top also, which put me in some disorder of my spirits. And, indeed, as the darkness increased, it seemed to me that there was more than one, and, it might be, even a whole band of such followers; at least so I judged by the rustling and creaking that they kept amongst the floors; besides that there would be at a time a sound of whispering, which seemed to import a conference among them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
Gradually the light faded, the hall grew darker—as something huge had come up behind me. However, in regard of who they were or what form they were of, I would not be persuaded to say what I thought. As I swung around quickly, there was nothing there. I drew a deep breath. It must have been just a cloud passing across the moon. But then The Door to Nowhere, all by itself opened. And before I could stop it, it closed with a bang. And it was then, as I was running out of the room, that I saw the ghost. It behaved just as you would expect a ghost to behave. It was a tall, dim, white figures, and it came gliding slowly toward me. I gave a yell, and tore down the stairs. I did not stop until I was in the morning room on the first floor. About Midnight (so far as I could judge) I heard my named called from along way off, and I would have sworn it was William that so called me. I stood still and listed at the pitch of his voice, and I supposed that the echo, or the noise of call, disguised for the moment any lesser sound; because, when there fell a stillness again, I distinguished a trampling (not loud) of running feet coming very close behind me, wherewith I was so daunted that I set off to run, and I continued running through the maze until the dawn broke. Sometimes when my breath failed me, I would cast myself flat on my face, and hope that my pursuers might over-run me in the darkness, but at such a time they would regularly make a pause, and I could hear them pant and snuff as it had been a hound at fault’ which wrought in me so extreme an horrour of mind, that I would be forced to betake myself again to turning and doubling, if by any means I might throw them off the scent. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
And, as if this exertion was in itself not terrible enough, I had before me the constant fear of falling into a trap, of which I had heard, and indeed seen with my own eyes that there were several, some at the sides and other in the midst of the hallways. So that in fine a more dreadful night was never spent by a mortal than that I had endured in my Labrinth; and not that jewel which I had from my beloved in my hand, nor the riches from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, could be a sufficient recompence to me for the pain I had suffered. Then as I made my way cautiously over the great floor, there came a sight which for the time excluded all other matters. There was the apparition of a child, wandering about the rooms moaning, and, strange to say, with the palms of his hands turned outwards. And just as I got over my fright, the boy floated over to the door and went right through the keyhole, the way water goes down the drain. Then he came back the same way. The ghost screamed for a while down in the cellar. I wandered through the house for nearly half an hour before finding myself in the kitchen. It was almost like a tunnel in the murky light of the gathering storm. Somebody had been eating a meal. I picked up a cup half-filled with coffee. The coffee was still warm. Whoever it was got out of here in a hurry, too. Knocked over the chair for being in such a rush. And threw a napkin on the floor. Suddenly I heard the violent slamming of doors. Somebody or something was moving through the mansion close behind me, stomping on the floors, charging through rooms. A little startled, I shouted. There was no answer. “Funny,” I said. “There certainly must be somebody there.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
Then the rain fell suddenly, like a torrent, hitting the roof and windows like tiny pellets. Some feeling of anxiety came upon me; and it grew stronger and stronger—horrour lest something might emerge before me, and a really agonizing conviction that a terror was on its war, from the sight of which I would not be able to escape. Oh yes, somewhere there was a movement in the mansion. Nearer and nearer it came, and it was of a blackish-grey colour with more than one dark hole. It took shape as a face – a human face – a burnt human face: and with the odious writhings of a wasp creeping out of a rotten apple there clambered forth an appearance of a form, waving black arms prepared to clasp the head that was bending over them. With a convulsion of despair I threw myself back, struck my head against a hanging lamp, and fell. There was concussion of the brain, shock to the system, and a long confinement to bed. Dr. Wayland was badly puzzled, not by the symptoms, but by a request which I made to him as soon as I was able to me. “I was to build another Ball Room.” I muttered and turned over to sleep, and the doctor intimated to the nurses that the patient was not out of the wood yet. When I was better to express my views, I made my meaning clear, and received a promise that the additional to the house should be done at once. When I awoke, I was glad to find that the servant had remembered to leave my curtains undrawn and my widows open. I went to the window which commanded a view of the garden. It was a brilliant sunlit morning. It a few weeks’ time the sonorous winds of autumn would break up all this calm. However, now the distant woods were in a deep stillness; the slopes of the lawns were shinning with dew; the colours of some flowers could almost be guessed. The light of the sun just caught the cornice of the observational tower and the peak of its dome, and I admired this real beauty. As I turned from the window, I felt that I had never seen anything more complete of its sort. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
The Curse of the Winchester Fortune is viewed by a joke by some, but the tragic events that Mrs. Winchester and a family suffered prove otherwise. Curses are real. There is a curse attached to Queen of the Damned as well, a 2001 film by Anne Rice Starring Aaliyah and Stuart Towsend. Queen of the Damned almost did not get cast. But is the role of a Queen not a role actors die for? Not if the movie is cursed, it seems. Aaliayh initially turned down the starring role. She was busy with her music career and did not have the time. Producers had seen her videos and told her that they would be willing to work around her schedule and that if she did not accept the role, they would not make the movie. However, even after accepting the role, the movie almost did not get maid. When is house was broken into, a producer broke his ribs, which punctured his lungs; an editor fell off the balcony and broke his leg; a cameraman fell down a flight of stairs fracturing his skull and severed a finger. After a freak accident on set, an experienced stuntman suffered multiple fractures, internal injuries and hemorrhaged for several days. Another stuntman was sliced on his throat when the stage exposed causing him to lose a lot of blood. A plane Aaliyah was flying on malfunctioned in 2001 killing several passengers and Aaliyah before the movie was completed. Even Stuart Townsend said the curse came between him and his wife. A curse is like a recipe. Read and reread it until you understand it. The film was thought to be cursed because producers wanted the movie to be authentic and some of the props were bought on the black market from an ancient burial tomb that was unearthed in 1827. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
After the filmed was released, it was later discovered that some of the antiquities were real, and were traced back to a string of deaths in 1858. Many of the tombs bore hieroglyphic inscriptions on sealed outer doors that were believed to be curses making all kinds of threats, seemingly with no moral boundaries. The phrasing and location of the tomb inscription was meant to strike terror into the heart of any potential tomb raider. One curse that seems to cover all eventualities comes from the administrator of the 18th dynasty, Amenhotep, the son of Hapu. He threatens anyone who would damage his tomb with a comprehensive list of punishments. They would: Lose their Earthly possessions and honours, be incinerated in a furnace in execration rites, capsize and drown at sea, have no successors, receive no tomb or funerary offerings of their own, and their bodies would decay because they will starve without sustenance and their bones will perish. I conjure thee, Lucifer. Come, therefore, promptly, obey my will, appear and as for anyone who shall lay a finger on this pyramid and this temple which belong to me, one will have laid one’s finger on the Mansion of Harris…one’s affair will be judged by the Ennead and one will be nowhere and one’s house will be nowhere; one will be one proscribed, one who eats oneself. As for every mayor, every wab-priest, every scribe and every nobleman who shall take from the statue, his arm shall be cut off like that of this bull, his neck shall be twisted off like that of this bird, his office shall not exist, the position of his son shall not exist, his house shall not exist in the World, his tomb shall not exist in the necropolis, his god shall not accept his white bread, his flesh shall belong to the fire, his children shall belong to the fire, his corpse shall not be to the ground, I shall be against him as a crocodile on the water, as a serpent on Earth and as an enemy in the necropolis. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
He who trespasses upon my property or who shall injure my tomb drag out my body, or injure my carriage, the sun god shall punish him. He shall not bequeath his goods to his children; his heart shall not have pleasure in life; he shall not receive water in the tomb; and his soul shall be destroyed forever. As to anyone who violates my body which is in the tomb and who shall remove my image from my tomb, he shall be hateful to the gods, and he shall not receive water on the altar of Osiris. I conjure thee, Lucifer, and constrain thee, in like manner, by the Most Holy Names of God, ELOY, ADONAY, ELOY, AGLA, SAMALABACTAY, which are written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; by all the sacraments, by all the names written in this book; and by him who drove thee from the highest height of Heaven. I conjure and command thee by the virtue of the Most Holy Eucharist, which hath redeemed men from their sins; I conjure thee to come without any delay, to do and perform all my biddings, without any prejudice to my body or soul, without harming my book, or doing injury to those that accompany me. Oybarhtoaz mepsa-tvrua mear mehsema meteahsxravh ansay atavnurus iszay met acahgnaneravh ayar eha aceravh acmehgnam eratna methsihav manarhdexah itas tay acmerhdexah iazay hsitioayoag-uruov oy orhtim manavead itiap ehderemak metxivvinuh merzav iazay menamhsac-eraveab mehsoag-argnazah mitioayoag-uruov merhtim iazay mepsa -tavrua mear mehsema tay eravh etiazay oy acayhteag atazay acavayniam epsiv itieyavanhsex menavru moah etiazay etneps ehsema etiazay madzam meruha etiazay. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
In 1890, Mrs. Winchester’s mansion had been vandalized. There were once tiles inside of the mansion, lettered, and the letters, taken in the right order, formed an inscription—what it was I forget—something about Theseus and Ariadne. There was, however, a copy of it, as well as the plan of the labyrinth itself. When Mrs. Winchester’s niece Diasy saw the damage, she said to her aunt Sarah, “How people can do such things! I shall never forgive you if you injure your maze. Do you know, they’re becoming very uncommon?” Although a huge portion of the mansion was destroyed, and the nine story Observational Tower was removed, much of the mansion still remains with 160 rooms and four stories. It once contained as many as 600 rooms. However, one of the oddest things in the whole series of transaction is that the book which contained blueprints and photos has entirely disappeared. Caretakers have never been able to find it. Some believe it may have been sold at auction and would be priceless. If it still exists, it is probably sitting in someone’s attic somewhere.
It is sometimes said that ghosts, or phantoms, may often walk unknown among the living. The supposition here must be that the ghosts of the dead are sometimes indistinguishable from “real” people. How many do we pass in the course of the day in the mansion? There is an intriguing account of a figure in a wide-brimmed hat standing at the counter in Sarah’s Café in what seemed to be seventeenth-century clothes. He then disappeared. He was seen again walking down Winchester Boulevard where no one seemed to notice him, and though he did not appear to take any deliberate avoiding action, he never seemed to get in anyone’s way or to bump into anyone. Muffled sounds float from the recesses of the basement and cause people to read into every wind-howl they hear. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As it is, however, the noise shatters all profoundly seated adjustment—all tacit acceptance that the inner mansion is utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of supernatural life as the sterile disc of the moon has evoked a monstrous response from the spirits.
A house built for uniform lifelessness has sometimes opened new and unexplored tunnels on the basement levels. There have been reports that in the basement a large pyramidal structure is accessible and it is remarkably well preserved. Along the path, there have been reports of a bulky white shape looming up ahead, which causes people to turned their minds from earlier fears of what might lurk near. Caretakes have found supplies of others in a great circular place that they must have planned to return after their scouting trip into the abyss. The white, waddling thing is fully six feet high and invokes a primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of any reasoned fear. A farmer pointed it out. “Folks that go in there after dark,” he said, “well, they usually don’t ever come out again. After the passing of Mrs. Winchester, Winchester Repeating Arms Company rented the mansion out three times, but every family had moved out within a week. They said the things that went on there were just too queer. So nobody would live in it. That is when they opened the house for tours.
While a number of people were looking at the statue of Hebe, no one had told them anything untoward about Hebe and Demiter, and they had no idea at the time of their fearsome reputations, they were just amazing statues. There were about seven people looking at Hebe when they heard a griding creaking sound coming from within the mansion. They all took a step back fearing an earthquake and that debris might fall on them. The noise continued for a few more moments, and they all had their eyes transfixed on the statue. Then it moved, just slightly initially, but its head definitely moved. Then its arm extended outward towards them, right where they stood. The arm appeared to extend forward, moving closer to them, and as it did so its head moved It was one of those occasion when one thinks someone was playing a practical joke on them, but they were not certain. They all laughed nervously, and then it moved again, this time they all screamed out in terror. One woman was screaming, “It’s alive, it’s alive!” Two officials came over to them and asked what had happen, so they told them, expecting them to dismiss their claims. They did not. Instead, they asked them to leave the area and join a complementary mansion tour. They no longer allowed guests to take photographs after this happened.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
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In the Long Run We are All Dead
As Mr. Keynes once remarked, “In the long run we are all dead,” and, as the line in the ballad says, everything is born to die. Repeated shocks will give you anxiety, and anxiety is the enemy of identity, and without identity there is no serenity. Some people can make money in the market by anticipating the business cycle. The great mature American companies do not increase their profits every year. When business is good, they make a lot of money, and when it is not so good, they make less. How well this game is played depends on perspicacity in evaluating economic intelligence. Let us say that we have had two disappointing automobile years. By determining the scrappage rates, the average age of cars on the road, the disposable personal income, the number of new buyers coming into certain age brackets, the average length of credit paper outstanding on existing cars, and a few other factors, we can have a pretty good guess that next year may be better for automobiles if the economy turns up or holds up. Some people can make money by anticipating the swings in interest rates. There is a whole group of sticks which are sensitive to fluctuations in the bond markers and to the course taken by the Federal Reserve, in which you anticipate whether money is getting cheaper or dearer. Nice profits can be made in bank stocks, finance company stocks, savings and loans, and utilities by those whose fingertips are sensitive to this sort of thing. The swings in these stocks are frequently greater than those in the base companies which are so thoroughly a part of the business cycle, but you have to know not only the anticipated actions of interest rates but the degree to which these moves have been discounted. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Speaking of World changing events, the possibility of a humanly meaningful survival after a nuclear war are remote. Yet a dependence on deterrence for safeguarding peace rests, at the very best, on guesses and nothing more. Thre is a conviction that the continuation of the arms race will inevitably doom humanity is bound to produce pressures for unilateral disarmament and therefore remove any incentive for serious negotiations on the part of the Communists. First, facts are facts; if one is convinced—as a great number of experts are—that nuclear war would doom us, how can one not have an attitude of despair if negotiations to end the arms race fail? Some believe that the answer is for universal controlled disarmament, and not for unilateral disarmament. A faction of Americans are proponents of multilateral disarmament. People around the World realize that war would be a calamity for all the peoples of the World. Imagine what will happen when bombs begin to explode over cities. These bombs will not distinguish between Communists and non-Communists….No, everything alive can be wiped out in the conflagration of nuclear explosions. It is believed by some that only an unreasonable person can be fearless of war in our day. However, has anyone one every consider that perhaps reasonable people want the conflict to stop and at any cost? Even God was tired of the sinful nature of life on Earth when he flooded the planet. One cannot say that God is unreasonable. It takes a being with great wisdom and maturity to create a World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Now, the idea of universal, unilateral disarmament is often confused with that of arms control. “Arms control” is considered by many to be the first step to disarmament, and if this were the essential function of arms control, there would be no serious objection to it. However, the fact is that most of the arms control theorists do not look at it as a real step to universal disarmament but as a substitute for disarmament. Actually, arms control can be viewed as being related to the strategy of the invulnerable deterrent. Once both sides are invulnerable, it is in the interests of both to limit stockpiles and to keep other countries from obtaining atomic weapons. Yet for the military thinkers, proposals for even such modest arms control are made not without qualms. Moreover, a feeling of despair should arms control prove unattainable would also be factually wrong. Without arms control stability will be more difficult to achieve. However, if can probably be achieved even then. In the equation of retaliatory forces, advances in mobility will probably promote a degree of invulnerability even without a negotiated agreement. It is clear that most military experts see arms control as part of a theory of armament, not disarmament. In terms of the dangers of war, arms control represents defeatism and the full acceptance of the risks of total way, even though most of the arms control theorists, like Mr. Morgenstern, recognize that there can be no victors, perhaps few survivours, if the deterrent fails. In terms of national policy and its effect on the American people, the arguments for arms control aim toward another result, that of lulling us into a feeling of false security. A feeling of despair should arms control fail, we are told, would be “factually wrong.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
As we have seen, to work at all, arms control-like the invulnerable deterrent—demands that we and our opponents act with a super-rationality, as though we were in a game. As one of the leading arms control theorists, Thomas Schelling, put it: “Threats and responses to threats, reprisals and counter-reprisals, limited war, arms races, brinkmanship, surprise attack, trusting, and cheating can be viewed either cool-headed. Rather it is asserted that the assumption of rational behaviour is a productive one in the generation of systematic theory. If the behaviour were actually cool-headed, valid and relevant theory would probably be easier to create than it actually is. If we view our results as a bench mark for further approximation to reality, not as a fully adequate theory, we should manage to protect ourselves from the worst results of biased theory. Arms control and strategic actions can be analyzed from the model of games, even though there are differences between games and these situations. It is the very nature of a game that each player, while one likes to win, is willing to accept the possibility of losing with equanimity; the loss is, by the very nature of the game, easily bearable, and far from being a threat to the existence of the players. The very thrill of the game lies, in fact, in the possibility of losing without having to fear that the loss will be devastating. If I were to put my entire future on a throw of the dice, or on the turn of a roulette wheel, I would not be playing a game—I would be a desperate man. For this very reason, the game theory can be satisfied with calculations that require plausibilities, probabilities, reasonable guesses. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In matters of life and death, whether it is medicine or peace, one can not rely on guesses, because the consequences are too serious. The premise here is the very contrary to that of the game theory, namely that loss (which means an all-destructive war) is unacceptable, hence, here the game theory is not applicable. However, even in the unlikely case that the continuation of the arms race, controlled or not, could prevent a nuclear war within the next five years, what is the like future of the social character of humans in a bilateral or multilateral armed World, where, no matter how complex the problems or how full the satisfactions of any particular society, the biggest and most pervasive reality in any humans’ life is the poised missile, the humming data processor connected to it, the waiting radiation counters, and seismographs, the over-all technocratic perfection (overlying the nagging but impotent fear of its imperfection) of the mechanism of holocaust? To live for any length of time under the constant threat of destruction creates certain psychological effects in most human beings—fright, hostility, callousness, a hardening of the heart, and a resulting indifference to all the values we cherish. Such conditions will transform us into barbarians—though barbarians equipped with the most complicated machines. If we are serious in claiming that our aim is to preserve freedom (that is, to prevent the subordination of the individual under an all-powerful state), we must admit that this freedom will be lost, whether the deterrent works or does not work. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
A similar idea is expressed by Charles E. Osgood. “I have come to the somber conclusion,” Mr. Osgood writes, “that we would not be able to maintain a favorable position in this race without giving up our way of life as rapidly as possible. Then we could be able to channel the energies of our people into military preparation, order our young people into training in the physical sciences, and make decisions and changes in strategy without democratic processes.” George Kennan has expressed his ideas about the results of the continuation of the arms race in his Reith Lectures delivered over the BBC in England. “But beyond this,” Mr. Kennan states, “what sort of a life is it to which these devotees of the weapons race would see us condemned? The technological realities of this competition are constantly changing from month to month and from year to years. Are we to flee like haunted creatures from one defensive device to another, each more costly and humiliating than the one before, cowering underground one day, breaking up our cities the next, attempting to surround ourselves with elaborate electronic shields on the third, concerned only to prolong the length of our lives while sacrificing all the values for which it might be worth while to live at all? If I thought that this was the best the future held for us, I should be tempted to join those who say ‘Let us divest ourselves of this weapon altogether; let us stake our safety on God’s grace and our own good consciences and on that measure of commonsense and humanity which even our adversaries possess; but then let us at least walk like men, with our heads up, so long as we are permitted to walk at all.’ #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
“We must not forget that this is actually the situation in which many of the peoples of this World are obliged to live today; an while I would not wish to say that they are now more secure than we are, for the fact that they do not hold these weapons, I would submit that they are more secure than we would be if we were to resign ourselves entirely to the negative dynamics of the weapons race, as many would have us do. The beginning of understanding rests, in this appalling problem, with the recognition that the weapon of mass destruction is a sterile and hopeless weapon which may for a time serve as an answer of sorts to itself and as an uncertain sort of shield against utter cataclysm, but which can not in any way serve the purposes of a constructive and hopeful foreign policy. The true end of political actions is, after all, to affect the deeper convictions of men; this weapon renders it unsuitable both as a sanction of diplomacy and as the basis of an alliance. Such a weapon is simply not one with which one can usefully support political desiderata; nor is it one with which one readily springs to the defense of one’s friends. There can be no coherent relations between such weapons and the normal objects of national policy. A defense posture built around a weapon suicidal in its implications can serve in the long run only to paralyze national policy, to undermine alliances, and to drive everyone deeper and deeper into the hopeless exertions of the weapons race.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
It is true that the aim of universal controlled disarmament is exceedingly difficult to reach; maybe it is unrealistic, as its opponents say. However, to believe that a strategy of mutual threats with ever-more destructive weapons can, in the long run, prevent a nuclear war, and that a society following this road could preserve its democratic character, is a great deal more unrealistic. It is, indeed, one of the irrationalities of human nature that we are prone to seek for easier, short-term solutions because we are afraid of the difficulties of the fundamental and real solution. However, individual or in social life, it is the logic of facts that determines reality, not the logic of wishful thinking. People say that those who are pro war are necrophilous. However, often the only way to achieve peace is war. Many times, the necrophilous orientation is in conflict with opposite tendencies, so that a peculiar balance is achieved. An outstanding example of this type of necrophilous character was C.G. Jung. In his posthumously published autobiography, he gives ample evidence for this. His dreams are mostly filled with corpses, blood, killings. As a typical manifestation of his necrophilous orientation in real life, I will mention the following: While Dr. Jung’s house in Bollingen was being built, the corpse of a French soldier was found who had been drowned 150 years earlier at the time when Napoleon invaded Switzerland. Dr. Jung took a picture of the corpse and hung it on his wall. He buried him and fired three shots over his grave as a military salute. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
On the surface this action may appear slightly odd but otherwise as not having any significance. Yet it is one of those many “insignificant” actions which express an underlying orientation more clearly than the intentional, important acts do. Dr. Freud himself noticed Dr. Jung’s death orientation many years earlier. When he and Dr. Jung were embarking for the United States of America, Dr. Jung spoke a great deal about the well-preserved corpses which had been found in the marshes near Hamburg. Dr. Freud disliked this kind of talk, and told Dr. Jung that he spoke so much of the corpses because unconsciously he was filled with death wishes against him (Dr. Freud). Dr. Jung denied this indignantly, yet some years later, around the time of his separation from Dr. Freud, he had the following dream. He felt that he (together with a black native) had to kill Siegfried. He went out with a rifle, and when Siegfried appeared on the crest of a mountain he killed him. He then felt horror-stricken and frightened that his crime might be discovered. However, fortunately a heavy rain fell which washed away all traces of the crime. Dr. Jung woke up thinking that he must kill himself unless he could understand the dream. After some thought he came to the following “understanding”: killing Siegfried means killing the hero within himself, and thus expressing his own humility. The slight change from Sigmund to Siegfried was enough to enable a man whose great skill was the interpretation of dreams, to hide the real meaning of this dream from himself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
If one asks oneself the question how such intense repression is possible, the answers is that the dream was a manifestation of his necrophilous orientation, and since this entire orientation was intensely repressed, Dr. Jung could not afford to be aware of the meaning of this dream. It fits into the picture that Dr. Jung was fascinated by the past, and rarely by the present and the future; that stones were his favourite material, and that as a child he had a fantasy about God dropping a big turd on a church and thus destroying it. His sympathies for Mr. Hitler and his racial theories are another expression of his affinity with death-loving people. However, Dr. Jung was an unusually creative person, and creation is the very opposite of necrophilia. He solved the conflict within himself by balancing his destructive powers against his wish and ability to cure, and by making his interest in the past, in death and destruction, the subject matter of his brilliant speculations. It is true that divergent features manifest in the necrophilous person, such as the wish to kill, the worship of force, the attraction to death and dirt, sadism, the wish to transform the organic into the inorganic through “order,” are all part of the same basic orientation. Yet as far as individuals are concerned, there are considerable differences with regard to the strength of these respective trends. Any one of the features mentioned here may be more pronounced in one person than in another; furthermore, the degree to which a person is necrophilous in comparison with his biophilous aspects, and finally the degree to which a person is aware of the necrophilous tendencies or rationalizes them, varies considerably from person to person. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Yet the concept of the necrophilous type is by no means an abstraction or summary of various disparate behaviour trends. Necrophilia constitutes a fundamental orientation; it is the one answer to life which is in complete opposition to life; it is the most morbid and the most dangerous among the orientations to life of which humans are capable. It is the true perversion: while being alive, not life but death is loved; not growth but destruction. If one dares to be aware of what one feels the necrophilous person expresses the motto of his life when he says, “Long live death!” Now, if the believer in the slightest degree is tempted to treat sin lightly, or attribute it to evil spirits when it is from oneself, one is equally on false ground, and lays oneself open to the old fallen nature regaining mastery over one with redoubled force. The warfare against the Ultimate Negative must be accomplished with a vigorous, unflinching warfare against sin. Any known sin must not be tolerated for a moment. Whether it be from the fallen nature of from evil spirits forcing it into the human, it must be cast off and put away, on the basis of Romans 6.6 and 12. Two misconceptions which give great advantage to the watching enemy are the thoughts in many believers’ minds that if a Christian commits sin one will at once know it oneself, or that God will tell one. They therefore expect God to tell them when they are right or wrong, instead of seeking light and knowledge according to John 3.21. Believers seeking victor over all the deceptions of the enemy must take an active part in dealing with sin. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Based upon wrong conception of “death,” they may have thought that God would remove sin out of their lives for them—with the result that they have failed actively to co-work with Him in dealing with evil within and in their environment: in others and in the World. For a life perpetual victory over the Ultimate Negative as Accuser, it is very important that the believer should understand and detect any inconsistency between the attitude of the will and the actions in one’s life. One should judge oneself from one’s actions as well as from one’s will and motives. For instance, a person is charged with doing a certain thing, which one at once denies, because the action does not agree with one’s will-attitude; and therefore, one says, it is impossible that one should have acted or spoken in the way stated. The believer is judging oneself by one’s own actions as well as by one’s will (1 Corinthians 11.31). On the Godward side, the cleansing power of the blood of Christ (1 John 1.7) is needed continuously for those who seek to walk in the light, cleansing themselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God (a Corinthians 7.1). The Ultimate Negative as an accuser also works indirectly through others, inciting them to make accusations which one wants the human to accept as true, and thus open the door to the Ultimate Negative to make them true. Or one accused the believer to others by “visions” or “revelations” about one, which cause them to misjudge one. In any case, whatever may come to the believer from human or the Ultimate Negative, LET ONE MAKE USE OF IT FOR PRAYER, and by prayer turn all accusations into steps to victory. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The non-historical presupposed that the running ahead of historical time has no aim either within or above history, but that history is the place in which individual beings live their lives unaware of an eternal telos of their personal lives. This non-historical view appears in several versions: the tragic, the mystical, and the mechanistic. The tragic interpretation is best exemplified by the Greek view of history as an eternal cycle of genesis, greatness, and decay. The whole cycle is determined by fate, and there is no hope of an ultimate fulfilment. The mystical interpretation is more common to the East. It affirms that one must live in history, but that history itself is barren, its ambiguities unconquerable, and its motion aimless. Consequently, although characterized by a deep compassion for the universality of suffering, it retreats from a reality which it feels powerless to transform. By mystical union with the ultimate it overcomes not reality, but is own involvement in reality. The last version of non-historical interpretations is the mechanistic, a kind of “reductionistic naturalism.” Physical time is more important to it than historical time, and it ambitions to control nature through science and technology. History is the story of humans, but humans are merely the supreme challenge to its power of control. Positive, Historical Interpretations: The historical interpretation of history as opposed to the non-historical asserts that history is running toward an end which is fulfilled within history itself. It, too, comes in three versions: the progressivistic, the utopian, and the transcendental. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The symbol of progress includes the decisive element of historical time, its running ahead toward an aim. Thus it interprets history in a genuinely historical way. However, progressivism as the belief in progress as progress without a definite end is the product of certain nineteenth-century philosophies. Its inadequacy was swiftly revealed by the World tragedies of the twentieth century, by the emphasis upon existential meaninglessness, and by insights into the non-progressive nature of freedom which begins anew in every individual. The second inadequate historical interpretation is utopianism. It is progressivism with a definite aim: arrival at that stage of history in which the ambiguities of life are conquered. Utopianism was a child of the Renaissance, but it has been adopted by revolutionary movements up to the present day. Its fatal error is demonization that ends in idolatry, for it gives the quality of ultimacy to something preliminary. A future historical situation, by the very fact that it is historical, that is, within history, remains conditioned, and hence cannot assume the dignity of the unconditional. The transcendental type is found in historical interpretation in the early church up to Augustine and in orthodox Lutheranism. According to the transcendental view, once saving revelation appears in history, nothing new can be expected until the afterlife. The difficulty with this interpretation is that salvation is for the individual alone, and the political aspect of the history-bearing group is completely ignored. Moreover, it considers the end of history as a static supranatural order into which individuals enter after their death, thus effectively severing culture as well as nature from the fulfilling process of history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
We simply have no organ for knowing, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or imagine) just as much as maybe useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called “utility” is the end only a faith, something imagined, and perhaps precisely the most disastrous stupidity that will one day do us in. Our new “infinite.” –How far the perspectival character of existence extends, or even whether it has any other character; whether an existence without interpretation, without “sense,” does not become “nonsense”; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially an interpreting existence—that cannot be decided, even by the most industrious and scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect: for in that very analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself under its perspectival forms, and only in them. We cannot see around our own corner—it I a hopeless curiosity to want to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there could be: for example, whether some creature can experience time backward, or alternatively forward and backward (which would be given along with another direction of life and another concept of cause and effect). However, today, I think, we are at least beyond the laughable immodesty of decreeing from our corner that one is allowed perspectives only from our corner. The World has instead become “infinite” for us once again inasmuch as we cannot deny the possibility that it includes in itself infinite interpretations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Once again the great shiver goes down our spine—but who would want to go on to deify this monstrosity of an unknown World in the same old way? And henceforth worship the unknown as “The Unknown”? Oh, there are too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation bound up with this unknown, too much devilry, stupidity, foolishness of interpretation—our own human, even all too human foolishness, which we know. The Kingdom of God has a double character: It has an inner-historical and a transhistorical side. As inner-historical, it participates in the dynamics of history; as transhistorical, it answers the question implied in the ambiguities of the dynamics of history. The Kingdom of God, thus conceived, has for connotations which render it an apt symbol for the aim of history. First, it is political and so corresponds to the political character of history-bearing groups; but it is also transformed into a cosmic symbol by the extension of the ruling power of God. Secondly, “Kingdom” has a social connotation of peace and justice, thus meets legitimate utopian expectations. However, it is also “of God,” and with this addition the impossibility of an Earthly fulfilment is implicitly acknowledged. Thirdly, there is the personalistic connotation, for in the Kingdom of God no individual is obliterated by identity with the ultimate, but humanity is fulfilled in every human being. Lastly, the Kingdom of God is universal in that it embraces all realms of finite being according to the multidimensional unity of life. In the New Testament the “transcendent-universal” aspects emerges more clearly as a political vision is replaced by a cosmic vision that will be realized not by historical developments, but by divine interference. In a word, the Kingdom of God is both in history and above history. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Victorians were not so many years removed from manual farm labour that they did not realize they were getting out of shape. They threw themselves into exercise body and soul. However, throughout the nineteenth century, many men and women prized pale, unburned skin. During the very late nineteenth century, there even arose a fashion for taking a particular poison (which I shall not name). Small quantities of the poison would not kill the fashionable young woman but would give her complexion a refined, blue-white pallor that simply reeked of class. For women in the 1840s and ‘50s, the Greek mode was widely favoured. A slight figure with a small bosom and narrow hips was considered very elegant. Hair parted in the center and worn close to the head forming curls or flaps in the back was the latest in Grecian fashion. Empire-waisted dresses were light, sometimes to the point of transparency, and necklines could be very low.
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Who Should be Hurt, Who Should be Blamed, Who Should be Hurt, Will We Remain?
In the second half of the fifteenth century, ambitious monarchs coming to power in France, England, and Spain sought social order and political stability in their kingdoms. Louis XI in France, Henry VII in England, Isabella of Castile, and Ferdinand of Aragon all created armies and bureaucratic state machinery strong enough to quell internal conflict, such as the English War of the Roses, and to raise taxes sufficient to support their regimes. In these countries, and in Portugal as well, economic revival and the reversal of more than a century of population decline civil disorder nourished the impulse to expand beyond known frontiers. This impulse was also fed by Renaissance culture. Ushering in a new, more secular age, the Renaissance (Rebirth) encouraged freedom of thought, richness of expression, and an emphasis on human abilities. Beginning in Italy and spreading northward through Europe, the Renaissance peaked dramatically in the late fifteenth century when the age of exploration began. The exploratory urge had two initial objectives: to circumvent Muslim traders by finding an eastward oceanic route to Asia and to tap the African gold trade at its source. Since the tenth century, Muslim middlemen in North Africa had brought the precious metal to Europe from Guinea. Now the possibility arose of bypassing these non-Christian traffickers. Likewise, Christian Europeans dreamed of eliminating Muslim traders from the commerce with Asia. Since 1291, when Marco Polo returned to Venice with tales of Eastern treasures—spices, silks, perfumes, drugs, and jewels—Europeans had bartered with Asia. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
However, the difficulties of the long eastward overland route through the Muslim World kept alive the hope of Christian Europeans that an alternative water route existed. Eventually, Europe’s mariners would find that they could voyage to Cathay by both eastward and westward water routes, but this took two more centuries to discover. In the meantime, what are some ways that the Christians could avoid war with the Muslims? One way is deterrence. To be effective, deterrence has four requirements: The implementation of the deterrent threat must be sufficiently credible to preclude its being taken as a bluff. The potential aggressor must understand the decision to resist attack or pressure. The opponent must be rational, id est, one must respond to one’s self-interest in a manner which is predictable. In weighing one’s self-interest, the potential aggressor must reach the conclusion the “deterrer” is seeking to induce. In other words, the penalties of aggression must outweigh its benefits. They key concept here is one that assumes rationality on the part of both opponents. The proponents of the invulnerable deterrent must propose this, for where there is the possibility of such destruction, the danger is not worth risking unless one can trust people to act rationally. How valid are these assumptions? Now, in modern times, even if we had an invulnerable deterrent (and what an invulnerable deterrent is, always depends on the latest progress in the development of weapons), this would not protect at least half of the American population from being destroyed, provide the enemy is not deterred. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The only safe way of deterring would be to show the other nations our military installations, so that their fear of our retaliatory power does not depend on a guess which can be wrong, but on solid knowledge. This procedure, while desirable, would at the same time give the opponent such knowledge of the location of our missile bases as to make such a procedure impractical. Furthermore, even with the invulnerable deterrent, all the possibilities for an unwanted war give one more time to wait for confirmation of an attack, since there would not be the chance that an attack could seriously cripple our retaliatory capacity. On the other hand, the decentralization of the units of deterrents (submarines, planes in the air, et cetera) actually increases the chances of irrational actions. The invulnerable deterrence theorists are forced to base all their hopes on mutual knowledge and rationality between the United States of America and Russia. This is in one sense ironic, since these same experts usually deny any possibility of understanding or rational agreement between the United States of America and Russian when it is a question of disarmament. In fact, if there is any agreement for rational actions, it is exactly the reverse of the argument of the deterrent theorist. In times of peace, one might assume that people have sufficient rationality to arrive at solutions which are beneficial for both sides. If this were not the case then, indeed, it is not likely that people would show this rationality of thought when threatened with the immediate extinction of a large part of their population or after even “only” one city with several million people has been pulverized. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
However, this may be, it is the common assumption of most “invulnerable deterrent” strategists that they do not see any alternative to the efficacy of deterrence. If the deterrent would not work them, indeed, the United States of America would cease to exist. Defense against these weapons is practically nonexistent; indeed, it is now impossible. It exists only in the fertile imagination of some men, not in physical reality. However, in contrast with this wide, is another view which claims that the deterrent does not necessarily preclude war, but thermonuclear war would by no means have to be as catastrophic as the nuclear pacifists on the one hand. Perhaps even more pertinent is this question, “How happy or normal a life can the surviours and their descendant hope to have?” Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, objective studies indicate that even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar World, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivours and their descendants. It is only a squeamishness which keeps experts from facing the possibilities of a total war. If we assume that people could survive the long-term effects of radiation, what would the standard of living in their postwar World be like? Would the survivours live as Americans are accustomed to living—with Ultimate Driving Machines, television, ranch house, freezers, and so on? No one can say, but I believe there is every likelihood that even if we make almost no preparations for recuperation except to buy radiation meters, write and distribute manuals, train some cadres for decontamination and the like, and make some other minimal plans, the country would recover rather rapidly and effectively from the small attack. This strong statement is contrary to the beliefs of many laymen, professional economists, and war planners. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
What are the proper preparations which will secure relatively harmless consequences of nuclear war? If the United States of America had a system of fall-out shelters all over the country, plus a system of blastproof shelters (plus arrangements for rapid entry), plus thirty to sixty minutes of warning, plus strategic evacuation of cities (that is, several days before an attack), the estimated casualties would be “only” 10,200,000 in an attack on one hundred and fifty cities; on the other hand, if none of these preparations ware made it is assumed the causalities would be 320,000,000. The actual figure between these two extremes will lie according to the degree of preparation. For example, with nothing else but fallout shelters plus arrangements for tactical evacuation, losses could be held to 170,000,000 people, given thirty to sixty minutes warning. What about these figures? In the first place, some of the conditions are completely unrealistic, such as the thirty to sixty minutes’ warning, when missiles from submarines or from Earth satellites would give practically no warning time other than a fifteen-minute alarm. In addition, tactical evacuation into blastproof shelters, even if there were a fifteen-minute warning, could only give people enough time to trample one another to death before they entered the shelters. If the warning time is in minutes only, as it will be at best, almost no one will reach the few shelters in large cities if these come under attack. People would be hijacking planes, killing to get on planes, and the people who did make it to the shelter would have to worry about chaos inside of the shelter and them being overrun by people who discover their location. There is also a small chance of contamination. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Whether or not all Americans will be destroyed still depends on other factors. On the other hand, even with the assumed shelter systems, heavier casualties and more extensive destruction are also conceivable. Unless U.S.A. active offenses and active defenses can gain control of the military situation after only a few exchanges, an enemy could, by repeated strikes, reach almost any level of death and destruction one wished. If all fifty-three large metropolitan areas in the United States of America were completely destroyed, still one-third of the United States of America’s population and one-half of the wealth of the United States of American, being left outside, would be spared. From this point of view, the above destruction does not seem to be a total economic catastrophe. It may simply set the nation’s productive capacity back a decade or two, plus destroying many “luxuries.” There is also another possibility of limitless destruction of the United States of America, unless we can win the war militarily. Or, in the long run, a purely military approach to the security problem can lead to disaster for civilization, and by long run, I mean decades, not centuries. However, there are flaws in this reasoning, which ignores a number f essential fact. First, the whole balance sheets of deaths is based on the shelter idea. However, it is generally recognized that within a few years there will be bombs many times more destructive than the Tsar Bomb of 50 megatons, which is ten times more powerful than all of the ordnances exploded during tht whole of World War II, would be invented, and then shelters will be useless, even if we all live underground. It is easier to increase the striking power of nuclear weapons than to increase the safety factors of shelters and hardened bases. #Randolphharris 6 of 19
Hardening imposes a greater burden on a country than the burden the opponent has to assume in order to raise one’s striking power with which to offset the effects of hardening. It follows that despite all the optimistic figures, if the arms race goes on for five years more, we, the Russians, the Chinese, the Middle East, Mexico, Japan, Germany, and a large part of the World are threatened with much higher losses than previous calculations assume, if not with extinction. Also, keep in fact that the figures focus on attacks all happening within a few days, then stopping. However, in past years, these shocks were spread over many years. While many normal personalities would disintegrate under hardships spread over a period of years, the habits of a lifetime cannot be changed for most people in a few days. If you have to take it at all, then from the viewpoint of character stability it is better to take this kind of shock in a short time rather than in a long one. To a psychologist, it is much more likely tht sudden destruction, and the threat of slow death to a large part of the American population or the Russian population or large parts of the World will create such a panic, fury, and despair, as could only be compared with the mass psychosis that resulted from the Black Death in the Middle Ages. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Duration of the fall-out shelters determines the length of time it is necessary to remain in shelters. These small and cramped; people will develop claustrophobia, run out of food and water or fall ill. In short, the point may be reached where in despair they prefer to venture outside, only to succumb to radiation sickness, probably to die. One can barely imagine the psychological situations that would arise and the problems the occupants of the shelter would have to solve for themselves. In the minds of the persons in the shelters would be the shattering knowledge of being involved in the greatest disaster the human race has ever seen. This would indeed be so: the Black Death, the massacres by the Mongol hordes, or any other large misfortunes either have been spread out over many years, or have involved isolated, widely separated cities, small by modern standards. Here disaster would cover great areas, be concentrated in tie and still last indefinitely, if the enemy so chose. The traumatic effects of such a catastrophe would lead to a new form of primitive barbarism, the resurgence of the most archaic elements that are still potentialities in every man and of wish we have had ample evidence in the terror systems of Mr. Hitler and Mr. Stalin. It is unlikely that human beings could cherish freedom, respect for life—in short, what we call democracy—after having witnessed and participated in the unlimited cruelty of man against man which thermonuclear war would mean. There is no evading of the fact that brutality has a brutalizing effect on the participants, and that total brutality leads to total brutalization. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Even in the event of only partial destruction—from one and twenty to one hundred and sixty million causalities in America (and corresponding numbers in other countries) one thing is definite: after such an event there will be no democracy left anywhere, only ruthless dictatorships and gangs organized by the survivours in a half-destroyed World. The only question posed is how many of us will be killed; the moral problem of killing millions of fellow human beings—men, women, children—hardly is mentioned. After wholesale slaughters, the survivours are supposed to live a reasonably happy life. One asks oneself from what kind of moral or psychological position these assumptions are made. One comes to a rather shocking suspicion when one understands war is horrible. There is no question about it. But so is peace. And it is proper, with the kind of calculations we are making today, to compare the horror of war and the horror of peace and see how much worse it is. When people forming life into a balance sheet of life and death, the horrors of war are minimized because peace—and that is life—is felt to be only a little less horrible than death. We are dealing here with one of the most crucial problems of our age—the transformation of men into numbers on a balance sheet; one thinks it is a reasonable calculation to weigh the death of one- to two-thirds of the nation, provided the economy will soon recover. Indeed, there have always been wars; there have always been people who have sacrificed their own lives or killed other humans—out of love of liberty or in mere drunken orgies of hate. What is so new and shocking about the contributions of our age is the cold-blooded use of bookkeeping methods to encompass the destruction of millions of human beings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Mr. Stalin did this with millions of peasants. Mr. Hitler did its with millions of Jews. He was motivated by an unknown source, but for many of his subordinates it was simply a bureaucratic measure; regardless of the motives, once the order had been given, millions of human beings were liquidated systematically, economically and totally. Yet, another consideration is one cannot discuss the question of what might happen as a result of unilateral disarmament—or, for that matter, of any mutual disarmament—without examining some psychological arguments. The most popular one is that China, the Middle East, Russia, and Mexico cannot be trusted. If “trust” is meant in a moral sense, it is unfortunately true that political leaders can rarely be trusted. The reason lies in the split between private and public morals: the state, having become an idol, justifies any immortality if committed in its interest, while the very same political leaders would not commit the same acts if they were acting in behalf of their own private interests. However, there is another meaning to “trust in people,” a meaning which is much more relevant to the problem of politics: the trust that they are sane and rational beings, and that they will act accordingly. If I deal with an opponent in whose sanity I trust, I can appreciate his or her motivations and to some extent predict them, because there are certain rules and aims, like that of survival or that of commensurateness between aims and means, which are common to all sane people. Mr. Hitler could not be trusted because he was lacking in sanity, and this very lack destroyed both him and his regime. It seems quite clear that the Russian leaders of today are sane and rational people; therefore, it is important not only to know what they are capable of, but also to predict what they might be motivated to do. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
This question of the leaders’ and the people’s sanity leads to another consideration which affects us as much as it does other nations. In the current discussion on armament control, many arguments are based on the question of what is possible, rather than on what is probable. The difference between these two modes of thinking is precisely the difference between paranoid and sane thinking. The paranoiac’s unshakable conviction in the validity of one’s delusions rests upon the fact that it is logically possible, and, so, unassailable. It is logically possible that his wife, children, and colleagues hate him and are conspiring to kill him. The patient cannot be convinced that his delusion is impossible; one can only be told that it is exceedingly unlikely. While the latter position requires an examination and evaluation of the facts and also a certain amount of faith in life, the paranoid position can satisfy itself with the possibility alone. Our political thinking suffers from such paranoid trends. We should be concerned, not with the possibilities, but rather with the probabilities. This is the only sane and realistic way of conducting the affairs of national as well as of individual life. Again on the psychological plane, there are certain misunderstandings of the radical disarmament position which occur in many of the discussions. First of all, the position of unilateral disarmament has been understood as one of submission and resignation. On the contrary, the pacifists as well as the humanist pragmatists believe that unilateral disarmament is possible only as an expression of a deep spiritual and moral change within ourselves: it is an act of courage and resistance—not one of cowardice or surrender. Forms of resistance differ in accordance with the respective viewpoints. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
On the other hand, Gandhists and men like King-Hall advocate nonviolent resistance, which undoubtedly requires the maximum of courage and faith; they refer to the example of Indian resistance against Britain or Norwegian resistance against the Nazis. Thus, we dissociate ourselves from the basically selfish attitude that has been miscalled pacifism, but that might be more accurately described as a kind of irresponsible antimilitarism. We dissociate ourselves also from utopianism. Though the choice of nonviolence involves a radical change in humans, it does not require perfection. We have tried to make it clear that readiness to accept suffering—rather than inflict it on others—is the essence of the nonviolent life, and that we must be prepared if called upon to pay the ultimate price. Obviously, if humans are willing to spend billions of treasure and countless live in war, they cannot dismiss the case for nonviolence by saying that in a nonviolent struggle people might be killed! It is equally clear that where commitment and the readiness to sacrifice are lacking, nonviolent resistance cannot be effective. On the contrary, it demands greater discipline, more arduous training, and more courage than its violent counterpart. Some think of armed resistance, of men and women defending their lives and their freedom with Winchester Rifles, pistols, or knives. It is not unrealistic to think that both forms of resistance, nonviolent or violent, might deter an aggressor from attacking. At least, it is more realistic than to think that the use of thermonuclear weapons could lead to a “victory for democracy.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The proponents of “security by armament” sometimes accuse us of having an unrealistic, flatly optimistic picture of the nature of man. They remind us that this “perverse human being has a dark, illogical, irrational side.” They even go so far as to say that “the paradox of nuclear deterrence is a variant of the fundamental Christian paradox. In order to live, we must express our willingness to kill and to die.” Apart from this crude falsification of Christian teaching, we are by no means oblivious of the potential evil within man and of the tragic aspects of life. Indeed, there are situations in which man must be willing to die in order to live. In the sacrifices necessary for violent or nonviolent resistance, I can see an expression of the acceptance of tragedy and sacrifice. However, there is no tragedy or sacrifice in irresponsibility and carelessness; there is no meaning or dignity in the idea of the destruction of mankind and of civilization. Man has in himself a potential for evil; his whole existence is beset by dichotomies rooted in the very conditions of his existence. However, these truly tragic aspects must not be confused with the results of stupidity and lack of imagination, with the willingness to stake the future of mankind on a gamble. Finally, to take up one last criticism, directed against the position of unilateral disarmament: that it is “soft” on communism. Our position is precisely based on the negation of the Russian principle of the omnipotence of the state. Just because the spokesmen for unilateral disarmament are drastically opposed to the supremacy of the state, they deny the right of the state to make decisions which can lead to the destruction of a great part of humanity and can doom future generations. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
If the basic conflict between Russia’s system and the democratic World is the question of the defense of the individual against the encroachment of an omnipotent state, then, indeed, the position for unilateral disarmament is the one which is most radically opposed to the Russian principle. No one must deny that there are risks involved in a limited form of unilateral action. Consider that we could easily be tricked into disarming ourselves and being attacked by others, we are caught in a position with little chance of survival without our weapons, unless we want to take refuge in hopes. Even if we make all the provisions, including shelters, warning and strategic evacuation of cities, and if the United States of America’s active offenses and active defenses can gain control of the military situation after only a few exchanges, we might only have 10,200,000 people killed. However, if these conditions do not materialize, an enemy could, by repeated strikes, reach almost the destruction of 320,000,000 Americans. In other words, any level of death and destruction he or she wished. (And, I assume, the same threat exists for other nations.) In such a situation, when nations are poised at the last moment when an agreement appears possible to end the risk of horrifying war, unleashed by fanatics, lunatics, or humans of ambition, it is imperative to shake off the inertia of our accustomed thinking, to seek for new approaches to the problem, and above all, to see new alternatives to the present choices that confront us. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Adolf Eichmann was fascinated by bureaucratic order and death. His supreme values were obedience and the proper functioning of the organization. He transported Jewish people as he would have transported coal off to exterminations camps. That they were human beings was hardly within the field of his vision, hence even the problem of whether he hated or did not hate his victims is irrelevant. However, examples of the necrophilous character are by no means to be found only among the inquisitors, the Hitlers, the Eichmanns. There are any number of individuals who do not have the opportunity and the power to kill, yet whose necrophilia expresses itself in other and, superficially seen, more harmless ways. An example is the parent who will always be interested in one’s child’s sickness, in one’s failures, in morbid prognoses for the future; at the same time one will not be impressed by a favourable change; one will not respond to the child’s joy; one will not notice anything new that is growing within one. We might find that one’s dreams for the child deals with sickness, death, corpses, blood. One does not harm the child in any obvious way, yet one may slowly strange one’s joy of life, one’s faith in growth, and eventually the parent will infect that child with their own necrophilous orientation. It is fashionable today to talk about the inherent evil quality of human beings, which, allegedly, stamps optimism for a better future as sinful pride. However, if we were really so evil, our cruelty would at least be human. However, the bureaucratic indifference toward life is a symptom of a new and terrible form of inhumanity, one in which humans have been transformed into things. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Indeed, an individual’s decision to give one’s life for the sake of a fellow man’s life, or his own integrity and his own convictions, is one of the greatest moral achievements man or woman is capable of. However, it is a moral achievement only if it is the result of an individual’s decision, a decision not motivated by vanity, depression, or masochism, but by devotion to another person’s life or to an idea. Few people have the courage and conviction to make this supreme sacrifice for the sake of an idea. The majority are not even willing to risk a job for the sake of their convictions. However, if this decision is made not individually but nationally, it loses its ethical significance. It is not an authentic decision made by one person, but a decision made for millions by a few leaders who, in order to get the individuals to accept the “ethical” decisions, have to make them drunk with passions of hate and fear. The ultimate negative very quickly becomes an accuser even if it does not succeed in getting a person to yield to one’s temptations. Psychopathological offenders can cause apparent conduct disorder to be manifested to the consciousness of a believer, and then will lash and accuse the human for their own workings. They counterfeit some sin, which may be called with sadness with sadness “my besetting sin,” in the believer’s life; and as long as it is believed to be sin from the evil nature, no “confessing” or seeking victory over it will cause it to pass away. They can also hide behind real sin. A sense of guiltlessness does not necessarily lead to absolute happiness, for even with the peace of conscious innocence there may be suffering, and the suffering may have its source in some sin which is not known. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Walking by known light and measuring guiltlessness by one’s cognizance of sin, is very dangerous for anyone who desires a fathomless peace, for it leads only to superficial rest—which may be disturbed at any moment by the attack of the Accuser, who will one’s darts at ta joint in the armour of peace which is hidden from the believer’s view. For obtaining victory over the Deceiver’s accusing spirits, spiritual believers should, therefore, understand clearly whether any consciousness of sin is the result of real transgression or is caused by evil spirits. If the believer accepts the consciousness of sin as from oneself when it is not, one at once leaves one’s position of being “dead to sin” and reckons oneself alive to it. This explains why many who have truly known victory over sin by the “reckon” of Romans 6.11 later surrender their basis and lose the position of victory—because the Accuser has counterfeited some manifestation of “self” or “sin” and then accused the man of it, with the taunt that “Romans 6 does not work.” This can cause one to fall into confusion and condemnation, as into a pit of miry clay and darkness. Every document reporting the past—legends, myths, chronicles, records, or scholarly history books—contains an interpretation of history which consciously or unconsciously wrestles with the meaning of existence and its ambiguities. What is the significance of history for the meaning of existence in general? In what way does history influence our ultimate concern? Because of the subject-object structure of history, a detached, objective answer is impossible: historical activity is the key to understanding history. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
One cannot stand back from the flood of history, the better to see whither it is rushing; only by plunging into the stream can one feel the strength and direction of the current. However, what type of historical activity provides the key to history? More specifically, to which historical group should one be committed, which vocational consciousness should one adopt as the key to unlock the enigma of history as a whole? The option for a particular historical group and its vocational consciousness as the key to history supposes that one has already grasped the meaning of history or has been grasped by it. For “the key and what the key opens are experienced in one and the same act.” This is not a barren, circular argument, but the dialectic of the theological circle which operates on faith. For the Christian, the Kingdom of God is both the key and the answer to the problem of history. An interpretation of history explains more than merely the direction and dynamics of man’s spiritual creativity; historical time embraces all the dimensions of life. Consequently, “the answer to the meaning of history implies an answer to the universal meaning of being.” In terms of the Christian interpretation of history, the Kingdom of God embraces life in every dimension, everything in which the inner aim of history is operative, from sub-atomic particles of matter to the sublimest cultural creation. You can see that consciousness does not really belong to the individual existence of man but to his community or heard nature; that, consequently, it is finely developed only in relation to community and herd utility; and, consequently, that each of us, with the best will to understand ourselves as individually as possible, “to know ourselves,” will always only bring to consciousness precisely what is nonindividual in ourselves, what is “average”; that our thoughts themselves are constantly overruled by the character of consciousness—by the “genius of the species” dominating them—and translated back into the herd perspective. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
All our actions are at bottom incomparably personal, unique, endlessly individual, there is no doubt; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they no longer seem so…This is genuine phenomenalism and perspectivism, as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness is such that the World we can be conscious of is only a World of surfaces and signs, a World generalized, made common—that everything that becomes conscious thereby becomes flat, thin, relatively unenlightened, general, a sign, a herd signal; that all coming to conscious involves a vast and thoroughgoing corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization. Heightened consciousness is ultimately a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious individuals knows moreover that it is a sickness. May the day soon dawn, we pray, that day of liberty, when every shackle forged by man is loosed to set him free, when serfdom’s yoke is broken, every politician humbled low, when man shall take his brother’s hand and lovingkindness show, when all are able to achieve the American Dream, and all are free from fear, and all are free to worship Thee and to Thy Law adhere. Then nevermore the wanderer’s staff, and nevermore the sword, for all Thy children everywhere shall live in true accord. O may we never weary grow, and may we never cease to work for such a blessed World where men shall be at peace. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Every man shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make him afraid. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
There is a strange story, from December 2007, a caretaker, was waiting in the mansion for more Christmas decorations to arrive. All the doors were fast locked, and everyone else had gone home for the night, when the front doors suddenly burst open, a shadowy figure came silently in and walked through the foyer. The caretaker followed the shadow as he passed through the Venetian Dining Room and straight through the glass doors to the courtyard. The caretaker went and fastened the doors and sat down again and waited for the Christmas decorations, but in a few minutes the same thing happened again. And this was really odd. At this time, the doors to The Winchester Mansion were never opened, in honor of Mrs. Winchester having sealed them off in the past, due to angry spirits. However, the door burst open, and the shadowy man passed through the house, then in the glass doors from the courtyard, and out the front. All through that night, as often as the lad shut the doors, the same thing happened over and over again. And he never dared speak to the strange visitor, for “he took it to be an angry sprit.”
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Time Running Toward Fulfilment
In the American colonies, people gathered in three main places: churches, courthouses, and taverns. Of the three, taverns attracted people on the daily basis, especially in towns, whereas churchgoing was a weekly duty and courthouse-going was customarily a monthly affair. Taverns were centers of social, political, economic and judicial activity. Following militia musters, men of all ages would mingle at the local tavern. Local political meetings, as well as state dinners, would meet at the public houses, as taverns were called. Merchants and retailers would gather at taverns to cut deals, settle bills, and even hold slave auctions. Local courts met quarterly in taverns in an era where courthouses had often not yet been built. Anyone wishing to see a traveler or visitor knew exactly where to find him—at the local tavern, for the public houses were also the eighteenth-century equivalent of today’s hotels and motels. Every ordinary craftsman and farmer knew that by frequenting the closet tavern, he could put himself in touch with the World beyond his immediate neighbourhood. Seeking heat and light as well as alcoholic beverages and sociability, people of every colonial community repaired to the nearest tavern. In most towns, they did not have to go far. In Boston, for example, at least 177 taverns dispensed cheer by 1737—one tavern for every 20 adult males. In other cities, where the regulation of tavernkeepers was more lax, one could find one tavern for every ten adult males. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
As centers of ritual and recreational life and as modes of communication, taverns were instrumental in promoting face-to-face contact, though mainly for men. When the community gathered in churches, the people assembled formally to listen and pray. By contrast, people gathering in taverns engaged in informal fellowships, which blurred the lines of social hierarchy as people of different occupations and status exchanged local news, gossiped, traded rumor, told tales, loosened their tongues and inhibitions, and exhibited their manliness and aggressiveness. Colonial minister railed against tavern-haunting and excessive drinking, but most colonial Americas were sermon-proof when it came to limiting their tavern-going. Along the way, they began to erode the lines of authority that they had inherited from England. In the coming of the American Revolution, the taverns were a vital part of a silent current that was converting ordinary people from postures of defence to postures of defiance. It was in taverns, especially in the cities, where the Revolution was spawned, that ordinary men learned to shed customary restraints on their political behaviour. Lubricated rum, ale, and other spirits, ordinary town dwellers heard the local news read aloud from newspapers, argued over English policies, and fortified their willingness to criticize, ridicule, and even plot against leaders to whom they have earlier deferred. War by Calculation [or miscalculation]. By this, we refer to the possibility that after due study, a nation might decide that going to war would be the least undesirable of its choices, either in the form of a preventative war, or a pre-emptive war. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The case of the pre-emptive war or “anticipatory retaliation” is not really a decision to attack. One side would strike only because it is convinced that the other side is ready to attack. This is clearly a situation in which each side has nothing to fear but fear, yet the knowledge that the other side is afraid fully justifies that fear. Many things could touch off a reciprocal fear of surprise-attack situation. Escalation. Part of the strategy of the general view f deterrence is that it allows limited war to take place without fear that the limits will be violated—since both sides could then destroy each other. However, under the stress of an actual crisis or limited war, accident or miscalculation might at any time trigger a full-scale cataclysm. This could occur either because the limits of a limited war are not being observed, or because more parties are being drawn into it, or because the issues themselves become fraught with significances that did not initially exist, or because of some unauthorized or accidental behaviour by subordinates. It is difficult to supply a plausible reason for escalation, when it is to everybody’s interest to control things, yet almost everybody considers that it can and perhaps will happen. Catalytic War. By this last possibility, we refer to either an ambitious third nation, or a desperate third nation which might force one of the two main powers who themselves do not want war to make an attack nevertheless. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The type of catalytic war which is much more likely and important than one resulting from the schemes of an ambition nation may occurs when a desperate third nation thinks it has a problem which can be solved only by war. Let us imagine a war between India and China which the Indians are losing. The Indians might also feel that if they induced the United States of America to strike at China and Russia, this would solve their problem, and any method they used to achieve this end was as good as any other. Conversely, let us imagine a situation in which the Chinese felt hard pressed (possibly over Formosa) and told the Russians, “We are going to strike the United States of America tomorrow, and you might as well come along with us, for they will undoubtedly strike you, even if you do not do so.” As stated, the situation may seem somewhat implausible. One may wish to broaden the definition of catalytic war. Any method by which a nation uses military or diplomatic power to embroil larger nations or increase the scope of the conflict could be called catalytic. By this definition, World War I was a catalytic war, set off by Serbia and Austria, which also had some overtones of reciprocal fear of surprise attack and self-fulfilling prophecy, because the side which mobilized first was likely to win. It meant that even a defensive mobilization (by the Russians) touched off a defensive-offensive mobilization (by the Germans) in much the same way some believe that a badly designed, quick-reacting force can be touched off by defensive moves by the other side. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The various possibilities mentioned here are all possibilities of war not provoked by the wish or the will of either of the two main power blocs to start an all-out nuclear war. Evern with only two nuclear powers and four nuclear nations in the World, there is a finite chance that all-out nuclear war could be triggered accidentally. This could be brought about as the result of either mechanical or human failure. No machine is perfect. No human being is free from the possibility of making errors of judgment. Already, for example, there have been several accidents involving American aircraft carrying nuclear bombs. Yet it is quite clear that very situation of two powers prepared to destroy each other, if and when necessary, creates a considerable probability for the decision to start a war by either side, even though both would refer to avoid it. The crucial point in these considerations lies in the fact that, once given certain constellations, the most conscientious and rational of military leaders on both sides will be forced to start an attack in spite of the fact that they do not want a war. With each new generation of weapons, the war nobody wants becomes more terrible in prospect, for the logic of deterrence demands continual build-up to be sure that no matter how many bombs the enemy sends, we will have some left to destroy him. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
There is also a possibility that a nation might wish to base it deterrence on a Doomsday Machine which would threaten to blow up the World along with the aggressor. Our normal military forces are frightening enough and they are improving rapidly. The most spectacular thing about the arms race is that it is a race and one that is being run with some celerity. Considering the sober and conservative assumptions which have been confirmed by many other sources, it would seem clear that the expectation that even a stable deterrent protects us from nuclear war is at best a hope or a guess, but by no means the kind of sage prediction which the general public takes it to be. There have been attempts by experts, especially those representing the Army and Navy to work out weapons systems that would eliminate or hold to a minimum the dangers of accident or miscalculation. These attempts are based on two assumptions. One is that danger of accident or pushing buttons too hastily can be minimized by an “invulnerable” deterrent, one which would survive no matter how strong the first strike might be; therefore there would be no ultimate advantage to surprise attack. The Polaris submarine missile system might serve this purpose, especially if Russia were also to have a similar deterrent. An effective invulnerable deterrent would be composed of atomic submarines and airplanes, which being mobile could not be destroyed by one surprise attack. If both sides adopt the Oceanic System, the most curious consequence is that both parties gain together: in making their deterrence effective they protect themselves against accidental war by enabling the opponents to verify signals of attack and to filter out the false one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Clear, an invulnerable force does not have to rise immediately when a signal of attack, which may be only a false alarm, is accepted as real. Even if the signal is true the retaliation can be spaced out over time giving all the favourable possibilities mentioned earlier. It is imperative for invulnerable deterrence strategy that each side know that the other is depending solely upon weapons designed for this strategy; that is, weapons of great destructiveness but relatively low accuracy, capable of destroying cities but not of pinpointing arms installations and holding undestroyed cities as hostages. If Russia, say, believes that we also have “counterforce” weapons and therefore the capacity to strike first, they will doubt our professions of purely punitive intent. In situations of tension they may fear that we will take the initiative, and so take it themselves—knowing that we can answer with our invulnerable city-buster but preferring to bank on their civil defense rather than on our good intentions. Thus, if the invulnerable deterrent is to deter, we must give up all accurate first-strike missilery, all intelligence activity that locates enemy missile bases (id est the weapons and activities championed by the Air Force), and even hold our invulnerable deterrence capacity down to a level where it cannot be used in large masses to make up for its inaccuracy so as to destroy missile bases as well as cities. For example, it is estimated that is we have more than forty-five Polaris submarines we are no longer convincingly incapable of destroying an enemy’s second-strike capacity, even with the uncertainties of aiming from a submarine. It is likely that in the coming all-out arms race we will voluntarily limit ourselves in this manner? And even if we do, how can we convince Russians that we have? #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We could not show the Russians our military instillations to prove that we had only weapons of the “invulnerable” type, because the weapons, to be invulnerable, must have secret locations. Another assumption necessary for the invulnerable deterrent to work is that both sides act coolly and rationally, always aware of what the other side’s power is at any given time, and always waiting in a tense situation in other to make sure. A small fraction of people believe unilateral disarmament is the best deterrent to war. However, there is widely held fear in the United States of America, that Russia is out to conquer the World for communism and that, if the United States of America disarmed, Russia and other countries would be all the more eager to achieve their wishes for World domination. With Russian, for instance, this idea of Russian intensions is based on an erroneous appreciation of the nature of the president-day Russia. It is true that under Mr. Lenin and Mr. Trotsky the Russian Revolution was aimed at conquering the capitalistic World (or at least, Europe) for communis, partly because the communist leaders were convinced that there was no possibility of success for communist Russia unless the highly industrialized states of Europe (or at least Germany) joined their system, and partly because they were prompted by the belief that the victory of the communist revolution in the World would bring about the fulfillment of their secular-messianic hopes. The failure of these hopes and the ensuring victory of Mr. Stalin brought about a complete change in the nature of Soviet Communism. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The annihilation of almost all the old Bolsheviks was only a symbolic act for the destruction of the old revolutionary idea. Mr. Stalin’s slogan of “socialism in one country” covered one simple aim—the rapid industrialization of Russia, which the Czarist system had not accomplished. Russia repeated the same process of accumulating capital which Western capitalism had gone through in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The essential difference is that, while in these centuries in the West the sanctions were purely economic, the Stalinist system now developed political sanctions of direct terror; in addition, it employed socialist ideology to sugar-coat the exploitation of the masses. The Stalinist system was neither a socialist nor a revolutionary system, but a state-capitalism based on ruthless methods of planning and economic centralization. The period of Khruschevism is characterized by the fact that capital accumulation has succeeded to a point where the population can enjoy a great deal more consumption and less forced to make sacrifices; as a result, the political terror can be greatly reduced. However, Khrushchevims has by no means changed the basic character of Soviet society in one essential respect: it is not a revolutionary nor a socialist regime, but one of the most conservative, class-ridden regimes anywhere in the Western World, humanly coercive, economically effective. While the aim of democratic socialism was the emancipation of man, the overcoming of his alienation, and the eventual abolition of the state, the “socialist” slogans used in Soviet Russia reflect empty ideologies, and the social reality is the very opposite of true socialism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The ruling class of the Soviet Union is no more revolutionary than the Renaissance popes were followers of the teachings of Christ. To try to explain Mr. Khrushchev by quoting Mr. Marx, Mr. Lenin, or Mr. Trotzky shows an utter failure to understand the historical development which has taken place in the Soviet Union and an incapacity to appreciate the difference between facts and ideologies. It should be added that our attitude is the best propaganda service the Russians could wish for. Against the fact, they try to convince the workers of Western Europe and the peasants in Asia that they represent the ideas of socialism, of a classless society, et cetera. The Western attitude, of falling for this propaganda, does exactly what the Russians want: to confirm these claims. (Unfortunately very few people except democratic socialist have sufficient knowledge of the difference between socialism and its distorted and corrupt form which calls itself Soviet socialism.) The role of Russia is still more emphasized by the fact that Russia feels threatened by a potentially expansionist China. Russia one day might be in the same position with regard to China as we believe we are in relation to Russia. If the threat to Russia from the United States of America were to disappear, Russia could devote her energy to coping with the threat from China, unless by universal disarmament this threat would cease to exist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The above-mentioned considerations indicate that the dangers which might arise if Russian were not to give up its armaments are more remote than they seem to many. Would the Soviet Union use her military superiority to try to occupy the United States of America or Western Europe? Aside from that fact that it would be exceedingly difficult, to say the least, for Russian’s agents to run the economic and political machines of the United States of America or Western Europe, and aside from the fact that there is no vital need for Russia to conquer these territories, it would be most inconvenient to try to do so—and for a reason which is generally not sufficiently appreciated. Even the procommunist workers in the West have no idea of the degree of coercion to which they would have to submit under a Soviet system. They, as well as noncommunist workers, would oppose the new authorities, who would be forced to use tanks and machine guns against the protesting workers. This would encourage revolutionary tendencies in the satellite states, or even within the Soviet Union, and be most undesirable to the Soviet rulers; it would especially endanger President Putin’s policy of liberalization, and hence his whole political position. Eventually Russian might try to exploit its military superiority for the penetration of Asia and Africa. This is doubtful whether the United States of America would really be willing to start a thermonuclear war in order to prevent the Russians from gaining certain advantages in the World outside of Europe and the America. As we see with the war in Ukraine, America is sending billions of dollars in aid, but otherwise staying out of it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
There are some who are totally devoted to death, and these are insane. There are others who are entirely devoted to life, and these strike us as having accomplished the highest aim of which man is capable. In many, both the biophilous and the necrophilous trends are present, but in various blends. What matters here, as always in living phenomena, is which trend is the stronger, so that it determines man’s behaviour—not the complete absence or presence of one of the two orientations. Literally, “necrophilia” means “love of the dead” (as “biophilia” means “love of life”). The term is customarily used to denote a sexual perversion, namely the desire to possess the dead body (of an individual) for purposes of pleasures of the flesh, or a morbid desire to be in the presence of a dead body. However, as often the case, a sexual perversion presents only the more overt and clear picture of an orientation which is to be found without sexual admixture in many people. The person with the necrophilous orientation is one who is attracted to and fascinated by all that is not alive, all that is dead; corpses, decay, feces, dirt. Necrophiles are those people who love to talk about sickness, about burials, about death. They come to life precisely when they can talk about death. A clear example of the pure necrophilous type is Mr. Hitler. He was fascinated by destruction, and the smell of death was sweet to him. While in the years of his success it may have appeared that he wanted to destroy only those whom he considered his enemies, the days of the Gotterdammerung at the end showed that his deepest satisfaction lay in witnessing total and absolute destruction: that of the German people, of those around him, and himself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
A report from the First World War, while not proved, makes a good sense: a solider saw Mr. Hitler standing in a trancelike mood, gazing at a decayed corpse and unwilling to move away. The necrophilous dwell in the past, never in the future. Their feelings are eseentially sentimental, that is, they nurse the memory of feelings which they had yesterday—or believe that they had. They are cold, distant, devotees of “law and order.” Their values are precisely the reverse of the values we connect with normal life: not life, but death excites and satisfies them. Characteristic for the necrophile is his or her attitude toward force. Force is the capacity to transform a man or woman into a corpse. Just as sexuality can create life, force can destroy it. All force is, in the last analysis, based on the power to kill. I may not kill a person but only deprive one of one’s freedom; I may want only to humiliate one or to take away one’s possessions—but whatever I do, behind all these actions stands my capacity to kill and my willingness to kill. The lover of death necessarily loves force. For one the greatest achievement of man is not to give life, but to destroy it; they use of force is not a transitory action forced upon one by circumstances—it is a way of life. This explains why the necrophile is truly enamored of force. Just as the lover of life the fundamental polarity in man is that between male and female, for the necrophile there exists another and very different polarity: that between those who have the power to kill and those who lack this power. For one there are only two “genders”: the powerful and the powerless; the killers and the killed. One is in love with the killers and despises those who are killed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Not rarely this “being in love with the killers” is to be taken literally; they are one’s objects of sexual attraction and fantasies, only less drastically so than in the perversion mentioned above or in the perversion of necrophagia (the desire to eat a corpse) a desire which can be found not rarely in the dreams of necrophilous persons. I know of a number of dreams of necrophilous persons in which they have sexual intercourse with elderly people by whom they are in no way physically attracted, but whom they fear and admire for their power and destructiveness. The influence of men like Mr. Hitler or Mr. Stalin lies precisely in their unlimited capacity and willingness to kill. For this they were loved by the necrophiles. Of the rest, many were afraid of them, and preferred to admire, rather than to be aware of their fear; many others did not sense the necrophilous quality of these leaders, and saw in them the builders, saviors, good fathers. If the necrophilous leaders had not pretended that they were builders and protectors, the number of people attacked to them would hardly have been sufficient to help them to seize power, and the number of those repelled by them would probably soon have led to their downfall. While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic life into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living person were things. All living processes, feelings, and thoughts are transformed into things. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Memory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object—a flower or a person—only if one possesses it; hence a threat to one’s passion is a threat to oneself; if one loses possession, one loses contact with the World. That is why we find the paradoxical reaction that one would rather lose life than possession, even though by losing life one who possesses has ceased to exist. One loves control, and in the act of controlling one kills life. One is deeply afraid of life, because it is disorderly and uncontrollable by its very nature. The woman who wrongly claims to be the mother of the child in the story of Solomon’s judgment is typical for this tendency; she would rather have a properly divided dead children than lose a living one. To the necrophilous person justice means correct division, and they are willing to kill or die for the sake of what they call justice. “Law and order” for them are idols-everything that threatens law and order is felt as a satanic attack against their supreme values. There are physical, soulish and spiritual “feelings.” Evil spirits can inject feeling into any of these departments. Their aim is to move the human by “feelings”—to substitute these for the actions of one’s mind, so that the believer is governed by the deceiving spirits through his or her feelings. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The necrophilous person is attracted to darkness and night. In mythology and poetry one is attacked to caves, or to the depth of the ocean, or depicted as being blind. (the trolls in Mr. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt are a good example; they are blind, they live in caves, their only value is the narcissistic one of something “home brewed” or homemade.) All that is away from or directed against life attracts one. One wants to return to the darkness of the womb, and to the past of inorganic or animal existence. One is essentially oriented to the past, not to the future which one hates and is afraid of. Related to this is one’s craving for certainty. However, life is never certain never predictable, never controllable; in order to make life controllable it must be transformed into death; death, indeed, is the only certainty in life. The necrophilous tendencies are usually more clearly exhibited in a person’s dreams. These deal with murder, blood, corpses, skulls, feces; sometimes also with humans transformed into machines or acting like machines. An occasional dream of this type may occur in many people without indicating necrophilia. In the necrophilous person dreams of this type are frequently and sometimes repetitive. Also, one tends to substitute feelings for the conscience in its recognition of right and wrong. Then if one “feels” they can do a thing, they will do it without asking whether it be right or wrong—if it is not visibly sinful. So for victory over the deceitful enemy, it is essential that the children of God cease to be guided by “feelings” in their actions. Some believers in God also think that is they do some action that the devil wants them to do, that they will “feel condemned” at once, but they overlook the fact that Satan can give pleasant feelings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
There are innumerable varieties of feelings caused by evil spirits; also countless sorts of attacks and false suggestions. These call forth all the spiritual discernment of the believer, and one’s understanding of spiritual things, in order to recognize them. No doubt, anyone who is truthful in that bold and ultimate sense presupposed by faith in science thereby affirms a World other than that of life, nature, and history; and insofar as one affirms this “other World,” must one not precisely thereby deny its counterpart, this World, our World? You will of course have grasped that it is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests—that even we knowing ones today, we godless ones and antimetaphysicians, still also take our fire from the flame ignited by a faith thousands of years old, that Christian faith that also was Mr. Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine…However, what if just this were to become ever more unbelievable, if nothing else were ever to prove itself divine, only error, blindness, lie—if God Himself proved to be our longest lie? The notion of history is inseparably linked to the concept of time. Time is one of the ontological categories, a characteristic stamped on every finite being, but it is verified differently in different dimension of life. Thus, time remains time in the whole realm of finitude; but the time of the amoeba and the time of history are different. The common element which gives time its identity is the element of “after-each-otherness.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The flow of “after-each-other-ness” is one-way traffic; it cannot be reversed, for there is no such thing as an exactly identical repetition. In the spiritual dimension, “after-each-other-ness” is manifest as the creation of new meaning. Historical time supplies the added element of direction, so that it is defined as “time running toward fulfilment.” Historical time does not return, nor repeat itself: it runs forward; it is always unique; it ever creates the new. There is within it a drive toward an end, unknown, never to be reached in time itself, always intended and ever fleeing. Time runs toward the “future eternal.” The aim of history is fulfilment and decision, that is, an unconditional, unambiguous fulfilment achieved through freedom, and free decision that ends in unconditional fulfilment. The goal of history, therefore, is transcendent to the ambiguities of time. Clock time is not historical time, for the ultimate stand equally close to and equally distant from each moment of history. Certain consequences follow from this transcendent quality of history: The meaning of history is untouched by the modes of past and future, by birth and death. Transcendence, therefore, can be defined neither as the beginning of time nor as the end of time, nor as the negation of time. It can be indicated only by the symbolic concepts of origin and ultimate, which do no mean either the first or the last moment of time, but something transcendent to which all modes of time are equally related. What this means in the concrete is that the theological symbols of creation and last judgement have nothing to do with the beginning and end of clock time. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
And the beginning of history is not the birth of the Universe, but the moment in which existence is experienced as unfulfilled and in which the drive toward fulfillment starts. In what sense can the march of historical time be called “progress”? Since every creative act is a step beyond the potential, history is progressive in the sense that it is in motion, always seeking to approach the ultimately new. However, some interpreters of history have made of progress a symbol for the very meaning of history. According to them, progress means either an ever-lengthening line between the fixed points of a temporal beginning and end or an infinitely ascending line that constitutes progress and end or an infinitely ascending line that constitutes progress itself the goal of history. Progress in certain areas—for example, ethical content, education, technology, and science are all relevant. However, at the core of man’s spiritual functions—the moral act of self-integration, the cultural act of creativity, and the religious act of self-transcendence—lies freedom, and freedom is the leap in which history transgresses the realm of pure being and creates meaning. The movement, then, of historical time is by unpredictable leaps rather than by a measured mounting of the steps of progress. Thou who art the breath of life, who didst create all humans alike in dignity, thy power is manifest in the destiny of nations. Thou makest nations great; Thou bringest nations low; thou givest freedom even unto the beast and winged fowl; Thy will it is that all humankind be free. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester said that in 1888, she was riding in her carriage to Llanada Villa. After crossing a small stream, her horses began to walk on very fast. It was between the hours of eight and nine o’clock in the morning. Besides her driver, Mrs. Winchester was alone it her carriage. It was a clear day. She entered a lane adjoining to her estate. Her horses suddenly wheel at a portion of the gate, looked at the mansion, and neighed very loud. Mrs. Winchester and her driver then saw Mr. William Wirt Winchester coming toward them, in the same apparel she had seen him in his lifetime: he had on a navy-blazer. Just before they came to the gate, Mr. Winchester varied to the right and vanished. About the first of December following, Mrs. Winchester was walking about her garden, about three miles from the mansion. About Dusk, Mr. Winchester came walking alongside of her, and walked with her about two hundred yards. He was dressed as when first seen. He made a halt about two steps from his wife. A farmer was ploughing the fields came riding up, and Mrs. Winchester lost sight of the ghost of her husband. She was much alarmed: not a word was spoke. The farmer did not see Mr. Winchester. The sight of her husband prayed upon her minds so.
Some time after Mrs. Winchester was lying in bed, about midnight, when she heard Mr. Winchester groan; it was like the groan he gave before he expired. Mrs. Winchester heard the groan. She got up and searched the mansion, but after many hours found nothing. Some time after, when in bed, and a great firelight in the room, Mrs. Winchester saw a shadow on the wall, and at the same time she felt gentle brush of her hair, and knew it was her husband comforting here. About the middle of April, Mrs. Winchester was sitting in the Hall of Fires, enjoying the heat when Mr. Winchester appeared, dressed in his navy blazer. He extended his arms around her and hugged her. She does not know how long she remained in this situation. She was much alarmed. In May, about twilight in the morning, she saw Mr. Winchester about a hundred yards from the mansion; he walked fast and disappeared: there was nothing between them to obstruct the view. On the same day, Mr. Winchester appeared again to Mrs. Winchester and their niece Daisy in the garden. Mrs. Winchester asked, “Do you not see your uncle William?” They advanced toward Mr. Winchester. Mrs. Winchester spoke to her husband, as Daisy watched. They walked off together about five hundred yards; a conversation took place as they walked. However, Mrs. Winchester has not the conversation in her memory. She could not understand Mr. Winchester’s, his voice was so low.
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I am Afraid that I Cannot Keep Such a Wicked Secret Any Longer
I was happy, living quiet sunny days without shadow or event. To my innocent mind, Llanada Villa seemed the soul of goodness and dignity and charm; in all the countryside there was no home that could compare with it. My home was much studied because of its peculiarly composite architecture; an architecture involving Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order or blend of orders—Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends spear truly. However, when it came to construction plans, to rebel against my decisions, to question my wishes, to doubt my wisdom and righteousness—these were crimes beyond the range of anyone’s wildest thoughts. But I loved my staff dearly. Sometimes I even helped the garden boy to clear away the leaves from the carriage way. Even thought I was a kind person, people accused me of being a witch. The accusers said, “When I heard Sarah Winchester’s name, I thought it was a witch’s name; for of course the correct way to pronounce it is “Sarah Wastwych.” Particularly more dreadful is that what they were calling me was “Sarah Was-the-witch.” And the villagers thought that they had other proofs. Inquisitive individuals claimed to see me walking very fast, and on dark nights carrying a horn lantern. They also said that at midnight, I would glide over the ground. And that I have developed the curious habit of vanishing from the house. It was utterly wicked for people to suspect me of witchcraft. I spent my evenings sewing peacefully in my sewing room, and I ventured to laugh at their stories. People would wait in the dark shadow of some bushes close by the gate, lying all silvery in the moonlight to catch a glimpse of me. They shivered as they lingered in the cold, waiting to see what would happen. Eventually, I sat in silent grief because my heart was wrung with sorrow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
One villager stopped my servant and said, “You should not have a witch for a mistress. I shall not come to your house again, for I do not care to associate with the servants of a witch.” Then she went away. Had the sun fallen out of the sky, I could hardly have been more dismayed. “I do not believe that Mrs. Winchester is a witch,” she said. “I have never believed it. I will care for her and treat her kindly, and I will watch what happens. And then I shall tell the truth.” That evening, the housemaid knelt on the window seat and watched the dark shadows dancing outside. They saw a tall figure pass by, and a little later a small black object crept out of the bushes and followed it. After a while, the housemaid heard my voice calling angrily for her. Shaking in her shoes, she hid behind the curtains, but I saw her. She was dreadfully afraid of my temper. I made her stand like a culprit before me, and she could not think how to evade my first angry question as to her whereabouts. The housemaid wept and said, “I had gone to find out whether you are a witch.” “You impudent little girl!” I shouted. “What do you mean?” I looked so fierce that she could scarcely bring herself to reply. Making a vast effort, the housemaid said, “Villagers said that you are so cleaver, beautiful, and rich that you must be a witch, Mrs. Winchester. They said only a witch could build a castle such as this.” If I had been any angrier, I would have burst. “How dare you—how dare you?” I said. “You believed such rubbish as that?” “Not quite, Mrs. Winchester,” she sobered. “You see, other servants said the you flew over the gardens every night at midnight on your broomstick. And we watched. We did not see a broomstick, but we saw you floating. So then we thought that you must be a witch.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
My colour faded away. “You servants on the grounds at night! You will be killed!” And forgetting my angry, I dashed down the stairs like a young woman and rushed out to the gate, the housemaid after me. And there at the gate stood the cook and the butler, being stalked by shadows. I was so glad to see them safe and sound that anger had no time to return. “Well, I hope that you are satisfied that I am not a witch,” I said. The other servants saw that I knew. I gave a cry of alarm at the sight of all them standing there. They looked at my horn lantern. They were embarrassed when once they had the supreme mortification of hearing me say, “Look, there are the silly servants who though that I was a witch!” The next day was clear and warm. There had been a bitter freeze again right after Christmas day, and several inundating rains, but the weather was now like spring, and the pink and red azaleas were blooming all over the property. The sweet olive had regained all of its beautiful green leaves in the after math of the freeze, and a new bright colour was coming out of the palm trees and evergreens. I took a walk around the garden. All the dead tropical plants had been cleared away, but the new banana trees were already sprining up from the dark freeze-killed stumps, and even the gardenias were coming back, dropping their shriveled brown laves and breaking out in dark glossy new foliage. They bony white crepe myrtle trees were still bare, but that was to be expected. All along the front gate the camellias were covered with dark red blossoms. And the tulip magnolias had only just dropped their great saucerlike bloom; the pavement was littered with their large pink petals. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
The house itself was shining clean and in perfect order. As we traversed half-mile or so through my house, I took occasion to ask the housemaid some question which brought up the topic of ghosts. As we came up to the Grandball Room, there to my horror I saw in the middle of the hallway a middle-aged man in a mackintosh. I could not see his face, but I noticed instantaneously that he was shining a torch onto the hallway itself. The housemaid and I stopped dead in our tracks. We felt a great cold, the coldness of a graveyard. So uncomfortable and nervous did I feel that I was ready to turn around and run, but as we looked at him, the figure turned and disappeared. “Come on,” I said to the housemaid, there is nothing there, and we went on; but later we talked about it and we had both seen the same thing, and she said, “I reckon it was a ghost.” Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our new emotions took—just what changed of immediate objective it was that so sharpened our senses of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what we feared—yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage-point. Probably I had not given up my zeal to glimpse apparitions themselves, though there was interposed a new goal in the form of crumpled sketches I had found. I had at once recognized a monstrous square tower figure over Llanada Villa, and took this as a message from the spirits as to what I was to build next. Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these hasty diagrams, made me think that it must for a feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by me. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Moreover, this tower might form a good present link with the upper World. Or maybe it was a route the spirits wished to use to descend. After the construction of the nine-story tower, some people viewed my home as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and werewolves. It was believed that Llanada Villa was a temple, making it the center of a cult feared phenomena. The place is mentioned in a chronicle as being a substantial wooden priory housing a strange and powerful monastic order and surrounded by extensive gardens which needed no walks to exclude a frightened populace. Of my family before the date that I purchased this land, there is no evil report, but something strange must have happened then. In one chronicle there is a reference to the Winchesters as “cursed by God” in 1881, whilst village legendry had nothing but evil and frantic fear to tell of the mansion that went up on the foundations of the old temple and priory. The fireside tales were of the most grisly description, all the ghastlier because of their frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness. They represented my ancestors as a race of demons, and hinted whisperingly at their responsibility for the occasional disappearance of villagers through several generations. In 1890, there was a hideous tale of a housemaid, who shortly after her marriage to a farmer was killed by him and his mother, both of the slayers being absolved and blessed by the priest to whom they confessed what they dared not repeat to the World. These myths and ballads, typically as they were of crude superstition, upset me greatly. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
I was much less disturbed by the vaguer tales of wails and howlings in the Observational Tower; and of the floundering, squealing white thing on which one of my horses had trod one night in a lonely field; and of the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the priory in the full light of day. These things were hackneyed spectral lore. The accounts of vanished servants were less to be dismissed, though not especially significant in view of mediaeval custom. Prying curiosity meant death, and more than one served head had been publicly shewn on the bastions. A few tales were exceedingly picturesque, and made me wish I had learnt more of comparative mythology in my youth. There was, for instance, the belief that a legion of bat-winged devils kept Witches’ Sabbath each night at the mansion—a legion whose sustenance might explain the disproportionate abundance of coarse vegetables harvested in the vast gardens. And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the ghouls—the army of obscene which had burst forth from the mansion three years after construction that doomed it to desertion—a ravenous army which has swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable army a whole separate cycle of myths revolves, for its it scattered among the estate and brought curses and horrors in its train. Such was the lore that assailed me as I pushed to completion the work of building my home. It must not be imagined for a moment that these tales formed my principal psychology environment. On the other hand, I was constantly praised and encourage by Mr. Hansen and the antiquarians who surrounded and aided me. I enjoyed the great rooms, wainscoted walls, vaulted ceilings, mullioned windows, and broad staircases with pride. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
At The Winchester Mystery House, there have been reports of very ancient ghosts, some of them dating from prehistory. In the winter of 1924, a caretaker noticed there was curious mile long stretch of hallway in the mansion. The area was a place of ritual activity. As he was walking, he suddenly caught sight of a ghost to the north-east, who was travelling the same direction as himself. The ghost came closer to him until the caretake could see him closely. He reported, “To my unutterable horror, I saw a ghost standing beside me. The ghost wore a long loose cloak. His face was turned towards me, but I could not see his features. He seemed to be threatening me with an implement which he waved in his right hand above his head. At this time, being unacquainted with the psychology of ghosts, I was frozen with terror. I ran the whole length of the hallway, desirous of nothing except to put distance between us.” The caretaker was convinced that he had seen some revenant from an earlier age of the World, walking as the ghost had done some thousand years before. In the late 1930s, two young caretakers went to the police after being terrified by a ghost who floated soundlessly beside them in the same hallway.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Nothing but a Trick from A to Z
Love is a decision, it is not a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision. The falsity of a judgement is not for us an objection to the judgment; this is perhaps where our new language will sound most foreign. The question is, To what extent is it life advancing, life preserving, species preserving, perhaps even species propagating? We are fundamentally inclined to assert that the falsest judgments (among them the synthetic judgment a priori) are for us the most indispensable, that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the wholly invented World of the unconditional, self-identical, without a constant falsification of the World through number, man could not live—that to renounce false judgments would be to renounce life, to negate life. To acknowledge untruth as a condition of life: this surely means resisting customary value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that ventures such a thing, just by doing so, places itself beyond good and evil. On the question of peaceful methods in the fight for communism, the difference between the Russian and the Chinese is as strong as it is in the question of co-existence. The emancipation of the workers and peasant can come about only by the roar of revolution and certainly not by the roar of reformism. The Yugoslav leaders, for whom the ritualistic word “revisionists” is employed, are singled out as the arch enemy and the center of World revisionism. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
However, the revisionists often serve only as a foil for the real opponent, Mr. Khrushchev who of course cannot open by called a revisionist. Yet Mr. Khrushchev’s position becomes quite clear in the declaration of the 81 Communist Parties with its emphasis on peaceful, economic competition between the two system, as against revolutionary activities. Actually, the conflict between the Russians and the Chinese lines is by no means restricted to the problems of the industrial countries (where it is largely theoretical and unreal). It is very acute with regard to the policy toward various underdeveloped countries. It is quite likely that the sudden cessation of the Communist offensive in Iraq in the summer of 1959 was due to Mr. Khrushchev’s pressure and against the intentions of the Chinese; the more clear-cut case is that of Algeria. In his report to the Supreme Soviet, in October 1959, Mr. Khrushchev, reversing his previous stand against Mr. de Gaulle’s plans, suddenly came out in favour of a North American cease-fire plan, while the Chinese have continued to label Mr. de Gaulle’s plan as “nothing but a trick from A to Z.” Eventually, the Chinese-Russian conflict centers on the leadership withing the Communist movement. The Chinese leaders claim that their communes are a decisive step forward in the direction of true communism, and that Mao Tse-tung is the leading theoretician of the Communist camp, while the Russians naturally deny this claim. This conflict is by no means just a matter of personal jealousy. It touches upon the very important question of whether the Soviet Union or Communist China will eventually be the leader of all underdeveloped countries and, specially, of the Communist Parties within these countries. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The difference between Russian and Chinese communism is a very real one. While Russia represents a conservative industrial managerialism, she has to support the colonial revolutions for the sake of her own World political position, always qualified by the concern for her own security and the possibility of an arrangement with the Western bloc. China, on the other hand, with ideas contrary to those of Mr. Marx’s socialism, has developed, thus far, an evangelical faith in an egalitarian type of mass society; this faith is based on a zealous expectation that the communes constitute a short-cut to the new form of society and a dee disbelief that capitalism can change its intention to destroy the Communist countries The Russian-Chinese antagonism is apparent not only in the conflicts regarding views on coexistence, on peaceful transition to socialism et cetera, but in many practical questions of foreign policy. In addition to the difference in attitude toward Mr. de Gaulle and, probably, to Iraq, it is well known that Mr. Khrushchev expressed his regrets at the aggressive attitude of the Chinese in the Chinese-Indian border conflict. There is also serious competition going on between Russian and China, not only in various Communist parties all over the World, but especially in such strategic places as the Congo, Algeria, and Cuba, where the Chinese are trying to win over the local leaders to their more aggressive policies while the Russians are in the position of having to exercise a moderate influence and at the same time talking sufficiently “tough” in order not to lose the battle for influence to the Chinese competition. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
More important, perhaps, is not the fact that the Russians did not want the Chinese to be equipped with atomic weapons, but there is a good deal evidence that the Chinese exerted a good deal of pressure on Russia to grant nuclear weapons to China, and there was a Russian reluctance to comply with this wish. There has been joint East German and Chinese pressure for atomic armament in cause the Western powers place thermonuclear weapons at the disposal of West Germany. Mr. Khrushchev, on the other hand, in an undated letter to the European Federation against Atomic Armament, made public by the Tass News Agency on March 18, 1959, stressed the “undesirability of expansion of the so-called atomic club,” and warned that action by the United States of America to supply nuclear weapons to her allies would set off “a kind of chain reaction n the dissemination of nuclear weapons all over the World.” Another fundamental importance for any consideration of the future of Chinese policy, is the problem of whether the aggressiveness of China’s political position at present indicates that China is bent on territorial expansion, and hence eventually on war. Considering her population pressures and the production of her agriculture not being at their peak, one might argue that for economic reasons China need to seek territorial expansion, and hence eventually war. Many people believe this is why China has been investing so heavily in the United States of America and why the Chinese-owned Fufeng Group, which describes itself as an “internationalized bio-fermentation products manufacturer, paid $2.3 million to purchase the 300 acres of land just 12 miles from Grand Forks Air Force base, home to top secret drone technology, which poses a national security threat. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Considering her population pressure and the subprime productivity of her agriculture, one might argue that for economic reasons China needs to seek territorial expansion Such expansion could take place either in the direction of the thinly population Outer Mongolia and Siberia, or in the direction of the heavily populated Southeast Asia with its fabulous resources of rice, oil, rubber, et cetera. While an increasingly aggressive China may one day take such a course of territorial expansion, there are many reasons why this is not the method which the Chinese leaders would prefer. Expansion toward Siberia would make Russia the enemy of China, and bring about an anti-Chinese, United States of America-Russia coalition, which would be a mortal danger for China. As to expansion toward the southeast, which could occur only with Russian implicit or explicit support, there is no real economic need for such expansion. It is true that China needs many of the raw materials obtainable in Southeast Asia, but the problem, for her, is not primarily that of owning the countries that have oil, land, rubber, et cetera, but of having free and unhindered trade with them at fair prices. The crucial point in China’s whole economic situation is the fact that China has almost no long-term credits, and is being forced to industrialize on a shoestring, that is to say, by forced saving at the expense of general consumption. As China embarks on her plan for World domination, it appears to be proceeding almost completely on a pay-as-you-go basis, and this may have been an important factor behind the radical changes in domestic policies which Peking introduced during 1957-1958. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
The dramatic decisions to set up decentralized, large-scale, labour-intensive industries, to mobilize labour on a mass scale for irrigation and other projects requiring little capital investment, and to regiment China’s population and resources further by establishing the communes may all be related, in some respects at least, to the fact that by 1958 Communist China was carrying out its development programs without long-term foreign loans. In spite of their fervour in pursing their type of communism, their intense nationalism, their pride, and their aggressive language, there is no reason to assume that the present leaders of China are not realistic and rational men who prefer to see their efforts succeed peacefully, rather than to provoke a war, even though they are less anxious to avoid such a war than the Russians are. There are many reasons to believe, however, that in their broad strategy Peking’s leaders do not think primarily in terms either of Chinese territorial conquest abroad or of exporting revolution by overt Chinese aggression. World conquest in traditional military terms and World revolution in Communist terms are very different concepts. Yet, Peking does attach high priority to the building up of its military strength, and in many ways it can attempt to use pressure and force while still trying to avoid war. Even after the stand of the Chinese leaders against the American accusation of being a “currency manipulator,” the Chinese have really given up their aim of avoiding war and of competitive coexistence which they followed before. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
One cannot, of course, rule out completely the possibility that Peking has made a major decision to place an increased reliance on military force to achieve its goals. However, as of the early autumn of 2020, there is little to indicate that the Chinese Communists have, in fact, decided to pursue a general policy of large-scale military aggression. The new pressures they have been exerting on China’s neighbours have to date been limited pressures, and apparently Peking’s aims in regard to Taiwan and Hong Kong and the Senkaku Islands have been limited. In all of these situations, in fact, local factors rather than broad tactical considerations seem to provide the main explanation for Peking’s recent actions, and it appears likely that after attempting to make local gains, Peking will probably try once again to reemphasize the carrot rather than the stick in its relations with Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and South East Asia. And with conflict in the Middle East joining the war in Ukraine as strains on China’s foreign relations, Beijing might well be rethinking its alliance with Russian. When you look at the Russia-China relationship, the “no limits” partnership is started press its luck. Concerning the Israel-Gaza conflict and Russia’s war against Ukraine, China is a little nervous that the Russia idea of communism is clashing with their own idea. Indeed, China might be moving closer to the USA positions on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East as it seeks to rein in “chaos” that could undermine Beijing’s interests. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Time may also be running out for Norther Korea’s strengthening relationship with Russia, owing to palpable discontent in Beijing with Moscow providing some types of technology to Pyongyang. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s growing reliance on Pyongyang to supply artillery shells and other basic armaments for his Ukraine campaign has left some Chinese officials uneasy. There is some palpable discontent in Beijing about this idea that Mr. Putin could be playing in their backyard. There are a lot of fears that support the North Korea with the types of technologies that are back flowing…in return for the weapons shipments could embolden the North Koreans next year. USA President Joe Biden and his administration have repeatedly called on Beijing to pressure its two neighbours, both to rein in Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and to constrain Pyongyang’s provocative actions. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un vowed support for Russia’s “just fight” during a summit with Mr. Putin in September 2023, a pledge that the USA warned could translate into a new source of ammunition for Moscow’s war in Ukraine. If one takes a sober view of the Chinese situation and is not blinded by passionate hatred of their kind of communism, one might arrive at this conclusion: the more difficult, economically, the Chinese position is, the more intolerant will the regime in China become, and the more aggressive its foreign policy. If the present policy of maximal economic isolation and of political humiliation of China continues, the aggressive tendencies within China will increase and help Mr. Putin’s enemies within Russia to gain victory. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
This course is likely to lead to the increase of thermonuclear arming of China, hence of Germany, and eventually to the brink of war. If, on the other hand, the Peking government is given credits and the possibility of free trade, and if the fulfillment of the country’s economic needs is not threated by hostile governments in America, Russia and South East Asia, there is a very reasonable chance that China will revert to its earlier policy of competitive coexistence. There is little doubt that the proposal for a unilateral disarmament—in the broad sense of the unconditional dismantling of a country’s military establishment—will be acceptable neither to the United States of America nor to Russian in the immediate future. This is why many are concerned with practical suggestions for arms control, it proposes another and very limited concept of unilateral disarmament, one which has been called by Charles Osgood “graduated unilateral action (or disengagement)” or which might be called unilateral initiative in taking practical steps toward disarmament. The basic idea underlying this concept is that of a radical change of our method of negotiating multilateral disarmament. This change implies that we give up the present method of bargaining in which every concession we make is dependent on a corresponding and guaranteed concession on the part of the Russians; that, instead, we take, unilaterally, gradual steps toward disarmament in the expectation that the Russians will reciprocate and that, thus, the present deadlock in the negotiations of universal disarmament can be broken through. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
However, in the back of the minds of many, any kind of disarmament sounds insane because not everyone will agree. Furthermore, up and coming nations who do not currently have thermonuclear weapons will build them and everyone will be in danger. Or one nation may keep their weapons and take over the World. Nonetheless, as to the specific steps which should be taken in this fashion, it would require a great deal of further thought, aided by competent specialists. However, in order t give at least an idea of the concrete steps this policy would envisage, it would be necessary to sharing scientific information; stop atomic tests; troop reductions; evacuation of one or more military bases; discontinuation of German rearmament; et cetera. The expectation is that the Russians are as willing as we are to avoid World War III, hence they will begin to reciprocate and that once the course of mutual suspicion has been reversed, bigger steps can be taken which may lead to complete bilateral disarmament. Furthermore, disarmament negations should be paralleled by political negotiations, which aim essentially at mutual noninterference on the basis of the recognition of the status quo. Here, too (and again in essential agreement with Mr. Osgood’s position), unilateral steps such as the recognition of the Oder-Neisse line would be taken in the expectation of reciprocation by the Russians (id est, curbing of Chinee aggression, noninterference in the Middle and far East.) However, if one looks at the mindset and history of Russia, no one really believes that they will agree to any kind of disarmament. They would let the entire World burn before giving up any weapons. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, many believe the rest of the World is in the same yacht. Total unilateral disarmament is unlikely because the present method of negotiations does not seem to lead to the goal of bilateral disarmament because of the deeply ingrained mutual suspicions and fears; without achieving complete disarmament, the armament race will continue and lead to the destruction of our civilization as well as that of the Russians or, even without the outbreak of another war, will slowly undermine and eventually destroy the values in defense of which we are risking our physical existence; while unilateral steps constitute a definite risk (and must be so by the very nature of the idea), the risk at every step is not a crippling one and is infinitely smaller than the danger we run by the continuation of the arms race. Even though the broader concept of complete—rather than graduated—unilateral disarmament is, as stated before, not a practical possibility in the near future, many people like to discuss it because a small minority of people believe that the risks in the continuation of the armament race are far greater than the very serious risks of unilateral disarmament. Yet the arguments in support of unilateral disarmament, even though they are practical, they are considered unacceptable, but the position contributes to breaking through the thought barrier which prevents us now from getting out of the dangerous circle of seeking peace by means of threat and counterthreat. However, more people would be fearful of attacking Russia or China than the United States of America because they know the Russians and the Chinese will strike back, but the Americans are acting like schoolboys who pay the bully during lunch time not to steal their lunch. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
However, people who believe in unilateral disarmament are united by their critical attitude toward the irrational aspects of international politics and by their deep reverence for life. They share the conviction of the oneness of the human race and faith in the spiritual and intellectual potentialities of man. They follow the dictates of their conscience in refusing to have any “part in making billions of women and children and noncombatants hostages for the behaviour of their own governments.” Whether they think in theistic terms or in those of nontheistic humanism (in the sense of the philosophic continuum from Stoic to eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy), they all are rooted in the same spiritual tradition and are unwilling to compromise with its principles. They are united by their uncompromising opposition to any kind of idolatry, including the idolatry of state. While their opposition to the Soviet system is rooted precisely in this attitude against idolatry, they are critical of idolatry whenever is appears in the Western World whether it is in the name of God or od democracy. While there is no proponent of unilateral disarmament who does not believe that the individual must be willing to give one’s life for the sake of one’s supreme values, if such an ultimate necessity arises, they are all equally convinced that to risk the life of the human race, or even the results of its best efforts in the last five thousand years, is immoral and irresponsible. However, many people believe that if the Sun does not destroy the World, then a war will. It is what many people expect. As warfare becomes at once more senseless and more devastating, the convergence between religious pacifist, humanist, and pragmatic opponents to nuclear armament grows. I supposed that is better than being a nihilist. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
From the standpoint of the proponents of unilateral disarmament, to continue the armament race is catastrophic, whether the deterrent works or not. In the first place, they have little faith that the deterrent will prevent the outbreak of a thermonuclear war. They believethat the results of a thermonuclear war would be such that in the very “best” case they completely belie the idea that we ought to fight such a war in order to save our democratic way of life. There is no need to enter the guessing game as to whether one-third or two-thirds of the population of the two opponents and what proportion of the neutral World (depending on how the wind blows) will be destroyed. This is a guessing game that verges on madness; for to consider the possibility of the destruction of 30 percent, 60 percent, or 90 percent of one’s own and the enemy’s population as an acceptable (although, of course, most undesirable) result of one’s policy is indeed approaching pathology. The increasing split between intellect and affect, which is so characteristic of or Western development in the last centuries, has reached its dangerous, schizoid peak in the calm and allegedly rational way in which we can discuss possible world destruction as a result of our own action. It does not take much imagination to visualize that sudden destruction and the threat of slow death to a large part of the American population, or the Russian population, or large parts of the World, will create such a panic, fury, and despair as could only be compared with mass psychosis resulting from the Black Death in the Middle Ages. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The traumatic effects of such a catastrophe would lead to a new form of primitive barbarism, to the resurgence of the most archaic elements, which are still potentialities in every man and of which we have had ample evidence in the terror systems of Mr. Hitler, Mr. Stalin, and Mr. Obama. It would sound most unlikely to many students of human nature and psychopathology that human beings could cherish freedom, respect for life or love after having witnessed and participated in the unlimited cruelty of man against man which thermonuclear war would mean. It is a psychological fact that acts of brutality have a brutalizing effect on the participants and lead to more brutality. However, it is believed that when the World reached a population of 5 billion that it was over populated. We are nearly 2.4 billion people past that number, and there are so who would actually like to see a large section of the human population disappear from the planet to reduce the risk of threat, reduce traffic and housing prices, and reduce the strain that people are putting on the World and give it time to heal. For perpetual victory, therefore, the believer must unceasingly be on guard against the Tempter and one’s agents, praying that all hidden temptations will be revealed as such. The degree to which one understands the workings of the ultimate negative will be determined by the degree of victory experienced, for in vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
For the believer to have victory over every aspect of a tempter’s working, it especially requires discrimination between what I temptation from a seducer working upon the uncrucified “old man,” temptation through the things of the World. In temptation, the crucial point is for the tempted one to know whether the tempting is the work of an evil spirit of from the evil nature. This can be discerned only by the experiential knowledge of Romans 6 as the basis of one’s life. Temptation from the fallen nature should be delt with on the foundation of “Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus” reports Romans 6.11., and practical obedience to the resulting command, “Let not sin reign in your mortal body.” In the hour of temptation to sin—to visible, known sin—the believer should take his stand on Romans 6.6 as his deliberate position of faith, and in obedience to Romans 6.11 declare his undeviating choice and attitude as “death to sin, in death-union with Christ.” If this choice is the expression of his real will, and the temptation to sin does not cease, he should then deal with the spirts of evil who may be seeking to awaken sinful desires (Jas. 1.14) or to counterfeit them. For they can counterfeit the dole nature in evil desire, evil thoughts, evil words, evil presentations—and many honest believers think they are battling with the workings of the old nature when these things are given by evil spirits. However, if the believer is not standing actively on Romans 5, the “counterfeits” are not necessary, for the old fallen creation is always open to be wrought upon the powers of darkness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The most normal and nonpathological form of violence is playful violence. We find it in those forms in which violence is exercised in the pursuit of displaying skill, not in the pursuit of destruction, not motivated by hate or destructiveness. Examples of this playful violence can be found in many instances: from the war games of primitive tribes to the axe throwing of Victorian famers. In all such games of fighting it is not the aim to kill; even if the outcome is death of the opponent, it is, as it were, the opponent’s fault for having “stood in the wrong spot.” Naturally, if we speak of the absence of the wish to destroy in playful violence, this refers only to the ideal type of such games. In reality one would often find unconscious aggression and destructiveness hidden behind the explicit logic of the game. However, even this being so, the main motivation in this type of violence is the display of skill, not destructiveness. Of much greater practical significance than playing violence is reactive violence. By reactive violence I understand that violence which is employed in the defense of life, freedom, dignity, property—one’s own or that of others. It is rooted in fear, and for this very reason it is probably the most frequent form of violence; the fear can be real or imagined conscious or unconscious. This typed of violence is in the service of life, not of death; its aim is preservation, not destruction. It is not entirely the outcome of irrational passions, but to some extent of rational calculation; hence it also implies a certain proportionality between end and means. It has been argued that from a higher spiritual plane killing—even in defense—is never morally right. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, most of those who hold this conviction admit that violence in the defense of life is of a different nature than violence which aims at destructiveness for its own sake. Very often the feeling of being threatened and the resulting reactive violence are not based upon reality, but on the manipulation of man’s mind; political and religious leaders persuade their adherents that they are threatened by an enemy, and thus arouse the subjective response of reactive hostility. Hence the distinction between just and unjust wars, which is upheld by capitalist and Communist governments as well as by the Roman Catholic Church, is a most questionable one, since usually each side succeeds in presenting its position as a defense against attack. In 1939, Mr. Hitler had to organize a fake attack on a Silesian radio station by alleged Polish soldiers (who ere, in fact SS men), in order to give his population the sensation of being attacked, and hence to justify his wanton attack against Poland as a “just war.” There is hardly a case of an aggressive war which could not be couched in terms of defense. The question of who claimed defense rightly is usually decided by the victors, and sometimes only much later by more objective historians. The tendency of pretending that any war is a defensive one shows two things. First of all that the majority of people, at least in most civilized countries, cannot be made to kill and to die unless they are first convinced that they are doing so in order to defend their lives and freedom; second, it shows that it is not difficult to persuade millions of people that they are in danger of being attacked, and hence that they are called upon to defend themselves. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Such persuasion depends most of all on a lack of independent thinking and feeling, and on the emotional dependence of the vast majority of the people on their political leaders. Provided there is this dependence, almost anything presented with force and persuasion will be accepted as real. The psychological results of the acceptance of a belief in an alleged threat are, of course, the same as those of a real threat. People feel threatened, and in order to defend themselves are willing to kill and to destroy. In the case of paranoid delusions of persecution we find the same mechanism, only not on a group basis, but on an individual one. In both instances, subjectively the person feels in danger and reacts aggressively. Beware, you philosophers and friends of knowledge, and guard against martyrdom! Against suffering “for the sake of truth”! Even against defending yourselves! It spoils all the innocence and subtle neutrality of your conscience, it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags, it dumbs you down, makes you brutish and bullish, if, when battling danger, defamation, suspicion, expulsion, and even meaner consequences of animosity, you wind up having to play the role of protectors of truth or Earth—as if “the truth” were some harmless and clumsy person in need of protectors! And you of all people, you Knights of the Most Sorrowful Countenance, my dear loiterers and cobweb spinners of the spirit: in the end, you know well enough that nothing hinges on whether you are proved right, indeed that no philosopher has ever been proved right, and that there might by a more worthy truthfulness in every little question mark you put behind your favourite words an beloved doctrines (sometimes even behind yourselves) than in all the solemn gestures and trump cards played before accusers and courts of law! #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
No, step aside. Ruin to the shadows. And have your masks and your finesse, that you may not be recognized! Or that you may be feared a little! And do not forget the garden, the garden with the golden trelliswork! And have people around you who are like a garden—or like music on the waters, in the evening, when the day has sunk into memory—Choose that good solitude, free, playful, lighthearted solitude, which might even give you the right to be good, in some sense! How poisonous, how cunning, how bad every protracted war that cannot be waged with open force makes us. How personal and protracted fear makes us, a protracted spying on one’s enemies, on potential enemies! These outcasts of society, those long hunted, wickedly persecuted—the forced recluses, the Spinozas or the Giordano Brunos—always in the end become, albeit in the most spiritual guise, and perhaps without knowing themselves, sophisticated revenge seekers and poisoners (let someone unearth the foundations of Spinoza’s ethics and theology!); not to mention the clumsiness of moral indignation, which is a sure sign that a philosopher has lost his philosophical sense of humour. The martyrdom of the philosopher, his “sacrifice to truth,” brings to light the agitator and the actor in him; and if one has hitherto regarded him with mere artistic curiosity, in the case of some philosopher it is not hard to understand the dangerous wish to see them, too, in the degeneration (degenerating into “martyrs,” crying out from their stages and rostrums). Except that with such a wish we must be clear about what we will get to see: just a satyr play, just an epilogue farce, just more proof that the actual long tragedy has come to an end—assuming that every philosophy arose as a long tragedy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Knowledge for its own sake—this is the final snare set by morality: one thereby gets completely tangled up in it all over again. The allure of knowledge would be meager, were it not that so much shame must be overcome along the way. The meaning of history seems more important to the mind than does the meaning of being. The metaphysical interpretation of the meaning of history has become an urgent and practical concern. The necessity of acting historically in the true sense, that is, of acting so as to change history, is one of the strongest motives for the development of a metaphysics of history…the recognition of the necessity of a metaphysical interpretation of history leads to the recognition of the necessity of metaphysics. The importance of history is attached to a clear sign that the symmetry of this theonomous union of religion and culture can be appreciated only by viewing it within the historical dimension. God as the ground of being lies at the depths of theonomy. The power of the New Being enables us to rejoin the ground from which existence serves us. And the Spiritual Community is the place where the transforming impact of the Spirit is felt. However, when is theonomous fulfilment realized? This is the question of a Christian interpretation of history, and, since history moves forward to its term, it is also the eschatological question. History is the movement of creative time toward fulfilment. History is also the realization of meaning through freedom. Although the concepts of history may be opaque, we discuss the various aspects of history—the historical dimension, man and history, historical time, the ambiguities of history—in hope in this way gradually to penetrate to a better understanding of it. It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Must you salt your truth so heavily that it no longer even—quenches thirst? #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
The Winchester Mystery House sits on an area of ancient human settlement. In a field close to the old road is the remains of a neolithic chambered tomb that has become known as “the dungeon”; in an adjacent field were a number of scattered stones, and standing stones in the vicinity know, as “The Winchester Stonehenge.” The road itself traveled over several prehistoric burials. The dungeon itself was erected at some date between 4300 BC and 3000 BC. However, The Winchester Mansion is also of more contemporary relevance. In The Oakland Tribune, 10 September 1890, there was a report concerning numerous sightings of a girl standing by the side of the road at eleven o’clock in the evening; she was at the gate of the mansion. She was hitch-hiking, even at this late hour. She was not in the least a faint or ghostly figure. However, then, unaccountably, on all occasion, she vanished. In The Oakland Tribune of 27 February 1899, there was another disappearance along the entrance of the mansion. Claus Holestein of Germany, for example, had several times seen two pedestrians walking along the front gate of the mansion; when the carriage came close to them, however, they disappeared. On one occasion he saw them walking around the mansion, when a sudden the two people rushed into the path of a carriage which passed straight through them.
Then in 1904, the local police were called to the scene on two occasions when motorists believed that they had knocked down a young woman on the road; on both occasions there was no evidence of any accident of victim. The first encounter was Wednesday 13 July 1904 when Mr. Groning past The Winchester Mansion, when suddenly a young girl appeared in front of his vehicle. He braked and swerved, but he was sure that he had hit her; he said that he heard the sound of the impact. He left his car and found a young girl lying in the road; she was bleeding. He described her as wearing a white blouse and white dress. He wrapped her in a tartan rug taken from the car, and carried her to Mrs. Winchester’s mansion. Unable to gain entrance to the front door, he left the girl and went looking for help. By the time he found one of the farmers, and they returned to the front door of the estate, there was no girl, and no signs of blood. Tracker dogs were introduced the following morning, but there was no scent. There were marks or indentations upon the car. After this event was widely publicized there were of course innumerable local reports of phantom hitch-hikers seen near The Winchester mansion, but none of them had been substantiated. There was, however, one interesting coincidence. An investigator, on searching through the back numbers of The Oakland Tribune, discovered that three young women were killed in a car accident in Santa Clara Valley late on the evening of 19 November 1905. One of these women was to have been married on the following day.
In the autumn of 1922 three separate motorist reported that they had knocked down a young woman who had run unexpectedly into the road. A driver was quoted saying that “she ran in front of the car. She stopped and looked at me. There was no expression on her face. Then I hit her, and it was as if the ground moved apart and sent went under the car. I thought I had killed her, because it was not as if she was see-through or anything. She was solid—as real as you are.” But of course, there was no one there.
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The Mystery of the Scream itself Remains
The land on which Llanada Villa is constructed is naturally cheerful. Sun and sky are bright, and the shade is enough. A spring gurgles; there is firewood at hand from the mahogany tree. However, the thing most people will remember about Llanada Villa is not the enormous lobby and dinning room, nor the elaborately carved mahogany woodwork framing the library, nor the men and women of the estate themselves, with their bright eyes and pale faces. The thing they will remember most is that behind the dark brocade curtains hang so heavily that there is little wonder that this fortress shelters a number of extremely active phantoms. For years, inhabitants of my mansion have claimed to see numerous ghostly reenactments of tragedies that have saturated the psychic ether of the environment. On this night, I lay sleepless in an unfamiliar bed. With a fire a blaze in the fireplace, I lay with my eyes open, thinking of absurd, disjointed things, wondering now why I had not pushed away this trivial bout of anxiety. Instead, I felt utterly alone, crippled by uncertainty and susceptible to fear. Suddenly I was frightened: it seemed to me quite possible that a panic attack might come on. It was a cold night and, of course, apart from the occasional noise from the house settling, very quiet. Then, there was a terrible scream. It seemed to come from downstairs. It was spine-chilling. It crescendoed for some seconds and then stopped suddenly. I can only liken it to the shriek I once heard when a cat was killed by a fox; this was also in the night. I thought to myself, “Somebody’s been killed.” I summoned one of the chambermaids and told of what I heard. She told me that she had heard it several times during her ten years’ service, but it was better to forget it. I still was not satisfied. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
I walked down the hall towards the stairs. I passed by an old room which was being sealed off from the main house. Suddenly I was aware of a hand and arm stretched out from the room to bar my passage. Being scared, I jumped, and for a moment turned by back to the room. On looking around, I saw a man dressed in dark clothes, walking back to the wall. He was wearing no hat when he reached the wall, and seemed to walk right into it. I could hear no sound of steps, and on close investigation after he disappeared, I could see no man and no hole in the wall. He vanished. I felt him vanish. I felt the warmth and the sudden movement in the air. It was as if something has been sucked away, and the chandeliers swung violently. And suddenly I did not know what I had seen, or what I had felt. My heart was skipping dangerously. I felt another wave of dizziness and continued to move along the wall, silent, as I heard learned to do in many a night. I hugged the wall, so that floor boards would not creak. A gust of cool air fanned my rosy cheek, and I put out a hand and found the edge of an open door. Mr. Hansen had told me a history regarding cupboard in this room. According to what he related, this young woman’s spirt comes out of this cupboard: but I do not fully recollect the matter. Not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, a farmer feloniously, willfully, and of malice made an assault and with a certain knife value a penny throat of one of the housemaids then and there did cut, of which the housemaid then and there did die, and the body of the housemaid was cast into a certain pond of water situate on this estate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
As I was recalling this history of this misfortune, footsteps that came downstairs sounded light and active, like a small, spry man. For an instant of horror, I feared there was no next room. My backward-groping foot could not find a floor to stand on, and only a quick, noiseless grab for the door-jamb kept me from falling. Then my foot stretched lower and touched solid woof. Another stairway here, going down—I painfully descended another step, another. I groped around a turn in the stairs and to a door below tightly closed. For long minutes I waited, hand on latch. I lifted the latch, slipped through, and closed the door behind me. There were noises in the distance. I became certain that I was hearing words in a tribal dialect that I did not understand carried on the wind of the inky winter nights. I knew that somewhere in this corridor resides a secret room in which a monster resides. For generations of servants have sworn that they have heard its shuffling feet and hideous half-human cries as it emerges for its nocturnal prowlings. According to my butler Herr Enderlin, in 1888, the spirits compelled the carpenters to built a ghastly chamber deep within the wall to hide a secret transmitted from the past, which is only know to three persons. When one of the triumvirates dies, the survivors are compelled by a terrible oath to elect a successor. According to legend, because of the family curse, a demon was incarnated. It was a half-human monster, misshapen, and was found to be a grotesque monstrosity, and the brutish creature was hidden away in this secret room. For decades, three people have been selected to care and look after the monsters. I was determined to discover the location of the secret room and view the monster for myself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
It was darker here than upstairs. I knelt and touched a cement floor, then a cement wall. There was a big rectangular chamber, with double doors at the far end. These led to an entry from lower ground behind the house. The basement had been furnished with a long bench of dark wood along one wall. There was something of a horrible spirit lurking in the abyss. I felt as petrified as men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photography them or study their habits. Half-paralysed with terror though I was, there was nevertheless fanned within me a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end. However, I certainly did not mean to face what I feared—yet I will not deny that I may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from a hidden vantage-point. The sub-levels of my home perhaps embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by me. I reflected on how in these days, while I was being terrorized by ghosts, some people were having serious difficulties with finances, employee morale, yet we all managed to keep a spirit of camaraderie, of heartiness. Of course, it was the natural consequence of people in Victorian times. One simply could not resist, in such a context, the droll remark, the grateful laugh, the sense of cheerful complicity in even an unfortunate fate. How puzzling the human personality is, I thought, as I was preparing to enter the basement, moving uncharacteristically slowly, when with others there is a public self, alone there is a private self, and yet both are real…Both are experienced as real. A heavy echoing thump startled me. I heard the floor creak as I moved cautiously but purposefully toward the basement stairs. Whatever the lurking horror might be, I believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly manifest. And yet, when I did venture down the stairs towards the dark basement, my first impression was one of anticlimax. The moon light beam from the skylight upstairs made a halo of radiance at the door. Light must have seeped at once through the cracks, for the shadows, halfway downstairs, paused. My heart was racing and my lip caught in my teeth, I tiptoed to the door and stood next to its hinges. A hand rattled the latch, lifted it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
The door was thrown open, screening me from the rest of the cellar. A specter appeared in my own resemblance, and she seemed to be habited in the same clothes and dress which I hath on at the same time. Revolver shots rang in the cellar like a bombardment. As I cleared the door, I darted up the stairs. I tripped on the top one, but kept my feet. Four mighty leaps carried me to the Grand Ball Room. I was taken up by the skirt of my doublet by this female demon, and carried a height into the air. I was soon missed by my servants, and after no news could be heard of me until at length (near half an hour later) I was heard singing and whistling in the fruit orchard where they found me in kind of a trance. I solemnly protested to them that the demon had carried me so high that my house seemed to me to be but as a sand castle, and during all that time I was in perfect sense, and prayed to Almighty God not to suffer the devil to destroy me; and I was then suddenly set down in the fruit orchard. The workmen found one shoe on the side of my house, and the other on the other side, and in the morning espied my hat hanging on the top of a tree; by which it appears I had been carried a considerable height, and that what I am telling is not a fiction. In the month of June, in a pond of water, with the throat cut: a knife belonging to a prisoner was found in that same water, and something dark came up out of the water at the edge of the pond farthest away from him, and so up the bank. And when it got to the top where he could see it plain against the sky, it stood up and flapped the arms up and down, and then run off very swiftly. And inside of Llanada Villa, it was also very noticeable what a silence the servants kept, and further (though this might not be otherwise than natural in that season of the year), what a darkness and obscurity there was in the mansion, lights being brought in not long after two o’ clock in the day, and yet no fog in town. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
On November 18, of the year of 2020, caretakers were decorating for the season. Suddenly, one man was startled by knocking sounds coming from behind the largest cupboard door in the house. He thought to himself, “there is someone hiding within, and I would know what she wants.” And with that he gave a sort of cry or a shout and ran out of the house into the dark, and another caretaker felt the cupboard door pushed out against her while she held it, but before she pressed to keep it shut as hard as she could, it was forced out against her, and she had to fall back. What came out? She could not see what it was: it fleeted very swiftly over the floor and out the door. What did it look like? It ran very low, and it was of a dark colour. She was daunted and made all the haste she could after it to the door that stood open. And she looked out, but it was dark and could see nothing. There were no tracks on the floor, but there was a voice heard without the house.
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Randolph Harris II International 