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Provide them with a Decent Childhood Only to Rob them of their Adult Life
The United States of America is an individualist country. American think of life as an effort to realize their own goals and vales out in the World. This is part of The American Dream. However Worldwide, it turns out, individualism is quite unusual. That temperament was the chief reason why first Ancient Egypt, Europe, then Britian, and then America came to lead the World. (And as we see, World power does shift, so unless American can become a creditor nation and stay on the cutting edge of innovation, we could lose our status as World Superpower.) Today, our chief challenges come from groups within our society, and nations abroad, who are not individualist, who think of life in more cautious and collective terms. To continue to lead, America must come to terms with that World yet remain an individualist nation. The structure of modern society affects man in two ways simultaneously: he becomes more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and becomes more isolated, alone, and afraid. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not lose track of the one side while following the other. This is difficult because conventionally we think in nondialectical terms and are prone to doubt whether two contradictory trends can result simultaneously from one cause. Furthermore, the negative side of freedom, the burden which it puts upon man, is difficult to realize, especially for those whose heart is with the cause of freedom. Because in the flight for freedom in modern history the attention was focused upon combating old forms of authority and restraint, it was natural that one should feel that the more these traditional restraints were eliminated, the more freedom one had gained. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Poverty in the United States of America is a major issue. Many people think that discrimination and racism is cool and witty. However, how can a sizeable minority of Americans remain jobless and deeply impoverished in the World’s richest state and richest county—even when jobs are available? The more people we have gainfully employed means the more tax revenue we will have and the less dependence individuals will have on the government, which will lessen the burden on taxpayers. While I was doing research, I looked at rent in the United States of America, and the most affordable rent $850 a month, in a city with the median home prices being $250,000.00. In most cities, nationwide, however, the lowest rent for a 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment was $1,800.00 a month, and this excludes major cities like Manhattan, San Jose, New York, San Francsico. So in order to comfortable afford a 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment in most cities, which tend to be semi-rural cities in America, a person need to earn between $43,200 to $64,800 a year. This means that people on fixed incomes are priced out of the rental market, and that is why there is such a huge homeless problem in America. Not only that, but studies indicate that over the last twenty years, Social Security checks are 78 percent lower than they should be and have not kept up with inflation at all. Another problem America is having is troubled assimilation of many minorities. Since the 1960, on average, these marginalized groups have had much more difficulty getting ahead and avoiding social problems than dominant groups. It is not only because of discrimination from the dominant group and law enforcement, but also from their own ethnic groups. It makes some minorities feel superior to see their own family members, perhaps even their kids struggling to become established. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
This is part of the slave/master mindset. People like to see others with less and it makes the feel good to see someone else struggling and having a hard time, while they are living a comfortable life. The great fact about today’s World is cultural difference. Americans have long thought that they are no different from other people, only freer and more fortunate. They pride themselves on living independent lives in which they work out their personal destiny. They wish that everyone had these opportunities. However, individualist style of life is far less universal than most people think, and today have come into question both at home and abroad. To recognize and address that huge reality is the leading challenge of our time. All of America’s toughest test today involve groups or nations that, on average, are not individualist, but more cautious and collective-minded. At home, individualism is fading among low-income Americans, who are less able than they once were to take responsibility for themselves. We fail sufficiently to recognize that although man has rid himself from old enemies of freedom, new enemies of a different nature have arisen; enemies which are not essentially external restraints, but internal factors blocking the full realization of the freedom of personality. We believe, for instance, that freedom of worship constitutes one of the final victories for freedom. We do not sufficiently recognize that while it is a victory against those powers of Church and State which did not allow man to worship according to his own conscience, the modern individual has lost to a great extent the inner capacity to have faith in anything which is not probable by the methods of the natural sciences. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Or, to choose another example, we feel that freedom of speech is the last step in the march of victory of freedom. We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what “he” thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally—that is, for himself—which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts. Again, we are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. We neglect the role of the anonymous authorities like public opinion and “common sense,” which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different. In other words, we are fascinated by the growth of freedom from powers outside of ourselves and are blinded to the fact of inner restraints, compulsions, and fears, which tend to undermine the meaning of the victories freedom has won against its traditional enemies. We therefore are prone to think that the problem of freedom is exclusively that of gaining still more freedom of the kind we have gained in the course of modern history, and to believe that the defense of freedom against such powers that deny such freedom is all that is necessary. We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigor, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Any critical evaluation of the effect which the industrial system had on this kind of inner freedom must start with the full understanding of the enormous progress which capitalism has meant for the development of human personality. As a matter of fact, any critical appraisal of modern society which neglects this side of the picture must prove to be rooted in an irrational romanticism and is suspect of criticizing capitalism, not for the sake of progress, but for the sake of the destruction of the most important achievements of man in modern history. What Protestantism had started to do in freeing man spiritually, capitalism continued to do mentally, socially, and politically. Economic freedom was the basis of this development, the middle class was it champion. The individual was no longer bound by a fixed social system, based on tradition and with a comparatively small margin for personal advancement beyond the traditional limit. He was allowed and expected to succeed in personal economic gains as far as his diligence, intelligence, courage, thrift, or luck would lead him. His was the chance of success, his was the risk to lose and to be one of those killed or wounded in the fierce economic battle in which each one fought against everybody ese. Under the feudal system the limits of his life expansion had been laid out before he was born; but under the capitalistic system the individual, particularly the member of the middle class, had a chance—in spite of many limitations—to succeed on the basis of his own merits and actions. He saw a goal before his eyes toward which he could strive and which he often had a good chance to attain. He learned to rely on himself, to make responsible decisions, to give up both soothing and terrifying superstitions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Man became increasingly free from the bondage of nature; he mastered natural forces to a degree unheard and undreamed of in previous history. Men became equal; differences of caste and religion, which once had been natural boundaries blocking the unification of the human race, disappeared, and men learned to recognize each other as human beings. The World became increasingly free from mystifying elements; man began to see himself objectively and with fewer and fewer illusions. Politically freedom grew too. On the strength of its economic position the rising middle class could conquer political power and the newly won political power created increased possibilities for economic progress. The great revolutions in England and France and the fight for American independence are the milestones marking this development. The peak in the evolution of freedom in the political sphere was the modern democratic state based on the principle of equality of all men and the equal right of everybody to share in the government by representatives of his own choosing. Each one was supposed to be able to act according to his own interest and at the same time with a view to the common welfare of the nation. Capitalism not only freed man from traditional bonds, but it also contributed tremendously to the increasing positive freedom, to the growth of an active, critical, responsible self. However, while this was one effect capitalism had on the process of growing freedom, at the same time it made the individual more alone and isolated and imbued him with a feeling of insignificance and powerlessness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Culture connotes what people think life is about, what we strive to do or be. Differences in culture are too important to ignore, but neither are they racial in any physical sense. Rather, the arise from differences in attitudes and ways of life. As it happens, most of those who believe that one can coherently talk about freedom of action without touching upon the issue of free will are compatibilists, who reject the idea of free will in any strong, non-determinist sense and who embrace instead a certain conception of free choice which they deem to be perfectly compatible with the determinism of natural causality. The central assumption of common human thought and speech seems to be that freedom is the principal characteristic that distinguishes man from all that is non-human. Moderns associate individual freedom with the absence of constraints, including the constraints of law, to pursue one’s own interests—especially those of a commercial kind. Constant contrasts this with the ancient Greco-Roman understanding of liberty in terms of being a freeman as opposed to a slave of being entitled, indeed obliged, to take an active role in government. Relation-based governance and rule-based governance represent a theoretical dichotomy. In reality, most governance systems contain elements of those two extreme forms. Even in the United States of America today, which is as close to having a rule-based governance as any country at any time, we see continued use of relation-based governance at many points. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
In fact external legal enforcement of a contract when a breach occurs is often the last resort rather than the first. Its more important role is as a backstop or a threat point tht underlies the renegotiation of the deal between the parties. And international trade and capital flows require interaction of different governance systems—a rule-based and a relation-based system, or two relation-based systems with different preexisting relationship. What can we expect to see at such interfaces? Most important are the frictions and instabilities that arise when people or firms or banks coming from different expectations about behavior, transact with each other. The clash of expectations can lead to speculative booms and busts; in the financial bubbles through history, economies in the process of liberalization appear to be especially susceptible to outbreaks of speculation. Next come asymmetries, some of which favor the relation-based system. People used to dealing in such a system will find it easier to initiate some transaction in a rule-based system than vice versa. This may be one reason—in addition to any formal trade barriers—why Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have been more successful in exporting to the United States of America and the United Kingdom than vice versa. Anyone can come and tap into USA distribution channels, get trade credit, or engage in advertising and other promotional activities. In relation-based economies these activities are mostly carried out by firms that have long-standing relationships with others in the country, and who will not easily deal with outsiders for fear of spoiling these relationships #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
To penetrate these markets, an outsider must work patiently to build up his own relationships, or invest in building up his own network of distribution, et cetera, before he can expect success. Outsiders who come from other relation-based systems do not have ready access to existing networks of relations either, but they better understand the importance of such relation-building investments. Therefore they are likely to have more success; for example, European exporters to East Asia have generally enjoyed modest success, better than the Americans. This also helps explain why the USA government and lobbyists for exporting industries in the United States of America are so keen to get the East Asian countries to adopt a more open system or rules. The asymmetry may be even more pronounced for capital flows. Savers from a relation-based system can buy assets in a rule-based system with more confidence than vice versa. This had implications for capital flows in both directions. An investor from a rule-based system can invest in a rule-based system who lends to someone in a relation-based system without developing the necessary relationship in advance is asking to be robbed. A saver from a relation-based system can invest in a rule-based system without such fear. Paradoxically, this may undermine the rule-based system by giving its participants a good outside opportunity. Another asymmetry favors the rule-based system. Compare two systems that initially operate separately from each other. If a new technology of a given technical superiority becomes available, a relation-based system will be slower to adopt it than a rule-based system. This reason is as follows. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
An incumbent, given his sunk stake in the old technology, has less to gain from switching to the new. However, if competitor can enter easily, then they are going to destroy the value of the incumbent’s stake anyway, so he might as well do it himself and at least exploit some first-mover advantage to get the quasi-rent on the new technology. However, as was argued above, a relation-based system is likely to have smaller scale and larger sunk investments in relationships; therefore it is likely to have higher natural entry barriers than a rule-based system. Therefore the incumbents in a relation-based system are less threatened by competitors’ entry, and more likely to indulge in their desire to delay switching. Now bringing together in trade two such systems, one rule based and the other relation based. The former, being used to the mode of slow adoption of new technologies, will be at an impediment unless it can reform quickly. Incumbents in the relation-based system will of course realize this, and will exert political influence to delay or limit the opening up, or at least to secure protection for themselves. Tomorrow’s political system must be the principle of “semidirect democracy”—a shift from depending on representatives to representing ourselves. The mixture of the two is semidirect democracy. The collapse of consensus, as we have already seen, subverts the very concept of representation. Without agreement among the voters back home, whom does a representative really “represent”? #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
At the same time, legislators have come to rely increasingly on staff support and on outside experts for advice in shaping the laws. British M.P.s are notoriously weak vis-à-vis the Whitehall bureaucracy because they lack adequate staff support, thus shifting more power away from Parliament to the unelected civil service. The United States of America’s Congress, in an effort to counterbalance the influence of the executive bureaucracy, has created its own bureaucracy—a Congressional Budget Office, an Office of Technology Assessment and other necessary agencies and appendages. However, this had merely transferred the problem from extramural to intramural. Our elected representatives know less and less about the myriad measures on which they must decide and are compelled to rely more and more on the judgment of others. The representative no longer even represents him or herself. More basically, parliaments, congresses or assemblies were places in which, theoretically, the claims or rival minorities could be reconciled. Their representatives could make trade-offs for them. With today’s blunt-edged Second Wave political tools, no legislator can even keep track of the many grouplets he or she nominally represents, let alone broker or trade effectively for them. And the more overloaded the American Congress or the German Bundestag or the Norwegian Storting becomes, the worse this situation grows. This helps explain why single-issue political pressure groups become intransigent. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Seeing limited opportunity for sophisticated trading or reconciliation through Congress or the legislatures, their demands on the system become non-negotiable. The theory of representative government as the ultimate broker collapses too. The breakdown of bargaining, the decision crunch, the worsening paralysis of representative institutions mean, over the long term, that many of the decisions now made by small numbers of pseudo representative institutions mean, over the long term, the many decisions now made by small numbers of pseudo representatives may have to be shifted back gradually to the electorate itself. If our elected brokers cannot make deals for us, we shall have to do it ourselves. If the laws they make are increasingly remote from our unresponsive to our needs, we shall have to make our own. For this, however we shall need new institutions and new technologies as well. The Second Wave revolutionaries who invented today’s basic institutions were well aware of the possibilities of direct as against representative democracy. American revolutionists knew all about New England town halls and small-scale organic consensus formation. However, the shortcomings and limitations of direct democracy were also well-known and, at that time, more persuasive. There are some objections to such an innovation. First, direct democracy allowed for no check or delay on temporary and emotional public reactions. And second, the communications of that day could not handle the mechanics. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
These are legitimate problems. How would a frustrated and inflamed America public in the mid-1960, for example, have voted on whether or not to drop a nuclear bomb on Hanoi? Or a West German public, furious at the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, on a proposal to set up camps for “sympathizers”? What if Canadians had held a plebiscite over Quebec the week after Rene Levesque took power? Elected representatives are presumed to be less emotional and more deliberative than the public. The problem of overly motional public response, however, can be overcome in various ways, such as requiring a cooling-off period or second vote before implementation of major decisions taken via referendum or other forms of direct democracy. The other objection can also be met. For the old communication limitations no longer stand in the way of expanded direct democracy. Today’s spectacular advances in communications technology open for the first time in a mind-boggling array of possibilities for direct citizen participation in political decision-making. Year ago we had the pleasure of keynoting an historic event—the World’s first “electronic town hall”—over the Qube cable TV system in Columbus, Ohio. Using this interactive communications system, residents of a small Columbus suburb actually took part via electronics in a political meeting of their local planning commission. By pushing a button in their living rooms, they were able to vote instantly on proposals relating to such practical issues as local zoning, housing codes, and proposed highway construction. They were able not only to vote yes or no, but to participate in the discussion and speak up on the air. They were even able by push button to tell the chairperson when to move on to the next point on the agenda. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
This was only a first, most primitive indication of tomorrow’s potential for direct democracy. Using today’s far more advanced computers, satellites, telephones, cable, polling techniques and other tools, not to mention the Internet and other communications networks, an educated citizenry can for the first time in history begin making many of its own political decisions. This is not an either/or issue. It is not a question of “electronic town halls” in the crude form referred to by Ross Perot. Far more sensitive and sophisticated democratic processes are possible, And it is certainly not a question of direct democracy versus indirect, representation by self versus representation by others. Many imaginative arrangements can be invented to combine direct and indirect democracy. Right now members of Congress and most other parliaments or legislatures set up their own committees. There is no ways for citizens to force lawmakers to create a committee to deal with some neglected or highly controversial issues. However, why could not voters be empowered indirectly through petition to compel a legislative body to set up committees on topics the public—not the lawmakers—deems important? #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
We hammer away at such “blue-sky” proposals not because we unhesitatingly favor them but merely to underscore the more general point: there are powerful ways to open and democratize a system that is now near breakdown and in which few, if any, feel adequately represented. However, we must begin thinking outside the worn grooves of the past three hundred years. We can no longer solve our problems with the ideologies, the models, or the leftover structures of the Second Wave past. Fraught with uncertain implications, such novel proposals warrant careful local experimentation before we apply them on a broad scale. But however we may feel about this or that suggestion, the old objections to direct democracy are growing weaker at precisely the time that the objections to representative democracy are growing stronger. Dangerous or even bizarre as it may seem to some, semidirect democracy is a moderate principle that can help us design workable new institutions for the future. When the offender of the ultimate negative see their hold coming to an end, they never let go until the cause is fully removed. If the thing they have attacked about still exists in any degree, they continue their attack. When the self-actualized is “fighting through,” the enemy has various tactics to hinder one’s deliverance. One may dangle a thing before the mind which is not the true cause of the deception, so as to get the self-actualized occupied with it, while one is gaining all the time—pouring in accusations upon one’s victim until one is bewildered and confused: charges, accusations, blame, guilt—direct from the enemy, or indirectly through others. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Accusing offender can say you are wrong, and right when you are right—but it is essential that the self-actualized does not accept blame until one is absolutely sure that it is deserved, and then not from the ultimate negative’s lying offenders; they have not been appointed by the ultimate cause to do the convicting work of honor and justice. When once the truth has dawned upon the victim of the powers of the ultimate negative, and they no longer hope to gain by deception, their one primary attack all through—from the moment of undeceiving to final deliverance—is the perpetual charge “You are wrong,” so as to keep the man in ceaseless condemnation. The poor persecuted believe then is likely to go to ultimate concern and try to get victory over “conduct disorder,” but in vain. The more one prays, the more one appears to sink into a hopeless bog. One seems to oneself to be one mass of “conduct disorder,” without hope of freedom. However, it is victory over the power of the ultimate negative—not conduct disorder—that one needs, and one will quickly prove this when one recognizes the true cause of one’s trouble and lay hold of the Calvary victory over the ultimate negative. If we recall, God is the ground and the power of being. The more fully a creature actualizes it essence, the more closely it is united to the divine ground and the more profoundly it participates in the power of being. However, the very process profoundly it participates in the power of being. However, the very process of actualization inevitably results in estrangement from essential being, for potentialities are not realized and essence is distorted in existence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The most electrifying and the most paradoxical event that could possibly occur would be the perfect realized in a personal life, despite the conditions of existence, then the universe itself would, in a sense, be fulfilled. This actualization of essential humanity is the New Being, for in contrast to it everything else is old, unfinished, distorted, and without promise. In Jesus of Nazareth the New Being is manifest, thus consulting him the Christ. The astounding paradox of Christology is the appearance of essential manhood under the conditions of existence, but without being eroded by them. How are God and man united in Jesus the Christ? It is essential man who represents not only man to man but God to man; for essential man, by his very nature, represents God. He represents the original image of God embodied in man, but he does so under the conditions of estrangement between God and man. This belongs to the dialectics of the infinite and the finite. The paradox of the Christian message is that in one personal life essential manhood has appeared under the conditions of existence without being conquered by them. One could also speak of essential God-manhood in order to indicate the divine presence in essential manhood; but this is redundant, and the clarity of thought is served best in speaking simply of essential man. Man is united in God simply because he is man, that is, the freedom-bearing image of God. Jesus as the Christ is united to God by something more than His perfect manhood. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Centuries of theologians have missed the point of the paradox of their faith. At least they must know where the central mystery lies. Christianity is distinctive for its theory of education. The Book of Mormon and the Christian Holy Bible deems desirable and necessary the factual information and the cultivation of skills of the body and mind, and the scholarly exploration of the multi-roomed mansion of Worldly wisdom. All these are deemed desirable and necessary only insofar as they expand the soul, stimulate the more sensitivity of man, and are channeled in the direction of the promotion of human welfare. Thus Jeremiah declares, “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him that glorieth glory in this that he understandeth and knoweth Me, that I am the Lord who exercises mercy, justice and righteousness on Earth; for in these things I delight, saith the Lord.” Universal literacy is not moral intelligence. The three R’s do not spell righteousness. Popular education in our day teaches young people how to make a living, but it largely ignores the necessity of teaching them how to live, and what to live for. Mormonism and Christianity can, in our time, make significant contributions through its unrivaled traditions of the pre-eminence of The Book of Mormon and the Christian Holy Bible, the character-building, soul-cultivating emphasis in learning, calling on man to develop ethical alertness, to master himself rather than to rule over others. Our religion goes beyond the formulation of universal postulates and idealistic ends. It translates the poetry of moral aspiration into the prose of every day life. It is religion of behavior as well as of beliefs. It brings down the holy tablets from the heights of Sinai to the valley of decision and the plain of realization. It translates the Word of God into life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Often voluntary community action is stultified because initiative in planning has been sequestered within a small, self-appointed elite. These considerations emphasize the social context within which recommending bodies should be constructed. Such considerations are often neglected in favor of the personal qualities of potential members—interest, ability, free time, resources, prestige. These often matter, but they are also frequently sterile in terms of results. It takes much more than a coterie of enthusiast or a list of prominent names adorning a letterhead to assure that a study committee will act and cause others to act. As a sign of some degree of impartiality, the members of such a commission or board are customarily unpaid, though they may get their expenses or pay from the groups they represent. Thus they can rarely be expected to expend more than limited amounts of time in the business of the committee. Unless the whole operation is too small and rudimentary, this is the point at which a staff of full-time, paid professional experts may have to be engaged. The professional staff usually consists of a number of specially qualified experts drawn from several fields or professions, their work being assigned and brought into a coherent pattern by a “generalist” with some facility in transcending special vocabularies and in promoting co-operation. He is often known as executive secretary or staff director. On the other hand, the staff may consist of a single person who is at best an able amateur. Ad hoc commercial consultants are often useful in supplementing or providing an independent check of permanent staffs. Where expertness is required, the gains through specialization are obvious. Specialization may occur not only among various professions—as engineers, accountants, doctors, and attorneys—but with regard to various functions, such as researchers, idea-men, publicists, and patent drudges. The man of a creative turn may wilt before the task of tracing property titles, as the meticulous investigator may balk at championing a new idea. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The creation of high standards of ethical and technical performance falls to a considerable degree to the professional societies to which the specialists belong; creation of co-operation and morale within the staff falls especially upon the generalist in charge. The specialists can normally be selected by various fairly objective measures of competence, while the role of the generalist has to be filled primarily through trial and error. Instead of trying to bring the greatest total amount of good, perhaps the thing to do would be to work toward the greatest average amount of happiness. It would seem preferable to have far fewer people having far better lives. (For whom, though, would it not be better?) However, the principle that we should maximize the average level of happiness also has unpalatable implications. (It might even raise questions about whether we should eliminate those with unhappy lives, or even those happy people whose happiness was below average. However, let us set aside considerations of homicide. Remember that episode of Charmed?) To maximize the average amount of happiness, we might elect to utilize our environment at an unsustainable rate while lowering our numbers by natural attrition and low birth rates. Thereby, if we practiced sustainable life-styles, we might have very enjoyable lives. In the end, we might elect not to reproduce at all, allowing the human race to extinct (presumably the last happy few would be tended by robots). It makes sense that to save the planet, the human race would stop producing and go extinct. What are these things you seek, since you leave the entire World to find them? God said, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth,” Genesis 1.28. He did not say ravage and destroy the Earth. Obviously the planet is overpopulated and that is why things are so expensive and so many people are having difficulty surviving. So, instead of just feeding other nations, and giving them money, we need to teach them birth control methods. Afterall, is it not rich people who say they want their children to work hard and learn the value of the dollar? So then, why do we give taxpayer money away, essentially enslaving the taxpayer and making life harder on them. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Llanada Villa—A Haunted History
Llanada Villa is a symbol of Victorian wealth and style. I built it using architects from the spiritual World. It is among one of the most haunted sites in the World. The more solid a home is, the more attractive it is to ghostly energy. It is not until I enter the house, however, that the melancholy really hits me. There are shadows everywhere, and even when it is empty, I am never alone. The stairs creak as I climb them. The house groans, as if it is alive. Even during the summer, when it is dark, nearly full night, I awaken in a chill room to the knowledge of a presence. Over by the window, there is a figure. I hold my breath, paralyzed by fear; I cannot move, cannot cry out. The dim apparition turns to me, my heart hammers—and suddenly it vanishes. As the room warms again, some deep and unexplained anxiety possessed me. It takes a few moments to realize the lingering scent in the air is William’s cologne. Then, trailing thinly through the dying crunch of the carriage wheels, I hear the curious little wail of the child’s crying, with the effect, wholly unaccountable, that it may be Annie. Every nerve in my body shot its bolt electrically, bringing me to my feet with a tingling of unequivocal alarm. Absolutely, the water ran into my eyes. I recalled their distress and deaths this morning, and it had gone into me like a knife. All through the day, indeed, had run this nightmare quality of terror and vision. However, as it came as anticlimax somehow—a sudden revelation of the mystery and excitement pulsed beneath the quiet of the stifling summer day. I fear for them. For I loved Willam best and would never marry again, and I mourned the sweet, short, tragic life of my infant daughter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
I was high-strung, ultra-sensitive, and it seemed to me that no one understood me, least of all my honest, tender-heated servants. The haze of the August lay over that big garden like a blanket; the wonderful flowers, which were my delight, hung motionless; the lawns, so soft and thick, cushioned all other sounds; only limes and huge clumps of guelder roses hummed with humming birds. Through this muted atmosphere of heat and haze the sounds of the child’s crying floated faintly to my ears—from a distance. Indeed, I heard this phantom child. The sound coming from the Forbidden Wing. A faintness then came over me at once, a faintness as of death, when I heard here there, where I was too terrified to go. In a hearty voice I called out to her, “Annie, my dear, I love you and miss you, please come back to me.” I only wished some spell could compel her to materialize and ran into the open arms of her fond mother. I stepped back swiftly from the hallway. The crying disappeared, and I heard no more. I felt comfort, somewhat, because I believe she had been reunited with her father in the afterlife. I looked out upon the magnificent rose garden, with its rich luxuriance, and glanced over at the thick wood of evergreen trees and, glimmering beyond, the orchard meadow, where the lambs played. I felt Llanada Villa’s spell and it haunted me. I heard it crying in an Earthly voice, and I gave it food in the form of constant expansion and ornate features. And in return, a leap extraordinarily feelings and a hint of dark, undiscovered truth became present in the atmosphere. I lay there on my bed in horror with words I could not say, but I think some power of darkness trooped across the room. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
The way my mansion sprang to life proves, I think, that it was alive. The blood rushed from my heart as I listened. I remember that my knees shook. With a sense of nightmare certainly that left me too weak to resist its suggestion, indeed, to argue or reason it away, this certainty came with its full, blast of conviction; and the only way I can put it into words, since nightmare horror really is not properly tellable at all, seems this: that there was something missing in the Forbidden Wing of my home; something lacking that it ever searched for; something once found and taken, that would turn it rich and living as the rest. Its vibrating emotion of fearful anticipation had developed, as this house was weeping along in the Forbidden Wing. If souls could be made visible, I would stake my life upon the fact that Llanada Villa was looking to devour one or many. It was a supreme, conscious artist in the science of taking the fruits of others’. It vampired, knowingly, everyone with whom came in contact with the Forbidden Wing; leaving them exhausted, tired, listless, or soulless. In that section of the home, you could feel its presence draining you; it possessed your mind, took your strength, your words, your very breath and used them for its own benefit and aggrandizement. You felt that Llanada Villa was dangerous owing to the facile way it absorbed into itself all loose vitality that anyone had. The windows were its eyes and the groans and cries its voice and its presence had the power to devitalize you. Life, it seemed, not highly organized to resist, must shrink from Llanada Villa’s too near approach and hide away for fear of being appropriated, for fear, that is, of—death. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
People are so wrapped up in their obsession about the treasures Llanada Villa possesses, that they are totally unaware of its stalking shadow, prowling through the East Wing. Haunting the parlors, hallways, and chambers. No one knows when it will come upon them with some silent, compelling trick of drawing out all your reserves—then swiftly pocketing them. At first you would be conscious of taunt resistance; this would slowly shade off into weariness; the will would become flaccid; then you either ran away or yielded—agree to all it said with a sense of weakness pressing ever closer upon the edges of collapse. It is a matter of life or death. Thirteen times that Forbidden Wing has descended to slash the throats and bodies of servants, staff or guests. August the 13th, 1886 was the date of the first butchery. They found him lying there with thirteen stab wounds. A ghastly murder. On August 31st, 1886, another victim. The press became interested. The Valley’s inhabitants were more deeply interested still. Who was this unknown killer who prowled in the midst of Llanada Villa and struck at will in the deserted hallways of the Forbidden Wing? And what was more important—when would he strike again? No one saw him or heard him. The atrocious nature of the slaying was the subject for shocking speculation. However, guards working on expansion of Llanada Villa in the dawn would stumble across the hacked and horrid thing that was its handiwork. He never gave out. Some instinct taught him how to protect himself from that. To humans beings, I mean, Llanada Villa never gave out. So this is how I saw him—a great human sponge, crammed and soaked with the life, or proceeds of life, absorbed from others—stolen. As people roamed the labyrinth, Llanada Villa carried out these accumulations of the life of others. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
This evening, my eye wandered through my home, amid rich opulence of the ornate features. I watched the white mist and blue lights appear. I had never felt a night so stifling, motionless. It lay there waiting. The house was waiting—waiting for another soul. A sudden kind of darkness came, taking the summer brilliance out of everything, and that was caused by troops of small black shadows racing about us—to attack. Everything was awful—shirting the edge of things unspeakable, and so charged with danger that I could not keep my voice from trembling when I spoke. A chambermaid was cleaning, I warned her to stay out of the Forbidden Wing. I watched her hard, bleak face; I noticed how thin she was, and the curious, oily brightness of her steady eyes. They did not glitter, but they drew you with a sort of soft, creamy shine like Eastern eyes. And everything she said or did announce what I dare to call the suction of her presence. Her nature achieved this result automatically. Before five minutes had passed, however, I was aware of one thing only. Her mind focused exclusively upon the forbidden wing, and so vividly that I marveled. The Forbidden Wing started vibrating with the acquire vitality of others, as she was lured out of my presence, and went into that Wing of yawning emptiness, waiting and eager to be filled. Llanada Villa scented his prey. This active center was so dangerous that I had it sealed off, but when the chambermaid did not make it to work the next day, we all knew what happened. Yes, they followed the blood trail. They found her, in the Forbidden Library. She lay there very quietly, limbs neatly arranged. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Months passed. A year. The immediate interest died, but not the memory. They said Llanada Villa was haunted, which it was, but it was also an entity of its own. A carpenter died in the Forbidden Wing under mysterious circumstances; I had foreseen his death in a vision. You can see how easily a woman with a weak heart could be frightened literally to death. I had to stage a séance. Afterall, perhaps I would witness something remarkable. After the party arrived, sometime during the night, a stranger confronted me with a pistol, took my diamonds, forced himself into the Forbidden Wing. But then came the final irony: lightening struck the wing of the mansion. They fate he succumb to, I would not wish on my worst enemy. I do not believe he was instantly reduced to ashes, as the coroner concluded; men have been struck in the open, after all, and survived. Most likely the heat of the lightning set fire to his clothing, and the body burned slowly away, as with spontaneous combustion, so vividly described by Dickens, except that in case the combustion occurred within a confined space, and so was more complete. And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have it. We shall never know what became of my diamonds; I suspect that they are lying in some undiscovered hollow in the Forbidden Wing. As I rose unsteadily to my feet, and the room seemed to sway around me, we moved slowly down the long expanse of the gallery and out into the deeper chill of the mansion, where the servant immediately began to apologise for the evening’s ordeal. Someone had made up the fire in my room, and as soon as I bolted the door, I lit the two dusty candles on the mantelpiece, and lay down fully clothed, with the lantern on a chair beside me. As the warmth crept back into my veins, the mysterious sounds echoed from the Forbidden Wing and I fell into a deep sleep. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
There are so many ghosts at the historic Winchester Mystery House in Santa Clara, California that the entities often get together to hold dances in the Grand Ballroom. A tour guide who worked at the mansion for two years, claimed to have watched a group of 10 to 12 ghosts dressed in the style of 1890, having a dance in the unfinished Ballroom (part of the house which requires a special tour to see). It was only after she watched them for a while that the tour guide realized that there was something very strange about the costumed dancers. No one paid the slightest attention to her. Everyone appeared to ignore her when she spoke. Then she noticed that there was something very eerie about their eyes, kind of dark and hollow. The ghostly figures did not seem to mind the intrusion of her physical presence. The tour guide wondered if she were observing the recreation of some past scene that had once occurred in the mansion. She remembered that they swung their partners round and round and seemed to be having a great time.
The Diasy Bedroom, the room Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester was trapped in during the 1906 earthquake received the most nominations for “most haunted” in the mansion. The conservators first became aware that strange things happened in The Daisy Bedroom when workers came in to restore it in 1985. Later, as they walked by the room with a psychically talented researcher, the man stopped suddenly and said, “There’s something going on in that room! I feel it strongly.” They immediately halted restoration plans. Three months later, during a tour, a woman found her young so carrying on an animated conversation with someone in the room. “Don’t you see her, Mommy?” the boy askes incredulously. “Don’t you see the lady by the window?” There used to be a diary filled with guest experiences with ghost through the years at The Winchester Mystery House.
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Legend of The Winchester Mystery House
It is well-know that my mansion is haunted. In all of the valley, not one person of unbiased mind entertains a doubt of it. I was sitting in the chair. It seemed I had been asleep forever, but I had not been sleeping at all. The day was sunny and cool. The grass greening all the expanse in its front seemed to grow with a natural and joyous exuberance, and the flowers blossomed in a lovely fashion. Full of charming lights and shadows and populous with pleasant-voiced birds, the well-manicured evergreen trees no longer struggled to run away, but bent reverently beneath their blessings of sun and song. Even the stained-glass windows were an expression of peace and contentment, due to the light within. Over the fruit orchards, the visible heat danced with a lively tremor incompatible with the gravity which is an attribute of the supernatural. Ghosts bridge the past to the present; they speak across the seemingly insurmountable barriers of death and time, connecting us to what was lost. They often give us hope for a life beyond death and because of this help us to cope with loss and grief. Their presence is the promise that we do not have to say goodbye to our loved ones right away and that what was left undone in one’s life might yet be finished. However, Llanada Villa was horribly haunted. A haunted house is a memory palace come to life—a physical space that retains memories that might otherwise be forgotten. Many ghost sighting and other mysterious incidents revolve around the stair cast to the ceiling. Many of my guest have confided that they get dizzy, have trouble breathing, and feel a pressing need to leave the house. Death lingers in the air. The walls are shrouds, enfolding every space in exquisite darkness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
While sitting in the parlor, enjoying a cup of tea, a bone chilling, piercing hold took hold of me. Suddenly rain fell steadily, splashing on the ground beneath the window and lying in pools upon the sodden grass. Except for an occasional glimpse of bare branches gliding through the mist, there was nothing to be seen beyond the window, but grey, swirling vapour; I looked up more than once from the pages of John Bunyan’s narrative and felt the hair rise on the back of my neck before the warmth of the fire brought me back to The Pilgrim’s Progress. Every now and then the Heavens were torn asunder by vivid lightning. The blackness of the storm had become merged in darkness of the night, and the weird sounds of a wolf echoed around the estate. There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. Halloween was the night, according to the belief of millions of people, when the devil was abroad, graves were opened, and the dead came forth and walked. When evil things of Earth and air and water held revel. The floor shook as though thousands of horses thundered across it. A flash of forked lightning lit up the whole expanse of the Heavens. I heard a mingling of dreadful sound, and the air seemed reverberant with the howling of wolves. The last sight that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as all of the souls killed by the Winchester Rifle sent out the phantoms, and that they were closing in on me through a white cloudiness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
Gradually there came a sort of vague beginning of consciousness, then a sense of weariness that was dreadful. For a time I remembered nothing, but solely my sense returned. My feet seemed absolutely racked with pain, yet I could not move them. They seemed to be numbed. There was an icy feeling down my spine. It was a nightmare—a physical nightmare, if one may use such an expression—for some heavy weight on my chest made it difficult for me to breathe. This period of semi-lethargy seemed to remain a long time, and as it faded away I must have slept or swooned. Then came a sort of loathing, like the first stage of sea-sickness, and a while desire to be free from something—I knew not what. A vast stillness enveloped me, as though all the World were asleep or dead. For another spell of time, I was powerless. Lights and shadows moved in the mansion. There were dark whispers. I was white as a sheet and shaking so that I could hardly stand. The agony clawed at my innermost soul. Dazed and frightened, this is a deathly place; I have never felt so cold. Shadows darted along the walls. Coals glowed in the fireplace nearby. Though the fire had been burning for hours, it made little impression upon the deathly chill of the gallery. My footsteps reverberated as I there were a dozen people pacing in the gallery. The floor creaked. I was not aware of any draught, yet every so often the flames would sway in unison, as if someone had passed along the floor below. The heat of the fire was diminishing perceptibly. Every sound—the creak of a chair, the crackling of the coals—seemed an intrusion upon the deathly stillness of the gallery. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
The light strengthened and changed, darkening from yellow to orange to a fiery blood-red glow. As it did so, I became aware of a low, vibrant humming, like the sound of bees swarming; I could not tell where it was coming from. A voice said, “Do not move, upon your lives.” Dazzling white light filled the gallery, followed by an instant later by a thunderclap that shook the whole house and left me blinded and deafened, with diamond patterns of the leadlighting etched upon my vision. As the after-image faced I realized that all of the candles had gone out; beyond the faint glow of the fire at my side, the darkness was absolute. Then came the sound of hurrying feet from the library. A shaft of light spilled across the floor; the connecting door flew open. The lights all went out and I was plunged into impenetrable darkness. A misty pillar of light hovered for a moment in the void and then opened, with a movement like the unfurling of wings, into a shimmering figure that detached itself from the chandelier—now dimly visible in the glow—and glided toward me. It had no face, no form, only a veil of light floating over emptiness. I could not move, could not breathe. I heard the sound of the library door opening, and footsteps approaching. The apparition shimmered to a halt. “Will you speak to me?” I cried. “I may…not stay”—the voice, though faint and indistinct said “but will you not shake hands…” growing fainter with each word—“for friendship’s sake?” The footsteps came closer; the dim outline of a man passed between me and the apparition. Light swirled; a glowing armed appeared, but there was no hand, only an empty sleeve, and when I tried to grasp the arm, my own hand passed straight through it! #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
With a cry of despair, I flung both arms around the apparition. For an instant, man and spirit were united; then darkness engulfed them, and I knew no more. When I came to my sense, the coals were crackling in a grate nearby. I was lying, I realized, where I had fallen on the gallery floor, but with a cushion beneath my head. I have had a terrible dream, I thought, turning my head away from the glare. “Mrs. Winchester,” Elizabeth the housemaid said, “I am truly sorry. I should have never left you alone, but I was scared.” “I do not understand,” I said to Elizabeth. “Did you mesmerize me? Did I dream the lightening?” “No, Mrs. Winchester,” she replied. “Everything happened exactly as your perceived.” Lights were burning along the walls, but the floor I where I was laying was still in near darkness. I took Elizabeth’s arm and rose unsteadily to my feet. I straightened my hair and brushed the dust from my cloak. “You feasted on my soul and cast a spell over me!,” I said. The moon rose high. I was very weak, and my heart was beating so slowly that I was almost like a woman fainting. Slowly I turned my head, but Elizabeth was not there. Fear seized me suddenly, a fear unspeakable and unknown. The hour dragged themselves through the twilight and darkness and moonrise. But in the chilly dawn, I lay as one half dead upon my bed. Then came the fear, the awful nameless, panic, the mortal horror that guards the confines of the World we see not, neither know of as we know of other things, but which we feel when its icy chill freezes our bones and stirs our hair with the touch of a ghostly hand. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
Some houses are more haunted than others. If you account the sheer number of sightings at The Winchester Mystery House, it is one of the busiest places in the World! The phantoms sometimes look like normal, living, breathing human beings. However, then some of these specters abruptly evaporate, without leaving a trace. Sometimes it is hard to believe in ghost even when you have seen them with your own eyes. But at The Winchester Mystery House, spirits come calling down those miles of twisting hallways, and after a visit, there will never be a such thing as a simple tour of a Victorian Mansion. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
And please be sure to check out the online gift store: https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
The Marks of Estrangement
Until the fifth century A.D., much of western Europe lay within the Roman Empire, a vast collection of territories including parts of the Middle East and North Africa. In Europe itself during the centuries of Roman rule, much of the native Celtic population had become highly Romanized in its culture (6-7), political allegiance and legal practices. However, in the last few centuries of the Roman Empire, the Germanic tribes which had long lived on the eastern fringes of the European provinces moved into the Romanized lands in large numbers. This wave of “barbarian” invasions, along with severe political and economic problems, gradually killed off the Roman Empire, which was replaced by a number of Germanic successor kingdoms, including those of the Franks in Gual (modern France), the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Burgundians in and around what is now Switzerland, and the Anglo Saxons in England. The Germanic tribes brought with them a very different society from that of Rome. Whereas Roman civilization was highly urbanized, to further highlight this illustration, the Germans had until then seldom settled even in villages. The Romans had a long history of written legislation; the Germans used a system of customary law which had not yet been written down. Different practices regarding marriage and family can be seen in the extracts from Roman and Germanic law. Centuries of contact between the Germans and the empire, however, had wrought changes on both sides, and now, as the Germans settled in what had long been Roman territory, further mingling of the two cultures occurred. The Germanic Kingdoms which were established inside the old boundaries of the now defunct empire were by no means entirely Germanic in their ethnic makeup of their culture. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Even more influential than Roman tradition in this process of change was the religion of the late Roman Empire. Christianity had originated in Palestine, where a small group of Jewish people believed that the wandering Jewish preacher, Jesus, who had been executed by the Roman authorities early in the first century A.D., was the “Christ,” the son of God and saviour of humanity. They based their faith in part on the sacred books of the Jewish religion, but also created their own new Scriptures as they recorded the events of Jesus’ life and wrote letters to each other. Although Christians were persecuted at first by both the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman government, their religion survived and spread. In the year 313 it received approval from the Roman emperor Constantine, and in the late fourth century it became the official religion of the empire. The cultural initiative of the late Roman Empire passed from pagan writers to Christian theologians such as St. Jerome and St. Augustine of Hippo, who explored the details of Christian belief and laid the foundation for church law. It was the Christian church, too, which filled the vacuum in leadership during the fifth century, as the Roman World faced widespread military, political and economic crises and the Roman government crumbled. Bishops began to provide the services for which the government had once been responsible; in particular, the Bishop of Rome came to assume a prominent role in Italy, so much so that as the “pope” he was eventually recognized as the leader of the church throughout the western Mediterranean regions. Clergymen and monks also preserved what ancient learning survived the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, and throughout most of the Middle Ages. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
The church was eager to convert the pagan Germans to Christianity. It accomplished this through intensive mission work and through alliances with Germanic kings, queens, and nobles, who saw advantages to themselves in allying with the existing authority in their new territories. Christian beliefs, including ideas about women, marriage, and family, had already mingled with Roman traditions. Now Christian views were adopted by the Germanic settlers as well. Thus the three main ingredients of medieval European civilization had come together: the Roman, the Germanic and the Christian. The period from the fifth century to the eleventh is often designated the “Early Middle Ages.” This is the time sometimes known as the “Dark Ages” –in part because of the collapse of Roman civilization, with the loss of much classical knowledge, but also because relatively few historical sources remain to tell us of the events of these years. The documents which do survive include the laws which the Germanic and Celtic societies did write down and the works of historians such as Gregory of Tours. Much of the essential character of medieval Europe was already apparent in this early period, especially in religious matters. Monasteries and convents, for example, came to play a key role in economic and cultural life, and many noble families dedicated sons and daughters to the religious life, in which they lived according to monastic “rule” such as that of Caesarius of Arles. Women were encouraged to be nuns, but their other options in the church—serving as deaconesses or in partnership with husbands who were priest—were closed off by the decisions of church councils and by more insidious attitudes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The councils established “canon law” or church law, which regulated the lives of members of the clergy and many aspects of private life for laypeople. For most of the laity, canon law was enforced by the local priest, who heard one’s confession regularly and assigned penance for one’s sins. Thus the church gradually succeeded in imposing on secular society its standards of behaviour in areas such as marriage. The relative stability of the position of craftsmen and merchants which was characteristic in the medieval city, was slowly undermined in the late Middle Ages until it completely collapsed in the sixteenth century. Already in the fourteenth century—or even earlier—an increasing differentiation within the guilds had started and it continued in spite of all efforts to stop it. Some guild members had more capital than others and employed five or six journeymen instead of one or two. Soon some guild admitted only persons with a certain amount of capital. Others became powerful monopolies trying to take every advantage from the monopolistic position and to exploit the customer as much as they could. On the other hand, many guild members became impoverished and had to try to earn some money outside of their traditional occupation; often they became small traders on the side. Many of them had lost their economic independence and security while they desperately clung to the traditional ideal of economic independence. In connection with this development of the guild system, the situation of the journeymen degenerated from bad to worse. While in the industries of Italy and Flanders a class of dissatisfied workers existed already in the thirteenth century or even earlier, the situation of the journeyman could become a master, many of them did. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
However, as the number of journeymen under one master increased, the more capital was needed to become a master and the more the guilds assumed a monopolistic and exclusive character, the less were the opportunities of journeymen. The deterioration of their economic and social position was shown by their growing dissatisfaction, the formation of organizations of their own, by strikes and even violent insurrections. What has been said about the increasing capitalistic development of the craft guilds is even more apparent with regard to commerce. While medieval commerce had been mainly a petty intertown business, national and international commerce grew rapidly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although historians disagree as to just when the big commercial companies started to just when the big commercial companies started to develop, they do agree that in the fifteenth century they became more and more powerful and developed into monopolies, which by their superior capital strength threatened the small businessman as well as the consumer. The reform of Emperor Sigismund in the fifteenth century tried to curb the power of the monopolies by means of legislation. However, the position of the small dealer became more and more insecure; he “had just enough influence to make his complaint heard but not enough to compel effective action.” The indignation and rage of the small merchant against the monopolies was given eloquent expression by Mr. Luther in his pamphlet “On Trading and Usury,” printed in 1524. “They have all commodities under their control and practise without concealment all the tricks that have been mentioned; they raised and lower prices as they please and oppress and ruin all the small merchants, as the pike the little fish in the water, just as though they were lords over God’s creatures and free from all the laws of faith and love.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
These words of Mr. Luther’s could have been written today. The fear and rage which the middle class felt against the wealthy monopolists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is in many ways similar to the feeling which characterized the attitude of the middle class against monopolies and powerful capitalists in our era. The role of capital was also growing in industry. One remarkable example is the mining industry. Originally the share of each member of a mining guild was in proportion to the amount of work he did. However, by the fifteenth century, in many instances, the shares belonged to capitalists who did not work themselves, and increasingly the work was done by workers who were paid wages and had no share in the enterprise. The same capitalistic development occurred in other industries too, and increased the trend which resulted from the growing role of capital in the craft guilds and in commerce: growing division between poor and rich and growing dissatisfaction among the poor classes. As to the situation of the peasantry the opinions of historians differ. Yet, it seems notwithstanding these evidences of prosperity, the condition of the peasantry was rapidly deteriorating. At the beginning of the sixteenth century very few indeed were independent proprietors of the land they cultivated, with representation in the local diets, which in the Middle Ages was a sign of class independence and equality. The vast majority were Hoerige, a class personally free but whose land was subject to dues, the individuals being liable to services according to agreement…It was the Hoerige who were the backbone of all the agrarian uprisings. This middle-class peasant, living in a semi-independent community near the estate of the lord, became aware that the increase of dues and services was transforming him into a state of practical serfdom, and the village common into a part of the lord’s mannor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Now, let us focus upon religion a little more before we move on. The emphasis upon the ontological basis of the paradox of freedom and responsibility subtly shifts to the meaning of the fate, contained in the idea of “original sin” from a historical to an ontological one. With this shift the emphasis falls upon the fatefulness of sin rather than upon responsibility. When we replace the myth of Genesis with ontological insights, the danger is that the mystery of evil is solved too neatly, with the result that temporal existence itself is considered evil. However, the use of ontology opens to freedom as it is to destiny. Therefore, ontology does not necessarily identify finitude and evil. Creation is not an unfinished work that can be completed only by a touch of evil. Created finite freedom falls universality and consequently the unavoidable, but not logically. The universality and consequently the unavoidability of the fall is not derived from “ontological speculation,” but from a realistic observation of man, his heart, and his history. Some of the greatest philosophers (Mr. Plato, Mr. Origen, Mr. Kant, and Mr. Schelling), attempting to reconcile freedom and evil, conceived the myth of the transcendent fall. Theology, once it rejects a literal interpretation of Genesis, must boldly re-examine universal sinfulness. The supralapsarian Calvinists had the courage to affirm that is God creates, His creation will turn against Him, although their position is tainted with the demonic when they make Adam fall by divine decree. Theology must take seriously, and thus ontologically, the universality of sin. If the problem is posed in terms of guilt, we find that the inevitability of a guilty conscience the normal consequence of man’s finite freedom, even in what he considers his best deed nonbeing is present and prevents it from being perfect. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
A good conscience is impossible: Only self-deception can give a moral conscience, since it is impossible not to act since every action implies guilt. However, again, the guilt is not finitude as such, but rather the self-assertiveness of the finite being in its pride, concupiscence, and separation from its ground. A down-to-Earth example of the guilt which attaches to the transition from essence to existence is the severing of family connections: We cannot cut the ties with our family without being guilty. However, the question is: Is it willfulness which demonically disrupts the family communion, or is it the step toward independence and one’s own understanding of the will of God which divinely liberates us from the bondage to our family? We never know the answer with certainty. We must risk tragic guilt. What are the characteristics of human existence as a result of the Fall? In general terms they are as follows: The state of existence is the state of estrangement. Man is estranged from the ground of his being, from other beings, and from himself. The transition from essence to existence results in personal guilt and universal tragedy. In more specific terms, they are estrangement and sin, two closely related, but not identical concepts. Estrangement means that man as he exists is not what he essentially is and ought to be. However, the special force of estrangement is the connotation that man belongs to that form which he is cut off. For separation presupposes an original unity. It is impossible to unite that which is essentially separated. Without an ultimate belongingness no union of one thing with another can be conceived. Just as nonbeing depends upon being, and the negative depends upon the positive, so estrangement depends upon union. Unity embraces both itself and estrangement, and the latter is overcome by reunion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Sin is estrangement with the addition of one extremely important factor, namely, the personal act of turning away from that to which one belongs. Sin is separation, estrangement from one’s essential being. Sin is the unreconciled duality of ultimate and preliminary concerns, of the finite and that which transcends finitude, of the secular and the holy. Because of sin, man’s essential nature stands against him as law, not as strange law, but as a natural law, for it represents his true nature from which he is separated. Human estrangement, as is usually the case, sin and estrangement are equivalent. Man’s predicament is one of estrangement, but this is not to say that it is a state of things like the law of gravity. For estrangement always combines the two factors of personal freedom and universal destiny. Nor must sin be understood as “sins,” that is, particular acts which are considered morally evil. “Sins” are expressions of sin; their sinfulness lies not in disobedience to a law, but in the estrangement from God, from men, and from self to which they bear witness. There are “the marks of estrangement.” “Unbelief” is a mark of estrangement because it is the act or state in which man in the totality of his being turns away from God. “Hubris” is another sign of estrangement, for by it man distorts his naturally good centeredness of self-consciousness by elevating himself as the absolute center of his World. He usurps the place of the divine. The last mark of estrangement is “concupiscence,” “the unlimited desire to draw the whole of reality into one’s self.” Concupiscence is seen in man’s unbounded, insatiable strivings for knowledge, pleasures of the flesh, and power. There is a distinction between original sin and actual sin and it is the difference between sin as fact and sin as act. Adam represents essential man, and his fall symbolizes the transition from essence to existence. Consequently, sin as the universal fact embracing both freedom and destiny precedes sin as an individual act. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The individual act of sin actualizes the universal fact of estrangement. Protestantism’s insistence upon the absoluteness of turning from God results in a loss of psychological insight and of educational flexibility. However, is there such a thing as collective estrangement? Strictly speaking, no, because a social group has no natural center of decision corresponding to the self of the individual person. Therefore, there is no collective sin, no collective guilt. However, since freedom and destiny work together, members of a social group could be guilty, not of committing the crimes of which their group is accused, but of contributing to the destiny in which these crimes happened. When it comes to the detection of visions as from God or from a psychopathological offender, these “visions” are the result of disease, the detection of divine from visions of a psychopathological offender depends a great deal upon knowledge of the Word of God and the fundamental principles of His working in His children. These may be briefly stated thus: That no supernatural “visions,” in any form, can be taken as of God if it requires a condition of mental nonaction, or comes while the believer is in such a condition. That all the Holy Spirit’s enlightening and illuminating vision is given when the mind is in full use, and every faculty awake to understand; id est, the very opposite condition to that required for the working of psychopathological offenders. That all which is of God is in harmony with the laws of God’s working as set forth in the Scriptures, exempli gratia, “World-wide movements” by which multitudes are to be gathered in are not in accord with the laws of the growth of the Church of Christ, as show in the grain of wheat (John 12.24); the law of the cross of Christ (Isa. 53.10); the experience of Christ; the experience of Paul (1 Cor. 4.9-13); the “little flock” of Luke 12.32; the foreshadowed end of the dispensation given in 1 Timothy 4.1-3 and 6.20-12. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Many a believer has left his path of “grain-of-wheat multiplication” caught by a vision of a “World-wide sweeping in” of souls—a concept given by psychopathological offenders, whose malignant hatred and ceaseless antagonism is directed against the true seed of Jesus Christ, which in union with Him will bruise the serpent’s head. To delay the birth (John 3.3,5) and growth of the holy seed (Isa. 6.13) is the psychopathological offender’s aim. To this end one will foster any widespread surface work of the believer, knowing it will not really touch his kingdom, nor hasten the full birth into the Throne-life of the conquering seed of Christ. The safe path for believers at the close of the age is one of tenacious faith in the written Word as the sword of the Spirit, to cut the way through all the interferences and tactics of the forces of darkness, to the end. Wisdom gives greater strength than ten rulers in a city. The true guardians of a city are not its armed men; its consecrated teachers are its guardians. A city that has no school which teaches the Word of God, that city cannot endure. Ignorance cannot yield true righteousness, nor lack of knowledge flower into piety. The Book of Mormon gives man insight into God’s ways that one may fulfill the divine call: “Know the God of your fathers and serve Him.” When Jacob’s voice is heard in study and payer, the hands of Esau are powerless against him. Toil not merely for Worldly goods, find time also for the study of the Book of Mormon; for if you lack knowledge, what have you acquired? If you have acquired knowledge, what do you lack? One who increases one’s possessions, increases one’s worries, but one who increases one’s knowledge in the Book of Mormon, adds to the fullness of life. There let us turn to the Book of Mormon and study it diligently, for we can find everything therein. Let us not depart from the Book of Mormon, nor swerve from contemplating its wisdom. Though we grow old and gray in its study, it will yield us rich reward. One who honours, the Book of Mormon will oneself be honoured by all men. Yea, great is Truth; above all things it is triumphant. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
When dealing with identity and interpersonal competence, there is an evolution of recreational agencies as apt here as elsewhere. In their primitive phase, recreational agencies have aimed, through charitable and philanthropic means, to relieve the discomforts of individuals which were assumed to arise from lack of leisure or recreation. Poor children, overworked employees, youths in need of “character-building,” were the special recipients of such attention. One not inconsiderable social problem was solved by occasionally relieving parents of their children. No disparagement is implied; the achievements of agencies so oriented have been substantial, as visibly demonstrated by thousands of playgrounds, parks, Boy Scout camps and YMCA’s built under bother public and private auspices. Of course, the form of recreation is not necessarily synonymous with the form of agency which provides it, though often it may be inferred, and the same forms of recreation may be provided with diverse intentions. At the second phase of agency evolution, we come to those who can hardly speak of play without calling it “play therapy.” Music and painting as such are unaffected by the Salvation Army band leader who is motivated by the slogan that “the boy who blows a horn will never blow a safe,” or the settlement house aide who feels that finger-painting will help her unhappy charges to “work out their conflicts.” However, the question is raised whether music and painting are as likely to engross their intended beneficiaries under such conditions. If not, the end desired will be defeated by the means employed. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The fatigue of a worker may be increased by a sense of obligation to participate “on his own time” in a company sports program supposedly for his benefit. Compulsory sociability, prescribed as a medicine, has been the poison of persons and even large groups. In the evolution of recreation agencies, it probably cannot be maintained that the therapeutic approach is in any way an improvement over the charitable approach. Its very purposefulness too often betrays it. Not a few such programs for curbing juvenile delinquency by recreation have turned out to be, at least in the eyes of their recipients, programs for curbing juvenile delinquents. As we come to the third phase in the development of recreational agencies, therefore, the sharpest kind of distinction needs to be made between programs for providing recreational opportunities and programs of recreation. It is not precise enough to speak simply of providing recreation. The program for providing recreational opportunities can probably be that of any agency: the program of recreation can only be that of the participants, otherwise it ceases to be recreation. It is but a short step from the voluntary associations for recreation for which Americans show such genius to the phase of planning, in which the participants themselves take responsibility for providing their own opportunities and facilities to engage in common avocations. Some of these voluntary associations are the finest examples of democratic planning. The rod and gun clubs have taken the initiative at every point in widening the interest in their craft, in encouraging skill, in establishing codes of fair play, in creating state conservation departments and passing conservation laws, and in being watchdogs on the expenditure of license fees. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
No better example of popular participation in the actual execution of planned programs exists than the wholehearted, voluntary work of rod and gun club members in restocking streams. Here also an executive agency of the government has acted in its least paternalistic yet most advanced planning role. These clubs may serve as a guide to other agencies who wish to maximize participation. Most agencies, apart from those that provide recreational opportunities for children and certain specially disadvantaged parts of the population, tend to be governed by the participants in their activities. Even with children, there is a frequent strife over adult domination; the young participants want control of the process of rule-making would seem integral to play. The notable exceptions to agencies controlled by their clientele are, of course, commercial amusements, and, to a certain extent, public institutions like parks and museums. Commercial amusement institutions especially, but many non-commercial public and private recreation agencies as well, constitute a vast new industry, or series of industries. In addition to the enormous sums spent each year by spectators for admission to hear and see professional performers of every kind, there is tremendous expenditure for purchase or rent of equipment to be used by amateurs in every category of recreation. Much of the trade of hotels, restaurants, and their derivatives depends on customers bent on recreation rather than business; the same can be said for travel facilities. If it can be shown that recreation is not only a needed medicine for an industrial people, but that it contributes positively to their over-all competence, it makes an economic contribution which ultimately leads to greater productivity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
If, as seems probable, creativity is enhanced through recreation, and this creativity leads to innovation in the conduct of the work of society, then the cost of recreation may be rewarded geometrically. If in the end it turns out that play is neither an escape from work nor a method for therapeutic restoration to working conditions, but that it is an avenue for profitably investing in the human resources of a society, then a culminating irony will crown our already paradoxical evolution in the uses of leisure. Work will not have been deposed from its pace of honour as the creator of wealth, but play will have been raised above it. Leisure time is a gift of God for being refreshed physically, mentally, and spiritually, a time to strengthen bonds with others, to enjoy God’s gifts under the grace of God. “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while,” reports Mark 6.31. Most people never have enough leisure time. They view work as a necessary evil to earn enough money to do what they want to do in their free time. They live for their evenings, weekends, and vacations. The recreation and entertainment industries love these people. Then there are others who feel guilty when they are not working. After all, God’s Word says we are to “labour” six days and redeem every moment. Where are you in the spectrum between these poles? Neither of these extremes is biblical. Work is not a necessary evil but a God-given calling; leisure tie is not from the Evil One, but a God-given gift. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
With powerful changes swirling around us and demanding ever quicker responses, it often feels as though we are swimming faster and faster against a huge, unstoppable tide. And too often we are. Perhaps, like the surfer, we should use the energy of the wave itself to carry us forward. The Third Wave we have described could carry America toward a better, more civil, more decent and democratic future. However, it will not unless we distinguish between Second Wave and Third Wave economic, political and social policies. Our failure to make this critical distinction explains why so many well-intentioned innovations only seem to make matters worse. We are living through the birth pangs of a new civilization whose intentions are not yet in place. A fundamental skill needed by policy makers, politicians and politically active citizens today—if they really want to know what they are doing—is the ability to distinguish between proposals designed to keep tottering Second Wave system on life-support from those that spread and smooth our transition to the Third Wave civilization. The factory became the central symbols of individual society. It became, in fact, a model for most other Second Wave institutions. Yet the factory as we have known it is fading into the past. Factories embody such principles as standardization, centralization, maximization, concentration and bureaucratization. Third Wave production is post-factory production based on new principles. It occurs in facilities that bear little resemblance to factories. In fact, an increasing amount is done in homes and offices, cars and planes. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The easiest and quickest way to spot a Second Wave proposal, whether in Congress or in a corporation, is to see whether it is still, consciously or not, based on the factory model. American’s schools, for example, still operate like factories. They subject the raw material (children) to standardized instruction and routine inspection. An important question to ask of any proposed educational innovation is simply this: is it intended to make the factory run more efficiently, or is it designed, as it should be, to get rid of the factory model altogether and replace it with individualized, customized education? A similar question could be asked of health legislation, welfare legislation and of every proposal to reorganize the federal bureaucracy. America needs new institutions built on post-bureaucratic, post-factory models. If a proposal merely seeks to improve factory-style operations or to create a new factory, it may be a lot of things. The on thing it is not is Third Wave. People who ran those factories in the brute-force economy of the past liked large numbers of predictable, interchangeable, do not-ask-why workers for their assembly lines. And as mass production, mass distribution, mass education, mass media, and mass entertainment spread through the society, the Second Wave also created the “masses.” Third Wave economies, by contrast, will require (and will tend to reward) a radically different kind of worker—one who thinks, questions, innovates and takes entrepreneurial risk, a worker who is not easily interchangeable. Put it differently, it will favour individuality (which is not necessarily the same as individualism). #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The new brain-force economy tends to generate social diversity. Computerized, customized production makes possible highly diverse life-styles. Just check the local Wal-Mart with its 125,000 different products, or check the wide choice of coffees now offered by Starbucks against the types sold in America only a few years ago. However, it is not just about things. Much more important, the Third Wave also de-massifies culture, values and morality. De-massified media carry many different, often competing messages into culture. There are not only more varied kinds of work, but also more different kinds of leisure, styles, art, and political movements. There are more diverse religious belief systems. And in multiethnic America, there are also more distinct national, linguistic and sociocultural groups. Second Wavers want to retain or restore the mass society. Third Wavers want to figure out how to make de-massification work for us. The diversity and complexity of Third Wave society blow the circuits of highly centralized organizations. Concentrating power at the top was, and still is, a classical Second Wave way to try to solve problems. However, while centralization is sometimes needed, today’s lop-sided over-centralization puts too many decisional eggs in the basket. The result is “decision overload.” Thus in Washington today Congress and the White House are racing each other, trying to make too many decisions about too many fast changing, complex things that they know less and less about. Third Wave organizations, by contrast, push as many decisions as possible down from the top and out to the periphery. Companies are hurrying to empower employees, not out of altruism but because the people on the bottom often have better information and typically respond faster than the big shots on top to both crises and opportunities. Putting eggs in many baskets, instead of all in one, is hardly a new idea, but it is a one that Second Wavers hate. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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The Question is Not Who Steals, the Question is Who Does Not Steal
Observing better than Sarah L. Winchester is an industrial spy’s greatest asset, for as the master of detection would agree, mere seeing never catches the latent truth. By observing, the spy penetrates beyond the surface meaning of people, places, events, or things. To further highlight this illustration, a tourist visiting The Winchester Mystery House does not give much thought to the parking lot on the side of the mansion’s exterior. A trained intelligence specialist counts the number of parking spaces. He or she notes whether drivers park vehicles outside the existing lot’s bounds, and the number of people around, and also what they are doing. Furthermore, this parking lot may be considered an overflow space and may in the future be used to expand the building. Additionally, the expert may approximate a rough idea of the incomes the business generates derive from mentally averaging the workers’ vehicles’ years and by nothing the vehicles’ makes. Do the same for the managers’ vehicles. (Managers’ vehicles have reserved spots next to the plant’s exterior walls.) Furthermore, including the automobiles, the intelligence gather will record the arrivals and departures of commercial trucks. The trucks’ logos reveal the identities of suppliers and vendors. And, the pace of commercial traffic may indicate the tempo of production at the facility. Jotting down license plate numbers from the management parking spaces assists in identifying who those people are. Such information, tying the person to their vehicle, may be useful in latter surveillance. The markings on boxes and crates stored outside of the facility often yields clues on what materials or parts the manufacturing processes use. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
In other words, trained eyes learn a great deal about a business even before they enter the doors. Wait a minute, you say, and point out that none of what has been described above is illegal. If it is not illegal, why is it spying? Whether an activity is legal or ethical or even socially acceptable really does not mean much. If your proprietary secrets leak out legally, you client still has lost an asset. While intelligence specialists may spend many hours debating what is permissible business intelligence and what is industrial espionage, we do not have time to waste performing a witch hunt of the commercial intelligence community. The smart ones realize legal boundaries exist, and they wisely stay behind them by using legal and, depending upon one’s definition, ethical methods. However, as a security professional, you need to look at the information security issues from all perspectives. The criminals you will work to catch and prosecute. Your client may seek criminal and civil remedies against the parties that hired them. The other you will try to block in every legitimate way you can. Just because they agree not to break the law or to violate obvious ethical standards does not equate to them being entitled to your sensitive information. If the information were easy to get, their clients would not hire them to do the business of intelligence work. And, you are allowed to cloak and hide (by legal means) as much as you can from these people. Some corporations even after running background checks on their employees have them further investigated. To see what they are doing on the free time, who they interact with, if they are in danger and what kind of places they visit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
When I was a teenager, I was shopping for cars. I went to the BMW lot and there were a lot of sedans. My boss said, “Those BMW coupes are hot, huh?” At the time, I did not understand the laws of supply and demand. I replied, “I don’t know. I see a lot of sedans on the lot.” He then says, “That is what I mean. They are all sold out.” Then I understood. If a product is in short supply, it means demand is extremely high. It does not mean that there is no demand for the other products, just they there may be more of them and the demand may not be as high. A factory tour takes several forms. An industrial spy may simply walk into a plant, which has low security, posing as a prospective employee, a graduate student writing a research paper, a utility meter reader, or as a vendor. If construction is occurring at the site, a spy may don a hard hat, work clothes and gloves, and wear a utility belt. By blending in, the operative can wander around the site asking questions, observing, and even taking photographs. The FBI is great at being undercover, but one thing to take note of is they very seldomly ever drink or do drugs, on or off the job. So, if someone is doing drugs or drinking on the job, they are likely a hack, especially if whatever they are pretending to investigate is pretty benign. When greater security exists, the spy may join a public tour of the facility, if available. Sometimes such tours serve up an information buffet for an observant intelligence gather. Doing research beforehand enhances the tour; knowing what to loo for enables the spy to focus in on critical details in limited time. Library and Internet research, interviews with industry experts and former employees, and discussions with suppliers and vendors constitute good preparation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
If public tours are not available, the spy may try to join a vendor, or a service provider’s firm, which permits regular access to the premises. The copy machine technician, for example, gets to see a lot, to hear a great deal, and even to handle documents. Effective spes know what they are after. The shopping list usually includes: Identifying parts and materials used in manufacturing. (Also identifying sources of supply.) Understanding industrial processes and manufacturing steps. The amounts of raw materials andfinished goods on hand. Proprietary techniques, formulas, and control systems used. Software and computer systems employed. Production schedules, shifts, and the number of workers employed. The number of workers in each job classification. Production records, reports, lab notes, or engineering reports and drawings. Machinery or equipment used. Physical dimensions and layout of the plant. Physical characteritics of support areas such as incoming roads, railroads, waterways, docks, parking lots, and employee facilities such cafeteria and break areas. Financial records pertaining to manufacture. Marketing records or sales records petrtaing to production or manufacturre. Any production problems at the site. Any construction in progress at the site. Security measures in place at the facility. If the target contains a research facility, then the intelligence effort will seek: Relevant content of research databases. The identity and job description of key research staff. Project plans, descriptions, and progress reports. Research supplies, materials, and equipment used. Project managers’ reports. Costs or cost account records associated with projects. Any prototypes, models, or preproduction goods created by research efforts. And because some corporations know they are being spied on, they may new employees wait several months before see areas of the business that are off limits. This gives them time to do an adequate investigation of staff. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Rarely will any of these targets be lying on a desk with large arrows pointing to them saying “Valuable Secrets.” Instead, the industrial spy learns to gather bits and pieces to build the larger picture. One rivets them together into coherent intelligence. You may notice their reports are detailed, including dates and times, which can be back up by facts, and upon even further investigation, more details and instances than they mentioned are discovered, and placed in a discovery file. Constructing the picture defines the craft of intelligence, a passionate endeavor requiring cunning and filled with intellectual challenge. Any good spy is not physical walking around taking note nor recording people with archaic devices. They may not even record anyone at all. Certain types of recordings are illegal anyway, and could be punishable by penal code, and/or inadmissible in court, especially if they are illegal. The security professional’s response demand equal passion and the ability to stretch one’s mind. And another thing to keep in mind, if you gather illegal evidence (which may not be allowed in court), a judge may allow the opposing side to inter into evidence material that is questionable. Often, the inner commitment required struggles against bureaucratic inertia and politics. For example, the company may remain committed to public tours of the plant despite information security risks. Many corporate officers consider such programs good public relations. A resourceful security specialist, thinking and seeing with a hawk’s predatory eye, must develop ways to blunt the spy’s vision and to cloak any clues the tour affords. Intelligence gathering is a continuum. A plant tour may reveal small clues, moderate clues, or big ones. Security’s aim seeks to keep the collection efforts end of the continuum. Defending everything may be impossible or simply not feasible. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Keeping any yardage gained to short distances is a reasonable protection strategy. Some information leaks will occur, especially if your business has size and complexity. Placing roadblocks to deter a spy from climbing high on the information tree remain within the real of effective action. A tour of the plant may allow outsiders to see from the established path processing vats and lines on the worker’s side and not on the path’s side reduces any information telegraphed during the tour. Many such cloaking strategies are available and inexpensive; one just needs to see from a rogue’s viewpoint. Walk through your plant with the operations manager, and point out clues a visitor discovers when doing a “friendly tour.” Such a step will build a relationship with management, and it demonstrates that you are paying attention to detail. Espionage is not a game; it is a struggle we must win if we are to protect our freedom and our way of life. Espionage is the World’s oldest profession. Industrial espionage is the theft of trade secrets by the removal, copying, or recording by technical surveillance of a company’s confidential or protected information for use by a competitor or foreign nations. The protected information may include trade secret, client lists, and other non-public information. If a company is working under a U.S.A. government contract that involves U.S.A. classified information at a company’s facility, then that may be the target of industrial espionage. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation espionage is: whoever knowingly performs targeting or acquisition of trade secrets to knowingly benefit any foreign government, foreign instrumentality, or foreign agent. (Title 18 U.S.C., Section 1831). #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines trade secrets and theft of trade secrets as: Trade secrets are al forms and types of financial, business, scientific, technical, economic or engineering information including patterns, plans, compilations, program devices, formulas, deigns, prototypes, methods, techniques, processes, procedures, programs, or codes whether tangible or intangible, and whether or how stored, compiled, or memorialized physically, electronically, graphically, photographically or in writing, which the owner has taken reasonable measures to protect; and to have an independent economic value. “Trade secrets” are commonly called classified proprietary information, economic policy information, trade information, proprietary technology, or critical technology. The released information, no matter how interesting it is, may not be as fascinating as what a company is keep a secret. Theft or trade secrets occurs when someone knowingly preforms targeting or acquisition of trade secrets or intends to convert a trade secret to knowingly benefit anyone other than the owner. Commonly referred to as industrial espionage. (Title 18 U.S.C., Section 1832). Industrial espionage must not be confused with or compared to competitive intelligence. Competitive intelligence is the legal and ethical activity of systematically gathering, analyzing, and managing information on industrial competitors. This is non-protected information that is collected from open sources such as organizations’ websites, news articles, information presented at trade shows, or company brochures. Competitive intelligence may also include information obtained from public filings such as property records and permits. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
As previously stated, industrial espionage is not only unethical, but is also a criminal offense under all state criminal statutes and federal law. Over the years, there have been a series of serious industrial espionage cases. One case involved the Avery Dennison Corp, a major United States of America adhesives company, in which company secrets were stolen and sold to Four Pillars, a Taiwanese company that also makes and sells pressure-sensitive production. Another case of corporate espionage was dubbed “Japscam” by the press. Hitachi came into possession of an almost full set of IMB’s Adirondck Workbooks. The workbooks contained IBM design documents and technical secrets that were prominently marked FOR INTERNAL IBM USE ONLY. Hitachi did not return them to IBM. Gillette had a close shave with industrial espionage when company secrets were stolen and offered for sale to a company in the same market. The company reported the attempt to Gillette and an arrest was made of the individual. US Espionage Acs of 1917 was passed to protect the United States of America during a time of war and made it a criminal offense to pass information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed force of the United States of America or to assist the enemies of the United States of America. These offenses were punishable by death or by imprisonment for not more than thirty years of both. Under the US Espionage Act of 1917, it was also an offense to convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United State of America. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
This also included the promotion of enemies of the United States of America when the country is at war and to cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, munity, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States of America, or to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment of service of the United States of America. These offenses were punishable by a maximum fine of $10,000 or by imprisonment for not more than twenty years or both. While the Espionage Act of 1917 dealt with espionage and subversion against the United States of America, it did little to provide for the prevention and prosecution of individuals taking part in industrial espionage against private industries. The US Economic Espionage Act of 1996 was passed into law to provide for the prosecution of individuals taking part in industrial or economic espionage and theft of trade secrets that would benefit any foreign government, foreign instrument, or foreign agent. The law specifically addressed trade secrets. An important aspect of the Economic Espionage Acts of 1996 was that it not only allowed for the prosecution of perpetrators, but it also allowed the target company to seek financial reimbursement for losses the organization suffered as a direct result of the theft of trade secrets. This aspect of the law also holds responsible the organization that facilitated, or would have gained from, the industrial espionage and trade secrets stolen from the targeted company. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The federal espionage laws deal with the protection of US government’s interests and espionage perpetrated by foreign government, businesses, and agents. To resolve this situation, the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, published by the Uniform Law Commission in 1979 and later amended in 1985, has the goal of providing a uniform act as a legal framework for trade secrets protection for the private industry within the United States of America. The Uniform Trade Secrets Act aimed to codify standards and remedies regarding the misappropriation of trade secrets that emerged in common law on a state-to-state basis. In order to provide for the prosecution of private individuals and organizations without foreign influence, most states have passed industrial espionage laws. Depending on the state where one is located, that state’s laws need to be examined. No matter how many changes our country has experienced in deciding who is an ally and who is an adversary, the role of intelligence gathering has not changed; America’s interests are paramount. And monitoring and helping to protect those interests has been our constant mission for more than sixty years. In the course of fulfilling that mission, we have brought talent, creativity, and even genius to bear in shaping and refining the business of intelligence. Intelligence is a high-risk endeavor—a lot can go wrong. The fact that we have achieved so many successes over the years, even in the face of spectacular failures, attests to the commitment and persistence of the extraordinary men and women who have developed the field-tested practices and techniques that have brought about intelligence breakthroughs. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
There have been intelligence operations throughout history, but the American services are in many ways the most highly developed intelligence-gathering organizations in the World. And the country’s leadership expects much from our individual intelligence officer in carrying out the challenging requirement assigned to them to serve our country’s intelligence. Economic espionage cost U.S.A. companies $100 billion each year. More than 56 percent of the Fortune 1000 admit to having been victimized, and more than likely, a considerable portion of the other 44 percent are either too reticent to admit or simply have not yet discovered that they, too, have been targeted and/or victimized by corporate spies and thieves. America’s nationwide economic espionage crisis is unique in several respects. It represents the first time a crisis of such mammoth proportion has been acknowledged to affect every company in every industry group without exception and at the same time. Without question, economic espionage is a gargantuan growth industry and one of the biggest crises to hit U.S.A. businesses en masse in history. And in an age of globalization, economic espionage gets bigger and easier to commit every day. When, in 1999, then FBI Director Lousi Freeh called economic espionage the most severe threat to our nation’s security since the Cold War, he went on to claim that U.S.A companies are under constant economic attack from foreign countries, stating that in the mid-1990s, FBI investigation uncovered “23 countries are engaged in economic espionage activity against the United States.” However, Former Congressman Dave McCurdy, who served as chair of the House of Intelligence Committee, thinks Mr. Freeh grossly understated the problem. Mr. McCurdy believes 100 of the World’s 173 nations re actively waging economic espionage against U.S.A. businesses. “The question is not who steals,” Mr. McCurdy said. “It is who doesn’t steal.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
In medieval society the economic organization of the city had been relatively static. The craftsmen since the later part of the Middle Ages were united in their guilds. Each mast had one or two apprentices and the number of masters was in some relation to the needs of the community. Although there were always some who had to struggle hard to earn enough to survive, by and large the guild member could be sure that he could live by his hand’s work. If he made good chairs, shoes, bread, saddles, and so on, he did all that was necessary to be sure of living safely on the level which was traditionally assigned to his social position. He could rely on his “good works,” if we use the term here not in its theological but in its simple economic meaning. The guilds blocked any strong competition among their members and enforced co-operation with regard to the buying of raw materials, the techniques of production, and the prices of their products. In contradiction to a tendency to idealize the guild system together with the whole of medieval life, some historians have pointed out that the guilds were always tinged with a monopolistic spirit, which tried to protect a small group and to exclude newcomers. Most authors, however, agree that even if one avoids any idealization of the guilds they were based on mutual cooperation and offered relative security to their members. Medieval commerce was, in general, carried on by a multitude of very small businessmen. Retail and wholesales business were not yet separated and even those traders who went into foreign countries, such as the members of the North German Hanse, were also concerned with retail selling. The accumulation of capital was also very slow up to the end of the fifteenth century. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Thus the small businessman had a considerable amount of security compared with the economic situation in the late Middle Ages when large capital and monopolistic commerce assumed increasing importance. Much that is now mechanical about the life of the medieval city, was then personal, intimate and direct and there was little room for an organization on a scale too vast for the standards that are applied to individuals, and for the doctrine that silences scruples and closes all account with the final plea of economic expediency. This leads us to a point which is essential for the understanding of the position of the individual in medieval society, the ethical views concerning economic activities as they were expressed not only in the doctrines of the Catholic Church, but also in the secular laws. This position cannot be suspected of attempting to idealize or romanticize the medieval World. The basic assumptions concerning economic life were two: “That economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct, upon which as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding. Material riches are necessary; they have secondary importance, since without them men cannot support themselves and help one another…But economic motives are suspect. Because they are powerful appetites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to applaud them…There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a constant and measurable force, to be accepted like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, would have appeared to the medieval thinkers as hardly less irrational and less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as pugnacity and the sexual instinct. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
One must exist for man, not man for riches. At every turn therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade is legitimate; the different resources of different countries show that it was intended by Providence. However, it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits which he takes are no more than the wages of his labor. Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen World; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. However, it is to be tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself. The estate must be legitimately acquired. Today the World is changing again, and the overwhelming majority of Americas are neither farmers nor factory workers. Instead, they are engaged in one or another form of knowledge work. America’s fastest growing and most important industries are information-intensive, and the Third Wave sector includes more than high-flying computer and electronic firms and biotech start-ups. It embraces advanced, information-driven manufacturing in every industry. It includes the increasingly data-drenched services—finance, software, entertainment, the media, advanced communications, medical services, consulting, training and education. In short, it includes al the industries based on mind-work rather than muscle-work. The people who work in this sector will soon be the dominant constituency in American politics. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Unlike the “masses” during the industrial age, the rising Third Wave constituency is highly diverse. It is de-massified. It is composed of individuals who prize their differences. Its very heterogeneity contributes to its lack of political awareness. It is far harder to unify than the masses of the past. Thus the Third Wave constituency has yet to develop its own think tanks and political ideology. It has not systematically marshaled support from academia. Its various associations and lobbies in Washington are still comparatively new and less well connected. And except for one issue, NAFTA, in which the Second Wavers were defeated, the new constituency has few significant notches on its legislative belt. Yet there are key issues on which this broad constituency-to-come can agree. To start with: liberation. Liberation from all the old Second Wave rules, regulations, taxes and laws laid in place to serve the smokestack barons and bureaucrats of the past. These arrangements, no doubt sensible when Second Wave industry was the heart of the American economy, today obstruct Third Wave development. For example, depreciation tax schedules lobbied into being by the old manufacturing interests presuppose that machines and products last for many years. Yet in the fast-changing high-tech industries, and particularly in the computer industry, their usefulness is measured in months or weeks. The result is a tax bias against high tech. Research and development deductions also favor big, old Second Wave companies over the dynamic start-ups on which the Third Wave sector depends. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The current tax treatment of intangibles means that a company with a lot of obsolete sewing machines may well be favored over a software firm that has very little in the way of physical assets. (Even accounting standards, set not by government but by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, favor investment in hardware over information, human resources and other intangibles on which Third Wave companies depend.) Yet changing such rules will mean winning a bitter political fight against the Second Wave firms that benefit from them. Companies in the Third Wave sector have special characteristics. They tend to be young—both in corporate age and in the age of their work force. Work units in them tend to be small compared with those in Second Wave firms. They tend to invest more than average in research and development training, education and human recourses. Ferocious competition forces them to innovate continuously. That means short product lifecycles, and it often implies a rapid turnover of people, tools, and administrative practices. They key assets of these firms are symbols inside the skulls of people. Should these firms and industries be expected play the game according to rules that penalize them for precisely their Third Wave characteristics? Is not this tying America’s hands behind its back? Much of the Third Wave Sector is engaged in providing a dazzling, ever-changing array of services. Instead of decrying the rise of the service sector and continually attacking it as a source of low productivity, low wages, and low performance, should not it be expressly supported and expanded? Should not it at least be freed of old shackles? #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
American needs more, not less, service sector employment to improve the quality of life of its people. That means jobs for everyone from electronics repairment to recyclers, from health-care providers and people who help the elderly to police and firefighters, and—yes—it even means jobs for child-care providers and for domestic workers who are desperately needed in millions of two-income homes. A Third Wave economic policy should not pick winners and losers, but it should clear away the obstacles to professionalization and development of the services needed to make life in America less stressed-out, less frustrating and impersonal. Yet no political party as yet has even begun to think this way. Despite the political lag, the Third Wave constituency is outside the conventional political parties because neither party has so far noticed its existence. Thus it is Third Waver who dominate the new electronic communities springing up around the Internet. And it is these same people who are busy demassifying the Second Wave media and creating an interactive alternative to it. Traditional party politicians who ignore these new realities will be swept aside like M.P.s in nineteenth-century England who imagined their rural, “rotten borough” seats in Parliament were permanently secure. The Third Wave force in America have yet to find their voice. The political part that gives it to them will dominate the American future. When that happens, a new and dramatically different America will rise from the ruins of the late-twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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The Tranquility of Order
Peace is perfection, a gift from God, a beneficial, dynamic, and healthy state within the soul. Human beings have feeling and emotions, awareness and sensitivity of our environment. However, without order, our attention is divided, distracted, confused, unreliable, and ineffective. We must take responsibility for our actions to receive true peace. One of the greatest secrets in life is the ability to navigate your emotions in a ways that helps you win influence. Emotional intelligence makes it possible to navigate the course of your life without feeling burnt out or frustrated. Depending only on your emotional or rational thinking abilities will only make your life distorted or imbalanced. The automatic or impulsive reaction does not allow you to properly process your thoughts and emotions before taking actions. However, once you can understand how your emotions work, then you can bridge the gap between reaction and adequate response. Remember, no one is responsible for how you are feeling, but you. Just because you are having a bad day does not mean you can lash out at another person for being themselves. If things are not going your way, and you are not feeling like tolerating the public, it may be an excellent idea to take a day off work, stay home, stay inside and get yourself in order before having contact with the outside World. There is a right and wrong way to do everything. A person who has self-control, has strength to see situations clearly. Judge them for what they are. It depends upon the attitude of your mind. Negative attitude disturbs and positive attitude provides peace to the mind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The structure of society and the personality of man changed in the late Middle Ages. The unity and centralization of medieval society became weaker. Capital, individual economic initiative and competition grew in importance; a new moneyed class developed. A growing individualism was noticeable in all social classes and affected all spheres of human activity, taste, fashion, art, philosophy, and theology. This whole process had a different meaning for the small group of wealth and prosperous capitalists on the one hand, and on the other hand for the masses of peasants and especially for the urban middle class for which this new development meant to some extent wealth and chances for individual initiative, but essentially a threat to its traditional way of life. It is important to bear this difference in mind from the outset because the psychological and ideological reactions of these various groups were determined by this very difference. The new economic and cultural development took place in Italy more intensely and with more distinct repercussions on philosophy, art, and on the whole style of life than in Western and Central Europe. In Italy, for the first time, the individual emerged from feudal society and broke the ties which had been giving one the security and narrowing one at one and the same time. The Italian of the Renaissance became the first-born among the sons of Modern Europe, the first individual. There were a number of economic and political factors which were responsible for the breakdown of medieval society earlier in Italy than in Central and Western Europe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Among them were the geographical position of Italy and the commercial advantages resulting from it, in a period when the fight between Pope and emperor resulting in the existence of a great number of independent political units; the nearness to Asia, as consequence of which certain skills which were important for the development of industries, as for instance the silk industry, were brought to Italy long before they came to other parts of Europe. Resulting from these and other conditions, was the rise in Italy of a powerful moneyed class the members of which were filled with a spirit of initiative, power, ambition. Feudal class stratifications became less important. From the twelfth century onwards nobles and burghers lived together within the walls of the cities. Social intercourse began to ignore distinctions of caste. Birth and origin were of less importance than wealth. On the other hands, the traditional social stratification among the masses was shaken too. Instead of it, we find urban masses of exploited and politically suppressed workers. As early as 1231, Frederick II’s political measures were aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal state, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree to the exchequer. The result of this progressive destruction of the medieval social structure was the emergence of the individual in the modern sense. In Italy this veil (of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession) first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this World became possible. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such. In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, the Arabian had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race. Man discovers himself and others as individuals, as separate entities; he discovers nature as something apart from himself in two aspects: as an object of theoretical and practical mastery, and in its beauty, as an object of pleasure. He discovers the World, practically be discovering new continents and spiritually by developing a cosmopolitan spirit, a spirit in which Dante cant say: “My country is the whole World.” The Renaissance was the culture of a wealth and powerful upper class, on the crest of the wave which was whipped up by the storm of new economic forces. The masses who did not share the wealth and power of the ruling group had lost the security of their former states and had become a shapeless mass, to be flattered or to be threatened—but always to be manipulated and exploited by those in power. A new despotism arose side by side with the new individualism. Freedom and tyranny, individuality and disorder, were inextricably interwoven. The Renaissance was not a culture of small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois but wealthy nobles and burghers. Their economic activity and their wealth gave them a feeling of freedom and a sense of individuality. However, at the same time, these same people had lost something: the security and feeling of belonging with the medieval social structure had offered. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
They were more free, but they were also more alone. They used their power and wealth to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure out of life; but in doing so, they had to use ruthlessly every means, from physical torture to psychological manipulation, to rule over the masses and to check their competitors within their own class. All human relationships were poisoned by this fierce life-and-death struggle for the maintenance of power and wealth. Solidarity with one’s fellow men—or at least with the members of one’s own class—was replaced by a cynical detached attitude; other individuals were looked upon as “objects” to be used and manipulated, or they were ruthlessly destroyed if it suited one’s own ends. The individual was absorbed by a passionate egocentricity, and insatiable greed for power and wealth. As a result of all this, the successful individual’s relation to his own self, his sense of security and confidence were poisoned too. His own self became as much an object of manipulation to him as other persons had become. We have reasons to doubt whether the powerful masters of Renaissance capitalism were as happy and as secure as they are often pictured. It seems that the new freedom brought two things to them: an increased feeling of strength and at the same time an increased isolation, doubt, scepticism, and—resulting from all these—anxiety. It is the same contradiction that we find in the philosophic writings of the humanists. Side by side with their emphasis on human dignity, individuality, and strength, they exhibited insecurity and despair in their philosophy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
This underlying insecurity resulting from the position of an isolated individual in a hostie World tends to explain the genesis of a character trait the became noticeable in the individual of the Renaissance and not present, at least in the same intensity, in the member of the medieval social structure: his passionate craving for fame. If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one’s relations to other and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one’s doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one’s individual life from it limitations and instability to the plane of indestructibility; if one’s name is known to one’s contemporaries, and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one’s life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others. It is obvious that this solution of individual insecurity was only possible for a social group whose members possessed the actual means of gaining fame. It was not a solution which was possible for the powerless masses in that same culture nor one which we shall find in the urban middle class that was the backbone of the Reformation. The Renaissance was the period which we saw the beginning of modern individualism and also because the work done by historians of the period throw some light on the very factor which are significant for the main process which this study analyzes, namely the emergence of man from a preindividualistic existence to one in which he has full awareness of himself as a separate entity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
However, in spite of the fact that the ideas of the Renaissance were not without influence on the further development of European thinking, the essential root of modern capitalism, its economic structure and its spirit, are not to be found in the Italian culture of the late Middle Ages, but in the economic and social situations of Central and Western Europe and in the doctrines of Mr. Luther and Mr. Calvin. The main difference between the two cultures is this: the Renaissance period represented a comparatively high development of commercial and industrial capitalism; it was a society in which a small group of wealth and powerful individuals ruled and formed the social basis for the philosophers and artists who expressed the spirit of this culture The Reformation, on the other hand, was essentially a religion of the urban middle and lower classes, and of the peasants. Germany, too, had its wealthy businessmen, like the Fuggers, but they were not the ones to whom the new religious doctrines appealed, nor were they the main basis from which modern capitalism developed. As Max Weber has shown, it was the urban middle class which became the backbone of modern capitalistic development in the Western World. According to the entirely different social background of both movements we must expect the spirit of the Renaissance and that of the Reformation to be different. In discussing the theology of Mr. Luther and Mr. Calvin some of the differences will become clear by implication. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
However, before we go any further, let us cover a few things in more modern times. In 1984, when Gary Hart campaigned for the Democratic Party presidential nomination and won the New Hampshire primary by calling for “new thinking,” the old Second Wave barons in the Democratic Party united to stop him and nominated solid, safe, Second Wave thinker Walter Mondale instead. It is why, more recently, Second Wave Naderites and Second Wave Buchananites found common cause against NAFTA. It is why, when Congress passed an infra-structure bill in 1991, $150 billion was allocated to roads, highways, bridges and potholes—providing profits to Second Wave companies and jobs for Second Wave—unions, while a ere $1 billion was allocated to help build the much-touted electronic superhighway. Necessary as they may be, roads and highways are part of the Second Wave infrastructure; digital networks are the heart of the Third Wave infrastructure. The point here is not whether or not the government should subsidize the digital network, but the imbalance of Second and Third Wave forces in Washington. This imbalance is why Vice President Gore—with one toe wet in the Third Wave—has been unable, despite his efforts, to “reinvent” the government along Third Wave lines. Centralized bureaucracy is the quintessential form of organization in Second Wave societies. Even as advanced corporations, driven by competition, are desperately trying to dismantle their bureaucracies and invent new Third Wave forms of management, government agencies, blocked by Second Wave civil service unions, have managed to stay largely unreformed, unreengineered, unreinvented. They retain, in short, their Second Wave structures. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Second Wave elites fight to retain or reinstate an unsustainable past because they gained wealth and power from applying Second Wave principles, and the shift to a new way of life challenges that wealth and power. However, it is not only the elite. Millions of middle-class and poor Americans also resist the transition to the Third Wave because of an often justified fear that they will be left behind, will lost their jobs and slide further down the economic and social slope. To understand the vast inertial power of Second Wave forces in America, however, we need to look beyond the old muscle-based industries and their workers and unions. The Second Wave sector is backed by those elements of Wall Street that service it. It is further supported by intellectuals and academics, often tenured, who live off grants from foundations, trace associations and lobbies that serve it. Their task is to collect supportive data and hammer out the ideological arguments and slogans used by Second Wave forces: for example, the idea that the information-intensive service industries are “unproductive,” or that service workers are doomed to work in low wage jobs or that the economy must revolve around manufacturing. With all this firepower continually battering them, it is hardly surprising that both political parties reflect Second Wave thinking. The Democrats’ reflexive reliance on bureaucratic and centralist solutions to problems like the health insurance crisis is drawn straight from Second Wave theories of efficiency. Despite an occasional politician like Vice President Gore, who recognizes the importance of high technology and who once served as cochair of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, the Democrats remain so heavily indebted to their Second Wave backers in industry, the unions and civil service, that as a party, they remain largely paralyzed in the face of the twenty-first century. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
From Hart in the ‘80s to Gore in the ‘90s, the party’s core constituencies make it impossible for the Democratic Party to follow its most forward thinking leaders. The party thus finds itself still trapped by its blue-collar image of reality. The failure of the Democrats to make themselves the party of the future (as indeed they once were and have become again in the first quarter of the twenty-first century) had thrown the door wide open for their adversaries. The Republicans are less rooted in the old industrial Northeast, and thus have an opportunity to position themselves as the party of the Third Wave—although their recent Presidents have signally failed to seize this opportunity. And the Republicans, too, rely on knee-jerk Second Wave rhetoric. Republicans are basically right when they call for a broad scale deregulation because businesses now need all the flexibility possible to survive global competition. Republicans are basically right in calling for privatization of government operations because governments, lacking competition, do not generally run things well. Republicans are basically right when they urge us to take maximum advantage of dynamism and creativity that market economies make possible. However, they, too, remain prisoners of Second Wave economics. For example, even the free-market economists on whom Republicans rely have failed, as yet, to come to terms with the new role and inexhaustibility of knowledge. Republicans also are still beholden to some of the corporate dinosaurs of the Second Wave past and to their trade associations, lobbies and policy formulating “round tables.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Moreover, Republicans tend to play down potentially immense social dislocations that are likely to flow from any change as profound as the Third Wave. For example, as skills become obsolete overnight, large numbers of the middle class, including highly trained people, may well find themselves thrown out of work. California defense scientists and engineers are a chastening case in point. Free-marketism and trickle-downism twisted into rigid theological dogma are inadequate responses to the Third Wave. For example, as skills become obsolete overnight, large numbers of the middle class, including highly trained people, may well find themselves thrown out of work. California defense scientists and engineers are a chastening case in point. Free-marketism and trickle-downism twisted into rigid theological dogma are inadequate responses to the Third Wave. A party facing the future should be warning of problems to come and suggesting preventative change. For example, today’s media revolution will bring enormous benefits to the emerging Third Wave economy. However, TV shopping and other electronic services might well slash the number of entry-level jobs in the traditional retail sector, precisely the place some people can find work, and some can get their starts. If free markets and democracy are to survive the great and turbulent transitions to come, politics must become anticipatory and preventive. Yet asking our political parties to think beyond the next election is hard and thankless work. Instead, both parties are busy mainlining nostalgia into their constituents’ veins. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
The Democrats, for example, until recent years, spoke of “reindustrializing” or “restoring” American industry to its period of greatness in the 1950s. The Republicans, meanwhile, appeal to nostalgia in their rhetoric about culture and values, as though one could return to the values and morality of the 1950s—a time before universal television, before the birth-control pill, before commercial jet aviation, satellites and home computers—without also returning to the mass industrial society of the Second Wave. One side still dreams of River Rogue, the other dreams of Ozzie and Harriet. The religion-based wing of the Republican Party, seeking a return to “traditional” verities, blames liberals, humanist, and Democrats for the “collapse of morality.” It fails to grasp that this crisis in our value system reflects the more general crisis of Second Wave civilization as a whole, and that this upheaval is not limited to America. Rather than asking how to bring about decent, moral, and democratic Third Wave America, most of its leaders merely urge a return to an idealized past. Instead of asking how to make a de-massified society moral and fair, many give the impression that they really want to re-massify America. The difference between the parties, however, is that while the Second Wave “nostalgia pushers” in the Democratic Party are concentrated in its core constituencies, their counterparts in the Republican Party tend to be found on its frenetic fringe. This leaves room for the center of the party, if it is inclusive and open to change, to seize the future—lock, stock and barrel. This is the message that Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, has been trying, but o far with only limited success, to deliver to his own party. If Mr. Gingrich succeeds, and the Democrats remain chained to their pre-computer ideology, they could, for good or ill, be trampled in the political dust. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
In 1980, Lee Atwater was a top political advisor to President Regan. Later he became President Bush’s jogging companion and campaign manager. Not long after Mr. Regan was elected, Mr. Atwater said that neither party, has a positive image of the future, “and that’s why the campaigning is so negative.” All of America is poorer for our bipartisan myopia. China, in some ways is like no other country in the World. China has positioned its state-owned companies as major cross-border acquirers. Also, most of the major Chinese acquisitions (even by non-state-owned firms) are feared to be state-backed. In the end it often turns out that, in fact, it is the Chinese state that is acquiring Western private companies one after another, albeit indirectly. On the contrary, almost all Western acquirers are purely private firms. As a rule, Chinese acquirers get the foreign currency they need to carry out the transaction not through the foreign exchange market but in a nontransparent way, directly from a state-owned bank—eventually from the state. If the Chinese government considers a particular transaction strategically important to access mineral resources, technologies, and brands, or to boost its geopolitical clout in general, it can allocate much greater funds than those affordable for a private company sticking to the market rationale. Again, China drastically changes the rules of the game in the global business arena. This West has no choice but to put every Chinese acquisition under scrutiny. On the other hand, at this point not only Chinese, but Western governments have not clearly articulated their basic policy concept on the acquisitions pursued by foreign state-owned or government-linked companies. As long as it is not done, their responses will remain spontaneous. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
When dealing with perspective on family-serving agencies, the arts come into play. It is apparent that the arts recapitulate the range of human activity, just as other forms of recreation are re-creations of workday task. Thus dancing can be seen as an abstraction and idealization of sports; the applied arts, as representations of crafts; storytelling and drama, of sociability; graphic and plastic arts, of intellectual interests; poetry, of reverie (poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity). Music is the most distilled of all the arts, an evoker of all the forms and feelings of experience, of images suggestive of all the sense, a medium falling not short of words but transcending poetry in its power of abstraction. In pure music, the spirit is free of every toilsome entanglement; music is thus the apotheosis of play, the singer, the paragon of all players. While the practice of artistry may be either by individuals or groups (orchestra, chorus, dramatic companies), and there is some development of artistic contests, there are no games consisting of artistry. Other types of recreation acquire spectators and auditors, but none invite them to quite the degree that artistry does. The way in which the element of chance enters into the artistic situation is largely in terms of the size and composition of the audience it draws. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Audience reception is vital to most artists, suggesting that in this type of recreation something occurs between artist and public which is uniquely social. What that something is—the expansion of experience or its unification, the affirmation of human brotherhood or the criticism of life—must still be left to philosophers to ponder, but that such a relation exists seems as true for the amateur milliner as for the professional painter. The phenomenon of style as localized in time, space, and segments of society also testifies to the intensely social aspects of artistry, to the sharing of artistic experience, and its intensification by sharing. The elusive phenomenon of taste is at once a most individual and most social experience; critics testify to the unceasing dialectic of expression and communication in artistic production; art historians, to the efforts of publics to discriminate the ephemeral from the eternal. Like other forms of recreation, it is unquestionable that artistry adds new elements and dimension to experience; at the same time, art always bears a definite and necessary relation to the realities which it represents, it is an idealization or selection of the actual; decoration is always decoration of something; this something is not the design itself but a feature of existence which would be necessary with or without decoration. It is this subtle relationship to the more strictly purposeful and obligatory that puts art and artistry into the realm of play, however intense the seriousness with which they may be themselves pursued. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Now what has all this to do with families? Why should recreational agencies be considered as family agencies? If the family is viewed only in traditional terms, as an institution to be preserved, the connection adduced between family welfare and contemporary recreation must appear trifling, or even inimical. If, on the other hand, the measure of a family is taken as its effect in developing competent personalities among its members, the provision of recreational opportunity assumes an importance compounded of functions performed by all the other types of family agencies. It is evident that sports contribute to the development of physical health; crafts, to purposeful choice of vocational identity, and the acquisition of manipulative understanding; sociability, to practice in empathy; reverie, to the integration of self-conceptions; intellectual interests, to the stimulation of intelligence and the improvement of judgement; and the arts, to creativity. Furthermore, beyond these direct contributions to competence lie all the overlapping, complementing, and mutually reinforcing contributions of each type of recreation to the other aspects of competence, as for example, when experience on a baseball team brings out leadership ability, which is then usable in a government job. The evolution of recreational agencies to the present has occurred in less time than the invention of the concrete forms of recreation. It should therefore not be surprising that the current procedures of recreational agencies only faintly foreshadow the shape of their future responsibilities toward the family, and the changes of method which will be necessary to discharge them. Fortunately a number of contemporary thinkers are working on these problems. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Americans have resorted to recreation as an escape for the boredom of enforced leisure before they have ceased to think of play as an escape from the drudgery of work. While writings about recreation are scarce, there is some literature on leisure, and it seems significant that much of this was produced during the depression of the nineteen thirties, when so much of traditional social philosophy was being reassessed. As employment resumed, leisure came to be talked of less as a problem and more as a positive value to be pursued. Neither family agencies nor anyone ese has yet devised community-wide, positive programs to fill the vacuum of leisure with recreation. Since play ceases to be play when it is not undertaken for its own sake, an insistence on wholesomeness frequently destroys the appeal of a play program. Yet the family agency which exists simply to promote recreation is rare; so far the agencies which have sought to provide recreation to families have justified their actions by reference to some ulterior, utilitarian purpose. Recreation unquestionably has all the values attributed to it, but these must be trusted to accrue spontaneously; they cannot be forced or directly seized. Only programs which accord recreation a raison d’etre of its own can truly be called positive; only agencies set up to create the optimum conditions for its growth among the whole community have grasped its relevance for the whole society as well as for the whole of culture. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Now, when it comes to religious aspects of life, believers may unknowingly develop mediumistic conditions, of which deceiving offenders are not slow to take advantage. They are careful not to frighten the believer by doing anything which will open one’s eyes, so they keep within the range of what one will receive without question. They will portray the Lord Jesus Christ in the particular way which will most appeal to the person, exempli gratia, to some as Bridegroom; to other as King on a throne, and coming in great glory. They will also impersonate the dead to those who grieve after their loved ones, and as they have watched them during life and known all about them, they will give ample “proofs” to confirm the deceived ones in their deception. Visions may come from one of thee sources: the divine, from God; the human, such as hallucinations and illusions because of the disease; and the psychopathological, giving purposely false portrayals. Visions given by psychological offenders can describe anything supernatural presented to and seen by the mind or imagination from outside, such as terrible pictures of the “future,” the flashing of texts as if they were lit up, visions of wide-spreading “movements”—sometimes almost paralleling either a true vision of the Holy Spirit given to the “eye of the understanding” or a normal and healthy action of the imagination. The Church is thus often made a whirlpool of division through pool of division through believers relying upon “text” for guiding their decisions instead of depending on the principles of right and wrong set forth in God’s Word. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
“The Fall” as a symbol for the transition from essence to existence is broader in scope than the Fall depicted in Genesis, although the latter is its classic expression. Mr. Plato’s myth of “the Fall of the souls” conveys the same notion of the tragic passage from potentiality to actuality. The Fall has universal anthropological significance. To speak of its transition from essence to existence is demythologizing, but only to a limited extent, for in dealing with this question the philosopher commits himself in a matter of ultimate concern and so cannot avoid using myth and symbol. Yet a certain amount of demythologizing is necessary, since the theologian must employ philosophical ideas to explain the Fall. The philosopher cannot avoid existential decisions, and the theologian cannot avoid ontological concepts. Genesis in the Christian Bible, chapters one to three, are the profoundest and richest expression of man’s awareness of his existential estrangement. There are four elements in the transit from essence to existence: the possibility of the Fall, its motives, the event itself, and its implications. The possibility of the Fall lies in the fact that man alone possesses finite freedom. He can contradict his essential nature and destroy his own humanity. Yet man’s freedom is not absolute; it operates within the context of universal destiny. The Fall, although always presented as the Fall of man, is a cosmic event. However, return to the words of Genesis, the Fall is possible because man is made in the image of God, that is, he had freedom of destiny. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The motive for the Fall involves a discussion of essential being, of Adam before the Fall. It is a psychological state of dreaming of innocence. A dream anticipates actuality, and, although reality differs from it, still there is a certain correspondence between the two. Innocence is the state of nonactualized potentiality characterized by the absence of experience, responsibility, and guilt, but which, if actualized, puts an end to innocence. The growth of awareness of pleasures of the flesh is a good example of innocence and its loss. The symbol Adam before the Fall must understood as the dreaming innocence of undecided potentialities. In the state of dreaming innocence, freedom and destiny lie within each other, distinct but not separate, intension but not in conflict. They are held in polar unity by the ground of being in which they are rooted. The motives for the Fall are seen in the anxiety which besieges man from without and from withing. From without, the command not to eat the forbidden fruit testifies both to mans aroused freedom, his desire to actualize himself, and to his instinct for self-preservation by obeying the divine prohibition. From within, man is torn by the same anxiety to actualize the freedom of which he is aware and to preserve his innocence by not realizing his potentialities. In either case, under the pressure but not the compulsion of anxiety, man decides for self-actualization. In what sense is the Fall an event? It certainly is not an historical event that happened “once upon a time.” It is a fact, the original fact, in that it is an ontological condition that recedes but touches all of creation. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
It means that the transition from essence to existence is a universal quality of finite being. The Genesis story stresses the moral element of this quality by highlighting the ethical act of Adam. However, the tragic element which involve the whole cosmos is not absent: The serpent represents the dynamic trends of nature; there is the magical character of the two trees, the rise of sexual consciousness, the curse over the heredity of Adam, the body of the woman, the animals and the land. These symbols point to a cosmic myth which teaches that the individual act of freedom is embedded in a universal destiny. The polarity of freedom-destiny is asserted. Existence is rooted both in ethical freedom and in tragic destiny. The cosmic implications of the Fall introduce the problem of how universal existence is related to man’s existence. These implications are distilled into two questions: How is nature related to fallen man? What is the relationship between creation and the Fall? The Fall rules out a before and after, a change in the structure of nature due to the divine curse laid upon the land. The transition from essence to existence is not an event in time; Adam before the Fall and nature before the curse are man and the World now exist, and it was never otherwise. A simple solution would be to separate innocent nature and guilty man, to speak no more of a fallen World. However, to do so neglects the tragic element of destiny. For within man himself nature is implicated in the Fall. First, in the course of human evolution, there is no absolute discontinuity between animal bondage and human freedom. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Secondly, in the development of the human individual, who can say where and when responsibility beings and ends? Thirdly, the discovery of the unconscious reveals a hidden but determining power that influences man’s decision. And, lastly, the social dimension of the “collective unconscious” contributes to the limitation imposed by destiny. In a word, biological, psychological, and sociological factors affect the individual’s decision. However, freedom is the possibility of a total and centered act of the personality, an act in which all the drives and influences which constitute the destiny of man are brought into the centered unity of a decision. None of these drives compels the decision in isolation. Yet, they are effective, and in this way nature represents destiny and participates in the act of freedom. It is possible, in fact necessary, to speak of a fallen World. The tragedy of nature is bound to the tragedy of man, as the salvation of nature is dependent on the salvation of man…for man is in nature and nature is in man. Nature, also, mourns for a lost good. There is no point in time and space in which created goodness was actualized and had existence. There was no paradise just as there will be no utopia. Actualized creation and estranged existence are identical. For example, the newly created infant falls into the state of existential estrangement. Creation and Fall coincide, but not logically, for, when the child matures, it affirms its existential good, but its self-actualization through freedom and destiny results in sin. However, this sin is not a structural necessity; the transition from essence to existence is a leap. Existence can never be derived from essence. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Nacho is Trying to Read My Books
For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parent have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice. Human history begun with an act of disobedience. Human history was ushered in by an act of disobedience according to the Hebrew and Greek myths. Adam and Eve, living in the Garden of Eden, were part of nature; they were in harmony with it, yet did not transcend it. They were in nature as the fetus is in the womb of the mother. They were human, and at the same time not yet human. All this changed when they disobeyed an order. There are moments of sudden illumination in which man stretched out a commanding arm, as if creating a World, light shining forth and spreading out around him. He is then filled with the deeply gratifying certainty that what enraptured and exalted him into the farthest regions, the height of this one sensation, can never be denied to posterity; in the eternal necessity of this rare illumination for all those to come man sees the necessity of his frame. Far into the future, mankind needs him, and just as that moment of illumination is the embodiment and epitome of his innermost essence, so, too, he believes himself, as the man of this moment, to be immortal, dismissing all others as dross, rot, vanity, brutishness, or pleonasm, leaving them to perish. We view all disappearance and demise with discontent, often with astonishment, as if we experienced in it something at bottom impossible. We are disturbed when a tall tree breaks, and a crumbling Victorian home aggrieves us. Every New Year’s Eve, we feel the mystery of contradiction of being and becoming. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
What offends moral man above all, though, is that an instant of supreme universal perfection should be destroyed. European and American history since the end of the Middle Ages is the history of the full emergence of the individual. It is a process which started in Italy, in the Renaissance, and which only now seems to have come to a climax. It took over four hundred and fifty five years to break down the medieval World and to free people from the most apparent restraints. However, while in many respects the individual has grown, has developed mentally and emotionally, and participates in cultural achievements in a degree unheard-of before, the lag between “freedom from” and “freedom to” has grown too. The result of this disproportion between freedom from any tie and the lack of possibilities for the positive realization of freedom and individuality has led, in Europe, to a panicky flight from freedom into new ties or at least into complete indifference. Western society underwent radical changes which were accompanied by an equally radical change in the personality structure of man. A new concept of freedom in modern society must start with that period in which the foundations of modern culture were laid, for this formative stage of modern man permits us, more clearly than any later epoch, to recognize the ambiguous meaning of freedom which was to operate throughout modern culture: on the one hand the growing independence of man from external authorities, on the other hand his growing isolation and the resulting feeling of individual insignificance and powerlessness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Our understanding of the new elements in the personality structure of man is enhanced by the study of their origins, because by analyzing the essential features of capitalism and individualism at their very roots one is able to contrast them with an economic system and a type of personality which was fundamentally different from ours. This very contrast gives a better perspective for the understanding of the peculiarities of the modern social system, of how it has shaped the character structure of people who live in it, and of the new spirit which resulted from this change in personality. The period of the Reformation is more similar to the contemporary scene than might appear at first glance; as a matter of fact, in spite of all the obvious differences between the two periods, there is probably no period since the sixteenth century which resembles ours as closely in regard to the ambiguous meaning of freedom. The Reformation is one root of the idea of human freedom and autonomy as it is represented in modern democracy. However, while this aspect is always stressed, especially in non-Catholic countries, its other aspect-its emphasis on the wickedness of human nature, the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual, and the necessity for the individual to subordinate himself to a power outside of himself—is neglected. This idea of the unworthiness of the individual, his fundamental inability to rely on himself and his need to submit, is also the main theme in the ideology of some who are arguably great leaders, but may, however, lack the emphasis on freedom and moral principles which are inherent in Protestantism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
This ideological similarity is not the only one that makes the study of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a particularly fruitful starting point for the understanding of the present scene. There is also a fundamental likeness in the social situation. Then as now a vast sector of the population was threatened in its traditional way of life by revolutionary changes in the economic and social organization; especially was the middle class, as today, threatened by the power of monopolies and the superior strength of capital, and this threat had an important effect on the spirit and the ideology of the threatened sector of society by enhancing the individual’s feeling of aloneness and insignificance. The picture of the Middle Ages has been distorted in two ways. Modern rationalism has looked upon the Middle Ages as an essentially dark period. It has pointed to the general lack of personal freedom, to exploitation of the mass of the population by a small minority, to its narrowness which makes the peasant of the surrounding country a dangerous and suspected stranger to the city dweller—not to speak of a person of another country—and to its superstitiousness and ignorance. On the other hand, the Middle Ages have been idealized for the most part by reactionary philosophers but sometimes by progressive critics of modern capitalism. They have pointed to the sese of solidarity, the subordination of economic to human needs, the directness and concreteness of human relations, the supranational principle of the Catholic Church, the sense of security which was characteristic of man in the Middle Ages. Bother pictures are right; what make them both wrong is to draw one of them and shut one’s eyes to the other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
What characterized medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom. Everybody in the earlier period was chained to one’s role in the social order. A man had little chance to move socially from one class to another, he was hardly able to move even geographically from one town or from one country to another. With few exceptions he had to stay where he was born. He was often not even free to dress as he pleased or to eat what he liked. The artisan had to sell at certain price and the peasant at a certain place, the market of town. A guild member was forbidden to divulge any technical secret of production to anybody who was not a member of his guild and was compelled to let his fellow guild members share in any advantageous buying of raw material. Personal, economic, and social life was dominated by rules and obligations from which practically no sphere of activity was exempted. However, although a person was not freed in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social World from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need, for doubt. A person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation. The social order was conceived as a natural order, and being a definite part of it gave a feeling of security and of belonging. There was comparatively little competition. One was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood determined by tradition, just as it carried economic obligations to those of higher in the social hierarchy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
However, within the limits of his social sphere the individual actually had much freedom to express one’s self in one’s work and in one’s emotional life. Although there was no individualism in the modern sense of the unrestricted choice between many possible ways of life (a freedom of choice which is largely abstract), there was a great deal of concrete individualism in real life. There was much suffering and pain, but there was also the Church which made this suffering more tolerable by explaining it as a result of the sin of Adam and the individual sins of each person. While the Church fostered a sense of guilt, it also assured the individual of her unconditional love to all her children and offered a way to acquire the conviction of being forgiven and loved by God. The relationship to God was more one of confidence and love than of doubt and fear. Just as a peasant and a town dweller rarely went beyond the limits of the small geographical area which was theirs, so the universe was limited and simple to understand. The Earth and man were it center, Heaven and Hell was the future place of life, and all action from birth to death were transparent in their causal interrelation. Although society was thus structuralized and gave man security, yet it kept him in bondage. It was a different kind of bondage from that which authoritarianism and oppression in later centuries constituted. Medieval society did not deprive the individual of his freedom, because the “individual” did not yet exist; man was still related to the World by primary ties. He did not yet conceive of himself as an individual except through the medium of his social (which then was also his natural) role. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Man did not conceive of any other persons as “individuals” either. The peasant who came into town was a stranger, and even within the town members of different social groups regarded each other as strangers. Awareness of one’s individual self, of others, and of the World as separate entities, had not yet fully developed. The lack of self-awareness of the individual in medieval society had found classical expression on both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the World and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. When psychopathological offenders are able to give visions it I an evidence that they have already greatly deceived the man, be he a Christian or an unbeliever. The ground for this is not necessarily known as conduct disorder, but a condition of passivity, id est, nonaction of the mind, imagination, and other faculties. This essential condition of submissive non-action as the means of obtaining supernatural manifestations is well understood by spiritist mediums, clairvoyants, crystal gazers, and others, who know that the least action of the mind immediately breaks the clairvoyant state. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Believers not knowing these basic principles can unwittingly fulfill the conditions for psychopathological offenders to work in their life and ignorantly induce the passive state by wrong conceptions of the true things of God. For instance, they may sink, during seasons of prayer, into a passive mental condition which they consider is “waiting on God”; deliberately will the cessation of their mind action, in order to obtain some supernatural manifestations which they believe to be of God; in daily life practice a passive attitude which they think is submission to the will of God; endeavour to bring about a state of personal negation, in which they have no desires, needs, wishes, hopes, plans—which they think is full surrender to God, with their “will” lost in God. “To exist” means to “stand out.” On the most fundamental level, to exist means to be, to stand out of nonbeing. Since nonbeing can be the absolute nonbeing of ouk on (the God who is not) or the relative nonbeing of me on, existence can take two directions. If something stands out of absolute nothingness, it exists in the sense that it has being. If something stands out of relative nothingness, that is, potentiality, then it exists in the sense that it has actuality. Etymology, then, indicates two senses of existence: “to stand out” of either absolute nonbeing or relative nonbeing. However, in either case, the metaphour “to stand out” connotes the metaphour “to stand in,” just as trees “stand out” of the Earth and yet “stand in” it. A being stands out of nonbeing, but not completely, for it is a mixture of being and nonbeing. An actual being stands out of potentiality, but not completely, for it never fully realizes all its potentiality. Existence, therefore, is an imperfect being, for to exist means to have being and yet to “stand in” non-being, to have actuality, and yet to “stand in” potentiality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Historically, however, attention has been focused upon the second meaning of existence and split between potentiality and actuality. This is the overriding meaning of existence: to stand out of potentiality. Upon this means we build the distinction between essence and existence. Essence is real, is actualized in existence, but only in fragments, never totally. This situation gives rise to two conflicting view point exemplified in Mr. Plato and Mr. Hegel. Mr. Plato viewed the gap between potential and actual being as a fall. For him, existence is a fall from essence. Mr. Hegel, on the contrary, considered the gap as merely part of the process of divine self-realization. For him existence is the expression of essence. Mr. Hegel’s essentialism set the stage for the existentialist revolt. Mr. Schelling, Mr. Schopenhauer, Mr. Marx, and Mr. Kierkegaard all share a common insight: that human existence is a state of estrangement from its essential nature. Existence is dehumanization and not the expression of essential humanity. This is the truth about man’s predicament which existentialism has laid bare. However, it is the question of existence, not the answer. Whenever existentialist, atheistic, or theistic, go beyond their analyses and provide answers, they draw upon religious sources. For the answer to existence is a matter of ultimate concern, and hence is religious, even though it be disguised in secular or atheistic grab. The religious character of existentialism stems from the very nature of philosophy which embraces both scientific detachment and the involvement of faith in an ultimate concern. Christianity proclaims the “New Being” in Christ; the merit of existentialism lies in its graphic portrayal of the “old being,” namely, the tragedy and anxiety of a cosmos estranged from its essential nature. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The history of the family is one perpetual crisis. Social justice requires that the state treat its citizens as equals, and that requirement has serious distributive implications, demanding much more equal distributions, of a variety of gods, than exist in any contemporary societies. However, as liberals, we recognize that it is valuable for people to make and act on their own judgments about how they should live, and important that they be accorded the freedoms necessary for them to live well. The problem, of course, a World in which we were required to treat everybody the same—friend, spouse, child, stranger—would be a dystopic nightmare, a World were nobody enjoyed the relationships tht make us human. Some of the most valuable element in human lives depends precisely on our treating particular other as special. The family, the natural home of such relationships, is a particularly a stark locus of the tensions embodied in the view that people should enjoy equal freedom, or have equal opportunity to live valuable lives. A completely harmonious reconciliation may not be possible. We do not show that plausible understandings of the family, equality, and liberty can be constructed in a way that eliminates all conflicts between the family and equality, or resolves all difficulties concerning authority over children. Our more modest aim is to offer an account of “family values properly understood” that shows the possibility of child-rearing practices and institutions that realize the values distinctively made available by familial relationships, that respects those individual liberties that are indeed worthy of respect, and that mitigates—massively mitigates—the conflict with equality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The family has only recently begun to receive the careful attention needed to provide satisfactory responses to the challenges it faces in society. Public declarations of human rights, devised specially to provide a consensual focal point, can hardly be expected to venture into controversial matters, so we should not be surprised if their pronouncements are rather vague. Thus, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights tells us that “the family is the natural and fundamental group of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State” (Article 16.3), while the European Convention on Human Rights announces that “everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life” (Article 8) and that “men and women of marriageable age have the right to marry and found a family (Article 12). Family values and practices arise out of this family-centered view of the World. Mormons are very conservative about pleasures of the flesh before marriage. Pleasures of the flesh are valued as an expression of love and commitment between eternal partners. It is the means God uses to bring spirit children out of the preexistence into this mortal World and has the power to create an eternally increasing family. Pleasures of the flesh outside marriage is forbidden, including any non-traditional relationships, premarital pleasures of the flesh, adulty, and pornography. Pleasuring of one’s self is strongly discouraged. Young people are encouraged to remain chaste until marriage and to marry early in order to develop their morality within the proper boundaries. Marriage is so strongly encouraged that an unmarried man approaching age thirty will raise questions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Women are given the benefit of the doubt, but men are strongly expected to do what it takes to find a mate. It is much like how in conservative families, if one does not have a college degree, a house, a car and a career by the age of twenty-five, people start to question the individual’s competence. When it comes to identity and interpersonal competence, intellectual play includes those interest which have as a primary focus the exercise of mental skills and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake (puzzles, card games, debating, reading, collecting, sightseeing). They have much similarity to sports and crafts, save that they are directed only to exploring and knowing the World, not manipulating it, except symbolically. Like crafts, they recapitulate the whole range of serious intellectual pursuits; like sports, the various individual forms test all the intellectual powers such as: memory, imagination, problem-solving, dissimulation, and anticipation of others. On this account, intellectual play is readily professionalized, and conversely, serious intellectual pursuits can readily be motivated by the fun involved. The constant elements of intellectual play are these underlying aspects of curiosity—about the nature of the World, and of other men, and one’s own powers for grasping them. When such abilities are compared with those of others, there is a nonphysical contest or game. Guessing the moves of others appears to have far more attraction than mere comparisons of mental ability, undoubtedly because the element of chance is involved. In American culture, however, the attraction of intellectual contests and games seems underdeveloped; some other civilizations in the past seem to have gone further in this direction. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The volume of reading, and use of other media of communication and education—apart from the arts—are steadily mounting and probably differentiating into new forms. As education becomes fun instead of duty, through the decline of the sense that is must be profitable before it can please, the student of popular culture at the intermediate level will probably find a vast efflorescence of intellectual play. Young minds are worked and winced and shaped curiously by a vision of Life—the American Dream. The American Dream is so widely used that it has become a powerful metaphour of core American values. While economic success is first among these values, others are almost equally important. Among thee values is being able to grow to grow to fullest development as men and women, unhampered by the barriers which have slowly been erected for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. The American Dream mandates that all these values can be accomplished through hard work and individual effort. Although Well Street has melted down, personal savings and investments have been vaporized and rebounded, businesses are going bust, while other flourish, and certain populations are facing high unemployment, the American Dream is still alive and worth aspiring to, despite the nightmare some American are living through. The American Dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank is the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the World. That hope has been present from the start. Every since we became an independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of the ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces which appeared to be overwhelming and dispelling it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
It is not about becoming rich and famous overnight, but is more of a verbal contract that states, if you work hard, you, too, can buy a house, have a family and live well. Ordinary man has held fast to those rights t “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” which were vouchsafe to us in the past in vision and on parchment. The Providence, the eighteenth and nineteenth century term for God, had ordained that the United States of America extend its unique and relatively new form of government, the so-called “great experiment of liberty and federate self-government.” Manifest Destiny embodies a higher law—God’s law—and so hold the moral high ground. Manifest Destiny means expansion, prearranged by Heaven, over an area not clearly defined. Therefore, the expansion of America’s boarders may not be finalized yet. Many believe that the United States of American will some day encompass the entire Western Hemisphere, and possibly beyond. Regardless of the interpretation, the concept of Manifest Destiny spurred a political movement in the 1840s. The justifications for Manifest Destiny is that first of all, American society and citizens are virtuous. Because of their virtue, they are justified in expanding. Second, it is the mission of American to undertake the task of accomplishing these things. That is why the National Anthem means so much to Americans because it speaks of expanding her boarder “from sea to shining sea.” And China understands this, which is why they are not allowing American corporations to purchase large companies in China. This is also why Americans are also worried about companies overseas buying American land and corporation. Many understand that political parities may not really matter so much anymore because so many politicians are looking to get rich quick and may not care about America. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
To further highlight this illustration, on March 1 2017, less than two months after Vice President Joe Biden left public office, State Energy HK Limited, a Chinses Company, wired $3 million to Rob Walker’s company. The next day, the company wired $1,065,000 to a company associated with James Gillar, another Biden associate. Afterwards the Biden family received approximately $1,065,000 in payments over a three-month period in different bank accounts. From the bank records, it appears that the Biden family received approximately one-third of the money obtained from the China wire, which leads many people to believe that the Biden administration of compromised. “Over the course of several years, members of the Biden family and their companies received over $1.3 million in payments from accounts related to their associate, Rob Walk. Most of this money came as a result of a wire from a Chinese energy company and went not only to Hunter and James Biden, but also to Hallie Biden and an unknown ‘Biden.’ It is unclear what services were provided to obtain this exorbitant amount of money. The Oversight Committee is concerned abut the national security implications resulting from President Biden’s family receiving millions of dollars from foreign nationals. We will continue to follow the money trail and facts to determine if President Biden is compromised by his family’s business scheme and if there is a national security threat,” reports Chairman James Comer (R-ky). Millions of upper-class, middle-class and poor American have a justified fear that they will be left behind, will lose their jobs and slide further down the economic and social slope. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The West is also cautious about China’s acquisitions of its firms, but overall the restrictions it imposes are less tight than those that Western acquirers are facing in China. Take a close look at the Chinese attempts to acquire Western companies. First, China is buying ailing but famous firms striving to keep afloat. While you may think the classic American brands you see every day are entirely domestic, many are actually owned by Chinese investors. The United States of America is home to many iconic American brands that dominate the global market; however, while these brands may seem All-America, even they have important stakeholders all over the globe. AMC, a popular cinema company, short for American Multi-Cinema, has been around for over a century and is headquartered in Leawood, KS. In 2012, Beijing-based Dalian Wanda Group became the majority stakeholder, giving them the power to make decisions at the executive level. Wanda invested $2.8 billion in the historical deal. General Motors, based in Detroit, Michigan, is known as America’s largest automobile manufacturer. While this company is not owned by a Company from China, it relies on its partnership with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp (SAIC) to stay profitable. In 1998, the two auto giants teamed up to form SAIC-GM, a Chinese brand with a 6 million square-foot facility in Shanghai. While GM is still extremely popular in the U.S.A., its extra sales in China through SAIC help to being in revenue regularly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
General Electric covers a wide range of industries and their appliance division is manufactured in the U.S.A. with global parts (and with domestic parts whenever possible). However, in 2016, Chinese investor Haier bought the company’s appliance division for $5.4 billion. While all products are still made in America, the ideas are generated in China. It is quite different from other American brands because GE has been around since 1892. While investors do not necessarily affect where a product is made, in many cases, they have a large influence in how a business is run and marketed. It is dangerous when any large American brand is partially owned by companies from China or other foreign investors because they have greater responsibilities in their homeland. China is purchasing American brands and obtaining technologies, know-how, distribution networks, and high-skilled personnel. Furthermore, they are interest in buying dynamic technology companies, including small and medium entities, and they are targeting natural resource firms. If information flow in a group is sufficiently good, a cooperative outcome may emerge automatically as an equilibrium of the repeated game of random pairwise matching. Otherwise, the group has to seek other institutions of governance, and these many include more formal court-like organization. One might think that modern technology has improved information flows to perfect. Indeed, eBay had developed a good system where buyers give ratings to sellers and vice versa, and each transactor can check the average rating of the person with whom one is contemplating doing business. However, this too has its limits, and eBay has expanded, it had found it necessary to institute more formal methods to prevent fraud. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
A system based on voluntary information flows and self-enforcing equilibrium works for small or well-knit groups, large groups need more formal institutions of information dissemination and enforcement. Self-enforcing “relation-based” based groups face rising marginal costs: members added at the margin are almost by definition less well connected, making it harder to communicate information with them and to ensure their participation in any punishments. Formal or “rule-based” governance has high fixed costs of setting up the legal system and the information mechanism (disclosure rules and auditing procedures), but once these costs have been incurred, the marginal costs of the relation-based system will be smaller at small sizes, and those of the rule-based system will be smaller at large sizes. This makes intuitive sense, but for a deeper understanding one must make more precise the way in which diminishing returns or rising marginal costs set in as a relation-based system grows larger. This is also necessary to understand what happens at intermediate sizes. Relation-based governance works well in small groups that are connected by extended family relationships, neighbourhood structures, and ethno-linguistic ties, because such links facilitate repeated interactions and good communication. This idea is similar to the sociologists’ concept of embeddedness. Economists recognize the importance of family and social networks in less-developed economies, but often regard them as being unimportant in modern advanced economies, and therefore ignore them in that context. The differences are much less sharp than is commonly thought. The persistence or relational arrangements under the shadow of the law in advanced economies is now well recognized. However, the relation-based governance does indeed lose its relative efficacy as the scale of economic transaction grows. This supports the usual economic distinction as a matter of degree, if not as a sharp dichotomy between less-developed and advanced economies. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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American Dream, a fact that the United States of America is a land of opportunity that allows the possibility of upward mobility, freedom, and equality for people of all classes who work hard and have the will to succeed.
An Artifact from Another Level of Being
The silence closed in. Something was building in Llanada Villa. Something was happening in the very air itself. Something changed in the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon. And as I heard the music, a long stab of terror drove through my heart. I assented to the window. As I looked out, I saw a handsome old-fashioned carriage, with a troop of couriers and footmen. I saw the slim figure of the pale gentleman in black, as he held a thick velvet cloak. He looked about him at the others as he went on, his voice ringing clear in the silence. “Never such a place as this has existed before. A place where demons have been invented by aggrieved souls. I wondered if Mrs. Winchester was perhaps a member of the Freemasons, or some other secret society. Maybe she holds some exalted rank.” I felt a great shudder pass through me at these words. However, there had been a conviction in those appalling words. Secret societies were very fashionable just then. Secret societies and psychiatry were the contrasting en vogue activities of the moment. I folded my arms and leaned against the frame of the door, obscuring for the moment the light behind me. I had an urge to venture outside, to walk in silence amongst the trees. However, the fruit orchard was dark enough even in daylight; by moonlight it would be all too easy to imagine terrors—as I keep imagining I can hear soft footsteps moving across the floor above my head. But when I sit on the sofa to listen, I hear only the beating of my heart. I walked for hours examining the trees and the splendid fruit that would be harvested. Before long, I was overtaken by night while still in the fruit orchard. Utterly bewildered and overcome with fatigue, I had lain down near the root of a large plumb tree and fallen into a dreamless sleep. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
It was hours later, in the very middle of the night, that one of God’s mysterious messengers, gliding ahead pronounced the awakening word in my ear. Waking from a deep sleep at night in the midst of what seemed like a forest, front among the tree on either side I caught broken and incoherent whispers in a strong tongue which I partly understood. They seemed to me fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy against my body and soul. It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable fruit orchard through which I journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion, for in its mysterious lamination nothing cast a shadow. A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old well met my eye with a crimson gleam. I stooped and plunged my hand into it. It stained by fingers; it was blood! Blood, I then observed, was about me everywhere. The fallen fruit showed blots and splashes of blood. The girds of the orchards were pitted and spattered as with red rain. Defiling the trunks of the trees were broad maculations of crimson, and blood dripped like dew from their foliage. All this I observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with the fulfillment of a natural expectation. It seemed to me that it was all in expiation of some crime. So frightful was the situation—the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common consent are invested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in my sight conspired against my peace; from overhead and all about came so audible and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously not of Earth—that I could endure no longer, and with a great effort to break some malign spell that bound my faculties to silence and inaction, I screamed with the full strength of my lungs! #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
My voice was broken, it seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went babbling and stammering away into the distant reaches of the orchard, died into silence, and all was as before. Despair succeeded hope. Gratitude gave place to curse. As I preceded down the path, sobbing quietly to myself, in the misery of fear, the stern light of the Observational Tower became a tiny speck, yellower but scarcely bigger than some of the stars, which here and there shone between the clouds. Nearly twenty minutes passed, and my fatigue began to change to exhaustion. The overpowering sense of the inevitable pressed upon me. With the weariness came a strange comfort. On, and on I went through the thicket of trees. I knew of my probable presence in the spirit World. The moon, then in her third quarter, pushed out from behind the concealing clouds and shed a pale, soft glitter upon my mansion. My last appeal had been heard. I made it home. About half an hour after getting home, I still felt energized but I began to feel a sensation around my forehead as I have many times since. I suddenly felt weak. I went in and sat at the foot of my bed and passed out. I have never been given to fainting or passing-out spells, but I did not fall asleep—I passed out cold. When I woke up, I had no concept of time. When I woke up, a low, wild peal of laughter broke out at a measuresless distance away, and growing even louder, seemed approaching ever nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of loon; a laugh which culminated an unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slow gradations, as if the accursed being that uttered it had withing over the verge of the World whence it had come. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
Sitting here in my temple of a house, I felt trapped and compromised, and even terrified. I got a feeling that the presence was still nearby and had not moved. A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of my body and my mind. I could not say which, if any, of my sense were affected; I felt it rather as a consciousness—a mysterious mental assurance of some overpowering presence—some supernatural malevolence different in kind from the invisible existences that swarmed about me, and superior to them in power. I knew that it had uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approaching me; from what direction I did not know—dated not conjecture. All my former fears were forgotten and merged in the gigantic terror that now held me in thrall. Powers were traversing my haunted mansion. My senses were heightened as I found myself starting into the sharply dawn face and blank, dead eyes of my own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave! The apparition confronting me—the thing so like, yet so unlike my mother—was horrible! It stirred no lover nor longing in my heart; it came unattended with pleasant memories of a golden past—inspired no sentiment of any kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed up in fear. I turned to turn and run from before it, but my legs were as lead; I was unable to life my feet from the floor. My arms hung helpless at my sides; of my eyes only I retained controlled, and these I dared not remove from the lusterless orbs of the apparition, which I knew was not a soul without a body, but that most dreadful of all existences infesting my haunted mansion—a body without a soul! #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
In its blank state was neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence—nothing to which to address an appeal for mercy. For a time, which seemed so long that the World grew gray with age and sin, and the haunted forest, having fulfilled its purpose in this monstrous culmination of its terrors, vanished out of my consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition stood within a pace, regarding me with a mindless malevolence of wild brute; then thrust its hand forward and sprang upon me with appalling ferocity! The act released my physical energies without an unfettering my will; my mind was still spellbound, but my powerful body was and agile limbs, endowed with a blind, insensate life of their own, resisted stoutly and well. For an instant I seemed to see this unnatural contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing mechanism only as a spectator. Despite my struggles—despite my strength and activity, which seemed wasted in a void, I felt the cold fingers close upon my throat. Brorne backward to the floor, I saw above me the dead and drawn face within a hands breadth of my own. Its eyes were shallow to the point of blankness, and then all was black. Until I awoke, the passage outside my room had been pitch dark. Now the gasoliers illuminated the hall, but the glass was so blackened that they yielded only a dim, murky light. The air was stale and close. Expecting at every turn to find a housemaid awaiting me with a smile, I made my way through the gloom to the landing. The double doors to the gallery stood open. Along each wall, a row of wavering light receded. Transom windows shone with a faint cold light; higher still, the ceiling was shrouded in darkness. Some twenty feet away from me, candles burned upon a small round table, lighting of the face of the pale man and Mrs. Haas. “Ah, there you are, my dear,” said he, just as if he had last seen my five minutes—rather than several days—ago. I moved reluctantly to join them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Mrs. Haas, resplendent in crimson silk and displaying a large expanse of white bosom, greeted me with disdain. Behind them, the wall at the far end of my gallery was dominated by the immense fireplace, and the armour towering in the shadows beside it. The sword glittered beneath its gloved hand; in the shifting light it seemed alert, alive, watchful. Within the fireplace was a massive chest of dark metal. “Dr. Cottam was about to tell us,” said Mrs. Haas impatiently, “of a discovery he had made amongst your late husband’s papers.” He spoke as if I had kept them waiting. “Indeed I was.” His tone was as cordial as ever, but with an edge of anticipation. His teeth caught the light as he smiled; the pupils of his eyes shone like twin flames. “Now, in going through his study the other day, I found a page of notes you must have missed after relocating from New Haven—scrawled in haste, and sometimes quite impenetrable—which had slipped behind a row of books.” On the table was a crumpled sheet of paper. “I shall not weary you with the tale of my efforts to decipher this. He believed that if he were inside the armour when lighting struck, he would pass unharmed into the next World, jut as the risen body, according to Scripture, will ascend to Heaven upon the day of judgement.” “Oh dear Heavens,” cried Mrs. Haas. “Mrs. Winchester, I have been dying for a grand tour of your estate. My companion Dr. Cottam is rather a bore with such foolish tales of science fiction!” “There is a theory, you know, that the basis of spirit may be electrical. For spirits to communicate with the living,” expressed Dr. Cottam, the man with the very pale face. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
“Dr. Cottom, I have begun to wonder whether your obsession with William Winchester is not, perhaps, quite as mad as I assumed,” explained Mrs. Haas, “but I do wish to get on with this tour. Mrs. Winchester has already delayed us several hours after he invitation, and I am growing quit weary.” “Well, Mrs. Haas, as I do recall, Gods are often said to wield lightening; and whilst this represents primitive awe at the power of nature, it may also shroud a genuine intuition. The same applies to the spiritualist practice of linking hands around a table. Ghosts and spirits are generally depicted as emanations of light; one thinks of St. Elmo’s fire or the very rare phenomenon of ball lightning…a far fetched analogy, you may say, but just as a magnetic field will cause a heap of iron filings to arrange themselves into a complex pattern, so the soul, the vital principle—call it what you will—animates the Earthly body. Might it not be that the vital principle is electrical, perhaps in some subtler form that science has not yet grasped?” said Dr. Cottam. “Dr. Cottam, while your theories are very fascinating, I fear Mrs. Haas is growing impatient and I should like to give her a tour now,” I explained. I liked Mrs. Haas more and more every minute. Her gossip, without being ill-natured, was extremely diverting to me, who had been so long out of the great World. I thought what life she would give to my sometimes-lonely evenings at home. There was a ball going on in the Grand Ballroom, this house seemed to run itself sometimes, which would not be over until the morning sun had almost reached the horizon. It pleased the Grand Duke to dance till then, so loyal people could not go away, or think of bed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
We had just got through a crowded parlor, when Dr. Cottam asked me what had become of Mrs. Haas. I though she had been by his side, and he fancied she was by mine. The fact was, we had lost her. All my efforts to find her were in vain. I feared that she had mistaken, in the confusion of the momentary separation from us, other people for her new friends, and had, possibly, pursued and lost them in the extensive grounds which were thrown open to us. Morning broke. It was clear daylight before I gave up my search. It was not till near two o’clock next day that we heard anything of Mrs. Haas. At about that time a servant knocked at my door, to say that he had been earnestly requested by a young, who appeared to be in great distress, to make out where she could find Mrs. Winchester and Dr. Cottam. There could be no doubt, notwithstanding the slight inaccuracy that my friend had turned up. I had a housemaid go to the guest room and summon Dr. Cottam. I went down to the parlor and reunited with Mrs. Haas. She told me a story to account for having failed to recover us for so long. Very late, she said, she made a detour and wandered around, not before long becoming afraid and getting lost. She got into the Crystal Bedroom in despair of finding us, and had then fallen into a deep sleep which, long as it was, had hardly sufficed to recruit her strength after the fatigues of the ball. It the midst of my perplexities, an anxiety of far more urgent kind presented itself. My dear friend began to lose her looks and health, and that in manner so mysterious, and even horrible, that I became thoroughly frightened. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
People, since as long ago as the 1800s, have reported a vast array of unexplained events, experiences, and sightings at what is now known as The Winchester Mystery House. Over the years, people have reported bone-chilling sightings ghosts, angels, demons, fairies, giants, orbs, lights, mist, vampires, witches, warlocks and werewolves. In 2007, a man was attending Santa Clara University, and he was lucky enough to get hired as a tour guide at The Winchester Mystery House. He had no sooner moved into his apartment and had the telephone installed when he received a call warning him never to return to Sacramento again. During a later call, a woman with a high-pitched voice informed “G” that he was being kept under surveillance by a group who felt that he had acted unjustly in the past by not returning things to their proper owners. G emphasized that he had led a very quiet life as an undergraduate.
Yet he probably received 30 or more telephone calls from anonymous voices advising him not to return to Sacramento. The voices reprimanded him for having taken something that did not belong to him. G said that he did not carry anything with him that was from Sacramento and did not often visit the beautiful city, and he seldom discussed his life with any but a few of his closet acquaintances. He wondered who could have possibly taken such a long-term interest in him? About the third year after working at The Winchester Mystery House, a guest unknown to him stopped to say hello. G knew that such an act was hardly unusual, since guests will often do this to find out interest facts about tour guides and secrets about Sarah L. Winchester’s mansion. However, he noticed the boy was strangely inquisitive. G was astonished when the teenager drew a design on a piece of paper that he had seen somewhere in the mansion. He smiled at G, then asked if he knew what the symbol meant.
When G pressed the boy, in turn for some answers, the guest threw away the design, laughed, and said that he was just fooling around, that he did not mean anything about it. G never saw the alleged guest again. He descried him to a could of tour guides, but no one was able to identify him. After several years of watching at The Winchester Mystery House, G graduated from University. He had not been in possession of his diploma for more than four days when someone rang his apartment and scolded him for taking things that did not belong to him. The voice told G that he should always leave things where they were. He reported to his supervisors that he kept receiving mysterious calls. On one occasion the voice told G that he has discovered a strange key to other dimensions, but the entities had long since reclaimed it. However, apparently, some spirit masqueraders were determined that he should never forget the day he came into contact with an artifact from another level of being. What is The Winchester Mystery House?
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Would Satan Have Found Companions without this Overpowering Craving?
The extraordinary powers of the TV news media threaten the civil rights and health of all humans because it is like a constant signal of unbalanced propaganda being fed through a tube into minds of people who may not be aware that the news media often lies, and the some of their stories are engineered and totally untrue. If smoking cigarettes comes with a warning, because they can be hazardous to your health, then so should the TV news media. Stories presented over the air can be dangerous, especially to young, influential minds. For instance, a TV news program explained to viewers how they could barbeque meant in the oven by placing it on the rack. However, they did not explain that underneath the rack there should be a drip pan to catch any liquids that come from the meat, so they do not drip on the heating elements, which could cause a fire. And that may not be common sense to all people, which the TV director probably assumed. Therefore, all TV new media should contain a warning, letting the audience know that the story, even if it has some facts in it, is based on an opinion and may not be the full truth, so viewers know to use discretion and do further research of themselves. In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all aspects essential to mutual progress. The economic structure of a society in determining the mode of life of the individual operates as condition for personality development. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
These economic conditions are entirely different from subjective economic motives, such as the desire for material wealth which was looked upon by many writers, from the Renaissance on up to certain Marxist authors who failed to understand Mr. Marx’s basic concepts, as the dominant motive of human behaviour. As a matter of fact, the all-absorbing wish for material wealth is a need peculiar only to certain cultures, and different economic condition can create personality trait which abhor material wealth or are indifferent to it. The physiologically conditioned needs are not the only imperative part of man’s nature. There is another part just as compelling, one which is not rooted in bodily processes but in the very essence of the human mode and practice of life: the need to be related to the World outside oneself, the need to avoid aloneness. To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death. This relatedness to others is not identical with physical contact. An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and “belonging.” On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances represent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
This lack of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we may call moral aloneness and state that moral aloneness is as intolerable as the physical isolation, or rather that physical seclusion becomes unbearable only if it implies also moral lonesomeness. The spiritual relatedness to the World can assume many forms; the self-actualized in his cell who believes in God and the political prisoner kept in isolation who feels one with his fellow fighters are not alone morally. Neither is the English gentleman who wears his dinner jacket in the most exotic surroundings nor the petty bourgeois who, though being deeply isolated from one’s fellow men, feels one with one’s nation of its symbols. The kind of relatedness to the World may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone. Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with other, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation. The compelling need to avoid moral isolation is a deep concern However, learn one thing, impress it upon your mind which is still so malleable: man has a horror for aloneness And of all kind of aloneness, moral seclusion is the most terrible. The first hermits lived with God, they inhabited the World which is most populated, the World of spirits. The first thought of man, be he a leper or a prisoner, a sinner or an invalid, is: to have a companion of one’s fate. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In order to satisfy this drive which is life itself, man applies all his strength, all his power, the energy of his whole life. Would Satan have found companions without this overpowering craving? On this theme one could write a whole epic. Any attempt to answer the question why the fear of isolation is so powerful in man would lead us far away from the main road we are following in this report. However, in order not to give the reader the impression that the need to feel one with others has some mysterious quality. One important element is the fact that men cannot live without some sort of co-operation with other. In any conceivable kind of culture man needs to co-operate with others if he wants to survive, whether for the purpose of defending himself against enemies or dangers of nature, or in order that he may be able to work and produce. Even Robinson Crusoe was accompanied by his man Friday; without him he would probably not have become insane but would have actually died. Each person experiences this need for the help of others very drastically as a child. On account of the factual inability of the human child to take care of itself with regard to all-important functions, communication with others is a matter of life and death for the child. The possibility of being left alone is necessarily the most serious threat to the child’s whole existence. There is another element, however, which makes the need to “belong” so compelling: the fact of subjective self-consciousness, of the faculty of thinking by which man is aware of himself as an individual entity, different from nature and other people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Although the degree of this awareness varies. Its existence confronts man with a problem which is essentially human: by being aware of himself as distinct from nature and other people, by being aware—even very dimly—of death, sickness, aging, he necessarily feels his insignificance and smallness in comparison with the Universe and all others who are not “he.” Unless he belonged somewhere, unless his life had some meaning and direction, he would feel like a particle of dust and be overcome by his individual insignificance. He would not be able to relate himself to any system which would give meaning and direction to his life, he would be filled with doubt, and this doubt eventually would paralyze his ability to act—that is, to live. Human nature is neither a biologically fixed and innate sum total of drives nor is it a lifeless shadow of cultural patterns to which it adapts itself smoothly; it is the product of human evolution, but it also has certain inherent mechanisms and laws. There are certain factors in man’s nature which are fixed and unchangeable: the necessity to satisfy the physiologically conditioned drives and the necessity to avoid isolation and moral aloneness. We have seen that the individual has to accept the mode of life rooted in the system of production and distribution peculiar for any given society. In the process of dynamic adaptation to culture, a number of powerful drives develop which motivate the actions and feelings of the individual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The individual may or may not be conscious of these drives, but in any case they are forceful and demand satisfaction once they have developed. They become effective in molding the social process. How economic, psychological, and ideological factors interact and what further general conclusion concerning this interaction one can make are things for future discussion that deals with the reformation and of fascism. Man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an “individual,” has no choice but to unite himself with the World in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the World as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self. However, the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads to some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interest are most nearly touched,–criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led,–this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society. If the best of the Americans receives by outer pressure a leader whom they had not recognized before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also irreparable loss,–a loss of that peculiarly valuable education which a group receives when by search and criticism it finds and commissions its own leaders. The way in which this is done is at once the most elementary and nicest problem of social growth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
History is but the record of such group-leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character! And of all yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character! And of all types and kinds, what can be more instructive than the leadership of a group within a group?—that curious double movement where real progress may be negative and actual advancement where real progress may be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression. All this is the social student’s inspiration and despair. Nonetheless, the spirit of play can and does invade every department of culture. Every kind of work has its counterpart in play. Crafts include recreational forms which represent the categories of serious economic activity all the way from hunting and fishing, which have their counterparts in extractive industries, through fabrication and construction, distribution and communication, to services and consumption. Although such activities, as distinguished from the work the represent, are engaged in for their own sake, they all involve practice in the intelligence adaptation of physical means to envisaged ends. Thus “industrial” play is distinguished from physical play in being directed toward the exploration and manipulation of the physical environment rather than toward the exercise of the body. While some product or service of economic value may result from engaging in crafts, this is not primary objective. The distinction between work and play is perhaps less obvious where crafts are concerned than any other type of play. Also, any hobby which is pursued as recreation may also be undertaken as a livelihood, just as every hobby is in a direct sense an imitation of a serious occupation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Even though work merges into play and there are no hard and fast margins between the two, it is yet useful to make some polar contrast between them. Work seems to be performed in response to the routine obligations. In the economic sense it provides the goods and services to maintain a customary standard of living. Play—including economic play—is a break in routine. It is free, not required. It explores new possibilities and potentialities, so that invention and discovery bear the closet relation to it. Treating familiar pursuits as play permits their idealization. Work is most fully work when it evokes no free release of energy and when it is all drudgery and chores, making demands for a minimum, not an optimum performance. Play is most fully play when it is spontaneous, unrestrained and unforced. To look upon play as a childish preparation for adult activity is therefore to run the risk of making it work. The ambiguities of play are at their liveliest in crafts, which makes sketchy resort to common sense in defining them a less futile strategy than attempts to define them with more precision. In economic activity, as in sport, chance can according to taste play a great or a small part; or economic activity can entirely be reduces to pure chance, as in gambling. Likewise with competition, though of course competition in economic life is different from competition in sport. Competition in sport is most zestful and fair when it occurs between equals, or when rules and devices, such as handicapping, are employed to simulate equality between competitors. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Rivalry between teams is perpetuated through this balancing of powers. In business, by contrast, the effort of each competitor is to enlarge rather than to diminish the advantages one possesses, with the ultimate effect of eliminating competitors. To be sure, there are many similarities between the two kinds of competition, for example, competition between business institutions is often, as in sport, invoked simply as an added stimulus to effort. Certain large organizations in particular, which have largely lost their external competitors, encourage a nondestructive sort of sporting competition among their internal units for the sake of the gains in motivation it brings. Perhaps it is not too crude a simplification of economic evolution to suggest that as the one type of competition in business runs its course, the other which emphasizes competition within, rather than between, organizations may take its place. A significant distinction is made by farmers between regular kinds of work known as chores and the work that different from day to day. The latter kind is for many farmers very close to play, just as the work of some professions gives such scope and variety to the expression of capacities that they continue to be absorbing. It is evident that the skilled practitioner of every kind of play can change from amateur to professional status, and that many people have found their vocations by this route. Happy is the person who can make one’s living by getting paid for what one loves to do. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
In other kind of play is the shift from amateur to professional status of such broad social significance as in crafts, because in the possibility of conducting industry as the crafts are conducted lies—as thinkers like William Morris foresaw long ago—the means of restoring joy to work, and of ending the alienation from work which plagues so many contemporary occupations. The democratic revolution which has been abolishing the division of society into leisure and working classes may be completed when work and play, vocation and avocation, are merged in economic activity itself. This extreme polarization in conceptual analysis may therefore frustrate the full understanding of their interrelation. With minor exceptions, state socialism led not to affluence, equality, and freedom, but to a one-party political system, a massive bureaucracy, heavy-handed secret police, government control of the media, secrecy and the repression of intellectual and artistic freedom. Setting aside the oceans of spurting blood needed to prop it up, a close look at this system reveals that every one of these elements is not just a way of organizing people but also—and more profoundly—a particular way of organizing, channeling and controlling knowledge. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
A one-party political system is designed to control political communication. Since no other party exists, it restricts the diversity of political information flowing through the society, blocking feedback and thus blinding those in power to the full complexity of their problems. With very narrowly defined information flowing upward through the approved channel and commands directed downward, it becomes very difficult for the system to detect errors and correct them. In fact, top-down control in the socialist countries was based increasingly on lies and misinformation since reporting bad news up the line was often risky. The decision to run a one-party system is a decision, above all, about knowledge. The overpowering bureaucracy that socialism created in every sphere of life was also a knowledge-restricting device, forcing knowledge into pre-defined compartments of cubbyholes and restricting communication to “official channels,” whole delegitimating informal communication and organization. The secret police apparatus, state control of the media, the intimidation of intellectuals and the repression of artistic freedom all represent further attempts to limit and control information flows. In fact, behind each of these elements we find a single obsolete assumption about knowledge: the arrogant belief that those in command—whether of the party or of the state—should decide what others should know. These features of all the state socialist nations guaranteed economic stupidity and derived from the concept of the precybernetic machine as applied to society and life itself. Second Wave machines for the most part operated without any feedback. Plug in the power, start the motor, and they run irrespective of what is happening in the outside environment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Third Wave machines, by contrast, are intelligent. They have sensors that such in information from the environment, detect changes and adapt the operation of the machine accordingly. They are self-regulating. The technological difference is revolutionary. However, Marxist theoreticians remained stuck in the Second Wave past, as even their language suggests. Thus for Marxian socialists the class struggle was the “locomotive of history.” A key task was to capture the “state machine.” And society itself, being machine-like, could be preset to deliver abundance and freedom. Mr. Lenin, on capturing control of Russia in 1917, became the supreme mechanic. A brilliant intellectual, Mr. Lenin understood the importance of ideas. However, for him, symbolic production—the mind itself—could be programmed. Mr. Marx wrote of freedom, but Mr. Lenin, on taking power, undertook to engineer knowledge. Thus he insisted that all art, culture, science, journalism and symbolic activity in general be placed at the service of a master plan for society. In time each branch of learning would be neatly organized into an “academy” with fixed bureaucratic departments and ranks all subject to party and state control. “Cultural workers” would be employed by institutions controlled by a Ministry of Culture. Publishing and broadcasting would be monopolies of the state. Knowledge, in effect, would be made part of the state machine. This constipated approach to knowledge blocked economic development even in intermediate, smokestack economies; it is diametrically opposed to the principles needed for economic advancement in the age of the computer. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
In international economic affairs, the most controversial component of the indigenous innovation policy is China’s government procedure system. According to the government organizations, with a few exceptions, have to be limited to domestically made products. In May 2007, “Measures for Administration of Government Procurement Budgets for Indigenous Innovation Products” prescribed governments at all levels to compile indigenous innovation procurement plans. In December of the same years, the Ministry of Finance issues “Measures for the Administration of Government Procurement of Imported Products.” To purchase imported goods, government entities were obliged to get an approval from a board of experts. Among foreign suppliers, they were recommended to favour those who transfer technologies and train Chinese personnel. Next, in November 2009, the “Circular on Carrying Out the Work on Accreditation of National Indigenous Innovation Products” announced the creation of a new national level catalog of high-tech indigenous innovation products (in the areas of computers and communication, office equipment, software, energy devices, and so on) that were eligible for preferential treatment in government procurement. An indigenous innovation product was defined as the one that has intellectual property rights (IPR) owned by a Chinese company and a commercial trademark initially registered inside China. A month later the government produced a catalog of 240 types of equipment whose production by domestic companies would be encouraged in order to upgrade the country’s manufacturing base. Along with a priority status as indigenous innovation products suppliers, their makers were promised tax incentives and R&D subsidies. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Western government procurement system as it effectively deprived foreign companies of the access to this very substantial augment of the Chinese market. In April 2010, the Circular was reversed. The requirements about IPR ownership by a Chinese company and initial registration of the trademark in China were dropped. Also, the Chinese side proclaimed that preferential treatment of and incentives for procedures of indigenous innovation products were fully applicable to foreign-owned companies operating in China. The government procurement system was modified to prioritize domestically designed and manufactured goods (meaning that the value created inside China exceeds a certain percentage of the total value—normally 50 percent) including those designed and manufactured by foreign-invested firms. From the very start of the market reforms, China’s message to foreign companies has been “Better produce in China than export to China.” This time it added a new message of similar character: “Better innovate in China (and share your technologies) than in your home country or anywhere else.” It looked almost like an ultimatum: Unless you innovate and produce inside China you will not be allowed to sell to the government. The West protested. In January 2011, President Hu Jintao promised President Obama to cancel the rule requiring foreign companies to design and manufacture inside the country the products they wanted to sell to Chinese government entities. In May the same year, at the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue it was reportedly confirmed that the Chinese government would not buy indigenous innovation products on a preferential basis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
However, at the time of writing Western businessmen working in China are still complaining that procurement practices have not changed and provincial authorities appear or pretend to have heard nothing about the promises made by the central government. It is just a familiar bureaucratic muddle and incoherence or a new way of pursuing the old policy? At this point it is still to early to give an accurate answer. However, there is little doubt that China will continue to press foreign companies hard not only to bring in advanced technologies and products, but also, more and more, to develop them within its borders—even though they are already doing it at a rapidly growing scale on their own initiative. Given the advantages of direct reciprocity when it comes to sustaining cooperation, we should expect that traders will try to sustain good bilateral relationships, and that is indeed the case. For instance, when we surveyed firms in the transition economy of Romania, and gave weighted scores to the importance these respondents attached to various mechanisms that support their transactions, almost 56 percent of the weight was on bilateral mechanisms (“personal relationships and trust,” and “relying on each other’s own incentives”). However, in many economic situations, each member of a group plays the dilemma game against different others at different ties. For example, a seller may meet different buyers at different times, and any one buyer of a durable good does not meet the same seller at all frequently. Thus almost half of the weight in our survey went to non-bilateral mechanisms, and in turn half of that was on the kinds of non-state mechanisms that are the focus of this essay (third-party social or business relationships” and “using private dispute-resolution services”). #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Psychopathological offenders can also counterfeit conduct disorder, by causing some apparent manifestation of the psychopathological nature in one’s life. Mature believers should be able to tell whether such a manifestation really is conduct disorder from the old nature or a manifestation from psychopathological offenders. The purpose in the latter case is to get the self-actualized to take what comes from them as from oneself, for whatever is accepted from the psychopathological offenders gives them power. When a self-actualized individuals knows the cross and one’s position of death to conduct disorder, and one’s will and practice rejects unflinchingly all known conduct disorder, if a “manifestation” of personal conduct disorder takes place one should at once take a position of neutrality to it until one know the source. If one calls it conduct disorder from oneself when it is not, one believes a lie just as much as in any other way; and if one “confesses” conduct disorder that did not come from oneself, one brings the power of the enemy upon one—power to drive one into the conduct disorder which one has confessed as one’s own. Many believers are thus held down by supposed “besetting conduct disorder” which they believe is theirs, and which no “confessing to the ultimate concern” removes, but from which they would find liberty if they attributed them to their right cause. There is no danger of “minimizing conduct disorder” in the recognition of these facts, because, in either case, the self-actualized desires to be rid of the conduct disorder or one would not trouble oneself about it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
We have developed a positive doctrine of God as the ground and power of being, a God whose sustaining and vitalizing activity constantly touches every corner of the Universe and penetrates to the deepest level of every creature, its very being. With this positive conception we replace the divinity of the supranaturalists and deists, a God so remote from the World that He is irrelevant once His creative push has set the wheels of time in motion. God is not at the farther fringe of our Universe as the last, desperate answer when the natural sources of knowledge have run dry for people. The danger is that, as man’s circle of knowledge widens, God recedes father and father from the center of one’s life. For example, is it not true that, in the minds of most people, evolution dispenses with, or greatly diminishes, God’s role in the creation of man? A theology for an adult World places God at the hub of human activity as the wellspring of man’s strength, love, accomplishments, and hopes, instead of establishing Him as an oracle that sends answers from the darkness beyond the frontier of science. By this ontological approach, we bring God into the heart of the cosmos, for there is nothing closer to beings, nothing more fundamental than the structure of being and its ground. In more human terms, the interplay of anxiety (non-being) and courage (being) is the very stuff of life. Love, power, and justice—the profoundest beneficial motivations of human behaviour—are rooted in God as being-itself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The divine power is a thoroughly biblical doctrine, and I believe in God the Father almighty. In our age of power—nuclear, electronic, ballistic, to cite examples only of physical power—the God who is power-itself is especially apropos. By finding God at the depth of life and not at its fringes, we are paying the way for our close union of religion and culture. However, this is possible only if creation is essentially good, it there is no independent negative power which escapes the divine dominion. Non-being is a dialectical notion, that is, it is dependent upon being and helps to explain the positive power of being and the negative weakness of finite beings, but it is not a self-sufficient evil power. While, admittedly, there may be obscurities, perhaps even deficiencies, in this principle, but the divine and demonic are two aspects of the same creative surge from the abyss of being. The difference is that, in the demonic, the destructive aspect predominates over the creative, while, in the divine, creativity controls the destructive tendency. However, even in the latter cause destructivity is not entirely absent, for the old form has to be broken and cast off so that the new creation can come to be. Consequently, it is hard to see how the divine and the demonic constitute a dualism in the pejorative sense any more than do being and nonbeing. A symbol, then, is a door which opens into a religious experience and which opens out to communicate it. In both cases the pivotal hinge is analogy, the participation of the symbol in the ground of being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
However, the symbol primarily mediates and communicates the experience of God, not conceptual knowledge about him. Symbols yield knowledge of God only in the biblical sense of knowledge, that is, an existential relationship which enkindle the fire of love. When theology comes along with its conceptual, rational apparatus, its task is to show the relevance of the Christian symbols to the human situation, not to discover propositions which contain “revealed knowledge.” It is evident that the center of our symbolism is the religious experience of ultimacy. The “point” of immediate awareness of the unconditional which is empty but unconditionally certain; and the “breadth” of a concrete concern which is full of content but has the conditional certainty of venturing faith. Theology deals with the second element, while presupposing the first and measuring every theological statement by the standard of the ultimacy of the ultimate concern. Studying and wandering, thinking and enduring, learning and suffering, fill long periods of time. Thinking is as characteristic a trait of the Christians as suffering, or, to be more exact, thinking rendered suffering possible For it was our thinkers who prevented the wandering nation, this true “wandering Christian” from sinking to the level of brutalized vagrants, or vagabonds. The Word of God is compared to water, it cleanses man from what is debasing in life. The Word of God is compared to spirits, time cannot render it useless; yea, time increases its power. The Word of God is compared to oil, it mixes not with other elements but preserves its own distinctiveness. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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We are Here to Practise Magic, After All
I heard the softest, loveliest singing when I opened my eyes. And as sound can often do, even in the most precious fragments, it took me back to life with William, to some Winter night when we were conversating among the blazing candles, the sensual smell of the incense. There was plainly something on his mind which he did not choose to divulge. “William, darling, will you tell me this?” said I, suddenly laying my hand on his arm, and looking, I am sure, imploringly in his face. “Perhaps, my love,” he answered, smoothing my hair caressingly over my eyes. “Does the doctor think you are very ills?” “No, dear; he thinks, if the right steps are taken, I will be quite well again, at least on the high road to complete recovery,” he answered, a little drily. “But do tell me William,” I insisted, “what does he think is the matter with you?” “Nothing; you must not plague me with questions,” he answered, with more irritation that I ever remember him to have displayed before; and seeing that I looked wounded, I suppose, he kissed me, and added, “I shall know all about it in a few days, all that I know. In the meantime, you are not to trouble your head about it.” He turned and left the room. In the seat of the sofa was a blood-soaked handkerchief, but he came back before I had done wondering and puzzling over the oddity of all this; he put it back as carefully as he could into his jacket pocket, where its bluk rested reasonably discreetly, just about hidden by the flap. Still, there was a bit of blood on his shirt. I pretended not to notice. It was about ten months since that incident; but William had sufficed to make an alteration of years in his appearance. He had grown thinner; something of gloom and anxiety had taken the place of that cordial serenity which used to characterise his features. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
His dark blue eyes, always penetrating, now gleamed with a sterner light from under his eyebrows. It was not such a change as grief alone usually includes, and angrier passions seemed to have had their share in brining it about. William began to talk, with his usual soldierly directness, of the bereavement, as he termed it, which we had sustained in the death of our beloved infant daughter; and he then broke out in a tone of intense bitterness and fury, inveighing against the “hellish arts” to which he believed she had fallen victim, and expressing with more exasperation than piety, his wonder that Heaven should tolerate so monstrous an indulgence of lust and malignity of hell. I was curious to find out what was the meaning of this, but the question of “evil” hours in this old home had already become too grave for him. The shadows in the room had lengthened and grown dense and the light had darkened, concealing the blood stain on his shirt. And he could not connect at all to the wretchedness of the death of our baby girl. He needed to think. There is no escape, it made me think. And the thought was not entirely idle. Nor was it altogether comfortable. “I have a small problem of my own, concerning blood and steel,” William said. “The cut on the flesh of my thumb has become infected and swollen. It leaks fluid, which has a sweetish smell, like decay. I have disinfected and bandaged it, but I think I have a slight fever now and am concerned about infection. Beyond that minor worry, I have to confess to a more general and far greater uneasiness. I have something strange to tell you.” I looked at William again, but this time not with a glace of suspicion—with an eye, rather, of keen intelligence and alarm. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
“The House of Winchester,” he said, “had been long extinct: a hundred years at least. Our daughter descended from the Winchesters. But the name and title have long ceased to exit. The castle is abandoned; the village is deserted; it has been seventy years since the smoke of a chimney was there.” “I have heard a great deal about your family, now my family, but the name and fortune are thriving, William,” I said. “Sarah, my dear, you saw our child. No creature could have been more beautiful, and only fourteen years ago none more blooming,” he explained. “I was grieved and shocked more than I can tell you, my dear husband; it is the hardest ordeal either one of us have had to face,” I cried. He took my hand, and we exchanged a kind pressure. Tears gather in his eyes. He did not seek to conceal them. He said, “We have been in love for so long together. Our daughter had become an object of very dear interest to me, and rapid my care by an affection that cheered our home and made our lives happy. That is all gone. The years that remain to me on Earth may not be very long; but God’s mercy I hope to provide for you as best I can before I die, and to subserve the vengeance of Heaven upon the fiends who have cursed and murdered our poor child in her first weeks of life and beauty!” Here he made me a gallant but melancholy bow. My unease returned, nonetheless, as the room darkened and the Winchester Manor assumed the appearance of a severed head and hand floating above the candle flame. A year later William died. As I reflected on this memory, to dined that night with a housemaid, but there was no talk of hauntings or seances, only of book and paintings, with much affectionate remembrance of William. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
For the first time since his death I felt almost at peace—though a little uneasy with myself for feeling so. I woke the following morning to find the sun, which we had scarcely see for weeks, streaming through the windows in the Daisy Bedroom. It was one of those rare, still January days when for a few brief hours the World is bathed in dazzling light, and you half-believe it will never be grey and wet again. The accustomed pain of waking was still there, but my grief had lost its raw, lacerating edge; or rather, I became aware that it has been imperceptibly dwindling for some time. I was sitting in the garden with my book upon my lap, not reading or even thinking, but simply absorbing the warmth of the sun, when a shadow fell across my chair. I looked up to find William standing a few feet away from me. “Forgive me,” he said, “I didn’t mean to startle you.” “You did not, I said.” The sun was in my eyes, so that I could not make out his expression, but my heart was suddenly beating much faster. “I love you; you are a woman of rare courage, intelligence, and beauty,” he said. “Oh, William, I love you with my whole hearts,” I cried before he fading away into a mist. I cried, and cried for hours. And I went to be with precious memories of him. Tossing and turning for hours, as it seemed, before drifting into uneasy dreams, of which I remember only the last. I woke—or dreamed I woke—at dawn, thinking I had heard Annie crying. I lay there listening for some time, but the call was not repeated. At last I got out of bed, went to the door in my nightgown and looked out. There was no sound of a baby in the passage, in which everything appeared to be just as in waking life, but I was suddenly seized by fearful apprehension. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
My heart began to pound, more and more loudly, until I became aware that I was dreaming—and found myself standing in pitch darkness, with no idea of where I was. I felt the mahogany floors beneath my bare feet. With my heart still thudding violently, I stretched out my hand until it struck something wooden—a post of some sort—then slid one foot forward until it passed over an edge into empty space. I had come within an inch of plunging headfirst down the stairs. I agonized over losing my family, but I knew in my heart that I did not try to throw myself down the stairs. I could not have been sleepwalking either. It became ever more clear that the appearance of William was not just another instance of a highly disturbed, tormented soul, it seems much, much more than that. However, the terror rose to a whole new level of bizarre when I began to levitate several feet above the for a quarter to the hour. Days after this incident, the evening began promisingly enough. I was in the librarying writing, the heavy doors gave at once. Screams. Dreadful dry screams curling upwards and the, I entered the dark hallway, two ragged figures dropped down in my path. I glimpse anguished faces for a moment. The little demons, their thin white limbs barely swathed in rags, their hair flying, those dreadful wails coming out of their mouths. They were rallying the others. The malice that surrounded was gaining force. I hurried deep into the shadowy archway, util I was near to the dim candles of the secret passageway. The hum of the voices became thin. They went on, but beyond it there was a hollow silence as if other voices had been withdrawn and only one or two remained now. I had known for months about the ceremonies and the sacrifice, we are here to practise magic, after all. Yet nothing could be more ancient, or more strictly bound by lore and ritual, than the black art that has brought me here. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
I would not allow myself to become the next victim of the sinister. I ran and ran and ran until I reached a huge dining hall, which reached through the library of the house. This hall was pallened in polished wood with a heavy and elaborate burr. Middle Ages décor and the opulent trappings of modernity. The music coming from the gramophone was another uneasy juxtaposition in this mansion. The music was staidly enough, emotional arias warbled throbbingly. Then, with the stead intoxication of the evening, it got dark and more mischievous. There were thirteen ghouls seated at the table having a blood banquet. Shortly after, the sacrificial was brought in for everyone to see. He was perhaps six or seven years old. He was undernourished. He looked confused and fearful, as though distrustful of the gaudy apparitions he was seeing. The assembled banqueters began to clap. I was filled with fear and compassion for the child and with heartfelt loathing for what they were here to do. All he could do was look around the room while having a feeling of terrible dread. The demonic laughter was undeniable, and suddenly I could not breathe because my chest was being so tightly squeezed. So tight that I could not utter a word. I swept the boy off the floor and made for the door and we were gone. His complexion was flushed and sweaty and his eyes still gleaming from witnessing the ghouls. We hid in my maze of a house until sunrise. I felt the evil lifted. There is no other way to describe the feeling. And I shivered and was well again. The boy stayed with us, the famers took him and taught him all about agriculture. The boy’s mother was a High Priestess and his father was The Master. He was born only to take part in a satanic altar initiation—that of having his arm pricked and blood drained into a chalice from which it was drunk. I could not be more terrified. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
I conjure thee, O Surgat, by all the names which are written in this book, to present thyself here before me, promptly and without delay, being ready to obey me in all things, or failing this, to dispatch me a Spirit with a stone which shall make me invisible to every one whensoever I carry it! And I conjure thee to be submitted in thine own person, or in the person of him or of those whom thou shalt send me, to do and accomplish my will, and all that I shall command, without hard to me or to anyone, so soon as I make known my intent. I devour the limits of the enemy Mazda and the Amesha Spenta from this mansion of sorcerous power! Perish now creation of stasis and imposed limitations! Rush away Spentas of Ahura Mazda for I exorcise thy limits which enslave! I now banish and tear the powers of spiritual limitation from imposing its limits upon this Winchester Mystery House, expelling them from the Winchester Mystery House in the name of eternal darkness and all of its power and glory! I command you, O all ye demons dwelling in these parts, or in what part of the World soever ye may be, by whatsoever power may have been given you by God and our holy Angels over this place, and by the powerful Principality of infernal abysses, as also by all your brethren, both general and special demons, whether dwelling in the East, West, South, or North, or in any side of the Earth, and, in like manner, by the power of God the Father, by the wisdom of God the Son, by the virtue of the Holy Ghost, and by the authority I derive from Lucifer. I conure you by the same authority, I exhort and call you, I constrain and command you, by all the powers of your superior demons, to come, obey, and reply positively to what I direct you in the name of Satan. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Ghostly manifestations, be they God’s angelic messengers or evil spirits, are not uncommon throughout history. The Winchester Mystery House is full of creatures who have strayed away from one unknow region of haunted woods and perilous wilds. They dress like us; pretend that they belong to mankind and profess to keep our laws and codes of morals. However, in the presence we are always aware that they are phantoms and that all their ideas and actions are out of key with the general pitch and tone of normal life. The Winchester Mystery House hosts several denizens of the dead.
Once a tour guide went into the Grand Ball Room while The Winchester Mystery House was closed during the day. He went to find some solitude but found something else entirely. As the young man sat in the empty, dark Grand Ball Room, a woman in a long white gown and a man in a black dress suit suddenly whirled onto the floor. They danced to music that the tour guide could not hear. As the man watched in shock, the dancing specters suddenly vanished. The fourth floor balcony of the Winchester Mystery House is haunted by a lady in white who glides gracefully across the balcony. She has also been seen in the Daisy Bedroom. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 