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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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The Harshest Feasible Punishment Best Deters Deviating Actions
The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the political-line,–the relation of Republicans to Democrats in America. It is such a problem that it could cause a civil war. As we know, official misconduct is the real cause of the conflict. No sooner had Democratic armies touch office, this old question, newly guised, sprang from the Earth,–What shall be done with the Constitution of the United States of America? Democratic rules seemed but to broad and intensify the difficulties of enforcing law and order and honouring God. Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, companionship, which are common to the humans, those drives which make for the differences in humans’ characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most unattractive inclinations of human beings is not part of a fixed and biologically given huma nature, but result from the social process which creates humans. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function—although it has that too—but it has also a creative function. Humans’ nature, one’s passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, humans themselves are the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history. Men, thin, with gray and tufted hair; women, with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,–a horde of starving people without homes, helpless, and worried are all in dark distress due to a loss of representation and displacement of Constitution rights. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Americans have been accepting encroachments on established liberties, and as a result, much of their government no longer represents American citizens. American taxpayers and those who used to pay taxes are going without necessities because much of their representation no longer serves the people. Millions of men and women made the greatest sacrifice to protect their liberties, but when they need their government, sports complexes, entertainment centers, decorative flowers hanging from street lights, and renovation of state buildings take precedence over affordable housing. Our core purpose should remain clear: We must resolve that it is an essential part of winning the war on our freedoms to insist that we keep intact the civil liberties and other freedoms that we have gained over the past 247 years. The stream of fugitives have swelled to a flood in public office and private corporations, and anxious Americans keep inquiring: “How will we survive? Major crimes are happening everywhere.” Petitions have come to President Biden from distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a comprehensive and unified plan for dealing with the abolishment of law and order and sanity in the United States of America. The American people want the execution of measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and humanly aiding, the passage of laws to increase the budgets of law enforcement and reinstate their authority to keep our streets safe and allow for the safe removal of dangerous criminals. Also, city, state, federal and private employees would like to be emancipated from what seems like forced labour, as a result of inflations and declining wages. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
American farmers would also like a bill to establish protection for them, their owned and leased lands, and for subsidies to help the produce more meat, poultry and produce so we once again can feed our own people and export our products to other nations, which will help bring America back to being a creditor nation. This is essentially a wake-up call for the American people. The American people want the government to be their friend again. The United States of American became the World’s largest debtor country in 1985. This was because America was seen as this beacon on the hill. The land of prosperity. Instead of lending other nations money, America started giving away billions of dollars, until it put them in debt. This is why people are calling on the government to find ways to balance the budget through other ways than raising taxes because the higher taxes become, the less money people have to spend and the less corporations will invest in America. It is recommended that, perhaps, America should change its laws to allow the government to have some competition with private businesses. For example, California Highway Patrol (CHP) often deals with traffic accidents and other incidents where tow trucks are needed. If the CHP dispatch center had their own tow truck division, they could send the proper equipment to the scene and have the roads cleared much faster. The revenues they earned could be reinvested into their budget, which would allow for them to operate more efficiently. Many people would also like the government to sponsor farms so we can keep our heartland strong before all of our land is used up on roads, highways, and for urban and suburban communities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
America also needs to return to being a country of family values. Men are now becoming emasculated by a peculiarly complete systems of degradation, in effort to destroy the nuclear family. In the midst of this war on the Christian family, people are becoming embittered that they are losing their representation and poor examples are being set for their children by offices as high as the president of the United States of America, and as low as the local news media. This is a curious mess we are looking upon: little despotisms, communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized charity, unorganized almsgiving, taught gender confusion–all reeling on under the guise of helping equality, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of riots and the cursing and silence of angry human beings. This is all a violation of simple and good faith, as human rights, virtues, morals and responsibilities are being discharged from the traditional American way of life, as psychopathological offenders pretend to promote equality and the general welfare. Human beings are not only made by history—history is made by human beings. The solution of this seeming contradiction constitutes the field of social psychology. Its task is to show not only how passions, desires, anxieties change and develop as a result of the social process, but also how humans’ energies thus shaped into specific forms in their turn become productive forces, molding the social process. We can accept alternative lifestyles without forcing them on to our children. It is our goal as American people, however, to promote God’s idea of a nation and family so that future generations will follow in our footsteps and the human family will naturally live on. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The concept of a united family that lives and progresses forever is at the core of the American doctrine. Within families led by a father and a mother, children develop virtues such as love, trust, loyalty, cooperation and service. Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children. The purpose of family is to create a safe, stable, and loving environment where a husband and wife can support and strengthen each other where children and learn, grow, and develop. God organizes us into families so we can experience happiness and learn patience and selflessness. These traits help us become more like God and prepare us to live happily as families throughout eternity. Family life is perhaps most significant for children. It is in the home that children learn to love others, show compassion, build trust, and express loyalty. The family is also a crucial building block of society. Strong marriages and families help maintain a prosperous society as they contribute hardworking and well-educated individuals. Because Christians believe that families are forever, they seek to identify generations of relatives through family history work. By discovering where your family came from, who your ancestor were, and what motivated them, you learn about your core family values, and you build a bridge connecting you to your ancestors. A family’s importance extends beyond mortal life. We highly value the promise that families can be together forever. Family structure began with God. God is your Heavenly Father, and you are His child. You live with your family now, and we believe that even after you and your family members pass on, you can live together again in Heaven. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
This is possible through God’s power and through eternal marriages performed in temples. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, unlike civil marriages performed in churches and courthouses that last “until death to you part,” temple marriages unite a husband and wife forever. A long as they are faithful to the promises they make with each other and with God, their children can be with them forever, too. Having strong families requires effort, both from parents and children. Fathers and mothers must work together closely to raise their children. They should act as equal partners while fulfilling the many different roles that come with parenthood. The success of a family depends on that partnership. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. Other things, such as exotic vacations, big homes, and money are not necessarily the basis of family happiness. Solid, happy families result when family members treat each other with the kind of love and respect that Jesus Christ showed. In “counterfeiting” the believer, the psychopathological spirit gives one exaggerated views, almost visions, of one’s own personality: one is “wonderfully gifted,” and therefore becomes puffed up; one is “miserably incapable,” and so is in despair; one is “amazingly clever,” and thus undertakes what one cannot do; one is “helpless,” “hopeless,” “too forward” or “too backward”—in brief, a countless number of false pictures of oneself are presented to the mind of the human when once the lying spirit has gained a footing in one’s imagination. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Or this falsifying may take another form. So subtle is the identity of the deceived spirit with a believer’s individuality that only others will see what may be described as a “spurious personality.” Sometimes the person appears to be “full of pride” when the inner human is sincerely humble. In fact, the whole outer appearance of the human in manner, voice, actions, words, is often quite contrary to one’s true character, and so one wonders why “others misunderstand,” misjudge and criticize. Some believers, of course, will go on happily satisfied with what they themselves know of their own inner motives and heart life—oblivious of this manifestation of the spurious self which others behold, and pity or condemn. The spurious personality caused by the psychopathological offenders can also be in a beautiful form, in order to attract or mislead others in various ways, all unwitting to the person or to the victim. This is sometimes described as “unaccountable infatuation,” but if it was recognized as the work of evil spirits, refused and resisted, the “infatuation” would pass away. It is so wholly apart from the action of the will in the persons concerned that the work of psychopathological offenders is clearly to be recognized, especially when the supposed “infatuation” follows supernatural experiences. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Many critics conclude that God as being-itself leaves no room for a personal God in any sense, despite our protestations to the contrary. Some claim that we suffer from ontological schizophrenia, being pulled in two opposite directions, toward the personal God of the Bible and toward the impersonal God of ontology. However, to all these critics, we do preserve the ultimacy of a personal encounter between God and humans. The proof is the simple fact of ultimate concern. No one can be ultimately concerned about something less than a person, but, at the same time, God is more than a person He is the ground and abyss of everything personal. Perhaps the reason why our doctrine has not been more readily accepted is that people do not seem to understand how an encounter with more than a person is still a personal encounter. It is like trying to sell a white car to a customer who wants a multicoloured car by telling him or her that white includes all the colours and they can all be derived from it. We do not like to designate God as a person because it seems to make Him a being next to other beings—and, with that step, one plunges over the precipice into theism and supranaturalism. We all have a need, want, and the basis for a personal God. God is a New Being, which appears in and overcomes existence. Grace is not completely beyond humans’ conscious life, uncreated grace as quasi-formal causal communication of God Himself shows a close connection between creation and the incarnation, the possibility of supernatural acts by the unjustified de facto situation that the state of pure nature does not exist, but that there is only a nature in a supernatural order. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
There are theories in behaviouristic psychology that have an assumption that human nature has no dynamism of its own and that psychological changes are to be understood in terms of the development of new “habits” as an adaptation to new cultural patterns. These theories, though speaking of the psychological factor, at the same time reduce it to a shadow of cultural patterns. Only a dynamic psychology, the foundations of which have been laid by Dr. Freud, can get further than paying lip service to the human factor. Though there is no fixed human nature, we cannot regard human nature as being infinitely malleable and able to adapt itself to any kind of conditions without developing a psychological dynamism of its own. Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology. It seems useful to differentiate between “static” and “dynamic” adaptation. By static adaptation we mean such an adaptation to patterns as leaves the whole character structure unchanged and implies only the adoption of a new habit. An example of this kind of adaptation is the change from the traditional Asian habit of eating with chopsticks to the typical Western habit of using a fork and knife. Many people who come to America, choose to adapt themselves to this new pattern, but this adaptation in itself may have little effect on one’s personality; it does not necessarily arose new drives or character traits. However, while we were in China, we did acquire the habit of eating pizza with a fork and knife. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
By dynamic adaptation we refer to the kind of adaptation that occurs, for example, when a boy submits to the command of his strict and threatening father—being too much afraid of him to do otherwise—and becomes a “good” boy. While he adapts himself to the necessities of the situation, something happens to him. He may develop an intense hostility against his father, which he represses, since it would be too dangerous to express it or even to be aware of it. This repressed hostility, however, though not manifest, is a dynamic factor in his character. It may create new anxiety and thus lead to still deeper submission; it may set up a vague defiance, directed against no one in particular but rather toward life in general. While here, too, as in the first case, an individual adapts himself to certain external circumstances, this kind of adaptation creates something new in him, arouses new drives and new anxieties. Every neurosis is an example of this dynamic adaptation; it is essentially an adaptation to such external conditions (particularly those of early childhood) as are in themselves irrational and, generally speaking, unfavourable to the growth and development of the child. Similarly, such sociopsychological phenomena as are comparable to neurotic phenomena (why they should not be called neurotic will be discussed later), like the presence of strong destructive or sadistic impulses in social groups, offer an example of dynamic adaptation to social conditions that are irrational and harmful to the development of humans. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Besides the question of what kind of adaptation occurs, other questions need to be answered: What is it that forces man to adapt himself to almost any conceivable condition of life, and what are the limits of his adaptability? Well, certain sectors in a humans’ nature are more flexible and adaptable than others. Those striving and character traits by which men differ from each other show a great amount of elasticity and malleability: love, destructiveness, sadism, the tendency to submit, the lust for power, detachment, the desire for self-aggrandizement, the passion for thrift, the enjoyment of sensual pleasure, and the fear of sensuality. These and many other strivings and fears to be found in humans develop as a reaction to certain life conditions. They are not particularly flexible, for once they have become part of a person’s character, they do not easily disappear or change into some other drive. However, they are flexible in the sense that individuals, particularly in their childhood, develop the one or other need according to the whole mode of life they find themselves in. None of these needs is fixed and rigid as if it were an innate part of human nature which develops and has to be satisfied under all circumstances. In contrast to those needs, there are others which are an indispensable part of human nature and imperatively need satisfaction, namely, those needs that are rooted in the physiological organization of humans, like hunger, thirst, the need for sleep, and so on. For each of those needs there exists a certain threshold beyond which lack of satisfaction is unbearable, and when this threshold is transcended the tendency to satisfy the need assumes the quality of an all-powerful striving. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
All these physiologically conditioned needs are a notion of a need for self-preservation. This need for self-preservation is that part of human nature which needs satisfaction under all circumstances and therefore forms the primary motive of human behaviour. Man must eat, drink, sleep, protect himself against enemies, and so forth. In order to do all this he must work and produce. “Work,” however, is nothing general or abstract. Work is always concrete work, that is, a specific kind of work in a specific kind of economic system. A person may work as a slave in a feudal system, as a peasant in an Indian pueblo, as an independent businessman in capitalistic society, as a salesgirl in a posh art gallery, as a worker on the endless belt of a big factory. These different kinds of work require entirely different personality traits and make for different kinds of relatedness to others. When men is born, the stage is set for him. He has to eat and drink, and therefore he has to work; and this means he has to work under the particular conditions and in the ways that are determined for him by the kind of society into which he is born. Both factors, his need to live and the social system, in principle are unalterable by him as an individual, and they are the factors which determine the development of those other traits that show greater plasticity. Thus the mode of life, as it is determined for the individual by the peculiarity of an economic system, becomes the primary factor in determining his whole character structure, because the imperative need for self-preservation forces him to accept the conditions under which he has to live. This does not mean that he cannot try, together with others, to effect certain economic and political changes; but primarily his personality is molded by the particular mode of life, as he has already been confronted with it as a child through the medium of the family, which represents all the features that are typical of a particular society or class. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
In only a very limited sense is it true to speak of a transfer of recreational functions from the family to other institutions; most of such activity simply did not occur previously. And since this is a new situation that has only existed previously in embryo, we are ill stocked with generalizations for describing and explaining its character. As the mahogany tree cannot be deduced from the acorn, earlier thinkers, though familiar with limited forms of play, could not have discussed its modern growth and differentiation. If current students have not yet made it the subject of substantial research, perhaps the degree of its novelty excuses them. However, social scientists can no longer scorn its importance. There is a wide range of activities which are primarily physical play. These we shall group as sports, and under this rubric include all those activities which simply explore and exercise the faculties and capabilities of the body, for motion, function, or sensation. They may utilize physical instruments, but not for the sake of manipulating and changing the environment. The range of physical play could also be classified in terms of elaboration from the simple individual exercise of some organ of the body through increasing degrees of complexity until it reaches the institutional size of the World Series. The facets in this sequence o elaboration of forms; number of persons involved; increase of skill, strength, speed, endurance, accuracy, dexterity, facilities, competition; rules; chance; formation of teams; formation of permanent fostering organizations; spectators; adoption of the sport by regular publics, and the season for its play becoming recognized in the calendar of the community. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Equipped with a somewhat more precise analysis than this brief schema, it is more than possible that someone may sit down and invent an ideal sport which could overnight become more popular than baseball. Baseball itself was just such an invention; it was one of the first team games to become popular in this country, which for its first few centuries possessed very few team games. Social historians could make much, in terms of cultural change, out of the shift in interest late in the last century from contests to games. Contests and games both conspicuously include the element of competition, but whereas the contest emphasizes displays of strength and skill, the game includes a large mixture of chance. Matching maximizes this tension of skill and chance, and so the game can be played again immediately. The contest if repeated at once would turn out exactly as before, though of course there are marginal forces like boxing, which are neither clearly a game nor a contest. In the evolution of sports, a step beyond the team game might be said to occur with professionalization, and its arduous practice, coaching, and even development of abstract theory. Whether individual or group, simple exercise or elaborate game, a competitive or concerned effort, physical play in its various forms creates the opportunity for its participants to explore and develop the powers of their bodies in compensatory, and normally salutary ways, beyond those permitted or called for by routine physical work. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The drama of success and failure, the prestige of demonstrated superiority, even the delights of graceful or dexterous movement, can be shared by spectators, though only the participants share in the enhancement of health and physical competence. Every sport recapitulates and idealizes the everyday bodily experiences. However, in evaluating the ultimate contribution of recreational institutions to interpersonal competence, it is vital to note how physical sports can foster other elements of competence besides health. The vicarious feature of all kinds of play is visible here on closer look. Now, we move on to socialism’s collusion with the future. The dramatic death of state socialism in Eastern Europe and its bloody anguish from Bucharest to Baku to Beijing did not happen by accident. Socialism collided with the future. Socialist regimes did not collapse because of CIA plots, capitalist encirclement or economic strangulation from outside. Eastern European communist governments toppled domino-fashion as soon as Moscow sent the message that it would no longer use troops to protect them from their own people. However, the crisis of socialism as a system in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere was far more deeply based. Just as Mr. Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the mid-twentieth century smashed Moscow’s control of the mind in the countries it ruled or held captive. Mind workers were typically dismissed as “nonproductive” by Marxist economists (and many classical economists as well). Yet it is these supposedly nonproductive workers who, perhaps more than any other, have given Western economics a tremendous shot of adrenalines since the mid-fifties. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Today, even with all their supposed “contradictions” unresolved, the high-tech capitalist nations have swept far ahead of the rest of the World in economic terms. It was computer-based capitalism, not smokestack socialism, that made what Marxists call a “qualitative leap” forward. With the real revolution spreading in the high-tech nations, the socialist nations had become, in effect, a deeply reactionary bloc led by elderly men imbued with nineteenth-century theology. Mikhail Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to recognize this historic fact. In a 1989 speech, some thirty years after the new system of wealth creation began to appear in the United States of America, Mr. Gorbachev declared, “We were nearly one of the last to realize that in the age of information science the most expensive asset is knowledge.” Mr. Marx himself had given the classic definition of revolutionary moment. It came, he said, when the “social relations of production” (meaning the nature of ownership and control) prevent further development of the “means of production” (roughly speaking, the technology). That formula perfectly described the socialist World crisis. Just as feudal “social relations” once hindered industrial development, now socialists “social relations” made it all but impossible for socialist countries to take advantage of the new wealth-creation system based on computers, communication and, above all, on open information. In fact, the central failure of the great state socialist experiment of the twentieth century lay in its obsolete ideas about knowledge. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The indigenous innovation policy is officially defined as the one enhancing original innovation through co-innovation and re-innovation based on the assimilation of the imported technologies. The idea itself, by and large, looks quite relevant. If you want to become an innovator yourself, developing original technologies and products, you should first of all learn what has been achieved by your predecessors, and it would be logical to start with innovating together with them or adding new elements or features to their inventions. It helps to accumulate knowledge and develop skills necessary to proceed to your own original research and development. This is the way it is was done by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and others who followed America and Europe on the innovation path. The problem, however, is that China seeks to achieve this basically relevant goal using a Chinese cocktail of policies that create unequal conditions for competition between domestic and foreign firms, effectively help the former to steal overseas technologies against their will. The Patent Law makes it possible for Chinese firms to obtain patents for odds and ends which are quickly issues and without in-depth examination. They serve as a tool to retaliate against overseas intellectual property rights (IPR) lawsuits. Testing and approval procedures for imported products have been deliberately made complicated and time-consuming in order to erect import barriers on the one hand and to learn foreign designs and production process on the other. The Anti-Monopoly Law can be used against foreign companies refusing to disclose their technologies and know-how. For instance, the list of the “abuses” of the law by MNCs included Cisco’s refusal to license its Internet protocol (IP) to Chinese companies that wanted to connect to its network. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Direct reciprocity is the case most conducive to resolving prisoners’ dilemmas. In it, the same two (or more) players repeatedly play the dilemma game. Evidence from cases studies in economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, and biology, and game-theoretic analysis, have given us a good understanding of the mechanisms for accomplishing good outcomes, and the conditions under which they succeed. All successful mechanisms, in theory as well as in practice, work by creating a future cost to the individual of taking an action that brings one an immediate personal benefit. The nature and the size of the cost can vary widely across different situations; the common requirement is that the future cost should outweigh the immediate benefit in the individual’s own calculation based on one’s own preferences, whether for material things, social standing, internal guilt, or whatever. Theory and cause studies agree on several of the desiderata for successful resolution of prisoners’ dilemmas by direct reciprocity. First and foremost, the players should have sufficient regard for the future. If the payoffs are monetary, this requires a low interest rate at which the future is discounted. If the payoffs are subjective, it requires the players to be more patient. However, an even more potent force that reduces the importance of the future in the players’ minds is uncertainty about continuation of the relationship. Therefore successful resolution of multi-person dilemmas, like the ones in most case studies, requires a stable group: members should not be able to exist after deviating from the cooperative action, and newcomers who are not part of the agreement should not be able to enter. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Second, any deviation should be detected quickly and accurately, and in multi-person dilemmas, the news of deviation by one member should be transmitted quickly and accurately to all. Then the prescribed punishment can be meted out to the miscreant equally quickly and accurately. The speed is important: if punishment may be unleashed in error even if one has not deviated, then the deterrent effect is lessened. Third, in multi-person dilemmas, the news of deviation by one member should be transmitted quickly and accurately to all. Then the prescribed punishment can be meted out to the miscreant equally quickly and accurately. The speed is important: otherwise the punishment would become more distant in time and get discounted more heavily in a potential miscreant’s calculation. The accuracy is also important: if punishment may be unleashed in error even if one has not deviated, then the deterrent effect is lessened. Third, in multi-person dilemmas, participation in the collective action of punishing a miscreant is sometimes individually costly; this turns the punishment process into another prisoner’s dilemma game requiring its own resolution. In the smaller-scale common property resources (CPR) [where] individuals repeatedly communicate and interact with one another in a localized physical setting,…[they] learn whom to trust,…[and] develop shared norms and patterns of reciprocity. The general method is to make contingent commitments to follow rules that define a set of appropriators who are authorized to use a CPR, relate to the specific attributes of the CPR and the community, are designed, at least in part, by local appropriators, are monitored by individuals accountable to local appropriators, and are sanctioned using graduated punishments. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The first item in the list pertains to the need for a stable group, and items 2-4 pertain to the speed and accuracy of detection any cheating and spread of the information around the group. The emphasis on the importance of local knowledge and information networks is noteworthy. Theory and case studies are agreed on most of these points, with an important exception. In the theory of repeated games, punishments are usually drastic and long lasting, like the grim-trigger strategies. The argument is that the harshest feasible punishment best deters deviating actions, and therefore sustain an equilibrium with the most cooperative outcome. In reality, however, graduated punishments fare better. That is why God in the Old Testament was so much. Look how society has fallen without the God of the Old Testament. The intuition is that one player may inflict occasional harm on others through inattention or miscalculation rather than deliberate deviation. Then a friendly notification, and an opportunity to make restitution, will remedy the situation without triggering the collapse of mutually beneficial future compliance with the tacit agreement. Only if the deviation persists should it be interpreted as deliberate and lead to harsher punishment. While some models of repeated games with imperfect monitoring, can be interpreted as suggesting graduated punishment, to my knowledge there is no explicit treatment of this in the theoretical literate. Some of this literature is also restricted in its practical applicability, because it focuses on the limiting case where the players are extremely patient (the so-called folk theorem). #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Away with the Republican Ballot, by Force or Fraud!
First World War was regarded by many as the final struggle and its conclusion the ultimate victory for freedom. Existing democracies appeared strengthened, and new ones replaced old monarchies. However, only a few years elapsed before new systems emerged which denied everything that men believed they had won in centuries of struggle. For the essence of these new systems, which effectively took command of man’s entire social and personal life, was the submission of all but a handful of men to an authority over which they had no control. Disappointment became all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded. The holocaust of war, the terror of communist, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the American people bewildered with no new watch-word beyond the old cry for freedom. Many found comfort in the thought that the victory of the authoritarian system was due to the madness of a few individuals and that their madness would lead to their downfall in due time. Others smugly believed that the Italian people, or the Germans, were lacking in a sufficiently long period of training in democracy, and that therefore one could wait complacently until they had reached the political maturity of the Western democracies. Another common illusion, perhaps the most dangerous of all, was that dictators had gained power over the vast apparatus of the state through nothing but cunning and trickery, that they and their satellites rules merely by sheer force; that the whole population was only the will-less object of betrayal and terror. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In these years that have elapsed since, the fallacy of these arguments has become apparent. We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for. We also recognize that the crisis of democracy is not a peculiarly Italian or German problem, but one confronting every modern state. Nor does it matter which symbols the enemies of human freedom choose: freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism than that outright Fascism. This truth has been forcefully formulated by John Dewey that I express the thought in his words: “The serious threat to our democracy,” he says, “is not the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon the Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here—within ourselves and out institutions.” If we want to fight Fascism, we must understand it. Wishful thinking will not help us. And reciting optimistic formulae will prove to be as inadequate and useless as fat free mayonnaise on a double bacon cheese burger. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
In addition to the problem of the economic and social conditions which have given rise to Fascism, there is a human problem which needs to be understood. It is the purpose of in the character structure of modern man, which made him want to give up freedom in Fascist countries and which so widely prevail in millions of our own people. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, and freedom was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the American youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those somber forests of one’s striving one’s own soul rose before one, and one saw oneself,–darkly as through a veil; and yet one saw in oneself some faint revelation of one’s power, of one’s mission. One began to have a dim feeling that, to attain one’s place in the World, one must be oneself, and not another. For the first time, Americans sought to analyze the burden they bore upon their backs, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind the name of a developed nation problem. They felt their poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, without tools, or savings, people had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbours. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
To be poor person is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. These outstanding questions that arise when we look at the human aspect of freedom, the longing for submission, and the lust for power: What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something inherent in human nature? It is an identical experience regardless of what kind of culture a person lives in, or it is something different according to the degree of the individualism reached in a particular society? Is freedom only the absence of external pressure or is it also the presence of something—and if so, of what? What are the social and economic factors in society that make for the striving for freedom? Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat? The facing of so vast a prejudice cannot but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came born upon the four winds: Lo! We are diseased and dying, cried the hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we never progress? And the fake news media echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for Americans? Away with the Republican ballot, by force or fraud,–and behold the suicide of the American race! Nevertheless, out of the evil is coming something of good,–the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Americans’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Analysis of the human aspect of freedom and of authoritarianism forces us to consider a general problem, namely, that of the role which psychological factors play as active forces in the social process; and this eventually leads to the problem of the interaction of psychological, economic, and ideological factors in the social process. Any attempt to understand the attraction which Fascism exercises upon great nations compels us to recognize the role of psychological factors. For we are dealing here with a political system which, essentially, does not appeal to rational forces of self-interest, but which arouses and mobilizes diabolical force in man which we had believed to be nonexistent, or at least to have died out long ago. The familiar picture of man in the last centuries was one of a rational being whose actions were determined by his self-interest and the ability to act according to it. Even writers like Mr. Hobbes, who recognized lust for power and hostility as driving force in man, explained the existence of these forces as a logical result of self-interest: since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present. However, Mr. Hobbes’s picture became outmoded. The more the middle class succeeded in breaking down the power of the former political or religious rulers, the more men succeeded in mastering nature, and the more millions of individuals became economically independent, the more did one come to believe in a rational World and in man as an essentially rational being. The dark and diabolical forces of man’s nature were relegated to the Middle Ages and to still earlier periods of history, and they were explained by lack of knowledge or by the cunning schemes of deceitful kings and priests. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
One looked back upon these periods as one might at a volcano which for a log time had ceased to be a menace. One felt secure and confident that the achievements of modern democracy had wiped out all sinister forces; the World looked bright and safe like well-lit streets of a modern city. Wars were supposed to be the last relics of older times and one needed just one more war to end war; economic crises were supposed to be accidents, even though these accidents continued to happen with a certain regularity. The bright ideals of the past,–physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,–all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,–all false? No, not that, but each alone was oversimple and incomplete,–the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the found imaginings of the other World which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or for yearnings for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak. Mr. Nietzsche had disturbed the complacent optimism of the nineteenth century; so had Mr. Marx in a different way. Another warning had come somewhat later from Dr. Freud. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
To be sure, Dr. Freud and most of his disciples had only a very beginning notion of what goes on in society, and most of his applications of psychology to social problems were misleading constructions; yet, by devoting his interest to the phenomena of individual emotional and mental disturbances, he led us to the top of the volcan and made us look into the boiling crater. Dr. Freud went further than anybody before him in directing attention to the observation and analysis of the irrational and unconscious forces which determine parts of human behaviour. He and his followers in modern psychology not only uncovered the irrational and unconscious sector of man’s nature, the existence of which had been neglected by modern rationalism; he also showed that these irrational phenomena followed certain laws and therefore could be understood rationally. He taught us to understand the language of dreams and somatic symptoms as well as the irrationalities in human behaviour. He discovered that these irrationalities as well as the whole character structure of an individual were reactions to the influence exercised by the outside World and particularly by those occurring in early childhood. However, Dr. Freud was so imbued with the spirit of his culture that he could not go beyond certain limits which were set by it. These very limits became limitations for his understandings even of the sick individual; they handicapped his understand of the normal individual and of the irrational phenomena operating in social life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,–else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,–the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,–all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but all together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal what swims before the American people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the American, not in opposition to or contempt of others, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that someday, we may give all humans those characteristics we sadly lack. Dr. Freud accepted the traditional belief in a basic dichotomy between man and society, as well as the traditional doctrine of the evilness of human nature. Man, to him, is fundamentally antisocial. Society must domesticate him, must allow some direct satisfaction of biological—and hence, ineradicable—drives; but for the most part society must refine and adroitly check man’s basic impulses. In consequence of this suppression of natural impulses by society something miraculous happens: the suppressed drives turn into strivings that are culturally valuable and thus become the human basis for culture. Dr. Freud chose the word sublimation for this strange transformation from suppression into civilized behaviour. If the amount of suppression is greater than the capacity for sublimation, individuals become neurotic and it is necessary to allow the lessening of suppression. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Generally, however, there is a reverse relation between satisfaction of man’s drives and culture: the more suppression, the more culture (and the more danger of neurotic disturbances). The relation of the individual to society in Dr. Freud’s theory is essentially a static one: the individual remains virtually the same and becomes changed only in so far as society exercises greater pressure on his natural drives (and thus enforces more sublimation) or allows more satisfaction (and thus sacrifices culture). Like the so-called basic instincts of man which earlier psychologist accepted, Dr. Freud’s conception of human nature was essentially a reflection of the most important drives to be seen in modern man. For Dr. Freud, the individual of one’s culture represented “man,” and those passions and anxieties that are characteristic for man in modern society were looked upon as eternal forces rooted in the biological constitution of man. While we could give many illustrations of this point (as, for instance, the social basis for the hostility prevalent today in modern man, the Oedipus complex, the so-called castration complex in women), I want only to give one more illustration which is particularly important because it concerns the whole concept of man as a social being. Dr. Freud always considers the individual in his relations to others. These relations as Dr. Freud sees them, however, are similar to the economic relations to others which are characteristic of the individual in capitalist society. Each person works for oneself, individualistically, at one’s own risk, and not primarily in co-operation with others. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
However, one is not a Robinson Crusoe; one needs others, as customers, as employees, or as employers. One must buy and sell, give and take. The market whether it is the commodity or the labour market, regulates these relations. Thus the individual, primarily alone and self-sufficient, enters into economic relations with others as means to one end: to sell and to buy. Dr. Freud’s concept of human relations is essentially the same: the individual appears fully equipped with biologically given drives, which need to be satisfied. In order to satisfy them, the individual enters into relations with other “objects.” Other individuals thus are always a means to one’s end, the satisfaction of strivings which in themselves originate in the individual before one enters into contact with others. The field of human relations in Dr. Freud’s sense is similar to the market—it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end itself. Contrary to Dr. Freud’s view point, the key problem of psychology is that of the specific kind of relatedness of the individual towards the World and not that of the satisfaction or frustration of this or that instinctual need per se; furthermore, on the assumption that the relationship between man and society is not a static one. It Is not as if we had on the one hand an individual equipped by nature with certain drives, and on the other, society as something apart from one, either satisfying or frustrating these innate propensities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The purpose of institutions and mechanisms of economic governance is to induce individuals to take cooperative or honest actions that achieve and sustain mutually beneficial outcomes in their economic interactions, countering the temptation of each individual to take opportunistic or cheating actions that promote one’s interest at the expense of the aggregate good. Similar issues arise in other fields, most prominently in evolutionary biology. Dugatkin gives a fourfold classification of the approaches to cooperation: kin and family selection; direct reciprocity; selfish teamwork; and group altruism. The first of these is inherently biological. Each individual is genetically programmed to follow a specific behavioural strategy (phenotype), and natural selection favours the fitter genes, namely those that get higher reproductive payoff from the interactions over resources, mates, et cetera. However, that does not imply individually selfish behaviour. If a phenotype will engage in self-sacrifice to save n others when it shares a fraction f of the relevant genes with each of them, and f n > 1, then this strategy will work to the net benefit of the shared genes. The other three of Dugatkin’s pathways have more immediate economic relevance. Selfish teamwork arises in assurance games, where it is in the interest of each person to take the jointly desirable action if, but only if, the other do likewise. Such games have multiple equilibria, one where all take the jointly desirable action and another where none do. Then the players need a way to select the better of the two equilibria. For this, they must create common knowledge, or jointly held expectation, of the necessary actions, that is, they must make it a focal point. This is must easier than resolving a prisoner’s dilemma, where each person wants to take the selfish or deviating action even if all others are taking the jointly desirable or complaint action. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Enforcing contracts is of great importance these days. China is no longer just a global factory. It is also establishing its position as a global center of high-tech manufacturing and a global research lab, opening unique opportunities to combine advanced technologies and high quality of products with competitive costs. The transfer of advanced foreign technologies to China is intensifying by itself, driven by the and of the global market. However, the Chinese government wants to speed up the process and, most of all, to raise the innovative capability of Chinese domestic institutions and companies. This is the major motive behind the policy of the so-called indigenous innovation launched in 2006 which is causing a lot of controversy today. It is the National Medium and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology for 2006-202. Officially this policy was elevated to the same strategic levels as the openness and reform policy launched under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The task has been to turned China into a big technological power by 2020 and a global technology leader by 2050. The gross R&D expenditure has to be increased from 1.3 percent to 2.5 percent of GDP. The plan designates eight key technological fields where 27 breakthrough technologies have to be pursued: biotechnology, IT, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, advanced energy technology, marine technology, laser technology, and aerospace technology. The four major basic research programs are in protein science, nanotechnology, quantum physics, and developmental and reproductive science. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The core of the plan is 16 megaprojects supported by massive government, financing, in such areas as core electronic components, high-end chips, and basic software products; large-scale integrated circuits manufacturing equipment; advanced NC machinery; advanced nuclear reactions; breeding new varieties of genetically modified organisms; pharmaceutical innovation and development; and so on. The plan sets the goal of reducing overall reliance on foreign technologies to 30 percent from an estimated 60 percent in 2006. These are the type of goals America need to focus on, besides their green energy. The companies, institutions and people with a strong stake in the Third Wave economy have not yet fashioned a coherent counter-rationale. Scientists today are asking how systems behave in turbulence, how order evolves out of chaotic conditions and how developing systems leap to higher levels of diversity. Such questions are extremely pertinent to business and the economy. In a storm of takeovers, divestitures, reorganizations, bankruptcies, start-ups, joint ventures and internal reorganizations, the entire economy is taking on a new structure that is light-years more diverse, fast-changing and complex than the old smokestack economy. This “leap” to a higher level of diversity, speed and complexity requires a corresponding leap to higher, more sophisticated forms of integration. In turn, this demand radically higher levels of knowledge processing. The culture of industrialism rewards people who can break problems and processes down into smaller and smaller constituent parts. This disintegrative or analytic approach, when transferred to economics, led us to think of production as a series of disconnected steps. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The new model of production that springs from the super symbolic economy is dramatically different. Based on a systemic or integrative view, it sees production as increasingly simultaneous and synthesized. The parts of the process are not the whole, and they cannot be isolated from one another. We are in fact discovering that “production” neither begins nor ends in the factory. Thus, the latest models of economic production extend the process both upstream and downstream—forward into aftercare or “support” for the product even after it is sold, as in auto-repair warrantees or the support expected from the retailer when a persons buys a computer. Before long the conception of production will reach even beyond that to ecologically safe disposal of the product after use. Companies will have to provide for post-use cleanup, forcing them to alter design specs, cost calculations, production methods and much else besides. In so doing they will be performing more service relative to manufacture, and they will be adding value. “Production” will be seen to include all these functions. Similarly, they may extend the definition backward to include such functions as training of the employee, provision of day care and other services. An unhappy muscle-worker could be compelled to be “productive.” In high-symbolic activities, happy workers produce more. Hence, productivity begins even before the worker arrives at the office. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
To old-timers, such an expanded definition of production may seem fuzzy or nonsensical. To the new generation of super-symbolic leaders, conditioned to think systematically rather than in terms of isolated steps, it will seem natural. Production is receptualized as a far more encompassing process than the economists and ideologist of intermediate economics imagined. And at every step from today on, it is knowledge, not affordable labour, and symbols, not raw materials, that embody and add value. This deep reconceptualization of sources of added value is fraught with consequence. It smashed the assumptions of both free-marketism and Marxism alike, and the material-ismo that gave rise to both. Thus, the ideas that value is produced by the glorious capitalist entrepreneur, both implied in material-isom, are revealed to be false and misleading politically as well as economically. In the new economy the receptionist and the investment bank who assembles the capital, the key punch operator and the salesperson, as well as the systems designer and telecommunications specialist all add value. Even more significantly, so does the customer. Value results from a total effort rather than from one isolated step in the process. The rising importance of mind-work will not go away, no matter how many scare stories are published warning about the dire consequences of a “vanishing” manufacturing base or deriding the concept of the “information economy.” Neither will the new conception of how wealth is created. For what we are watching is a mighty convergence of Third Wave changes—the transformation of production coming together with the transformation of capital and money itself. Together they form a revolutionary new system for wealth creation on the planet. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The picture of recreation in the United States of America is impressively novel, and novel in a variety of ways. In contrast to most other countries, leisure here is not the possession of a privileged class but of the mass of citizens. Its development has been little influenced by the tradition which scorns work and fosters the cultivation of aristocratic pleasures. On the contrary, American recreation has made its way against a tradition which held work a virtue and play—if not a vice—a secondary and residual activity, a tradition which still persistently seeks to impose upon recreation some criterion of moral worth or practical gain. Yet for all these lingering puritanical inhibitions, probably no people has been more abundantly blessed with leisure time and recreational facilities than American in recent times. Enriched by the cosmopolitan extraction of its people, watered by the volume of ideas transmitted through its unparalleled channels of communication, the field of play has effloresced in unequalled variety and profusion. Idealistic emphasis on the civic virtues engendered through sportsmanship has reinforced commercial incentives to promote recreation. The multiplication o jobs consisting of routine drudgery has for many depreciated the value of work and enhanced the appeal of avocations. And the reduction of the average working week to five days of eight hours each has created a vacuum of leisure which ingenuity has not been slow to fill. The result has been an elaboration playful pursuits almost beyond comprehensive grasp. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
However, it is important to keep in mind counterfeits of God and the divine things are not only the counterfeits the angel of light has at his command. Psychopathological offenders can also counterfeit human personality traits. This falsifying may involve strangers, close acquaintances, and even the believer oneself. Individual will be made to appear different from what they really are—to be jealous, angry, critical, or unkind. Self-centeredness is made to appear in others, in enlarged form, where there is really the very opposite tendency—selflessness and love. Wrong motives seem to govern acquaintances and friends; simple actions are coloured, and words are made to mean and suggest what is not the mind of the speaker—sometimes to the confirmation of supposed wrong-doings by that person. Individuals of the opposite gender may also be supernaturally portrayed to a believer, in either a repulsive or beautiful form, with the object of arousing various formant thoughts in the innocent believer which one does not realize exist within. Sometimes the reason for the inspection is masked as “for prayer,” “for increased fellowship,” or “for spirit-communion in the things of God.” When their influence is centered in the body, the lying spirits’ counterfeit representation of these others may be in the realm of the passions and affections, seeking to rouse or feed these emotions in the oppressed one. The individual’s face, voice, “presence,” may be presented as if that person was equally affected. This is accompanied with a counterfeit “love” or drawing to the other one, with a painful craving for one’s company which almost masters the victim. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
This subject of love, and its painful arousing and communicating or counterfeiting by evil spirits, is one that touches multitude of believers of all classes, Many are made to suffer poignant agonies of craving for love, with no specific person involved; others are wrought upon in their thoughts so as not to be able to hear the word “love” mentioned without embarrassing manifestation of colour (blushing)—none of these manifestation being under the control of the will of the believer. God is not only the ground of being, but also the abyss of being which infinitely surpasses finite beings and thus prevents Him from being identified with them. However, it is possible that, although God is not identified with finite beings, they are identified with Him. Man has the power to contradict even the ground being. God is beyond potentiality and actuality, beyond essence and existence. The theonomous union of religion and culture can be achieved only by grace, by being grasped in the ultimate concern which is faith. Consequently, a far more serious problem is the personal encounter demanded by an ultimate concern. The problem would not be so serious if it were not for the situation of prayer. The ego-thou relation is essential for it. Therefore, God is not less than we. As the ground of everything personal, He is also personal in relation to a person…But God also transcends the personal…The reason is that God as Spirit means that He is not-personally present to not-personal life, personal to personal life, and supra-personal to all life. Wisdom gives greater strength than ten rulers in a city. The true guardians of a city are not its armed men and women; it is consecrated teachers are its guardians. A city that has no school which teaches the word of God, that city cannot endure. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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It Could be Salem All Over Again
The undoubted good intent of those who seek to enliven public awareness to sadistic satanic practices can hardly be question. Tuanton State Hospital was founded as the State Lunatic Hospital in 1854. It operated for decades as a repository for individuals suffering from mental illness. It was the second state asylum in Massachusetts. Most of the original part of the facility was built in a unique and rare neo-classical style designed by architects Boyden & Ball. The Asylum had brushes with true evil not many other places can rival. Before its closure in the 1970, staff and other patients reported feeling uneasy in the lower levels of the hospital. After auditing the hospital’s records, a group of staff allegedly uncovered evidence that an inner circle of doctors and nurses were conducting experiments on patients in the basement of the hospital. Staff notes were reportedly found indicating that some patients were taken from the wards by certain doctors and not seen again. It was also reported that this hospital was the site of cult rituals and devil worship. Patients were used as guinea pigs, they were experimenting on with morphine and atropine just to see how different doses would affect them. Some of the staff also became fond of poisoning people. One mystery especially puzzling were the claims of patients who said that they had been taken into a secret tunnel where they had seen naked people cavorting before them, had foreign objects inserted in their bodies, and had witnessed devil worship and that patients were sacrificed to the devil through blood rituals. Some patients were reportedly dismembered. #RandolphHarris 1 of
Underground tunnels are a feature of many such cases, and it is a known practice of many occultists to seek deep and dark caverns underground which are said to provide spiritual energy for rituals. One of the city’s social workers admitted, “We had many telephone calls from other social workers seeking help. I told them that at first we did not believe what the patients were telling us, and then by sheer force of numbers we began to take the seriously.” A boy showed signed of disturbed behaviour, laughed hysterically and talked of “funny drinks.” Thereafter the social service department was involved in nine cases of ritual abuse, involving seventeen adults and a total of seventy-five patients. These cases have been shrouded in secrecy ever since, and many of the interviews were conducted by social workers from outside the area. No charged were every brought and the fate of the patients never made public. Other patients talked of witches and gave descriptions of what sounded like satanic rituals. They gave detailed and alarming description of human sacrifice, blood-drinking, and animal killings. The social workers questioning the patients seemed to uncover the allegations that people in dark robes had taken part in lewd and libidinous activities in night-time ceremonies between June and November. Patients were being forced into devil-worship and suffering sexual and physical abuse, and if anything, the scale of the problem had been underestimated. In 1999, the large dome towering the hospital’s administration building collapsed. Then, on the night of March 19, 2006, a massive fiver broke out in the center of the building, which included the administration and theater. #RandolphHarris 2 of 4
Sections damaged by fire were then leveled, leaving only the decaying wings of the Kirkbride Building. In May 2009, demolition of the remaining historic sections of the Kirkbride Building began. The facility had numerous architectural features that were salvaged and sold to individuals and companies throughout the United States of American, including architectural granite, bricks, timbers, iron gates, vintage plumbing and lighting fixture, furniture, and slate roofing tiles. (Not only to acquire the land, this is one reason many people like to condemn historical structures.) Two notable patients of the State Hospital, was an Italian-American serial killer called Anthony Santo (born circa 1894 in Italy – date of death unknow). He had confessed to murdering two of his cousins and another girl in the span of three months during his “mad spells.” He was eventually diagnosed as having hallucinations and sent to Taunton Lunatic Asylum, where he supposed died. Jane Toppan (born Honora Kelley; March 31, 1854 – August 17, 1938), nickednamed Jolly Jane, was an American serial killer who is known to have committed twelve murders in Massachusetts between 1895 and 1901; she confessed to a total of thirty-one murders. The killings were carried out in Ms. Toppan’s capacity as a nurse, targeting patients and their family members. Ms. Toppan, who admitted to have committed the murders to satisfy a sexual fetish, was quoted as saying that her ambition was “to have killed more people—helpless people—than any other man or woman who ever lived.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 4
It is not hard to believe that things like this can happen, especially when reports go uninvestigated. Not all people go into helping professions to help people. To further highlight this illustration, Dorothea Helen Puente (January 9, 1929 – March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer. In the 1980, she ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California USA, and murdered various elderly and disabled borders before cashing their Social Security checks. Witnesses reported that Ms. Puente would drug people and steal from them. Ms. Puente’s total count reached nine murders; she was convicted of three and the jury hung on the other six. Newspapers dubbed Ms. Puente the “Death House Landlady.” Therefore, it is very important to investigate organizations that receive government funding to make sure they are handling their responsibilities and not abusing tenants and patients because their could lead to their deaths. Also, people who have no known relatives or relatives who want to do away with a family member to cash in on a life insurance policy could be victimized by these facilities. If you suspected someone is being abused and the agencies you are supposed to report to brush the claims off, it is always a good idea to reach out to others in the community or find an officer on the street and talk to them in person. Often times, an in-person meeting is much stronger than talking to a person over the phone or filing a crime report online. It is not usual that there is a nationwide conspiracy or anything going on, nor that a situation is becoming a national scandal. However, working closely with the police, if allegations of abuse are taking place, and they can be proven, it is not a problem securing a conviction. #RandolphHarris 4 of 4
America is Struggling to Retain its Supremacy
Present political developments and the and the dangers which they imply for the great achievement of modern culture, individuality and uniqueness of personality have interrupted the culture of America and have created a social crisis for our day, as the calamity has challenged the meaning of freedom for modern humans. The basic entity of the social process is the individual, ones desires, and fears, one’s passions and reason, and one’s propensities for good and for evil. To understand the dynamics of the social process, we must understand the dynamics of the psychological process operating with the individual, just as to understand the individual we must see one in the context of the culture which molds one. Modern humans freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave them their individual self; that is, the expression of one’s intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought human beings independence and rationality, has mode them isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternative one is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of one’s freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individual of man. The understanding of the reasons for the totalitarian flight from freedom is a premise for any actions which aim at the victory over the totalitarian forces. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
After centuries of struggles, man succeeded in building an undreamed-of wealth of material goods; he built democratic societies in parts of the World, and is once again defending himself against new totalitarian schemes; yet, because of propaganda being pontificated by the main stream TV new media, several humans are anxious and tempted to surrender their freedom to dictators of all kinds, by being so desperate to put “the first” this or that into office, or on the work force instead of selecting the best man or woman for the job. This has caused people to become small cogs in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free human but an automaton. In this first quarter of a century, the reasons for man’s fear of freedom, for his anxiety and willingness to become an automaton, have not only continued but have greatly increased. In this highly technological society also comes job insecurity. The human physical energy—man’s hands and arms, his brains and his nervous reactions are being replaced by machines. Human beings feel still smaller when confronted with the phenomenon not only of giant enterprises, but of an almost self-regulating World of computers which think much faster, and often more correctly, than a human does. Another danger has increased, rather than diminished: the population explosion. Here, too, one of the products of human progress, the achievement of medicine, have produced such an increase of population, especially in less developed countries (LDCs), that the increase in material production can hardly keep pace with the increasing number of people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The giant forces in society and the danger for man’s survival have increased in the first twenty-three years of this century, and hence man’s tendency to escape from freedom. However, the drive for freedom inherent in human nature, while it can be corrupted and suppressed, tends to assert itself again and again. Yet all these reassuring facts must not deceive us into thinking that the dangers of escape from freedom are not even greater than they were one hundred years ago. It would seem that majority of humans have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself. Most humans repress the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; they worship power, money, the sovereign state, the nation, which can be just as dangerous. In the process, humans beings pay lips service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, and has transformed their teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship. How can humankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical over maturity and emotional backwardness? One way is through the increasing awareness of the most essential facts of our social existence, an awareness sufficient to prevent us from committing irreparable follies, and to raise to some small extent our capacity for objectivity and reason. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
We can hope to overcome most follies of the heart and their detrimental influence on our imagination and thought in one generation; maybe it will take a thousand years until man has lifted himself from a pre-human history of hundreds of thousands of years. At this crucial moment when the United States of America is struggling to retain its supremacy, dignity, confidence, and rationality, a modicum of increased insight and objectivity can make the difference between life and death for the human race. For this reason, the development of a scientific and dynamic social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine. No one could be more aware of the inadequacy of our knowledge than the students in this field. Ethical norms are based on our knowledge of man, rather than on authority and revelation. Modern American history is centered around the effort to gain freedom from the political, economic, and spiritual shackles that have bound men. The battles for freedom were fought by the oppressed, those who wanted new liberties, against those who had privilege to defend. While a class was fighting for its own liberation from domination, it believed itself to be fighting for human freedom as such and thus was able to appeal to an ideal, to the longing for freedom rooted in all who are oppressed. In the long and virtually continuous battle for freedom, however, classes that were fighting against oppression at one stage sided with the enemies of freedom when victory was won and new privileges were to be defended. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Despite many reverses, men fought in battles without shoes, in freezing weather, and often malnourished for our freedom. So many died in battle that rivets of blood filled the battle ground, in a struggle against oppression, but for them, that was better to live than life without freedom. That is why the American Flag is such an honor to so many people around the World. For many, it is as sacred as God’s word. Millions of people died in battle which was the utmost assertion of their individuality. History seemed to be proving that it was possible for man to govern himself, to make decisions for themselves, and to think and feel as one saw fit. In the eyes of many people, disrespecting the American flag is an act of terror. The full expression of man’s potentialities seemed to be the goal toward which social development was rapidly approaching. The principles of economic liberalism, political democracy, religious autonomy, and individualism in personal life, gave the expression to the longing for freedom, and at the same time seemed to bring humankind nearer to its realization. One tie after another was severed. Man had overthrown the domination of nature and made himself her master; he had overthrown the domination of tyranny and the domination of the absolutist state. The abolition of external domination seemed to be not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition to attain the cherished goal: freedom for the individual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
It is paradoxical that Americans at large should have ambivalent feelings toward their schools. Not only has this country carried free public education further than elsewhere in the World, but it is constantly extending its range; higher education will soon be claimed as a common right, judging by the increasing public support for colleges and universities. Yet alongside this attitude lies a fear that the school may lead pupils too far from the beliefs of their parents, or fail to develop traditional habits. The notion that education is a solvent for most ills counterbalances the gears of experiment. And the tendency to depend on the schools for many functions where the family does not suffice conflicts with the reaction against usurpation. This paradox, however, may not be strange, if viewed in terms of family development. The professional who comes between parent and child can expect to be regarded with suspicion. Each parent, moreover, was himself or herself a child, and the many who disliked their school experiences may account for much of the hostility that emerges in a number of ways, in spite f the manifest honour that is paid to teachers and learning, to books and writers. The identification with their child’s development is likely to tempt parents into encouraging the personal rivalry that countless teachers have fought to assuage, and demanding a show of relative ranking, instead of judging performance against potential. If the paradox yields to this explanation, then educational policy may gain in effectiveness if it is guided by a similar analysis. What would follow if the classroom were explicitly conceived as an extended projection of family relations? #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
If the entire curriculum over the ten-to-twenty-year school experience were organized as a continuous venture in family living, the results to be obtained from single courses on the family would pale by comparison. If classes were conceived as quasi-families, they would have to be kept small and stable. Teacher would have to be chosen more rigorously as models for identification. Experiment could soon establish how valuable it would be to put each class in charge of a pair of teachers, a man and a woman, one observing interaction while the other conducts the program. The optimal audience and timing for performance by each pupil could likewise be determined by trial and observation. A wide vista of possibilities is opened up by taking this view (which should not be confused with what is advanced as the life adjustment curriculum, despite some similarities). Of course, research and experiment represent the furthest expression of the planning stage of agency development. Perhaps the paucity of private educational agencies in America, below the college and university level, accounts for there being less research and experiment than there might otherwise be. Some of the private schools are the least progressive, and some the most. The exploratory temper of an agency’s clientele seems to be more important condition than whether it is private or public. State teachers’ colleges may tend, as often charged, toward uniformity, yet state colleges of home economics, through their extension services, have the most inviting opportunity in sight for getting involved in the rapid developments in family living occurring in the suburbs and schools of American cities. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
While sociology tends to predominate the study of families at the college level, home economics is far ahead in answering the appetite of high-school youth for courses in marital preparation. And the suburban high school, as a community center, involves parents far more than do country town or metropolitan schools. The high schools because of their coverage are also the soundest hope for producing a whole generation competent for family living. On the whole, therefore, the evidence seems abundant that hopes invested in the public school are justified. And as for adults, to the degree they are involved as participants in experimentation first as pupils, and then as parents, the ambiguities in their reactions to the professional educator may perhaps diminish. The atmosphere of public interest in family relations as shown in the commercial media, libraries, and churches is already quite intense. The rising enrollments in volunteer courses and child study groups, the attendance at forums and the purchases of books on marriage and parenthood, attest convincingly to the demand for educational aid in the adult years. Taken as a whole, therefore, the educational agencies serving the family whatever the resistance they still encounter, are no doubt further ahead in terms of development than any of the other five types of family agency. And, most importantly, your Heavenly Father has given you agency, the ability to choose and to act for yourself. Agency is essential in the plan of salvation. Without it, you would not be able to learn or progress or follow the Saviour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
With agency, you are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of psychopathological offenders. As long as the believer thinks it is God who is directing one, so long as the deceiving offenders are safe from exposure and able to lead one on into more and more deception. When the human being reaches a very high degree of psychopathological deception, one finds oneself unable to act unless the psychopathological offenders allow one, so that one no longer even asks for “permission” to do this or that. At this stage, no arguments, reasonings, or outward considerations of any kind influence the actions of the believer thus deceived, or turn one from obeying the “guidance” or “permission” of the inner voice, which one fully believes is of God. Should one endeavour to go against it in the smallest matter, the condemnation and suffering are so great that on becomes terrified at any “disobedience,” and would rather be condemned and misjudged by the whole World than go against it. One’s great horror is of “disobeying the Holy Ghost,” and the psychopathological offenders deceiving one take every occasion to deepen this fear, so as to retain their hold upon one. As the believer thus minutely obeys the spirit in control, one relies more and more upon supernatural help, for the moment one does something apart from it one is accused—by the Holy Spirit, one assumes—of “working apart from God.” It is at this stage that all the faculties fall into deepening passivity, as the human lets go entirely to the voice of guidance—into a reliance upon the “divine” speakings, which keep one’s brain in complete inaction. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Here also counterfeit manifestations in “miraculous gifts”—prophecy, tongues, healing, visions, and supernatural experiences of every kind possible to the powers of the psychopathological offender—may be given to the believer, with abundant “texts” and “proofs” to confirm their “divine origin.” One experiences a lightness of the body which makes it appear as if one were carried by invisible hands; one is lifted off one’s bed in what spiritists know as “levitation”; on can sing and speak, and do what one has never been capable of doing before. Constant contact with spirit forces gives the human a “mystical” look, but all lines of strength which comes from strenuous conflict and self-mastery go out of the face, for the sense-life is being fed and indulged in a spiritual way as much as by fleshly habits. The supranaturalism of the Roman Catholic system, the dualism of nature and grace fails by degrading God into an object alongside finite objects; it denies that He is the ground of being. On the other hand, naturalism defaults by identifying the finite and the infinite; it denies that God is the abyss. Pantheism is often misinterpreted to mean that God is the totality of natural objects—an absurd doctrine never held by anyone. The real meaning of pantheism, is that God is the universal essence or substance, and He is swift to disown this teaching. For pantheism is bondage. It incarcerates God in finite beings and, at the same time, shackles their freedom. Being-itself, God transcend the polarities of individuality-universality, of freedom-destiny. He transcends essence and existence. Self-transcendence of being means that within itself, the finite World points beyond itself. Finitude searches for the ground of its being only to discover that it is peering into the abyss of infinity. God stands for the World and against the World. Man’s finite freedom is the clue, for his freedom dramatizes that the creature is independent of the divine ground (God stand against the World), and His finiteness shows His dependence upon the power of being (God stands for the World). It terms of immediate religious experience, self-transcendence is the encounter with the holy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Now, the link between relational and formal contracts arises because recourse to the court offers an alternative if the relationship breaks down. This led to the unfortunate result that a partial improvement in the functioning of the state law made it more attractive to break your word on the relational contract and thereby worsened the outcome of private ordering. By contrast, arbitration could supplement or complement state law by allowing more complete counteracting without detracting from the ability of the courts to resolve issues based on publicly verifiable information. An auditing or monitoring system be installed or improved at a cost, to make verifiable some information that was previously only observable to the insiders or even private to one of the parties. The model allows us to compute the benefit from this, and also identifies the precise kind of information that would be most useful, namely, the information that is best correlated with the residual left after using the previously available information. This can help the state law, or any alternative private governance method, improve its information structure and therefore its usefulness. Formal modeling has thus deepened and sharpened our understanding of each of these modes of private ordering, and of their connections with state law. However, these advantages come at a cost. Each institution has a rich and multidimensional structure. Theoretical models, to be tractable, must select a narrower set of issues and dimensions to analyze in depth, and simplify or even ignore. For example, two parties are involved in only one interaction. In reality, such pairs often simultaneously interact in several dimensions, including not only business dealings but also social meetings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Private governance can sometimes advantageously use this multiplicity to create punishments in one dimension to deter cheating in another. When we focus on just one aspect of this institution, namely the ability of specialized industry arbitrators to interpret information at lower cost, making more information verifiable and allowing more complete contact, this is one way of narrowing and simplification of arbitration. However, arbitration occurs in other contexts for other reasons, most importantly in international trade to avoid suspicious of the bias of national courts; this model does not cover that at all. Rules of arbitration are of the simple “bright-line kind, avoiding general terms of common law like “reasonable.” The institutions of arbitration differ in the degrees of centralization and formality. At one extreme, arbitration can be institutional or centralized, using a preexisting organization or arbitration center with formalized rules and procedures that guide the conduct of, and supervise, the arbitrators. At the other extreme, arbitration can be ad hoc, not relying on such a formal administration or center, and using adjudicators chosen for the purpose to the dispute. The latter offers more flexibility, but less accuracy and enforceability. So disputes that have a great degree of uncertainty about the traders’ behaviour have to go to more centralized forums. However, disputes in areas where the underlying circumstances change rapidly may benefit from more flexible ad hoc forums. Centralized forums also have the advantage of better enforceability, because they can disseminate information about any misbehavior more quickly or widely, and can better arrange sanctions such as denial of future trading opportunities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Therefore parties to disputes with serious potential problems of enforcement have to use more centralized methods. Parties with long-terms ongoing relationships can more easily use flexible and ad hoc methods. Such issues of the relative merits of different kinds of arbitration, and of the choice among different forums, will need other models. There is always the risk that the aspects simplified or omitted in theoretical modeling interact in significant ways with those the model is trying to focus on. Therefore modeling involves judgment, which may turn out to be wrong. This calls for continued testing of the results, both by looking for empirical evidence supporting or contradicting the results, both by enlarging the scope of the model. In the latter activity, the understanding of concepts and techniques gained from the original model play an important part. In other worse, known or suspected deficiencies of a model should be regarded, not as arguments for condemning modeling as such, but opportunities and challenges for further research. China is rushing to access the World’s most advanced technologies and to become a leader in research and development. The China-West technology was has begun. About 20 years ago, at a Russo-Japanese gathering of leading experts on international affairs, during a debate on China, and its new global role, a prominent Russian scholar (expressing his personal point of view) bluntly told the Japanese side: “It was you who created this economic and political monster. Now we all have to pay the price.” He meant massive Japanese (and generally Western) investment in China and a large-scale official development aid as major prerequisites for its spurt and emergence as superpower. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The formula is largely correct if you accept the wording. Let us put it this way: Western investment and development aid contributed a lot to the birth of a new superpower of a size and character never seen before, which is now posing unprecedented challenges for the West itself. As far as the economic dimension is concerned, until recently the formula applied to production and exports. Why did the West do it? Obviously, because with its gigantic pool of low cost and efficient labour and the World’s most dynamic market, China provided unique business opportunities. Due to this uniqueness, it faced no big problems with using Western capital, technologies, and expertise to become the World’s largest manufacturer and exporter of a wide range of low-end products. Nowadays, China is interested in foreign capital for a different reason. As far as low-end manufacturing is concerned, it has accumulated more than enough capital, technologies, and expertise to do it all by itself. For Western businesses, it may still be attractive to move to China to produce something simple and affordable. However, this is not the major thing today’s China wants them to do. Furthermore, it often does not want them to do it at all. Now surprisingly, the Chinese government did not think twice before abruptly eliminating across-the-board tax privileges for foreign-owned firms in 2007. Sometimes it does not even stop short of blocking a foreign investment project altogether when it targets a low-end and, especially, environment-unfriendly manufacturing. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Nowadays China does not need just money. It needs advanced technologies to upgrade its industries and wants Western companies to bring them in. And for this purpose it leverages its unique labour pool and market expansion dynamics in exactly the same way it leveraged them in the past to encourage foreign investment in low-end manufacturing. And this time, too, Western companies are doing what China wants them to do: They are becoming important contributors to its technological upgrading. Today it is largely the West itself that is creating China as a new technological superpower. Foreign company research and development (R&D) activities play a significant role in China’s plan to move up the value chain. Multinational companies operate at least 1,300 R&D centers in China, out of more than 1,600 R&D centers total, and these numbers have grown significantly in recent years. This expansion has occurred even while companies remain concerned about protecting their intellectual property rights (IPR) in China. China’s spending on research and development climbed 10.3 percent to 2.44 trillion Chinese yuan ($378 billion) in 2020. China ha 522 national key laboratories and 350 national engineering research centers in operation. There are nearly half a million projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2020, and 3.6 million patents were granted. By contrast, the U.S.A. spent around $134 billion on R&D in 2020. As the World’s supply chains have become more unstable, China and other nations have taken steps to try to boost their technology sovereignty and become more self-reliant on core critical technologies like 5G and semiconductor chips. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Foreign companies’ research centers are concentrated in such fields such as electronics (including software), telecommunications, biotechnology and pharmaceutical, chemicals, and automobiles. Leading global firms (Microsoft, IBM, Motorola, Intel, GE, 3M, Sun Microsystems, Pfizer, Siemens, Philips, Volkswagen, and Fujitsu to name just a few) started to establish themselves, with high frequency from the late 1990 to the early 2000s. As far as other foreign companies go, GM, Nissan, and Hyundai have opened R&D centers in China; as well as other companies such as Roche, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, AstraZeneca, and Merck Serono in pharmaceuticals; Dow, Exxon Mobile, and Bayer in Chemicals, and so on. As time goes by, the pace is accelerating. Under the organization and guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the four major mobile operators in China—China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Broadnet, jointly announced the laugh of what they claimed as the World’s first 5G inter-network roaming service trial. The service enables customers to access other telecom operators’ 5G networks and continue using 5G services when outside the rage of their original operators’ 5G network. Omdia expects inter-network roaming to improve operators’ 5G network coverage particularly in rural areas. Driven by better 5G network coverage, 5G will overtake 4G’s leading position and become the largest technology in China’s mobile market by 2026. By the end of 2028, we anticipate 5G will account for 65.1 percent of the total mobile subscriptions. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Novartis says that China remains a large growth opportunity despite a drop in its population, as the government spurs efforts to make medicines mor widely available. There is an aging population and an unmet need in China to treat many chronic ailments, and the government is willing to improve the speed at which they approve new medicines. Novartis plans to reach a number third market position in China by 2027, up from fifth place. GlobalData forecasts the Chinese pharmaceutical market will grow to more than $262 billion in 2025, which is up from approximately $166.7 billion in 2020. Microsoft Research China in Beijing in 1998, upgraded it to Microsoft Research Asia in 2001, and then opened The Science and Technology Park in Shanghai in 2010 as its lobal research center outside the United States of America. Going beyond product development for the Chinese market, foreign companies’ centers are increasingly engaged in basic research. With a certain time lag, R&D activities are globalizing in the same way as production. Global companies are doing their research on a global basis, choosing venues providing high-qualified human resource and attractive in terms of cost, infrastructure, and legal and regulatory environment. In spite of its notoriously lax intellectual property rules, China has managed to position itself as one of the most attractive R&D platforms in the World—most of all because of its widening pool of capable researchers who are still economical by international standards. On its part, the Chinese government exempts taxes on R&D centers’ equipment imports and provides R&D subsidies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Products manufactured by foreign companies at their Chinese factories are also significantly upgraded. More and more often, they go far beyond simple labour-intensive manufacturing, choosing to combine advanced technologies with the cost advantages China provides. It applies to both final and intermediate products, giving multinationals new important benefits. For instance, manufacturers of cars or electronic devices transferring production of parts or materials to China get much greater cost advantages than those who transfer assembly operations only. A close look at the new investment projects launched by foreign firms in China nowadays clearly shows that many of them are related to production upgrading, the transfer of advanced technologies, or to the creation of R&D facilities. Mitsubishi Chemical and Mitsubishi Plastic Engineering established a joint venture with Sinopec to make high-end resins used in the manufacturing of auto and electronic parts, optical disks, and construction materials. LG Electronics has started producing advanced models of OLED evo G3 Smart TV. Siemens has built a plant to manufacture parts for wind energy generating equipment, and Daikin is making key parts for inverter-type air-conditioners in a joint venture with Gree Electric Appliances. Honda has started local production of electric vehicles. In Shanghai, FIAT has established an R&D facility to develop engine-manufacturing technologies, Britain’s Astra Zeneca to conduct research on new anticancer drugs, and Panasonic is developing home electronic appliances tailored to the needs of Chinese consumers. Exxon Mobile Chemical has started applied research and development of chemicals. The list can be continued. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
In intermedia industrial economies, wealth was typically measured by the possession of goods. The production of goods was regarded as central to the economy. Conversely, symbolic and service activities, while unavoidable, were stigmatized as nonproductive. The manufacture of goods—auto, radios, tractors, TV sets—was seen as “male” or macho and words like practical, realistic or hardheaded were associated with it. By contrast, the production of knowledge or the exchange of information was typically disparaged as mere “paper pushing.” A flood of corollaries flowed from these attitudes. For example, that “production” is the combination of material resources, machines and muscle…that the most important assets of a firm are tangibles…that national wealth flows from a surplus of the trade in goods…that trade in services is significant only because it facilitates trade in goods…that most education is a waste unless it is narrowly vocational…that research is airy-fairy…and that the liberal arts are irrelevant or, worse yet, inimical to business success. What mattered, in short, was matter. Ideas like these were by no means limited to the Babbitts of capitalism. They had their analogs in the communist World as well. Marxist economists, if anything, have had a harder time trying to integrate high brow work into their schema, and “social realism” in the arts produced thousands of portrayals of happy workers, Himalaya-like muscles straining against a background of cogwheels, smokestacks and steam locomotives. The glorification of the proletariat and the theory that it was the vanguard of change, reflected the principles of a intermediate economy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
What all this added up to was more than a welter of isolated opinions, assumptions and attitudes. Rather it formed a self-reinforcing, self-justifying ideology based on a kind of macho materialism—a brash, triumphant “material-ismo!” Material-ismo, in fact, was the ideology of Second Wave mass manufacture. There was a time when material-ismo may have made sense. Today, when the real value of most products lies in the knowledge, embedded in them, it is both reactionary and imbecile. Any country that chooses to pursue policies based on material-ismo condemns itself to becoming the Bangladesh of the twenty-first century. Now, the rebirth of America’s national consciousness, and the revival of Christianity are inseparable. When America found itself, it found its God. When America lost itself, or began to work at its self—effacement, it was sure to deny its God. The selection of America, the indestructibility of God’s covenant with America, the immorality of America as a nation, and the final restoration of America to Heaven, where the nation will live a holy life, on holy ground, with all the wide-reaching consequences of the conversion of humanity, and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth—all these are the common ideals and the common ideas that permeate the whole American literature extending over nearly four thousand years. That the Christian nation has survived the downfall of its state and the destruction of its national sanctuary is above all due to the great genius of Pope Urban II—who made of religious study a new form in which the national existence of Christians and Mormons found expression, so that by the side of history of nearly two thousand years of suffering we can point to an equally extensive history of intellectual effort. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Winchester Mystery
We were thundering over the bride and to Llanada Villa, and on through the crowds of Santa Clara. I heard laughter, like that of mischievous children. The carriage swerved. We were racing home, scattering the crowds before us and roaring past little villages. For one second, I felt the presence of the paranormal, but it was gone so quickly I doubted myself. I looked back and could catch no glimmer of it. The villagers were gazing at the spinning wheels, finally we entered the halls of the carriage house. We were currently working on the construction of the norther wing of the mansion. It was late in the night and I was walking into my room when I caught sight of a figure. It was a man, dressed in an elegant black brocade suit jacket. When I tried to get a better look at his face, he vanished. The next evening, he appeared again. He had empty eye sockets and a glowing countenance. He was ghastly to watch. The way he moved over the floor as if he did not even touch it. Even the wisps of his hair this way and that way by the bone chilling breeze was horrifying. The man moved through the wall itself, and I drew back into the shadows, and hid myself behind the curtain, from which I could not, of course, emerge until the housemaids searched the entire mansion. It was all to no purpose, however. My perplexity and agitation increased. They examined the windows and doors, but they were secured. I was by this time convinced that no one was in my room, nor in the dressing-room, the door of which was still locked on this side. He could not have passed it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
I was utterly puzzled. Had he discovered one of those secret passages which the old housekeeper said were known to exist in the schloss, although the tradition of their exact situation has been lost? A little time would, no doubt, explain all—utterly perplexed as, for the present, we were. It was past five o’clock, and I preferred passing the remaining hours of darkness in the Daisy Bedroom. Daylight brought no solution of the difficulty. The whole household was in a state of agitation next morning. Every part of the mansion was searched. The grounds were explored. Not a trace of the mysterious man could be discovered. When news of this haunting came out, it was not a surprise that members of the house staff resigned from their jobs and decided to leave the cold mansion permanently. More people started to tell personal stories of their own encounter with the ghost. People started to call him “Hallow Eyes.” He appeared and terrorized unsuspecting victims. The second reported sighting was by Florence Harwood, a writer and friend of mine. As she was preparing for bed, Hallow Eyes appeared and turned his head around so that it was facing backward, and all Mrs. Harwood saw was a head of hair floating on top of his shoulders and body. It goes without saying that she was frightened beyond her wits and woke up the house by screaming, hardly able to believe what she had seen. The sight was enough to send chills down the spine of anyone! Mrs. Harwood was inclined not to believe her eyes. At first, she dismissed it as a figment of her imagination. However, over the course of the next four night, the seem vision repeated itself again and again. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
First, there would be a bright light that would shine behind her eyelids, and then slowly, a mist would solidify into this man’s corpse, as the room became utterly cold and frigid. This went on until Mrs. Harwood was certain that Llanada Villa was haunted. By this time, guest and staff had seen Hallow Eyes often enough that my home was getting a reputation as a haunted mansion. It was in the Crystal Bedroom that this apparition was most often seen. Mr. Hansen slept in that room each night with a revolver stashed beneath his pillow. For the first two days, there were no signs of anything paranormal. As he left the room to returned to the guest house, he caught a glimpse of a candelabra that was coming toward him. He figured that it was probably one of the housemaids on her way to visit the kitchen. Mr. Hansen moved quietly. As he watched from his vantage point, Mr. Hansen was stunned to realize that it was Hallow Eyes. Hallow Eyes then grinned at him in a malicious and diabolical manner. An ordinary man might have frozen in such a situation. Mr. Hansen, on the other hand, yanked his revolver hard and discharged the bullet right into his face. It passed right through him and lodged itself in the wall behind him, as Hallow Eyes himself vanished into thin air. The next sighting of Hallow Eyes happened a few weeks later. I was walking up the zig zag staircase, when I felt an unusual chill and caught sight of the ghost. It remains one of the longest nights I had ever endured in my mortal life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
It as endless and fathomless and dizzying, and there were times when I wanted some defense against the specter, and I had none. I returned to my room and went to sleep as usual in my bed, with my doors locked, that of the dressing-room, and that opening upon the gallery. My sleep was uninterrupted, and, so far as I know, dreamless; but I awoke just now on the sofa in the dressing-room there, and I found the door between the rooms open, and the other door forced. How could all this have happened without my being wakened? It must have been accompanied with a great deal of noise, and I am particularly easily wakened; and how could I have been carried out of my bed without my sleep having been interrupted, I whom the slightest stir startles? By this time, the housemaid, Hattie, was in the room. “My dear Mrs. Winchester,” she said. “I need not approach the topics on which you desire silence. But, the marvel of last night consist in your having been removed from your bed and your room without being wakened, and this removal having occurred apparently while the windows were still secure, and the two doors locked upon the inside.” “Hattie, I wish all mysteries were easily explained,” I replied.” “And so we may congratulate ourselves on the certainty that the most natural explanations of the occurrence is one that involves no drugging, no tampering with locks, no burglars, or poisoners—nothing that need alarm you, Mrs. Winchester, or any one else, for our safety,” said Hattie. I would not hear of an attendant sleeping in my room. Servants slept outside my door as a precaution. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
The hurt in my heart stunned me. I did not like the chill in the air, and a fear overcame me. Everyone asks me what I “think” of everything, and I make answer as I can—begging or dodging the question, putting them off. The very next afternoon, whilst I was seated in the shade of the Araucaria Araucana, attempting to concentrate on my book, I heard the crunch of hooves on gravel, so I waited uncomfortably, expected to be summoned at any moment, until Mr. Hansen at last appeared, strode across the drive without a glance in my direction, swung up onto his horse, and spurred away out the gate. I felt briefly ashamed of having hidden from Mr. Hansen, but the thought was swept aside in a rush of emotion. The housekeeping staff reported having seen Hallow Eyes several times, and many of them talk about cold drafts and lights typical of a haunting within the mansion. The truth is that he still lingers in the walls, waiting for a release from his prison. Such a tragedy. All this anger and hate inside of him with no closure. He still roams the halls of Llanada Villa, seeking revenge for his life having been claimed, waiting for the day when, once and for all, he will exact his revenge, and be able to leave The Winchester Mansion. A place where the voices accompanying the phantom music could often be heard from the garden with a distorted disembodies clarity that was strangely beautiful. Where endless fireflies hovered about, like an aura. It could be a sweet dream, or a beautiful nightmare. Perhaps the most alluring aspect of Llanada Villa is that the mystery cannot be explained. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
The mysterious spirits of The Winchester Mystery House walk among us, sometimes pretending to be us to achieve some goal that is at present beyond our ability to ascertain. If, when we encounter these entities, we might come away from the experience concluding that we had met angels unaware, higher beings who were trying to teach us something or who were cleverly guiding our footsteps along the path of this sacred mansion. However, The Winchester Mystery House lies beyond our knowing, it in fact seems designed to confuse us rather than enlighten us. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Something is Out There
The morning sun was shining full on the Victorian garden outside, making each archway of the cloister a picture of yellow light and fluttering leaves. The iron-rimmed wheels of the carriage hearse had trundled a few hours ago. But the weird apparition from this morning had left no physical evidence of its passing. Through the window, I could hear a melancholy charm which I could not duplicate. Sometimes with the nostalgia and grief and self-pity mingling so intensely in me, I wept at the recollection, of what I called a normal life. Sunlight warmed the room through the windows, as I sipped tea. A sensation ran through me like a strong and vibrant current. I heard music again. The notes were drifting upward from two floors below as Daisy played the piano. Daisy could really play the piano. It must be talent, pure and simple, I thought. As I listened to the music playing, the sun was setting, and I laid across my bed, falling quickly to sleep. I had a dream of something black coming round my bed, and I awoke in perfect horror, and I really thought, for some seconds, I saw a dark figure near the chimney piece, but I felt under my pillow for my charm, and the moment my finger touched it, the figure disappeared, and I felt quite certain, only that I had it by me, that something frightful would have made its appearance, and, perhaps, throttled me, as it did the poor servants. I have quickly learned an important lesson about humans and their willingness to be convinced that the World is a safe place. And this lesson about human peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing plates and glasses all over, pouring water on pillows, making bells ring at all hours, humans will accept almost any “natural explanation” offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
Next night I passed as well. My sleep was delightful deep and dreamless. However, I wakened with a sense of lassitude and melancholy, which, however, did not exceed a degree that was almost luxurious. I pinned the charm to the breast of my nightdress. It was too far away the night before. I m quite sure it was all fancy, except the dreams. I used to think that evil spirits made dreams, but Dr. Wayland told me it is no such thing. Only a fever passing by, or some other malady, as they often do, he said, knocks at the door, and not being able to get in, passes on, with that alarm. For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed woman. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it. Without knowing it, I was now in a pretty advanced stage of the strangest illness under which mortal ever suffered. There was an unaccountable fascination in its earlier symptoms that more than reconciled me to the incapacitating effect of that stage of the malady. This fascination increased for a time, until it reached a certain point, when gradually a sense of the horrible mingled itself with it, deepening, as you shall hear, until it discoloured and perverted the whole state of my life. The first change I experienced was rather agreeable. It was very near the turning point from which began the descent of Avernus. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
Certain vague and strange sensations visited me in my sleep. The prevailing one was that of pleasant, peculiar cold thrill which we feel in bathing, when we move against the current of a river. This was soon accompanied by dreams that seemed interminable, and were so vague that I could never recollect their scenery and persons, or any one connected portion of their action. However, they left an awful impression, and a sense of exhaustion, as if I had passed through a long period of great mental exertion and danger. There was the old lime tree with its great trunk gnarled with the passing of nearly nine centuries, the deep well, and the Torture Tower. The Torture Tower is truly grim place. The dust of ages, and darkness and the horror seemed to have settled on it. I saw a half-human form falling to its death from the tower. After all these dreams there remained on waking a remembrance of having been in a place very nearly dark, and of having spoken to people whom I could not see; and especially of one clear voice, of a female’s, very deep, that spoke as if at a distance, slowly, and producing always the same sensation of indescribable solemnity and fear. Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me, and I became unconscious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
It was not three weeks since the commencement of this unaccountable state. My sufferings had, during the last week, told upon my appearance. I had grown pale, my eyes were dilated and darkened underneath, and the languor which I had long felt began to display itself in my countenance. One night, instead of the voice I was accustomed to hear in the dark, I heard one, sweet and tender, and at the same time terrible, which said, “You mother warns you to beware of the assassin.” The following day, There were bats circling the Observational Tower at dusk, but the sky above the treetops was a pale, almost cloudless blue, permeated with fine streaks and swirls of creamy vapour. Everything about the sky suggested an idyllic afternoon scene, but that was not the impression left by the house itself. The sunlight seemed only to accentuate the darkness of the encroaching fruit orchard, and to deepen the shadows within the window frames. My home was seemingly filled with incarnate darkness; even the hot sunlight streaming in through the door seemed to be lost in the vast thickness of the walls, and only showed the masonry rough as when the builder’s scaffolding had come down, but coated with dust and marked here and there with patches of dark stain which, if walls could speak, could have given their own dread memories of fear and pain. The housemaids had been rather neglectful. The wooden staircase was dusty. When I came up through the open trap in the corner of the chamber, there was certainly more light, but only just sufficient to realize the surrounding of the place. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
The spirits who designed the tower had evidently intended that only they who should gain the top should have any of the joy of light and prospect. There were ranges of windows, albeit of medieval smallness, but elsewhere in the tower were only a very few narrow slits such as were habitual in places of medieval defense. A light unexpectedly sprang up, and I saw Trinity, the housemaid, stand near the stairs, in her white nightdress, bathed, from her chin to her feet, on one great stain of blood. My next recollection is that of standing on the lobby, crying for help. Hattie and Mr. Hansen came scurrying into the tower in alarm; a lamp burned always on the lobby, and seeing me, they soon learned the cause of my terror. I insisted on our knocking at Trinity’s door. Our knocking was unanswered. It soon became a pounding and uproar. We shrieked her name, but all was vain. We all grew frightened, for the door was locked. We hurried back, in panic, to my room. There we rang the bell long and furiously. Servant soon came running up the stairs. I ordered the men to force the lock on Trinity’s door. They did so, and we stood, holding our lights aloft, in the doorway, and so started into the room. We called her by name; but there was still no reply. We looked round the room. Everything was undisturbed. I stood on the boards looking at the gilded railings, the new chandelier that hung from the ceiling, and up at the arch overhead with its masks of comedy and tragedy like two faces stemming from the same neck. It was exactly in the state which I had left it on bidding her good night. However, Trinity was gone. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
The room of the Witches Cap is said to have had a spiritual meaning for Mrs. Winchester. However, some have said that the room has a presence of evil—a bad aura around it. It seemed to have a cold presence. Psychics said that they felt weird around the Witches Cap and found that it had a living entity attached to it. The entity was inside of the wood of the room. It seemed to have a controlling effect on anyone who entered it. There is intelligence in the room, which sometimes projects frightening images of the past into the minds of people. Some have also experienced very vivid dreams. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Commonwealths as Free as Angels
By education, I would be understood to mean not only the instruction given to a youth for the regulation of one’s manners, and for one’s improvement in literature and morals; but every opinion, which one had imbibed, and every habit, which one has contracted; whether from reading, observation, and reflection; or from the influence of one’s propensities and passions, and the example of one’s companions and friends’; the whole system of thought and action, which one has acquired at that period of life, when one is released from the authority of one’s parents and teachers, and permitted to be master of one’s own conduct. The importance, and therefore the necessity, of a well-directed education, in this comprehensive sense of the term, is so readily and so generally confessed, that to enlarge upon it may perhaps be thought an unnecessary waste of time both of the author and the reader. However, there are humans, who do not willingly admit the value of studies, which have no tendency to lower the price of bread; and indeed the general truth seems to be acknowledged without definite ideas of what is comprehended under it; without the due impression of its utility upon the mind. A statement more in detail, therefore, of its use and advantages may possibly awaken a more rational and vigorous attention; and may form no unsuitable introduction to a professed treaty on the subject. Every human is what one’s education has made one in a much greater degree, than superficial observers will easily believe. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
How far one’s principles and one’s conduct, one’s successes or one’s misfortunes, the happiness or misery of one’s life depend upon it, seems to be not fully known, or not duly considered. So helpless is the condition, in which man is left by nature; so incapable is one, not only of attaining science and enjoyment, but of providing for ones own subsistence and safety; so much is one the creature of the care of others, and of one’s own exertions; so wonderful is the difference between what one is at birth, and what one becomes at one’s maturity; that amongst the other instances of one’s superiority over the rest of the terrestrial creation, one has been said, with hardly more boldness of language, than force of truth, to enjoy the proud preeminence of being one’s own maker; of enlarging and forming one’s various powers by one’s own diligence and skill. The human mind in its infancy has often been compared to a portion of paper without any imperfection; to an empty reservoir, or a vacuum in nature; and the comparisons are sufficiently accurate to illustrate the truths, which they are intended to support; that the most simple of our ideas are not innate and unborrowed; that we have no acquaintance with external objects, but what I received through the medium of the sense; and consequently no principles of reasoning upon them, but such as are acquired by instruction and reflexion: in one word, no knowledge, but what we on to education. Human knowledge has frequently been considered under three principal divisions of history, of science, and of the arts. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
These subjects of education have been respectively assigned to three great powers of the mind, the memory, and the reason, and the imagination. It is the peculiar province of memory to retain such facts as have been collected respecting the operations of nature and the transaction of mankind; of reason, to form comparisons, distinctions and conclusions throughout the whole circle of ethical and mathematical science; and of the imagination, to combine or diversify the ideas already acquired, and to exhibit them in the various and elegant productions of the statuary, and the musician, the painter, and the poet. Of these powers, however, the strength and extent in so small degree depend upon the cultivation they have received. However, it is an ironical fact that the school after audaciously taking over so many functions of the family now is beginning to provide instructions on how to conduct family life itself. Across the country during the past few years, high school or college students in hundreds of institutions have asked for courses in marriage and family living. When their demand is granted, as it usually is, no one is likely to consider this a revolutionary event. Nor is the so-called family life educator very likely to be regarded as a great innovator. All this shows how basic assumptions have changed. To be sure, when family life education is confused with sex education (as when the course is assigned to a biology teacher), and when parental anxieties about public discussion of sex are aroused, there may be a temporary hullaballoo. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
It seems surprising that some adults strongly oppose the matter-of-fact presentation of the facts of life to high school or college students, facts known to the usual farm child before he or she reaches kindergarten age. Nevertheless such anxieties persist in considerable segment of American communities. Family life educators, while disappointing young people, have often made it easier for parents to accept them, by distinguishing carefully between sex education and education for marriage and family living. To do so is not merely a matter of practical diplomacy; it makes sense theoretically. Not only is the student likely to know the basic physiology of reproduction, thanks to the mass media if not to the parents, but of course the most important content of family life education is the realm of interpersonal relations. The major studies of sexual adjustment over the past generation have all converged on the finding that sexual difficulties in marriage have their origins primarily in personality, not in physiology. The arts of achieving and maintaining intimacy, communication, and consensus are learned, not inborn. Moreover, they are learned much better by children in some families than in others. The child of parent low in social skill has in the past been most likely, statistically speaking, to fail in marriage. One is a poor risk as a potential partner, because in a very real sense one carries on the tradition of one’s family. As everyone dealing with problem families knows, not only may a person’s character difficulties be traceable to those of one’s parents, but their difficulties, to their parents, and so on, as far back perhaps as the biblical seven generations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Recent researchers, instead of falling into fatalistic acceptance of the chains of transmission by which the habit of frustration and failure becomes virtually immortalized, have pondered means of breaking these chains. Yet to announce such an aim is almost to say that the expert will counter the influence of parents. What the family life educators are doing is searching around for means by which deficits in social skill, passed on to children like debts of their parents, may be made up by the schools. In a groping and confused way, this objective probably informs the impulse which leads young people to ask for courses in marriage and family living. Some of them say quite explicitly that they do not want their marriages to be like those of their parents, or that they do not want to bring up their children as they were brought up. Others, less condemnatory but still critical, imagine that family living could be better than it is at present. And some of course, strongly attracted to marriage and parenthood in their own account, want to improve their technique for practicing them as arts. This demand for greater knowledge about family living poses a more serious problem than opposition by groups who fear encroachment of schools on the prerogatives of home and church: it raises the problem of whether the schools can claim to possess the knowledge and means for instruction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Social science can help, of course, but is well advised not to promise too much too soon. On the other hand, scientific caution cannot be used as a warrant for refusing to do as much as can be done; to offer functionless theory and stale description to students who sincerely put answerable questions is to give them a stone when they ask for bread. Practical educators, pressed by importunate queries and pleas, are greatly tempted to supply answers and prescriptions which have not been validated. This in a way is the characteristic position of the practical administrator of any agency; one cannot wait for certainty but must make decisions and go ahead on the basis of the best knowledge available. One needs from the social scientist not the promise of an unspecified utopian future, in which unassailable truths will ultimately be available, but rather a means of rating the reliability of one’s current predictions about various lines of action. The researcher in family relations who can bring one’s investigations to bear at this point may seem to offer less to the family life teacher than either the latter had hoped for, or one oneself has aspired to, but the assistant will be real, not indefinitely potential. It can avoid those painful episodes in which a tentative finding of research is converted into a sweeping dictum by a teacher or popularizer, with consequent scorn by the scientist. Such scorn is the futile reciprocal of the scorn of the practical human for useless theory. Many of the materials and methods now employed in family life and education—textbooks, pamphlets, movies, lectures—consist of popularized research findings, interlarded with invalid opinions and prescriptions, not even suggested by previous research. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
It is not a counsel of perfection to suggest that closer ties between teachers and researchers have fewer hazards for either than their alienation from each other. If teaching and research are to discipline each other there must be a closer association between teachers and researchers. The fact that teaching and research are often done by the same person has not in the past automatically produced the sort of research that can be applied to family living. The steady growth of scientific evaluation procedures in education already indicates the proper channel for such collaboration. If the over-all objective of education is conceived as the production of desired changes in behaviour (or potential behaviour), then the evaluation of whether and how those desired changes can be produced becomes a mater of scientific measurement and understanding. And the teaching of a course can be seen as an experiment. Of all the subjects in the curriculum of a high school, it would seem that family living most lends itself to the latter construction. Those who speak of functional family life courses means courses in behavioural change, not merely courses that reproduce information. Few courses now given on the family are demonstrably functional in this sense. The average family life teacher today may claim that one’s purpose is to improve the quality of family life in one’s community. Even if one supposes one is doing this only by transmitting knowledge, and not by training one’s pupils in greater social skill, unless the result can finally be measured in terms of changed patterns of behaviour, one’s methods can only be defended by wishful thinking. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
To the extent that one is indeed assuming some responsibility for improving the quality of family living through the school, one is quite radically challenging the traditional assumption that each family is adequate to prepare it offspring for competent marriage and parenthood. The small size of modern families, the rate of change between generations, afford immediate grounds for supposing that the contemporary family is less adequate to impart social skills than older families were; and numerous less direct arguments could be adduced for the same conclusion. The more important question is whether the school is more adequate, and beyond that, whether the school—at least through the medium of the next generation—can make the family more adequate. From the standpoint of parents all this may seem a little bit more than they bargained for. Unless they are progressively involved in such developments, and become committed at each important decision along the way, it is to be expected that they will react against the school’s new roles. The process of exploration into the possibilities of what the school can offer to raise the standard of family living in the community requires a reciprocal relationship between citizens and their public institutions. An increasing number of studies show that children’s performance is intimately related to their family situation. It is thus clear that parents cannot throw total responsibility for the performance of their children upon the schools. In order to share that responsibility most effectively, the parents’ family situation may have to be looked at in the light of what can be learned from family research and educational psychology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
It is by the avenues of reciprocity, rather than by any simple transfer of putative function, rather than any simple transfer of putative functions, that schools of family research and educational psychology may contribute to raising the standard of family life in the community, while the improvement of family life in turn can facilitate the performance of children in schools. A program so conceived is likely to produce results without the cross-purposes and mutual frustrations which result when the family life educator creates the impression that one is threatening the most venerable of institutions. Immense changes cannot come without power conflict, and to anticipate who will gain and who will lose, it may help to think of companies on a mind-work spectrum. We need to classify companies not by whether they are nominally in manufacturing or service but by what their people actually do. CSX, for example, is a firm that operates railroads throughout the eastern half of the United States of America along with one of the World’s biggest oceangoing containerization businesses. However, CSX increasingly sees itself as being in the information business. “The information component of our service package is growing bigger and bigger. It’s not just enough to deliver product. Customers want information. Where their product will be consolidated and de-consolidated, what time each item will be where, prices, customs information and much more. We are an information-driven business.” Which means that the proportion of CSX employees in the middle and higher ranges of the mind-work spectrum is increasing. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
What this suggests is that companies can be roughly classified as “highbrow,” “middlebrow” or “lowbrow,” depending on how knowledge-intensive they are. Some firms and industries need to process more information than others in order to produce wealth. Like individual jobs, they can be positioned on the mind-work spectrum according to the amount and complexity of the mind work they do. Lowbrow firms typically concentrate mind work in a few people at the top, leaving muscle work or mindless work to everyone else. Their operating assumption is that workers are ignorant or that, in any case, their knowledge I irrelevant to production. Even in the highbrow sector today one may find examples of “de-skilling”—simplifying jobs, reducing them to their smallest components, monitoring output stroke by stroke. These attempts to apply methods designed by Frederick Taylor for use in factories at the beginning of the twentieth century are, however, the wave of the lowbrow past, not the highbrow future. For any task that is so repetitive and simple that it can be done without thought is, eventually, a candidate for robotization. As the economy moves more toward Third Wave production, all firms are being compelled to rethink the role of knowledge. The smartest firms in the highbrow sector are the first to rethink the role of knowledge and to redesign work itself. They operate on the assumption that productivity and profits will both skyrocket if mindless work is reduced to a minimum or transferred to advanced technology and the full potential of the worker is tapped. The goal is a better paid but smaller, smarter work force. Even middlebrow operations that still require physical manipulation of things are becoming more knowledge-intensive, moving up the mind-work spectrum. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Highbrow firms, in general, are not charitable institutions. Although the work in them tends to be less physically onerous than in lowbrow operations and the surroundings more agreeable, these firms typically demand more of their employees than lowbrow firms do. Employees are encouraged to use not only their rational minds but to pour their emotions, intuitions and imagination into the job. This is why Marcusian critics see in this an even more sinister “exploitation” of the employee. In November 2009, exactly when America and its allies were urging President Karzai of Afghanistan to be serious about fighting corruption in his regime, China Metallurgical Group Corp. made its entry into the country winning, for $800 million, a bid for the stake in the development of one of the World’s largest copper ore deposits. To become a winner, the Chinese side paid a $30 million bribe to Afghanistan’s minister of mines Muhammad Ibrahim Adel. The Minister denied the allegations. The total amount of the Chinese investment into the deposit development is nearly $3 billion, the largest foreign investment in Afghanistan ever. As there is no railroad to transport the ore and the power plant to supply energy, China pledged to construct both. If concessional loans and government-backed subsidized investments are counted as development assistance, China has already become one of the major sources of assistance for Africa, Latin America, and Asia, comparable to any major donor among the industrially developed states. As its assistance is highly concentrated on the development of natural resources and infrastructure, in these areas, for a non-negligible number of developing countries, especially in Africa, it is already number one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The amount of China’s development assistance increased from less than $1 billion in 2002 to $25 billion in 2007. As of 2007, assistance was extended to 62 states. Africa received the greatest amount: $17,962 million. Latin America got just $401 million, but after $16,425 million in 2006. Southeast Asia’s portion was $6,735 million. Out of the total, 66 percent was provided in the form of concessional loans or credit lines, 29 percent state-sponsored investment, and the remaining 5 percent as grants, debt cancellations, and in-kind aid. For comparison, the U.S. foreign operations budget in 2008 (the total of bilateral development aid, economic security and military assistance, multilateral assistance, and food aid) was estimated at $24 billion. Almost all China’s assistance targets natural resources extraction and infrastructure/public works projects. In 2002-2007, allocations for natural resource extraction projects accounted for $9,432 million of assistance of Africa, $18,525 million for Latin America, and $4,788 million for Southeast Asia. The scale of financing infrastructure/public works projects reached $17,865 million, $7,535 million, and $6,438 million respectively. Aid is highly concentrated on resource-rich countries like Angola, the Congo, Sudan, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Gabon. On the other hand, the scale humanitarian aid, as well as technical and military assistance is minor. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Within less than one decade, China has established direct access to a wide range of natural resources in the developing countries. Through active resource diplomacy, it has also dramatically raised its overall economic and political clout in the Third World. For many developing nations all around the globe, it has rapidly grown into the most or one of the most important economic partners. The West becomes increasingly nervous about Beijing’s rising influence and warns developing states of the dangers of China’s tight embrace. A mode of private ordering has an information advantage over court-based formal governance, and the operation of the private mode in the shadow of the law is the object of analysis. The general finding is that arbitration based on its information advantage works well in conjunction with the formal legal system; the two may be said to be complementary to each other. This may explain why the law takes such a benign view of arbitration, respecting its verdicts and even standing ready to enforce them. It may also offer a good approach to the development of formal institutions in less developed countries and transition economies. These can start with a minimal state law that promises to enforce the judgments of arbitration tribunals. At the early stages of this process, the government should encourage such forums to develop rule and procedures using their information advantage. Gradually, the state law can take over these rules and courts can take over some of the functions of the arbitrators. The emerging systems of commercial law in European states similarly adopted and enforced the practices evolved by the private adjudicators of “the law merchant.” This seems to have occurred despite the fact that private arbitrators do not have the incentive to provide a public good to society, or even to their own profession, by creating rules and precedents. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Deceiving spirits carefully adapt their suggestions and leading to the idiosyncrasies of the believer, so that they do not get found out: id est, no leading will be suggested contrary to any strong truth of God firmly rooted in the mind, or contrary to any special bias of the mind. If the mind, or contrary to any special bias of the mind. If the mind has a practical bent, no visibly foolish leading will be given; if the Scriptures are well known, nothing contrary to Scripture will be said; if the believer feels strongly on any point, the leadings will be harmonized to suit that point. And, wherever possible, leadings will be adapted to previously true guidance from God so as to appear to the continuance of that same guidance. Here we see clearly the way of the enemy’s working. The soul begins in God’s will, but the purpose of the evil spirit is to draw it off into the carrying out of one’s will by counterfeiting the guidance of God. Psychopathological offenders have guidance that alters the points of the life, and misdirects the energies of the human and lessens one’s service value. To frustrate this artifice of the enemy, the believer should know that there are two distinct attitudes with regard to guidance. There can be serious problems if their difference is not understood: id est trusting God to guide, and trust that God is guiding. The firt means reliance upon God Himself, and the second is an assumption of being guided which can be take advantage of by deceiving spirits. In the first, God does guide in response to definite trust in Him, and He guides through the spirit of the man who continues to cooperate with His Spirit. Every faculty is left free to act, and one’s will is able to choose intelligently the right step in the path before one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
In the second, when evil spirits take advantage of an assumption that God “is guiding” independent of momentary watchful cooperation with the Holy Spirit, a slight compulsion may be noticed, slowly increasing in force, until ultimately the believer says, “I was compelled” to do such-and-such, and “I was afraid to resist”—the compulsion being taken as an evidence of the guiding of God instead of recognized as being contrary to God’s principle of dealing with His children. If false guidance is yielded to and believed to be of God, the result is that the believer becomes a slave to a supernatural power which destroys all freedom of volition and judgment. One begins to be afraid to act oneself, lest one should not fulfill what one believe to be a minute obedience to the “will of God.” One asks “permission” to do the most obviously simple duties of life, and fears to take a step without “permission.” As soon as the believer is so passively automatic that one is incapable of realizing one’s condition, the psychopathological spirits do not need to work so much under cover. They insidiously start directing one to do the most absurd or foolish things, carefully working inside the range of one’s passive obedience to their will so as to avoid the danger of awakening one’s reasoning powers. As a matter of “obedience,” and not from any true conviction or true principle, one is bidden to let one’s hair grow long, so as to be like Samson, a Nazarite; to go without his cap, to prove his willingness to obey in the smallest matters; one must wear faded clothes as a “test” of “no pride” and a “crucifixion of self,” or as a mark of “implicit obedience to God.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
These things may seem trifles to others, who use their reasoning powers, but they become great issues in the purpose of the deceiving spirits, who, by these directions, aim at making the believer a passive, unthinking, or unreasoning medium, pliable to their will. By one’s obedience in these trivial matters, their hold deepens upon one. When these foolish and absurd actions are publicly visible, the lying spirits know that they have destroyed the testimony of the deceived human in the eyes of sober people. However, there are vast numbers of devoted believers—people known to the Church at large—who are not pushed to such “extremes” of exterior action but who are equally misled, or in bondage to “supernatural” commands concerning matters of food, dress, manners, et cetera, which they think they have received from God. Their spirit of judgment of others, and the secret self-esteem for their “consecration to God” which accompanies their “obedience,” betrays the subtle workings of the enemy. By “sustaining creativity,” we mean the theological notion of “preservation of the World.” Creaturehood implies a twofold resistance: resistance against nonbeing, and resistance against the ground of being by actualized freedom. God as the creative power of being-itself imparts the power of resistance in both cases. His sustaining creativity preserves the structure of reality. The question arises whether God is immanent or transcendent to the World, and the usual answer is that He is both. However, the real problem is the meaning of these spatial symbols “in” and “above” in ontological terms. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The divine immanence is explained in that God is the permanent creative ground of the World, and His transcendence is accounted by the abyss that divides the finite from the infinite. However, the abyss is the obverse of the ground; the finite is infinitely overshadowed by the infinite upon which it totally depends—and one is right back at immanence again. Religious experience demands a less ambiguous transcendence which is better explained in terms of freedom. The otherness of the wholly other is not merely its infinity, but the freedom of a Thou which conflicts with my freedom. Therefore, the divine transcendence is the possible conflict and the possible reconciliation of infinite and finite freedom. This kind of transcendence corresponds more accurately to the demands of the religious encounter. “Providence” is the more traditional name for “directing creativity.” We do not like the term “the purpose of creation,” because it tends to imply that God created in order to gain something. From the creature’s viewpoint, the goal of creation is the creature itself, the actualization of its potentialities. In regard to God, the end of creation is simply the exercise of the divine creativity. In neither cases does creation have a purpose beyond itself. We like to speak of the telos of creativity—the inner aim of fulfilling in actuality what is beyond potentiality and actuality in the divine life. God’s providence, then, is an inner quality present in every set of circumstances which drives or lures the creature to its fulfilment. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Finitude finds its answer in creaturehood and the divine creativity. However, for centuries theologians discussed God’s relation to the World in terms of the natural and the supranatural. However, because of our preference for thinking in dimensions instead of layers, it is no surprise that we object to the natural-supranatural scheme. However, we do more than object. Our whole system is a concerted campaign to slay the theological dragon called “the supernatural.” We consider the concept of the supranatural and its application to such specific problems as inspiration, miracles, and ethics simply intolerable. It is a metaphysical devaluation of the natural; it is static, without dynamism. It is docetic-monophysitic, sorcery, and leads to superstitious consequences. Our idea of God is not transcendent in a supranatural sense, that is to say, if “transcendent” means the establishment of a “World” behind the World, if “incarnation” means the descent of a divine being from a Heavenly place and its metamorphosis into a human being, if “immortality” is understood as the continuation of temporal existence after death, if the latent church within cultures and religions is denied, if a dramatic end-catastrophe sometime in the future is affirmed. All this is a supranaturalism against which our theology stand. Our concept of the supranatural is dialectic; it is arrived at by opposition to the natural. Whatever cannot be derived from the law of nature is supranatural. This basis of definition is the natural, and the essential element is the supra. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Thus the dialectic of the supranatural involves two movements. The first denies the natural. The second, the supra, duplicated the natural by affirming it on a higher level. From this basic position the supranaturalistic theologians develop their concept of God, His aseity and transcendence. They link Him to the World by causality, yet confine Him to the realm that is above nature, id est, the supranatural order. God is above the World. The rest of supranaturalistic theology marches to the same beat. Its method treats the Christian message as a package of supranatural truth that fell into the natural World. Miracles are the effects of supranatural tinkering with natural laws. Creation is a supranatural act that began time and nature, and eschatology is a cataclysm that ushers in an idealized reduplication of natural life. We characterize supranaturalism as dualistic, in the sense of a theology that imagines a supranatural World beside or above the natural one, a World in which the unconditional finds a local habitation, thus making God a transcendent object. By this standard we are justified in speaking of the supranaturlism of Roman Catholic system, the dualism of nature and grace. Christianity has survived through the ages because it has been a dynamic tradition. It always knew how to adapt itself to a new thought and new conditions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Moses, the Prophets, Joseph Smith, Johanan ben Zakkai, Maimonides—each saved Christianity in an hour of crisis by adjusting it to the times. Our holiest sentiments must be expressed in the tongue that links us with our ancestors and our brothers everywhere. The practices and customs of Mormonism and Christianity are precious to us, because their contents reflect the noblest aspirations of which humans are in the process of showing themselves capable, and because their forms, growing out of our own group experience, are closest to us. Our loyalty to Mormon and Christian life is therefore entirely free from a scorn or dislike for other religions and cultures. On the contrary, Mormonism makes possible our appreciation of other civilizations. Being a Mormon is the least difficult way of being truly human. The recognition of God in the World and the drive for ethical perfection are the two great contributions of the Mormon to the World—two that are really one. Perhaps other civilizations can survive without religion, but not Mormonism. Our history, our customs, our law, our literature, even our music and art, are intimately connected with the religious and ethical ideals of Mormonism. Mormon nationalism and religion are the body and soul of the living organism which is the Mormon people. A vital Mormonism in America includes an optimistic attitude toward Mormon traditions and an equally clear awareness of the necessity for growth and development. It does not deny the patent fact of the peoplehood of America, but places the emphasis properly upon the fundamentally religious character of its civilization. It is genuinely American, yet retains its bond of attachment to Heaven. There will be an inevitable victory of universal justice, freedom and peace, which our prophets and sages envisioned as the Kingdom of God on Earth. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Evils of Ignorance–Creation is the Beginning of the Fall
Public sentiment is a growing power the World over. In our country its influence is most marked. Here it creates law and repeals it. A law in violation of public sentiment is dead letter, and therefore demoralizing, for laws habitually violated tend to lawlessness. Reverence for law is a wholesome sentiment, which should be early implanted in the juvenile mind. Laws in reference alike to the support of schools or attendance upon them must depend largely upon public sentiment. Laws, just and right in themselves, and adapted, if sustained, to promote the greatest good of the greatest number, may yet fail utterly from the want of popular sympathy and support. The question, therefore, of the expediency of compulsory attendance at school in any given State depends on the enlightened public sentiment of the community. Wherever good schools have been so long maintained that the people generally regard them as essential to their individual thrift and happiness and to public security, morality, and prosperity, laws for the prevention of illiteracy may be wisely enacted. In those States where free public schools are still a novelty, or where illiteracy most abounds, where multitudes appreciate neither the advantages of education nor the evils of ignorance, compulsory attendance is considered impracticable. However, in those States where the traditions of the people from their earliest history have fostered the general appreciation of common-school education as their most precious heritage, as the source of their success and prosperity, as indispensable to their future growth, as essential to skilled industry, as the cheapest police-agency comes at length to be recognized as the universal right, duty, and interest of humans. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
If the State has a right to provide for any internal improvements, it has the right to provide for that education which is the condition of all progress. If the State may enforce regulations for the health of the body, it may do the same for the mind. If the State has a right to hang a criminal, it has a better right to prevent one’s crime by proper culture. The right to imprison and to execute implies the right to use the best means to prevent the need of either. What have to get this fatalistic idea out of people’s heads that we are on a downward spiral that cannot be stopped. The public school system in which the United States of America takes pride is one of the most paradoxical if not self-contradictory institutions in American life. On the other hand, it is completely socialized. No family pays directly for the education of those of its children who attend it; each family pays taxes more or less according to its ability, receives according to its need. All the children in the school share its services, expect where segregation and discrimination occur. The public high school in particular is the most cosmopolitan and equalitarian congregation of people in any community. Education is not merely available to all children, but compulsory during certain ages in each state. No child can be rejected as a pupil, save for reason of severe defect. The entire staff of the school—administrative, professional, and maintenance—is salaried. The whole roster of citizens in each community is eligible to participate in selecting members of its board of education and in affecting their policies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
On the other hand, in the actual conduct of teaching and learning, conventional procedure is the incarnation of competitive individualism. The assignment of pupils to grades, rooms, and seats usually ignores the social ties among them. The marking systems rank each on the basis of rivalry with all. Beyond this marking system is the swarm of psychological test devised on the premise of an individualistic psychology to which few theorists remain willing to commit themselves. The tasks imposed on pupils are for the most part individual tasks, with no group decisions and no group responsibilities. To the extent that the problem of motivation is consciously considered at all, it is generally assumed sufficient to rely on the stimulation of rivalry for grades, and on parental interest in fostering the art of getting on in the World. Yet realistically, the spectacle is one of a majority sentenced to unfavourable comparisons and burdensome compulsions, from which they escape daily and yearly as fast as they can—5.3 percent dropouts in the high school years is still the rough national average; but California has a dropout rate of 10 percent. It would be redundant to recite here the long struggle between those who want the school to concentrate upon putting vocationally useful knowledge into children’s heads, and those who have declared their aim as the development of the entire personalities of children. The liberal educationalists tend to be those who emphasize the school’s functions in developing people for their responsibilities of citizenship; the vocationalists, those who emphasize training for economic competition. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Nevertheless, there occur numerous crossings for these lines. To further highlight this illustration, if one considers the method of examination employed in purely vocational schools run on a commercial basis, the pupil is usually passed on the achievement of a standard level of objective competence, rather than upon the calculation of a minimum numerical average maintained in competition with other pupils. As the scope of formal education comes to include adults and the very young, it is notable also that this new population in nursery schools and adult programs is not subjected to the usual competitive apparatus. Methods in adult education especially, where participation is completely voluntary, relay largely on noncompetitive motivation such as: group recognition, recruitment through friends, sociability, a degree of student choice of subject matter, choice of instructors, and design of methods. Forums, workshops, round table, committees, conferences, and seminars characterize adult methods. In public school extracurricular activities, it is obvious that only voluntary methods seem appropriate to induce participation, that motivation depends primarily upon the membership standing of a person in a group. Any teacher in a high school can give examples of seemingly dull, resistant, apathetic youths, who suddenly come alive in extracurricular activities, and exhibit prodigies of ability, energy, and ingenuity when given a responsible share in the tasks of a voluntary group. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Any teacher in a high school can give examples of seemingly dull, resistant, apathetic youths, who suddenly come alive in extracurricular activities, and exhibit prodigies of ability, energy, and ingenuity when given a responsible share in the tasks of a voluntary group. Not as many teachers have grasped the possibility of finding ways in which channels of motivation can be put to the service of serious learning. Since much of the best learning occurs in extracurricular activities, how could this be made to include more of the ordinary curriculum subject matter, thus making the child’s learning a art of one’s active involvement with one’s fellows? The evolution of policy within the school falls readily int our familiar three stages, although this may not be as readily apparent as with other types of family agencies. At the first stage, the intervals of spontaneous activity by pupil—recess, playground periods, assemblies, and singing—are regarded as concessions, as ways for children to let off steam, so they can return more seriously to the work of learning. At the second stage, extracurricular activities are recognized as having some values on their own account, more facilities and encouragement are provided, and these activities become more definitely and extensively organized on a group basis, but with a substantial element of adult guidance; counseling services grow, starting with health and going on to home visits and intensive testing. At the third stage which is far from being realized, the responsible self-governing group which is characteristic of many extracurricular activities permeates school activities, less as a concession to recreational demands, or as an attempt to supply social graces to children from limited home environments, but as a beneficial program of complete education. #RandophHarris 5 of 19
The parent-teacher associations connected with public schools are potentially the bodies through which all adult citizens may participate directly in the planning and evaluation of the educational programs in their communities. At present, however, the bords of education are too remote from ordinary citizens on the one hand, and the parent-teacher associations are too frail on the other. School boards, consisting of a handful of unpaid citizens elected for several years on a normally nonpartisan basis, tend to leave initiative and leadership to the salaried administrators. They are less governing boards than boards of audit and review. Their members are often so busy and exhausted that they have less intimate day-by-day knowledge of what goes on in the schoolrooms than do the parents of school children. Yet, in the hands of boards of education rests the ultimate power to modify what goes on in the schoolrooms day by day. Lacking any such power, parent-teacher associations normally operate (save in certain small school districts) under the handicap of seeming to be purely “social” organizations, where acquaintances may be made, tea drunk, and speeches heard. Biennial elections of school boards, and, in smaller places, annual school meeting to hear and accept reports, are usually pale and bloodless versions of what might be possible if the powers and functions of boards of education and parent-teacher associations could be fused in some workable manner. A few boards have made grouping efforts in this direction, of course, is not peculiar to public school systems. It is the characteristic shortcoming of local government in general. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The frequently heard suggestions for a revival of town meetings or their equivalent fail to appreciate the peculiarly modern nature of the problem—the frustration of citizenship in the city. So far no inventor of social procedures has suggested a solution which has worked as well as town meetings are reputed to have worked in their time. As it is universally admitted that the members of the human family must be prepared by instruction, and training, for the service which devolves upon them in this life, many are advocating for the maintenance of our public schools. Without education, each human must begin jut where one’s ancestors began, and however much wisdom or knowledge on obtains by one’s own efforts, one leaves none of it to one’s posterity when one dies; there is no opportunity for the advancement of one’s race. Humans, uneducated, are not prepared either to serve the World most effectively, or to enjoy the World most fully. The difference between a human who has been well instructed and trained from one’s youth, and what the same human would have been like if one had grown up untaught and untrained, is the difference, in some cases, between a civilized human and an uncultured human. The one may fulfill a noble mission, lead a life of high enjoyment, add to the happiness of one’s fellow humans, many of whom one never saw, and, when one dies, after a brief sojourn here, may leave the World better, richer, and more prosperous for one’s having lived in it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The other, in some cases, may become a burden to one’ fellow humans to oneself, while one adds nothing to the World’s wealth, and, at the best, renders no more service to one’s race than if one had been a horse or an ox. People in China are certainly preparing for the World of the future. China is breaking existing rules in three major ways. First, it combines participation in the resource development projects in Less Developed Counties (LDCs) with large-scale development assistance focused on the building of their infrastructure. The government is acting in tandem with resource companies, providing financial and organizational support. Western firms do not work together with their governments in this fashion and thus cannot offer similar packages. (To compete with China, Japan, and South Korea are starting to rapidly move in the same direction at this point.) Second, the development assistance China provides is, mostly, neither official development aid ( developing country itself, China does not want to bear donors’ responsibilities), nor purely commercial loans and investment. It is something in between: concessional loans (extended on better terms than commercial credit) and investment backed and subsidized by the state. China often extends resources-backed development loans, meaning that the borrowers pay its debt not in cash but with oil, cocoa beans, or metal ores. It is a mutually beneficial scheme. The Chinese side gets resources it needs, while cash-strapped loan recipients do not have to pay in precious hard currency. In the late 1970s, to build its own infrastructure, China obtained similar loans from Japan leveraging its coal, oil, and other resources. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Third, unlike the West and to its great embarrassment, China’s assistance is not conditioned on the recipient states’ record regarding democratization, human rights, economic liberalization, or anticorruption measures. To access natural resources, it does not hesitate to cooperate with the most dictatorial and abusive regimes in the World. In such countries it easily becomes a de facto monopolist as Western firms are prohibited from going there by law. Compared to the West, China provides its assistance quicker and more easily, without complicated screening procedures, and often on a larger scale. Let us pick up Africa as one of the major examples. Here, between 2004 and 2010, Beijing concluded agreements on the resource-backed loans with at least seven states for a total of nearly $14 billion. It extended the oil-backed loan o Angola with Chinese companies building roads, railways, hospitals, schools, and water systems. Nigeria got two loans to finance projects for utilization of gas to generate electricity. The hydropower project in the Congo was prepaid in oil and the one in Ghana in cocoa beans. The former also received a $3 billion copper-backed loan to build infrastructure, hospitals, and universities. In 2004, the Export-Important Bank of China extended three loans to the Angolan government at interest rates ranging from LIBOR plus 1.25 percent to LIBOR plus 1.75 percent, with generous grace periods and long repayment terms. Commercial lenders, such as Standard Chartered Bank, charged Angola LIBOR plus 2.5 percent or more, without any grace periods, and required faster repayment. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
China’s $3 billion joint mining venture in the Congo gives the Congolese government a 32 percent stake, while in the joint ventures (JVs) with companies from other countries its share ranges from 7 percent to 25 percent. Also, China is starting to actively create and manage Special Trade and Economic Cooperation zones in Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Zambia, and so on, building infrastructure and facilities, especially with the aim of boosting low-cost manufacturing production and exports. This is exactly what African countries need to diversify and upgrade their industrial structure and to create jobs. In fact, the Chinese are replicating their own pattern of economic development at its earlier stages. The zones also serve as platforms for the entry by Chinese companies searching for new markets and lower costs. Encouraging the transfer of production of low-end and/or energy-intensive manufacturing items, the government subsidizes part of their start-up expenses. The $5 billion China-Africa Development Fund has acquired equity shares in three of the seven planned zones. In contrast, the U.S.A. Congress does not all the U.S.A. Agency of International Development to finance any activities leading to the relocation of Americans’ jobs overseas. Parties to an economic transaction can exploit their high-quality inside information using a relational contract, and a formal contract that must be based on lower-quality publicly verifiable information acts as a fallback in the event of cheating within their relationship. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Actions are costly to the agent, and observable only to oneself. The principal cares only about one’s own outcome minus one’s payment to the agent. The principal wants to motivate the agent’s actions, but there is some uncertainty so actions cannot be inferred precisely from the outcome. In the standard theory of the agency, the principal’s outcome is assumed to be verifiable, so outcome-based bonus or incentive payments can be designed and written into a contract that can be enforced in a court of law if necessary. However, in reality the principal’s true outcome is rarely verifiable to outsiders, even though the parties may have good information about. External, legally enforceable contracts then have to relay on some other performance measure that is an imperfect proxy for the principal’s outcome, and an even more imperfect proxy for the agent’s action. (The traditional economic theory of agency formulated the problem as a trade-off between giving the agent stronger incentives and making one bear more risk.) The simplest example of this situation is an employment contract, where the principal is the owner of a firm and the agent a manager or worker. However, it can also be interpreted in the context of a firm’s outsourcing decision. The principal firm buys from an agent firm a component that I an input to one of the principal’s final products. The principal firm’s ultimate objective is profit, but the contribution of the component to the final product, and indeed the contribution of the final product to the profit of the firm as a whole, are so thoroughly concealed in the account of the firm as to be unverifiable to a court of law. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Matters like the quantities and time of delivery of the component are recorded and easily verifiable; therefore a contract that specifies the firm’s payment to the component supplier as a function of these matters can be written and enforced by the government’s civil courts. However, the two firms may have a much better idea of other matters, such as the quality of the work, and can base a relational contract on such inside information. The finding that relational contract work best when the parties value the future highly and when the external performance measure is of very poor quality is surprising. However, one result is not so immediately obvious, and repays further thought. This is the finding that when the incentive constraint is binding and the relational contract yields a second best, a partial improvement in the external performance worsens the outcome of the relational contract. This reminds one of various “second-best” propositions in economics: when an economy has two or more distortions, a reduction in the size of one distortion may aggravate the overall distortion and reduce economic welfare. In this instance the explanation is tied to a general property of tacitly cooperative equilibria of repeated games. The harsher is the punishment that faces a deviator, the better the equilibrium that can be achieved. In this model, the punishment consists of having to fall back on the formal contract based on the external performance measure. The more accurate is that measure, the better is the payoff from the formal contract and therefore the weaker the punishment. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Similar results appear in other contexts. For example, Kranton (1996) models self-governing repeated interactions with well-matched partners, when the consequence of cheating is having to go to an anonymous arms-length market with inferior matching but enforceable contracts. A partial improvement in the quality of matching in the market then tightens the incentive constraint on self-governance and worsens its outcome. In Kranton’s context this leads to a cumulative process leading to an equilibrium where one or the other of the modes survives. More generally, one can argue that cooperation within a group is better sustained if the consequences of deviation are made worse, which requires worse outcomes from dealing with people outside the group. This is a trade-off: better within-group cooperation may require worse cross-group relations. In starker terms, a beneficial sense of “us” may be fostered only by sharpening the sense of “us versus them” hostility. In the economic context, the result has potentially serious implications of less-developed countries and transition economies that are attempting to install a formal system of contract law or to improve an existing one. The new institution of governance cannot be expected to leapfrog to perfection. The organizations and people are sure to need a period of trial and error, of experimentation and learning. The above results say tht the process of gradual improvement of state law may inflict an interim cost on the economy, by worsening the outcomes of the currently used relation-based system. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Therefore it is important to explore the results in greater depth, and look for empirical evidence bearing on it. In an established bilateral relationship it is the relationship itself that determines the degree of cooperation, regardless of whether the courts are effective. This is encouraging for the prospects of improving the courts gradually without causing short-term harm. However, the finding runs contrary to the theoretical result. If the theoretical model is broadly right, effectiveness of the courts would be irrelevant to the outcome of relational contract only if the parameters puts the equilibrium in a region that increases one’s temptation to renege on the relational contract. A second possibility is that the accuracy of the external measure is so poor that the alternative relational contract is not recourse to the courts but a total breakdown of the interaction. The third possibility, of course, is that the theoretical model is missing some key aspect of reality; that provides a challenge and an opportunity for future research. The upper-symbolic economy makes obsolete not only our concepts of unemployment but our concepts of work as well. To understand it and the power struggles that it triggers, we will even need a fresh vocabulary. Thus, even the division of the economy into such sectors as agriculture, manufacturing, and services today obscures rather than clarifies. Today’s high-speed change blur once-neat distinctions. Instead of clinging to the old classifications, we need to look behind the labels and ask what people in these companies actually do to create added value. Once we pose this question, we find that more and more of the work in all three sectors consists of symbolic processing, or “mind work.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Farmer now use computers to calculate grain feeds; steelworkers monitor consoles and video screens; investment bankers switch on their laptops as they model financial markets. In matter little whether economist choose to label these as agriculture, manufacturing, or service activities. Even occupational categories are breaking down. To label someone a stockroom attendant, a machine operator, or a sales representative conceals rather than reveals. It is a lot more useful today to group workers by the amount of symbolic processing or mind work they do as part of their jobs regardless of the label they wear or whether they happen to work in a store, a truck, a factory, a hospital, or a office. In what might be called the “mind-work spectrum” we have the research scientists, the financial analyst, the computer programmer or, for that matter, the traditional file clerk. We include file clerks and scientists in the same group because, while their functions obviously differ and they work at vastly different levels of abstraction, both—and millions like them—move information around or generate more information. That makes their work symbolic. In the middle of the mind-work spectrum we find a broad range of “mixed” jobs—tasks requiring the worker to perform physical labour but also handle information. The Federal Express or United Parcel Service driver also operates a computer at one’s side. In advanced factories the machine operator is a highly trained information worker. The hotel clerk, the nurse, and many others have to deal with people—but spend a considerable fraction of their time generating, getting, or giving out information. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Auto science engineers at BMW dealers, for example, may still have greasy hands, but they also use a computer system designed by Hewlett-Packard that provides them with an “expert system” to help them in trouble-shooting along with hundreds of gigabytes of technical drawings accessible via the Internet. The system asks them for data about the car they are repairing; it permits them to search through the masses of technical material intuitively; it makes inferences and then guides them through the repair steps. When they are interacting with this system, are they “auto science engineers” or “mind workers”? It is the purely manual jobs at the lower end of the spectrum that are disappearing. With fewer manual jobs in the economy, the “proletariat” is now a minority, replaced increasingly by a “cognitariat.” More accurately, as the super-symbolic economy unfolds, the proletariat becomes a cognitariat. The key questions about a person’s work today have to do with how much of the job entails information processing, how routine or programmable it is, what level of abstraction is involved, what access the person has to the central data bank and management information system and how much autonomy and responsibility the individual enjoys. We will continue more of this discussion in the upcoming days. The “voice of the devil” as an angel of light is more difficult to detect when it comes with wonderful strings of texts which makes it appear like the voice of the Holy Spirit. Voices from without, either as from God or angels, may be rejected, yet the believer may be deceived by “floods of texts” which one thinks are from God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Therefore, detection of the source of supernatural voices requires further inquiry: Does the believer rely upon these “texts” apart from the use of one’s mind or reason? This indicates passivity. Are these texts a prop to one, an undermining of one’s reliance on God Himself; weakening one’s power of decision and one’s (proper) self-reliance? Do these texts influence one and make one elated and puffed up as “specially guided by God,” or crush and condemn one, and throw one into despair and condemnation, instead of leading one to sober dealing with God Himself over the course of one’s life—with a keen and increasing knowledge of right and wrong obtained from the written Word by the light of the Holy Spirit? If these and other such-like results are the fruit of the “texts” given, they may be rejected as from the deceiving spirits, or at least an attitude of neutrality should be taken concerning them until proof of their source is obtained. The voice of the devil is also distinguishable from the voice of God by its purpose and outcome. If the outcome is not in accordance with the guidance given, then one definitely needs to check with fellow believers regarding its validity. For, obviously, if God speaks directly to a human, the human will then be infallibly correct with regard to the specific matter in question. Thus far, creation has been considered within the order proper to it, the essential order. However, man as the creature the exercises freedom brings us to the boundary line of the existential order of tragedy and dissolution. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
God as the creator is beyond the distinction of essence and existence. He does not depend upon essences or divine ideas which govern His creativity. His creative vision simultaneously embraces both the essence of a creature and each moment of its existence. However, created being does not lie buried within the divine life. It exists in the universe of reality, and its existence is different from its essence. Humans provide the clearest insight into creaturely existence because only they possess finite freedom. Humans, and analogously the rest of reality, is not only grounded in the creative ground of being, but they are also outside it inasmuch as one “stands upon” one’s self when one exercises one’s freedom. One can only actualize one’s essence, be a real human, by positing free acts which inevitably clash with one’s essential nature. Fully developed creatureliness is fallen creatureliness. At this pivotal point of freedom the doctrine of creation (the essential order) and the doctrine of the fall (the existential order) merge and become indistinguishable. Being a creature means both to be rooted in the creative ground of the divine life and to actualize one’s self through freedom. Creation I fulfilled in the creaturely self-realization which simultaneously is freedom and destiny. However, it is fulfilled through separation from the creative ground through a break between existence and essence. Creaturely freedom is the point at which creation and fall coincide. Creation is the beginning of the fall. One who feels in one’s heart genuine tie with the life of one’s people cannot possibly conceive of the existence of the Christian people apart from “Queen Sabbath.” We can say without exaggeration that more than America preserved the Sabbath, the Sabbath preserved America. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
If I were asked to single out one of the great historical institutions more essential for our preservation than all others, I would not hesitate to declare that it is the observance of the Sabbath. Without this, the home of the Church or Mormon Temple, the festivals and the holy days, the language and the history of our people, will gradually disappear. If the Sabbath will be maintained by those who have observed it and will be restored to those who have abandoned it, then the permanence of Christianity or Mormonism is assured. Every Christian or Mormon who has it within one’s power should assist in the effort to restore the Sabbath to the man from whom it has been taken away from. No deeds of charity or philanthropy, no sacrifices of tie or fortune made by anyone, equals in beneficent result the expenditure of time and money looking toward the re-establishment of the Sabbath among God’s people. No amounts of prating about morals will ever take the place of rooted habits ruthlessly plucked out. The observance of the Sabbath brings deep and abiding rewards to the Christian and Mormons. It re-creates one’s spirit as it regenerates one’s physical and nervous system. It brings one into communion and with God, links one with the profoundest aspirations of America, and draws one into the orbit of the Book of Mormon or the Christian Bible. It therefore follows inseparably that the failure to observe the Sabbath brings its penalties in the impoverishment of the spirit, the denudation of Christian and Mormon values and alienation from Christian and Mormon community, literally “that soul is cut off from its kinsmen.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Lay Bare the Secret You Keep from Each Other
It was a lie. A lie I would never forget for as long as I walked the Earth. He would tell us nothing of himself but that he was “a fool,” to be frightened by their talk, and that the rattle of a window, or the dropping of a pin was enough to scare him now. He was now asleep on the sofa. The candles were flaring, and there was a wavering shadow at the door that looked like the head of a man with a long neck, and a long, sharp nose, peeping and drawing back. The fugitive shadow seemed to be breaking up, rearranging itself oddly. I rose, and walking slowly to him, I stood over him and looked at him, at the blood that soaked his lace shirt and stained his face. He did not open his eyes. However, I felt his sorrow. I felt its immensity, and I wished I did not feel it, and for the moment I understood the gulf that divided us, and the gulf that divided his attempt to overpower me from my rather simple defense of myself. And with his eyes closed, and his hand open beside him, he appeared the abandoned offspring of time and supernatural accident, someone as miserable as myself. What had he done to become what he was? His family was ruined, I believe, in some civil wars, long ago. Through the hall door, I could see the moonlight was beautiful. As the night waned on, the young man recovered slowly from his brain fever, but not perfectly. He was not sufficiently strong to remove for change of scene and air, which were necessary for his complete restoration. In the dead of the night, Haze Austin was suddenly awakened. And in this broken child were centuries of evil and centuries of knowledge, and out of him there came no ignominious entreaty but merely the soft and bruised sense of what he was. Old, old evil, eyes that had seen dark ages of which I only dream. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
I shall never forget this sight, for he looked the perfect incarnation of hate. His green eyes blazed with lurid fire, and his white teeth seemed to almost shine through the blood which dabbled his mouth. Desperately he tried to vanquish what he did not comprehend. He was so exquisitely beautiful and so lost. “Is there a chill in the air, dear?” I said. “I almost shiver; have I been dreaming? You look ill, Mrs. Winchester; a little faint,” said Haze. “I am better now. How do you feel now, Haze?” I said. I was beginning to take alarm. Natural enough, was it not, that one of his own should take him away from Llanada Villa. “Papa would be grieved beyond measure,” he said. “If he thought we were inconveniencing you at all.” In a moment he was standing on his own feet. And then he walked drowsily beside me, my arm about his shoulder, bolstering him and steadying him, until we were moving towards his father’s cottage on my estate. I only half glanced at the figures passing us, until I saw a familiar shape under the trees. Somewhere far off in the darkened gardens, other were near. When he pushed open the door to his father’s home, he was laying dead upon the floor. His cravat was drawn halter-wise tight round his throat, and he had done its work well. The body was cold, and had been long dead. In due course the coroner held his inquest, and the jury pronounced that the deceased, Mac Austin, had died by his own hand, in a state of temporary insanity. However, Haze had his own opinion about his father’s death, though his lips were sealed, and he never spoke about it. He went and lived for the residue of his days in York, where there are still people who remember him, a taciturn and surly young man, who attended church regularly, and also drank a little, and was know to have saved some money. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
But there occurred that night an event which gave my thoughts quite a new turn, and seemed to even startle even Haze’s languid nature. When I returned to my drawing-room, and sat down to coffee and chocolate, Elizabeth joined me, and we had a little card party. When the game was over, Elizabeth and I sat down on the sofa, and I asked her, a little anxiously, whether she had heard from her mother since her arrival. She answered “No.” I then asked her whether she knew where a letter would reach her at present. “I cannot tell,” she answered, ambiguously, “but I have been thinking of leaving you; you have been already too hospitable and too kind to me. I have given you an infinity of trouble, and I should wish to take a carriage to-morrow, and post in pursuit of her; I know where I shall ultimately find her, although I dare not tell you.” “But you must not dream such a thing,” I exclaimed. “I cannot afford to lose you so, and I will not consent to your leaving us, except under the care of your mother, who was so good as to consent to your remaining with us till she should herself return. I should be quite happy if I knew that you heard from her; but this evening the accounts of the progress of the mysterious disease that has invaded our community, grow even more alarming; and my beautiful guest, I do feel the responsibility, unaided by advice from your mother, very much. However, I shall do my best’ one thing is certain, that you must not think of leaving Llanada Villa without her distinct direction to that effect. We should suffer too much in parting from you to consent to it easily.” “Thank you, Mrs. Winchester, a thousand times for your hospitality,” Elizabeth answered, smiling bashfully. “You have all been too kind to me; I have seldom been so happy in all my life before, as in your beautiful mansion, under your care, and in the society of your dear niece.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
I accompanied Elizabeth to her room, and sat and chatted with her while she was preparing for bed. She turned around, “Do you think that you will ever confide fully in me about your home?” “Now, Elizabeth, you are gong to talk your wild nonsense again,” I said hastily. “Not I, silly little fool as I am, and full of whims and fancies; for your sake I’ll talk like a sage. Did you ever have a ball in the Grand Ballroom? What was it like? How charming it must be.” “I almost forget, it is years ago.” I laughed. “Mrs. Winchester, you are not so old. Your first ball can hardly be forgotten yet.” “I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent. There occurred that night what has confused the picture, and made it colours faith I was all but assassinated in my bed, wounded here,” I touched my breast, “and never was the same since.” “Were you near dying?” “Yes, a very—cruel love—strange love, that would have taken my life. Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifices without blood. Let us go to sleep now; I feel lazy.” I bid her good-night, crept from the room with an uncomfortable sensation, locked her door and retired to my chambers. I was lying in bed, with my hands buried in my rich wavy hair, under my cheek, and my head upon the pillow. I often wondered whether my pretty guest ever said her prayers. I certainly had never seen her upon her knees. In the morning she never came down until long after our family prayers were over, and at night she never left the drawing room to attend our brief evening prayers in the hall. Ever since the midnight invaders, I locked all the doors in the house at night, and my whimsical alarms about prowling assassins required me to have the servants search every room in the house to make sure there were no lurking assassins or robbers “ensconced.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
After these measures were taken, I got into my bed and fell asleep. A light was burning in my room. This was an old habit, of very early date, ad which nothing could have tempted me to dispense with. Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. However, dreams come through walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exists and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths. I had a dream that night that was the beginning of a very strange agony. I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep. However, I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was. I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as I had seen it last, except tht it was very dark, and I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. However, I soon saw that it was a sooty-black figure that resembled a man. He appeared to me about five or six feet tall, he floated around the room hither and tither with the lithe sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you ay supposed, I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and I could see it was Haze. He looked at me with centuries of evil blazing in his eyes, but there was not the slightest stir or respiration. And I felt a shudder. My heart expanded slightly, against my will. “I curse you,” he said. As I stared at him, I felt danger again, terrible danger. Then he appeared to have changed his place, and was now nearer to the door; then, close to it, the door opened, and he vanished. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
It would be vain my attempting to tell you the horror with which, even now, I recall he occurrence of that night. It seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompassed the apparition. Later that day, I had another strange experience; I walked into the parlor that afternoon where Daisy and Elizabeth had been sitting, and a saw Haze upon the sofa. However, then I realized that he was invisible to the others. He got up and walked toward me—I was not afraid—and then—seemed to dissolve into the air. And so I wondered…whether I might have fallen into a trance. I clasped my hands and struggled to control my breathing. We know that, in the mesmeric trance, a subject may acquire unusual mental powers; The Frenchman Didier, who could read minds, play cards blindfolded, and identify the contents of sealed containers with great accuracy, is one of the best-known instances. Ancient houses, it has always seemed to me, are like Leyden jars, quietly accumulating the influences of the past…and my home is a special case. I lay awake into the small hours, worrying over these anxieties as they became more and more nightmarish until I sank into a troubled sleep. Sleeping had become so difficult one night that I wandered through this vast mansion, searching for a precious jewel William had given me. The jewel had been lost; I did not know how, but I knew that my own carelessness was to blame. To make matter worse, I could not remember what kind of stone it was, for as I went from room to room, a voice kept chanting, “Emerald, sapphire, ruby, diamond,” over and over, and none of them seemed right, because the lost stone was a different, a more beautiful colour than any of those, and I knew I ought to be able to picture it, and thus recall its name, but I could not. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
The mansion was absolutely silent; the light throughout, even in corridors was a pale, uniform grey like that of an overcast sky. The rooms were modestly furnished; each one seemed to have its own miniature flight of stairs, up or down two or three steps, and the corridors kept changing levels in similar fashion. Though the house itself was not especially sinister, my anxiety over the fate of the jewel grew steadily more acute until it had risen to an unbearable pitch. Then it occurred to me that I still had not searched the Venetian Dining Room. The thought precipitated a vertiginous change of scene; the light sank to a dim, murky brown, and I was standing in the doorway of the room where we had dined that night. The curtains were drawn, the candles snuffed; the room seemed to be empty, but as I crept toward the table, I saw, above the back of the chair in which I usually sat, the dark outline of a head. There was time to slip away quietly; but perhaps the jewel had fallen into the lining of my chair, and if I were to tiptoe forward, I might be able to see it. I was within two feet of the motionless figure when a voice spoke from the doorway behind me, a word that rang like a loud gong, louder and louder until it became my own cry of “No!” and I woke in grey dawn light to find myself standing at the head of the stairs. And then I thought I caught sight of a shape, dak in space and light, through the door in one of the bedrooms. There was a tall figure in what I could have sworn was a black top hat, staring directly back at me. The figure was dressed formally in black morning suit. And then, with a movement so spasmodic and sudden, the man turned and stated to walk eastward, out of sight. I dismissed it, as one of the Winchester’s passing enigmas. There was much about the curse of the Winchester Mansion that I did not understand. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
Spirits of Llanada Villa, I awaken the powers of darkness which dwell within you by the power of the blood of the three heeded Dragon Zohak that you may serve to empower Mrs. Winchester’s great work! Through serving the greater cause of dark magick which break the shackles that bind the Blackened Fire of Spirit, may you be uplifted and liberated! Awaken and empower the forbidden rites of Angra Mainyu! Awaken to empower the Mrs. Winchester’s great work of counter creation as an Apostle of the Lord of Darkness eternal and as a warrior of the path of the Lemegeton. I adjure thee, Emperor Lucifer, as the agent of the strong living God, of His beloved Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and by the power of the Great ADONAY, ELOIM, ARIEL, and JEHOVAM, to appear instantly, or to send thy Messenger Astarot, forcing thee to forsake thy hiding-place, wheresoever it may be. Aeshma, Div of wrath and fury! He who wields the bloody mace! Aeshma who is demon of the wounding spear I call you forth into this temple of counter creation! Through devotion to my becoming on this path, your spiritual weapon has been made manifest in this corporeal World through my will and counter creative power so you may fill it with your essence and might! Empower it so that it may serve me here upon the corporeal plane! May it serve as a key to the realms above and below unlocking the power and wisdom for the spirits of the Winchester’s glory and ascent! Fill this weapon with your powers of wrath and fury that it may seek out spiritual attacks made and render them useless and impotent! #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
One Halloween, a tour guide saw a little boy who was no more than six years old. He was dressed in a black hood, and long black robe, and it looked like he did not have a face, as he had a black, opaque nylon covering the opening in the hood. The tour guide asked him who he was supposed to be, and the little boy said, “I’m the Angel of Life.” The tour guide then asked him who the Angel of Life is. The boy replied, “The Angel of Life is someone who comes to talk to you. He tells you things about your life.” The conviction on the little boy’s face and the non-hesitant way in which he explained who he was made the tour guide think that the boy had some knowledge of what he was talking about. Shortly after, objects in the gift shop started floating about, and glimpses of a shadowy figure were spotted in the basement. In the café, according to a female patron, she had been sitting at a table in a back corner of the room when a man suddenly appeared in a chair across the table from her. The man stared straight ahead and refused to react in any way. The female patron looked away to get the waitress’s attention and when she looked back, the man was gone. The woman related that the elusive figure was wearing old-fashioned clothes. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 