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Return in the Darkening Twilight
Llanada Villa is a prime example of Victorian architecture. Its exterior is stately, refined, with a touch of Gothic elegance. Its front doors welcome, even as it seems to be hiding something. Inside the floors creak without warning, without any sense of someone there. The wood is thick with the humidity, as if the walls and floor breathe. Through the years, guest have reported feeling cold spots, or seeing strange, wispy streaks of light. The sense of the uncanny cries out for an explanation. Ghosts bridge the past to the present; they speak across the seemingly insurmountable barriers of death and time, connecting us to what we thought was lost. The townsfolk whispered tales of its dark history, of unspeakable horrors that occurred within the walls of my homes. As I climbed the grand staircase, each step seemed to release a flurry of hidden memories. Voices whispered incantations that send shivers down my spine. I must not faint, I told myself, and summoning all my resolve, made my way to the safety of the back parlour. There I collapsed into a couch, with my head already beginning to throb. The pain soon became so excruciating that I lost all sense of time until someone, I could not tell who, brought me a sleeping draught, and I sank at last into merciful oblivion. Next morning, I was at first bewildered to find myself fully dressed upon the parlour sofa. The parlourmaid, Trinity, brought me a cup of tea. She had set my skin crawling with fear. At this moment the unwonted sound of carriage wheels and many hoofs upon the road, arrested out attention. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
I was haunted with a terror of robbers. My house was robbed once, and two servants murdered, so I always lock my door. It had become a habit. Still, it was a fine autumnal sunset, and melancholy lights and long shadows spread their peculiar effects over the landscape. I was looking out of one of the long drawing-room windows, when there entered the court-yard, a figure of a wanderer who I knew very well. He used to come by twice a year asking to tour my home. He was a tall man, with sharp learn features. He wore a pointed black bread, and he was smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He was dressed in buff, black, and scarlet, and crossed with more straps and belts than I could count, from which hung all manner of things. Behind, he carried a magic-lantern, and two boxes, which I well knew, in one of which was a salamander, and in the other a mandrake. These monsters used to my Mr. Hansen laugh. They were compounded of parts of monkeys, parrots, squirrels, fish, and hedgehogs, dried and stitched together with great neatness and startling effect. He had a fiddle, a box conjuring apparatus, a pair of foils and masks attached to his belt, several other mysterious cases dangling about him, and a black staff with copper ferrules in his hand. His companion was a rough spare dog, that followed at his heels, but stopped short, suspiciously at the front gate, and in a little while began to howl dismally. In the meantime, the mountebank, standing in the midst of the court-yard, raised his grotesque hat, and made us a very ceremonious bow, paying his compliments very volubly in execrable French, and German not much better. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Then, disengaging his fiddle, he began to scrape a lively air, to which he sang with a merry discord, dancing with ludicrous airs and activity, that made me laugh, in spite of the dog’s howling. Then he advanced to the window with many smiles and salutations, and his hat in his left hand, his fiddle under his arm, and with a fluency that never took breath, he gabbled a long advertisement of all his accomplishments, and the resources of the various arts which he placed at our service, and the curiosities and entertainments which it was in his power, at my bidding to display. “Will your ladyship be pleased to buy an amulet against the oupire, which is going like the wolf, I hear, through these woods,” he said, dropping his hat on the floor. “They are dying of it right and left, and here is a charm that never fails; only pinned to the pillow, and you may laugh in his face.” These charms consisted of oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic ciphers and diagrams upon them. I instantly purchased one. He was looking up, and I was smiling down at him, amused. His piercing black eye, as he looked up in my face, seemed to detect something that fixed for a moment his curiosity. “I told you that I am charmed with you in the most particulars,” he said. “You are slender, and wonderfully graceful. Your complexion is rich and brilliant; your features are small and beautifully formed; your eyes large, dark, and lustrous; your hair is quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently think and long when it is down about your shoulder. It is exquisitely fine and soft, and in colour a rich very dark brown, with something of gold.” “Well, I do wonder at a wise man like you,” I replied. And so he walked on, and I heard no more. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Within the space of a week, my colour had returned, and I was sleeping so soundly that I was scarcely aware of my dreams. I walked miles on my estate each day, and I began to see it with new eyes. Every field, every path, even every hedgerow had its own name and its own history. I considered the amulet I purchased as an omen of good luck—and placed in beneath my pillow, to guard against further visitation. That evening, as I reached the top of the stairs, I heard a peculiar flickering sound. Entering my dressing room in the darkness, I made my way to the familiar dressing table on the right side of the room. Now the noise was even more pronounced. It sounded to me as if someone were turning the pages of book, a sound for which there was no rational source. Move over, I suddenly became away of a clammy, cold feeling around me. Since it was a warm evening, this too surprised me. In the dark, I could not be sure if there were not someone else in the dressing room. I quickly existed the room and went to bed. But this night, I was awakened by a violent shaking of my bed. I could see, in the very imperfect light, two figures at the foot oof it, holding each a bedpost. A voice said, “We’ll hang you!” Trembling, I climbed over to the footboard; and saw the figure at the other side, little more than a black shadow, begin also to scale the bed; and there was instantly a dreadful confusion and uproar in the room, and such a gabbling and laughing; I could not catch the words. I found myself on the floor. The phantoms and clamour were gone, but a crash and ringing of fragments was in my ears. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
The great china bowl, from which for generations the Winchester had been baptized, had fallen from the mantelpiece, and was smashed on the hearthstone. I warned the servants not to disregard oaths and curses. A mourning coach drove up, and two gentlemen in black cloaks, and with crape to their hats, got out, and without looking to the right or the left, went up the steps to the Winchester mansion. Mr. Hansen followed them slowly. The carriage had, he supposed, gone round to the yard, for, when he reached the door, it was no longer there. So he followed the two mourners into the house. In the hall he found a fellow servant, who said he had seen two gentlemen, in black cloak, pass through the hall, and go up the stair without removing their hats, or asking leave of anyone. This was very odd, Mr. Hansen thought, and a great liberty; so upstairs he went to make them out. But he could not find them then, nor ever. And from that hour the house was troubled. In a little time there was not one of the servants who had not something to tel. Step and voices followed them sometimes in the passages, and tittering whispers, always minatory, scared them at the corners of the galleries, or from dark recesses; so that they would return panic-stricken. I, myself, had also heard these voices, and with this formidable aggravation, they came always when I said my prayers. I was scared at such moments by dropping words and sentences, which grew, as I persisted, into threats and blasphemies. These voices were not always in the room. They called, as I fancied, through the walls, very thick in this house, from the neighbouring rooms, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other; sometimes they seemed to holla from distant lobbies, and came muffled, but threateningly, through the long paneled passages. As they approached they grew furious, as if several voices were speaking together. Whenever I applied myself to my devotions, these horrible sentences came hurrying towards the door, and, in panic, I would start from my knees, and all then would subside except the thumping of my heart against my stays, and the dreadful tremours of my nerves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
What these voices said, I never could quite remember one minute after they had ceased speaking; one sentence chased another away; gibe and menace and impious denunciation, each hideously articulate, were lost as soon as heard. And this added to the effect of these terrifying mockeries and invectives, that I could not, by any effort, retain their exact import, although their horrible character remained vividly present to my mind. Camile who acted as a housemaid, would not sleep in the house, but walked home, in trepidation, to her father’s, under the escort of her little brother, every night. Mrs. Rendell, the kitchenmaid, endured the nightly terrors. Mr. Hansen was testy and captious about these stories. He was already uncomfortable enough by reason of the entrance of tow muffled figures into the house, about which there could be no mistake. His own eyes had seen them. He refused to credit the stories of the servants. I made a decision not to fuel the stories of the ghost to keep the servants. “If you see ghosts here, it is no place for you, and it is time you should pack,” I would say. Here has been the cook with the kitchenmaid, as white as pipeclay, all in a row, to tell me I must have a parson to sleep among them, and preach down the devil! Upon my soul, I would not allow my home to fall into utter chaos and disarray. “Mrs. Winchester, I know you are no fool,” said the cook. “But supposed there was a such thing as a ghost here, don’t you see, it ain’t just women telling stories.” “I will not dignify such ideas,” I replied. The women left the kitchen, the cook and the butler went down, not altogether unused to such condescension in the household. The fire had gone down and I was chilled. The candles were expiring in the socket and threw on the white all long shadows, that danced up and down from the ceiling to the ground, and their black outlines I fancied resembled the two men in cloaks, whom I remembered with profound horror. I took the candle, with all the haste I could, getting along the passage, on whose walls the same dance of black shadows was continued, very anxious to reach my room before the light should go out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
On night in 1990, there was an unusual buzzing sound in The Winchester Mystery House, one of the staff encountered a dark, hooded figure standing at the door-to-nowhere. In the dim light issuing through the stained glass windows from an outside light, he could see that the intruder, who looked very much like a cowled monk, was waving his arms in a particular manner. Interpreting his movement as threatening, he approached the man and asked him to leave. At the very moment, the employee says he never felt so weak and helpless.
He collapsed in a heap backward onto the floor. He remembered that he actually began to weep in fear and confusion. He was completely at the mercy of whoever or whatever was standing at the door. It was then that the hooded being spoke. “Don’t be afraid,” it said in a quiet whisper. “We won’t hurt you.” And the next thing he knew, the morning sunlight was making him squint into wakefulness. As he reflected on the incident, he became more and more convinced that an actual visitation had occurred and that some kind of entity had come into the mansion. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Some Move to Suburbia Out of Fear of those Unlike them
Sarah L. Winchester stirred, rolling onto her side and clutching her pillow. She had been caught in a strange netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, her uneasy rest punctured by nightmares of loss connections with her daughter and husband, but a noise downstairs had brought her back to reality. Every criminal offense is comprised of a set of behavioural (actus reus) and mental (mens reus) prerequisites. These statutory provisions are clearly sated in the criminal code and establish what an individual must do and think to be in violation of the law. Criminal events transpire when offenders, victims, and audience members intersect in a given setting. These participants engage in a dynamic set of actions and counteractions to produce the criminal outcome. The term “criminal transaction” is used to describe this exchange process. A full discussion of the criminal transaction must consider broad-based issues such as the demographics of the actors, the environment in which the crimes occur, and the way that these events tend to play themselves out. In the case of the offender-victim relationship, it is noted the violent crimes tend to take on a one-on-one offender-victim dynamic. Conversely, property offenders, public order offenders, and many organizational criminals are prone to work in small groups. What is more, robbery, burglary and common property offense are described as stranger crimes while other crimes tend to involve a victim and perpetrator(s) who know one another. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Faith motivated individuals, faith-based organizations, and the transformative power of faith itself are proven keys in reducing crime and improving the effectiveness of our criminal justice system. We now know that intentional partnerships between congregations and law enforcement can lead to dramatic improvement in police-community relations and reductions in crime, youth violence, and gang activity. We also known that faith-based programs can provide an antidote to the harmful culture that permeates so many of our correctional facilities. In this way, religion can help change prisons from an environment for learning even more deviant behaviour to places where rehabilitation is a realistic possibility. Additionally, faith-motivated mentors and faith-based groups can provide both the support and supervision necessary to help not only prisoners but also those former prisoners stay crime-free by learning moral and productive lives. The American suburbs are part of what is called a “global project.” Across the planet, after World War II, America’s image as a democracy and as World economic leaders also became a cultural model for consumerism and community-building. American images and ideas central to the lifestyle of its new suburbs—supermarkets, automobiles, super-highways, and motels—were exported to other nations. The American post-war dream was concretized in the form of the single-family suburban home, the cul-de-ac community, the local shopping center, and the family car, as opposed to the crowded, high crime, industrial cities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
To middle class families the suburbs give a safe, sanitary environment, new houses in styles somewhat in keeping with the conception of family life, and permanent neighbourhoods of people with similar outlook. In an atmosphere of rapid change, the income-graded neighbourhoods render two important service to their residents. Relative evenness of wealth meant neighbours who would reinforce an individual family’s efforts to pass on its values to its children. The surrounding evenness of wealth also gave adults a sense of a community of shared experience, and thereby gave some measure of relief from the uncertainties inherent in a World of highly competitive capitalism. Even those excluded from them, the suburbs offered a physical demonstration that the rewards of competitive capitalism might be within the reach of all. The suburban life is also a spiritual quest. These suburbs are the latest version of the promise of the American frontier—blank slates on which new residents can write their stories. The pioneers who move to these suburbs have made a startling leap into the unknow. The places have no past, no precedent, no settled conventions. The residents have no family connections here. However, people move here with the hope that there soon will be communities and relationships developed among people in the same yacht as themselves. Fellow pilgrims on the journey, as it were. Many people are struck by the significance of suburban living as a spiritual quest or pilgrimage. They are all looking for something. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
People live in the suburbia for any number of reasons. They may have come here because of a job change or for a relationship. They come in search of affordable housing, good school, or safe communities. Or they may have grown up in suburbia by default; indeed, over half of the American population now lives in suburbia, and many of them have been suburbanites for two or three generations. Whatever the case, those who live in suburbia have aspirations for a certain kind of life. For some it is an optimistic vision, while others may be more cynical about ever seeing such a life to come. However, it is still a spiritual longing in either case. Even those who come to suburbia for less than noble reasons do so out of a particular vision of their ideal life. Some move to suburbia out of fear of those unlike them, fleeing from racial diversity and searching for a place “safer” and more comfortable to their preexisting prejudices. Others care little for their neighbours and fashion suburban lives of self-centered materialism, acquisition of possessions and status climbing. These too point to spiritual needs, however misguided or impure the motivations might be. Whenever people describe suburbia, invariably they use phrases like “a good place to raise kids,” or “where people settle down and start a family.” Inherent in these comments is an aspiration of hope for their future and a dream of a good life for their children. Suburbia is the context and the setting for the fulfillment of people’s hopes and dreams. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The suburbs had always promised prosperity, upward mobility, a healthy life in an unpolluted environment, safety and tranquility, and above all, the best place to bring up kids. Although this promise still fuels many dreams and infuses a nostalgic political rhetoric, the future is hopeful. It is a place many people can hear the voice of God. The suburban Christian ought not uncritically absorb all the characteristics of the suburban World but rather should thoughtfully asses and discern how Christians ought to live in this environment, without either capitulating to the culture or abandoning it by fleeing the suburbs and relocating to the country. Given suburbia’s new centrality, Christians, especially suburban Christians, must take the suburbs seriously. In order to detect the “voice of God,” we need to understand that the Holy Spirit alone is charged to communicate the will of God to the believer, and that He works from within the spirit of the disciple, enlightening the understanding so as to bring one into intelligent co-working with the mind of God. No matter where you live, the purpose of the Holy Spirit is, briefly, the entire renewal of the redeemed one, in spirit, soul and body. God therefore directs all His working to the liberation of every faculty, and never in any way seeks to direct a human as a passive machine, even into good. God work in one to enable one to choose the good, and strengthens one to act, but never—even for “good”—dulls one or renders one incapable of free action. One would nullify the very purpose of Christ’s redemption on Calvary, and the purpose of His own coming. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
When the self-actualized understands these principles, the “voice of psychopathological offenders” is recognizable: when it comes from outside the human, or within the sphere of one’s perception, and not from the central depth of one’s spirit where the Holy Spirit abides; when it is imperative and persistent, urging sudden action without time to reason or intelligently weigh the issues; when it is confusing and clamorous, so that humans are hindered from thinking. For the Holy Spirit desires the believer to be intelligent, as a responsible being with a choice, and will not confuse one so as to make one incapable of coming to a decision. The speaking of psychopathological offenders can also be a counterfeit of the apparent inner speaking of the human oneself, as if one were oneself “thinking,” and yet with no concentrated action of the mind; exempli gratia, a persistent and ceaseless “commentary” going on somewhere within, apart from volition or mind action, commenting on the human’s own actions or the actions of others, such as “You are wrong,” “You are never right,” “God has cast you off,” “You must not do that,” et cetera, et cetera. Humans do not grasp God through symbols, but in the experience of faith one is grasped by an ultimate concern expressed in symbols. Every symbol descriptive of ultimate reality originates in an experience of ultimate concern and continues to live only insofar as it can introduce someone into the revelatory constellation by arousing a similar experience. Religious symbols participate in the power of being not merely ontologically, but experientially. They concretely convey the experience of ultimacy, of seizure by an ultimate concern. And lest this affirmation of the symbol open the door to the demonic, we insist upon the negation of the symbol by the ultimate to which it points. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Analogia is more negative-protesting than positive-affirming. Religious symbols participate in that which they symbolize, being-itself; they participate by sharing in the ground of being, as do all finite beings; and they participate by expressing the experience of ultimacy. This last element is decisive. One expresses the experience of the ground being through the religious symbols which are formed in the crucible of the experience itself. God is being-itself is the only nonsymbolic statement about God. The religious experience of God is had through finite beings which participate in being-itself. The principle of analogy justifies this. The expression of this experience is through religious symbols which participate in the experience itself. Theology elaborates the meaning of religious symbols by using ontology. Analogy permits and even demands this procedure. We use the principle of analogy for two purposes: to permit a religious encounter with God through finite beings and to justify the theological use of ontology. Theology speaks ontologically about religious symbols which express the encounter with God, our ultimate concern. The word “creation” is one of the great symbol-words describing the relation of God to the Universe. The doctrine of creation depicts a state; it does not relate an event that happened “once upon a time.” Humans ask the question of their finitude and of finitude in general, and creation answers it by pointing to the situation of creatureliness and to its correlate, the divine life; it is beyond potentiality and actuality. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Hence the question whether creation is a necessary or contingent act of God is meaningless. For nothing higher than God necessitates His creativity; neither does it happen to one as an accidental act. The divine life and the divine creativity are one. All three modes of time must be used to symbolize the infinite scope of the divine dynamism. Therefore creativity originates (the past) sustaining creativity (the present), and directing creativity (the future). The classical phrase to express the Christian doctrine of creation is creatio ex nihilo. We see in it the exclusion of the pagan idea of me on, of the “given” which resists the divine creativity. Though ouk on, absolute nothingness, suffices to explain nihilo, the ex demands something more positive to describe the origin of the creature. The solution lies in the dialectic of being and non-being. Ex nihilo indicates the “heritage of nonbeing” which is the lot of every creature. Yet the creature is; it participates in the power of being which holds nonbeing in check. Being a creature include both the heritage of nonbeing (anxiety) and the heritage of being (courage). Creation is essentially good, for it is not the offspring of me on, of some semi-divine power that opposes being-itself. The way to incarnation lies open, for finitude essentially is not in conflict with God. Secondly, the element of nonbeing in creatureliness provides the potentiality for tragic disruption within finitude itself. Eschatology is forbidden to do violence to the finite by eliminating the possibility of conflict, by locating salvation in an unreal World above or finite, tragic World. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The simple theoretical analysis of the evolution of family agencies into three phases appears to be corroborated by the growth in all six types of agencies of what may indeed be called quasi-families—that is, small groups of persons similarly affected by some distinctive problem, condition or interest, who come together voluntarily to solve, correct, or pursue it by concerted actions, meanwhile providing each other with a degree of understanding, encouragement, and support which they have not found elsewhere in the community. Most of these have only arisen within the past five or six decades. While they are predominately found in urban areas, since only in such centers are there enough persons of any one type of category, exempla gratia, the Townsend Clubs, which considerably outlived the depression. While some of these quasi-families have been the products of invention and experiment by therapists, so many have sprung up apparently quite spontaneously (exempla gratia, child study groups attached to cooperative nursery schools) as to suggest that they are a particularly fitting response to current situations confronted by members of the community. Their fraternal rather than patriarchal structure does not negate the value of construing them as quasi-families; indeed, to recognize their correspondence with the more fraternal character of contemporary families improves the analogy. The desire of many public and private agencies to foster participation “at the grass roots” is most successful when the grass roots consist of strong, intimate, small groups, not collections of strangers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Under urban conditions, such groups do not as a rule get constituted on a neighbourhood basis, but out of common interests; they may primarily focus on these interests, yet they frequently have corrective and therapeutic effects on their members. While the characteristic quasi-family has a fairly homogenous membership, draw from some limited segment of a community, this does not mean that one had to regard them as simply the result of an ever more refined division of labour or fragmentation of interests. An urban quasi-family often recruits only one member of a family, which makes it quite different from those farm organizations whose local units aim to provide some engrossing activity for every member of a family. Yet every quasi-family so rapidly takes on an elaborates other functions, that few persons would ever need or want to belong to more than two or three quasi-families at most. Every member can remain as convinced of one’s own individuality within a quasi-family as within one’s actual family. In fact, scrutiny reveals a number of respects in which membership in quasi-families offers certain advantages which real families cannot. Involvement in these groups, however highly committed and intense it may be, is more like becoming a member of a club or a team in a game. Family commitments, by contrast, have still an inescapable character posing the gravest consequences for the unwilling participant. It is unlikely that individual counseling can or should be dispenses with. Yet, the theoretical shift to recognition of the family origin and interpersonal nature of personality difficulties, justifies the support counseling activity gives to voluntary group procedures. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Sociologists long ago recognized the threat to individual psychological existence in the breakdown of ancient primary group supports. Though the rural village, like Humpty Dumpty, cannot be put back together again, the incessant reorganizing of the various institutions of the urban community can well take account of the means whereby citizens continually reintegrate their selves. If it is granted that small, intimate groups of significant others play a vital part in supporting every self, it is probable that groups formed solely for the sake of such mutual support will be less durable and successful than those which accomplish this in the process of pursuing other ends. It is improbable, therefore, that individual counseling agencies could produce a full solution ever under ideal conditions, since the problem involves the whole structure of the community as this bears upon personality. What the best solutions will be is known to on one, and will only be approached through imaginative experiments of many kinds. However, no matter what, people believe that the United States of America will continue to be a great manufacturing power. There just will not be as high a percentage of people working in factories. Explaining the difference between traditional manufacturing methods and the way Macintosh computers were then being produced, she pointed out that the United States of America was surely one of the great good producers of the World with fewer than two percent of the work force engaged in agriculture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
However, many people would like America to returned to its agricultural roots, while we still have farmland, and to increase the amount of meat, poultry, and produce that is created in America so we will stop importing it, feed our own people, and export our products to other nations. This will help reduce the national deficit and be a step in the right way to help America return to being a creditor nation. Also, the American population will expand, and the labour force is also likely to expand, so more people will be willing to work on farms. While the United States of America is likely to generate 10,000 new jobs a day for the next decade, it is important to regain a presence in the manufacturing business. We do not want to leave the economy hollowed out. Nonetheless, the shift away from Second Wave manual labour toward Third Wave service work and super-symbolic activity has become widespread, dramatic and irreversible. In the United States of America today, these activities account for fully three-quarters of the work force. The great transition is reflected globally in the surprising fact that World exports of services and “intellectual property” are now equal to those of electronics and automobiles combined, or of the combined exports in foods and fuels. Futurists foreshadowed this massive shift as early as the 1960s. However, because the early warnings were ignored, the transition has been unnecessarily rocky. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Mass layoffs, bankruptcies and other upheavals swept through the economy as old rust-belt industries, late to install computers, robots and electronic information systems and slow to restructure, found themselves gutted by more fleet-footed competition. Many blamed their troubles on foreign competition, high or low interest rates, overregulation and a thousand other factors. Some of these no doubt played a role. However, equally to blame was the arrogance of the most powerful smokestack companies—auto makers, steel mills, shipyards, textile firms—that had for so long dominated the economy. Their managerial myopia punished those in the society least responsible for industrial backwardness and least able to protect themselves—their worker. The fact that aggregate manufacturing employment in 1988 was at the same level as 1968 does not mean that the workers laid off in between simply returned to their old jobs. On the contrary, with mote Third Wave technologies in place, companies needed a radically different kind of work force as well. The Old Second Wave factories needed essentially interchangeable workers. By contrast, Third Wave operations require diverse and continually evolving skills—which means that workers become less and less interchangeable. And this turns the entire problem of unemployment upside down. In Second Wave or smokestack societies an injection of capital spending or consumer purchasing power could stimulate the economy and jobs. Given one million jobless, one could, in principle, prime the economy and create one million jobs. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Once consumers have the money, they will rush out and buy things. This in turn leads to manufacturers to expand their plants and hire more workers. Good-bye, unemployment. Monetarists urge manipulation of interest rates or money supply instead, to increase or decrease purchasing power as needed. In today’s global economy, pumping money into the consumer’s pocket may simply send it flowing overseas without doing anything to help the domestic economy. An American buying a new TV set or compact disc player merely sends dollars to Japan, Korea, Malaysia, or elsewhere. The purchase does not add jobs at home. However, there is a far more basic flaw in the old strategies: they still focus on the circulation of money rather than knowledge. Yet it is no longer possible to reduce joblessness simply by increasing the number of jobs because the problem is no longer merely numbers. Unemployment has gone from quantitative to qualitative. The jobless desperately need money if they and their families are to survive, and it is both necessary and morally right to provide them with decent levels of public assistance. However, any effective strategy for reducing joblessness in a super-symbolic economy must depend less on the allocation of wealth and more on the allocation of knowledge. Furthermore, as these new jobs are not likely to be found in what we think of as manufacture, we will need to prepare people through schooling, apprenticeships and on-the-job learning for work in such fields as the human services—helping to care, for example, for our fast-growing population of the elderly, providing child care, health services, personal security, training services, leisure and recreation services, tourism and the like. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
We will also have to begin according human-service jobs the same respect preciously reserved for manufacture rather than snidely denigrating the entire service sector. The service industry cannot stand as the sole symbol for range of activities that includes everything from teaching to working at a pet groomer or in a hospital radiology center. What is more, if, as is often charged, wages can be below what people need to survive on their own in the service sector, then the solution is to increase service productivity and to invent new forms of work-force organization and collective bargaining. Unions, primarily designed for the crafts or for mass manufacturing, need to be totally transformed or else replaced by new-style organizations more appropriate to the super-symbolic economy. To survive they will have to support rather than resist such things as work-at-home programs, flextime and job-sharing. The rise of the super-symbolic economy compels us to reconceptualize the entire problem of unemployment from the ground up. To challenge outworn assumptions, however, is also to challenge those who benefit from them. The Third Wave system of wealth creation thus threatens long-entrenched power relationships in corporations, unions and governments. China, already a major importer of fuels and many minerals, is getting equipped for such a competition especially fast: With its rapidly growing, highly energy- and resources-intensive economy, the consequences of resource supply irregularities may be fatal. In the days of the Iraq war Beijing already resorted to eventually a panic buying of petroleum, overstanding the global market. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
In today’s World, if you cannot obtain your own resources domestically, to avoid supply troubles, it is considered preferable to establish long-term relationships with particular resource-rich countries, getting a stake in their resource development and extraction. Perhaps more than any other country, China is making big steps to obtain direct access to fuel and mineral resource in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The United States of America and European countries are supplied a significant portion of the natural resources they consume by major multinational companies such as Exxon-Mobil, Royal-Dutch Shell, Rio-Tinto, or BHP Billiton. In Japan and South Korea, a key role is played by the resource supply channels of leading trading houses like Mitsubishi Corporation, Itochu, SK Corporation, or Hanwha Trading. State-owned resource companies play their part, too. In most other countries, China included, supplies are provided first of all by state-owned oil and mining corporations. Currently, with strong support from the state, China’s natural resources heavyweights—PetroChina, Sinopec, CNOOC, Chinalco, China Metallurgical Group and the like—are establishing themselves among the leading global players, not at all inferior to Western majors or Japanese and Korean trading houses. On its part, the Chinese government is coming out with an innovative model of tapping natural resources in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In broader terms, this model helps China to strengthen its overall presence and influence in the World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Economic and legal scholars who study business disputes (and other events such as accidents where some economic consequences are at issue) recognize that the initial allocation of legal entitlements, the expectation and uncertainty about a court’s decision in the matter, and the costs of using the legal system all affect the parties’ choice between going to the law and settling the dispute by private negotiation. Rolling back one more step along a game tree, the same considerations also affect individuals’ decisions about engaging in activities that can lead to accidents or disputes. Consider two parties involved in an economic dispute. One of them (plaintiff) could sue the other (defendant) in a court of law. Their expectation for the time being assumed to be commonly held and known, is that the court will aware AP to the plaintiff and AD to the defendant. (If the defendant is ordered to make restitution or pay a fine, his payoff Ad can be negative.) In addition, each side has to bear some cost for using the court; this can be monetary in the form of court costs and lawyers’ fees, or non-monetary in various forms, such as time, mental strain, or damage to reputation. The costs can depend on the legal system; for example, in the American system each side bears its own court and lawyer costs, whereas in the British system the loser bears both sides’ cost. Denote the overall monetary equivalent costs by CP for the plaintiff and Cd for the defendant. Thus the expected net payoffs from recourse to the court are (AP-CP) for the plaintiff and (AD-CD) for the defendant. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The two parties could negotiate a settlement, either before a suit is filled at all, or after a suit is filed but before trial. Doing so enables them to avoid some or all of the costs of using the law. If the court is expected to levy a fine in addition to mandating some transfer between the parties, and the proceeds of the fine go to the government, then the negotiation avoids the fine and leaves a larger sum of money available for dividing between them. Suppose S is the total available for them to bargain over, and S> (AP – CP) + (AD – CD). The excess of the left-hand side of this inequality over the right-hand side constitute the “surplus” that is available for them to negotiate over. Denote the sums they can get through bargaining by XP and XD, respectively, then XP + XD= S is the bargaining frontier. The bargaining frontier is a straight line of slope -1. If the negotiation fails and the plaintiff has to sue, their payoffs in the court will be (AP – CP, AD – CD). This point is therefore the threat point that lies behind their bargaining. The generalized Nash bargaining solution then says that each party will get its threat-point payoff, plus a share of the surplus equal to its bargaining power. This bargaining power can be explained in terms of the two parties’ relative impatience, but we will simply assume that the plaintiff’s bargaining powers is and that of the defendant (1 –
). Then the outcomes of the negotiation is (figure 2.1) XP = (AP – CP) +
[S – (AP – CP) – (AD – CD), (Figure 2.2) XD = (AD – CD) + (1 –
) [S – (SP – CP) – (AD – CD)] = (1 –
)(AP – CP) + (AD – CD). These expressions yield several simple implications. For example, they tell us how different rules about the allocation of legal costs affect the outcome of pretrial negotiation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Supposed the expectation is the plaintiff will win. Under the American system, each side would pay its own monetary legal costs. Under the British system, the monetary part of the plaintiff’s legal costs would be shifted to the defendant. Denote this by M. Then the British system, as compared with the American, CP is lower and CD higher by M. Therefore (2.1) shows that XP is higher by M, and (2.2) shows that XD is lower by M, in the British system than in the American. In turn, we can calculate how the expectation of this outcome affects the incentive of the parties to engage in activities that may lead to such disputes. This argument assumes that the expected payoffs AP and AD when the parties go to the court are the same in the two systems. If the courts adjusted the payoffs to offset the stipulated allocation of costs, then the threat points of the two systems would be the same, and therefore so would the Nash solution of the negotiation. However, this simple model has some flaws. Most obviously, in the model the negotiation succeed and the threat of going to court is never invoked. This is less egregious than it may appear at first sight, because only 10 percent of disputes go to trial. Simple extensions of the model explain why and which disputes are likely to go to trial. The main cause is the parties’ inconsistent expectations about the outcome in court. If the plaintiff expects AP to be high, and the defendant simultaneously expects AD to be high, then each may think that there is no surplus to bargain over. The simple figure and algebra I have developed here promising foundations for formal models of such extensions, but I will leave developments along these lines for future work. The model can readily be extended to apply another situation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
My discussion of the court that generates the threat-point payoff in this model treated it as a well-meaning but costly system. However, it could easier be a corrupt system, or a predatory or kleptocratic government. Economic activities and transactions in such a country would try to proceed in secrecy. However, the threat of disclosure, and the consequent exposure to extortion by the state’s agents, would underlie all negotiations. By interpreting CP and CD as the expected amounts the state would extort from the two parties, the model can cover this situation. Now, let us focus on how a Christian suburb is to be. Better is a dry morsel and quietness therewith, than a house feasting amidst strife. Yea, better to ear herbs where love is, than the choicest food and hatred therewith. Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Through wisdom is a house builded, and by understanding is it established. By knowledge is the home filled with all that is pleasant and precious. Make your house a meeting place for the learned, and give heed to their words. If three people have eaten at one table and have spoken the word of the Christian Bible or Book of Mormon, it is as though they had eaten at God’s table. Blessed is that home where the woman regards the ways of her household. Blessed is the man who has a good wife, for the number of his days shall be doubled. Blessed is he who loves his wife and honours her, and direct his children into paths of righteousness. When husband and wife are worthy of each other, the divine spirit rests upon them. A home where a man loves his wife as himself, and honours her beyond his own person, shall be blessed everlastingly. A home where children honour their parents is a home in which God dwells, and He Himself is honoured. How goodly are your homes, and your dwellings, O America. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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I’m a Pharmacist, I Know What I am Doing
Recreational drug use is often portrayed in popular culture and music. To further highlight this illustration, probably the best known musical cliché of recent decades was “sex, drugs, and rock’ n’ roll,” while the Billbooard charts have been filled with songs involving drugs, such as Eric Clapton’s Cocaine or the Rolling Stones’ Sister Morphine and Mother’s Little Helper. Popular culture portrays not just recreational drug use but tragedy associated with drugs, for example, the deaths of guitarist Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison and many others. Of course, not all common-use drugs are understood as dangerous or associated with tragedy. We found clear evidence of two very different modes of entry among the respondents, namely recreational abusers and therapeutic self-medicators. However, it is important to note tht these were not mutually exclusive categories of offenders. In other words, these two categories were not completely dichotomous. As is usually the case, real life seldom fits cleanly into nice, neat categories. In fact, we were able to identify a number of cognitive and behavioural themes that were common to almost all of the drug-using pharmacists interviewed. These themes were expressed by nearly all of the drug-abusing pharmacists that we interviewed, regardless of how the individual initially began their illicit drug abuse career. The existence of these common themes suggest that pharmacy-specific occupational contingencies play a center role in the onset and progression of illicit use of prescription medicines. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Intuitively, it should not be surprising that pharmacists would steal prescription medicines as a way of treating their own physical ailments. After all, they have been exposed to years of pharmacy training that emphasized the beneficial, therapeutic potential of these medicines. Each pharmacist has dispensed the medicines to hundreds of patients and then watched the drugs usually produce the predicted beneficial results. They have all read the literature and drug inserts detailing the chemical composition of drugs and studied the often dramatic curative effects of the chemical substances. Pharmacists, more so than any other member of society, are keenly aware of how and why drugs work. There was strong evidence to suggest that both the therapeutic self-medicators and the recreational abusers actively used the years of pharmacological knowledge that they had acquired. In their eyes, it made perfect sense that they should put their pharmacy knowledge to work on themselves. This application of knowledge can be seen in the comments of a 40-year-old female self-medicator: “So, in 1986 I was sent to the psychologist. That was when I was forced to recognize that I had an alcohol problem. And I recognized that I had to do something. And in my brilliant analysis, I made a decision that since alcohol was a central nervous system depressant, the solution for me was to use a central nervous system stimulant. That would solve my alcohol problem. So I chose the best stimulant that I had access to, and that was [pharmaceutical grade] cocaine. I started using cocaine in 1986. I never thought that it would progress. I never thought it was going to get worse. I thought, ‘I’m just going to use it occasionally.’” #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Similar trends were observed among the recreational abuser group, only here, the applied use of drugs was based upon more recreational motives. Almost all of the therapeutic self-medicators and recreational abusers described how they became masters of quickly diagnosing their own ailments or emotional needs and then identifying the appropriate pharmacological agent that would remedy the problem. Moreover, as professionals, they were confident that they would be able to self-regulate their drug intake so as to never become addicted. All of the respondents drew upon their social status as pharmacists to convince themselves that their drug use would not progress into dependency. They recall being adamant in their view that personally they were immune from such problems, believing that only stupid, naïve people became addicted to drugs. As a 40-year-old female self-medicator put it, “I’m a pharmacist, I know what I am doing.” A 39-year-old male self-medicator went so far as to say: “I mean, we know more [about the effect of drugs] than doctors. We have all the package inserts. We have the knowledge. We know a lot about the drugs, so what’s the big deal?” Elsewhere we refer to this denial mechanism as a “paradox of familiarity,” because familiarity can breed consent, not contempt toward prescription drug use. Members of both categories of pharmacists claimed that they had never been warned about the dangers of drugs, insisting instead that their training had only stressed the beneficial side of prescription medication. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
To further highlight this illustration, a 48-year-old male misuser stated: “I never had anybody come right out and tell me that [prescription drug abuse] was probably unethical and illegal because they assumed that we knew that. But nobody ever said this is something that is not done.” Let without guidance on the issues, some pharmacists assumed that self-medication was acceptable behaviour. To this end, a 39-year-old female self-medicator said: “It’s [self-medication] just part of it [the pharmacy job]. It’s just accepted because we know so much. I’m sure it’s the same way when the doctors do it. It wasn’t a big stretch to start going “You know, I got a headache here, maybe I should try one of these Percocets [narcotic analgesic]?” Many pharmacists spoke about their prescription drug theft/use as if it were an entitlement that went along with being a pharmacist. Much like a butcher always has fresh meat at home or a car dealer always drives a state-of-the-art automobile, pharmacists will always have the best drugs. This theme is illustrated in an exchange that occurred between the interviewer and a45-year-old-male pharmacist: “Why take plain Aspirin or plain Tylenol when you’ve got this [Percocet-narcotic analgesic]? It works better….[so] you don’t even have to struggle with it. I really believed that I had license to do that…as a pharmacist. I mean with all that stuff sitting there, you know. Oh, my back was just killing me during that period of time and this narcotic pain reliever is sitting right there. I thought, ‘why should [I] suffer through back pain when I have this bottle of narcotics sitting here?” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The above-mentioned themes involve cognitive dimensions of the pharmacists’ drug abuse in that they speak to common motivational and justification themes that were present in all of the interview. Perhaps more important is the fact that there was a common behavioural characteristic shared by all 50 pharmacists. In ever case, occasional prescription drug abuse eventually gave way to an advanced addictive state that was marked by an enormous intake of drugs, unmistakable habituation, and the constant threat of physical withdrawal. Members of the recreational abuser and therapeutic self-medicator groups alike routinely reported daily use levels exceeding 50-100 times the recommended daily dosage. One pharmacist reported that his drug use regimen progressed to 150 Percocets [strong narcotic analgesic] per day. Another individual reported injecting up to 200 mg of Morphine each day. Still another respondent described a daily use pattern that, among other things, included 5g of cocaine. Invariably, these advanced levels of drug use led to clear signs of habituation and the constant threat of physical withdrawal. At this point, the individual recalls growing increasingly desperate. Consider the following quote from a 44-year-ol male pharmacist who was in charge of ordering the narcotics at the independent retail pharmacy where he worked: “I was ordering excessive quantities and chasing down tracks. That’s what I used to do. I was really reaching my bottom. I would chase these delivery trucks down in the morning because I didn’t come to my store until mid-afternoon. I was in withdrawal in the morning and I was without drugs, so I had to have it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
“I was just going nuts. Many mornings I had gone to work sweating. It would be 30 degrees (Fahrenheit), it would be January, and the clerk would say, ‘you look sick,’ and I would say, ‘It’s the flu.’ So I would pay the delivery guys extra money to deliver my drugs first or I would chase the delivery trucks down in the morning. I knew the trucks delivered at 6 in the morning, they came by my area, and I would get up early and chase the trucks down the highway. I would go in excess of 100 miles an hour trying to catch up with this truck and flag it down.” The advanced stages of drug addiction invariably produced traumatic physical psychological outcomes. Eventually, “out-of-control” drug use patterns along with the realization of chemical dependency left the pharmacists in a problematic mental state. It was at this point that al of the pharmacists recalled coming to grips with their addiction. This personal realization was accompanied by a shift in the way they thought about their drug use. They no longer denied that situation by drawing upon recreational or therapeutic explanations. Instead, they finally admitted the dire nature of their situation and became more and more reclusive. In short, all of the respondents grew to realize that they had a drug problem, turning then to fear and ignorance to foster the final weeks or months of their drug addiction. Two identifiable criminal career trajectories were observed among the pharmacists who we interviewed: recreational abusers and therapeutic self-medicators. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Careful scrutiny of contemporary drug theory, policy, and practice in all areas, from prescription pharmaceuticals to illegal recreational drugs, reveals numerous apparent inconsistencies and pervasive incoherence. This results, in part, from a kind of silo thinking in which attention to drug theory and drug policy, however sophisticated in its own realm, is encapsulated within distinct professional, practical, and economic spheres or “silos.” Silos are descriptively and prescriptively dense but stand isolated from each other in an empty landscape. In other words, people in one arena of drug theory, policy, or practical programs have plenty to say to each other about the way things are and the way things should be with respect to drugs, but they don’t talk much across the open spaces between their areas of focus. Not only do they not talk much between their fields, for reasons to be explored, they cannot really do so. Clearly, our discussion of the therapeutic self-medicator category goes far beyond what is present in the existing literature. However, the first documentation of recreational drug use among health professionals, had minimal impact on the way that the various healthcare professions think about or address problem of substance abuse within their ranks. The pharmacy profession has been especially reluctant to address the reality of the prescription drug abuse situation. For instance, existing self-reports and interview research on drug using pharmacists largely ignores the recreational origins of drug use and, instead, describes the affected individuals as having misplaced therapeutic motivations. This assumption is reinforced by published biographical accounts of recovering drug using pharmacists. While principally intended to raise awareness among fellow pharmacists, these confessionals consistently emphasize the well-intentioned motives behind the individuals’ destructive drug use past. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Information is called observable when it is available symmetrically to both parties, and verifiable when it can be proved to third parties such as a court. In practice, this is a matter of cost, and the standard of proof required. Contracts that are intended to be enforced in a court of law can only stipulate actions that are conditioned on verifiable information; courts cannot judge whether a breach of the contractual terms has occurred if they cannot verify whether the circumstances that call for an action have actually transpired. However, observable information can be the basis for contracts that are enforced by extralegal or private methods, because the two parties can know fully well whether a breach has occurred. Such extralegal methods of enforcement come in to broad types. One is enforcement by insider third parties with specialized knowledge that enables them to verify information that outsider general courts of law cannot; arbitrators in industry associations are the most prominent enforcers of this kind. The second is based on a relationship or ongoing interaction between the parties; a breakup of this relationship constitutes the punishment that may deter one of the parties from breaching. This covers many possibilities. The same two parties may meet repeatedly; the two may not have a direct repeated interaction with each other, but each may interact with others in a group or network that transmits information about any breach to all members and collectively sanctions the miscreant, using ostracism in business interactions or social relationships or both. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The distinction between observable and verifiable information is standard in the economic theory of contracts. The New York Stock Exchange developed its internal rules and procedures for dispute resolution, and even Taiwanese shoe manufacturers and Western fashion houses performed dispute-resolution functions in addition to their primary matchmaking ones. One may think that these alternative methods of private ordering must suffer a crippling disadvantage relative to the government’s courts, namely their lack of coercive power to ensure that their decisions are obeyed. However, the difficulty is often nonexistent or easily overcome. First, the sanctions available for private ordering are often very effective. Breach of contract can be deterred in ongoing relationships by the threat that the miscreant will be barred from future business with this particular partner or the group; this can be buttressed by social ostracism if the group fosters social ties among its business members. Sometimes this threat may be even more severe than the fines that courts would impose in the matter. If the threat is credible, in the sense of being a part of the strategies in the subgame-perfect equilibrium of the repeated game that constitutes the ongoing relationship, then the contract is self-enforcing. Second, arbitrators may have similar sanctions at their disposal; if they can bar the miscreant from the industry association, they can instantly put one out of business, which can be a more effective sanction than the fines the courts will impose. Of course, the feasibility of such sanctions depends on the availability of the requisite information, and in the case of repeated interactions, on how highly the participants value the future relative to the present. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Finally, courts recognize the informational advantage of the alternative institutions. Therefore when a relational or implicit contract serves such an informational purpose, courts refuse to intervene to modify its terms, or to insert missing provisions, or to overrule the availability of discretion to one party. They also enforce the awards of industry arbitration tribunals, using the government’s power of coercion to obtain compliance if the loser in the arbitration attempts to defy the ruling. In the United States of America, this has been so since 1920; in the international context, over 100 countries now accede to the 1958 New York Convention of the Recognition and Enforcement of Arbitral Awards. By providing for the appointment of industry-expert arbitrators, who can make many factual determinations more accurately and less expensively than a judge or jury can, the rules greatly expand the “contractible” aspects of an exchange. The use of stream-lined procedures together with the appointment of expert adjudicators transforms considerations that in the public legal system would have been only observable to the parties…into considerations that are also verifiable…thereby encouraging transactors to enter into more complete contracts. The point is not that arbitrators have access to more information. Any relevant information can be elicited and brought before the court by either party to the dispute through the legal process of discovery. Conversely, many arbitration forms do not allow discovery, although the arbitrator can request additional information. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The key is how information is used; industry arbitrators can use their expertise to interpret it—make factual determinations—more accurately and at a lower cost than non-specialized courts can. This is the sense in which verifiability should be interpreted in this context. Arbitration is used in other contexts for other reasons. In international transactions, each party may suspect that the other country’s courts will be biased in favour of its own nationals; this can deter them from entering into contrast that may end up in national courts. Therefore both may agree ex ante to settle any disputes in an agreed international forum of arbitration. Several of these exist, based in London, Paris, Stockholm, et cetera. They differ in their procedures (degree of formality, time taken, fees charged, et cetera) and the range of legal traditions they cover (civil, common, Islamic, et cetera). These affect the choice of forum by the parties to each transaction. These forums usually lack the expertise that industry-specific forums can provide. Therefore they are not likely to lower costs or improve verifiability and permit more complete contracts; instead, removing the suspicion of bias may be their most important function. The different modes of private and official governance can interact in various ways. To further highlight the illustration, if an ongoing relationship based on the superior observability of information by the two parties breaks down, the best alternative available to the parties may be recourse to a contract based on verifiable information enforceable in a court of law, not total cessation of transactions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
And if an arbitrator’s award is not enforceable by direct sanctions such as fines, it may nonetheless form part of a relational arrangement where the arbitrator can terminate the miscreant’s access to future trades. Not only do modes like arbitration evolve and apply to provide governance for transactions where they have an informational advantage and can reduce transaction costs, but also transactions take forms that adapt to the available information and governance. As for the emergence and prevalence of barter and countertrade in post-Soviet Russia in this way: The advantage of paying with goods rather than money is that they can be earmarked s property of the creditor. Money is fungible and liquid; a buyer can hide money easily if he chooses to renege on his promised payment to the seller. Goods in a barter or countertrade contract are more difficult to hide, and therefore can act as deal-specific collateral that mitigates opportunism. When it comes to systems of integration, rising complexity in the economy calls for more sophisticated integration and management. In a not atypical case Nabisco, the food company, as to fill 500 orders a day for literally hundreds of thousands of different products that must be shipped from 49 factories and 13 distribution centers, and at the same time take into account 30,000 different sales promotional deals with its customers. Managing such complexity requires new forms of leadership and an extremely high order of systemic integration. That, in turn, requires greater and greater volumes of information to pulse through the organization. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
To hold everything together—to track all the components and products, to synchronize deliveries, to keep engineers and marketers appraised of each other’s plans, to alert the R&D people to the needs of the manufacturing side and, above all, to give management a coherent picture of what is going on—billions of dollars are being poured into electronic networks that link computers, data bases and other information technologies together. This vast electronic information structure, frequently satellite based, knits whole companies together, often linking them into the computers and networks of suppliers and customers as well. Other networks link networks. Japan has targeted $250 billion to develop better, faster network. All these changes further accelerate the pace of operations and transactions. Economies of speed replace economies of scale. Competition is so intense and the speeds required so high that the old “time is money” rule is increasingly updated to “every interval of time is worth more than the one before it.” Time becomes a critical variable as reflected in “just-in-time” deliveries and a pressure to reduce DIP or “decisions in process.” Slow, sequential, step-by-step engineering is replaced by “simultaneous engineering.” Companies wage “time-based competition.” Expressing the new, it is clear that money moves at the speed of light. Information has to move faster. Thus acceleration pushed Third Wave business closer and closer to real time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Taken together, these ten features of the Third Wave economy, among many others, add up to a monumental change in how wealth is created. The conversion of the United States of America, Japan and Europe to this new system, though not yet complete, represents the single most important change in the global economy since the spread of factories brought about by the industrial revolution. This historical transformation, picking up speed in the early-to mid-1970, was already fairly well advanced by the 1990s. Unfortunately, much of America’s economic thinking was left behind. Global markets of energy and mineral resources are undergoing far reaching irreversible changes, and so are perceptions about the policies needed to provide their stable supply. Global demand is surging due to a dramatic increase of consumption by the fast-growing large emerging economies. Experts project that, absent significant changes in policy or technology, global energy consumption will increase nearly 50 percent over the next 30 years. Energy consumption is growing faster than the GDP in many countries. On the supply side, uncertainties and destabilization risks are exacerbating due to rising political instability in exporting countries, periodical redirections of sales from external to domestic markets by leading suppliers, and, to a certain extent, a depletion, in some major producing countries, of existing deposits in the absence of new ones whose discovery and exploitation could make up for the loss. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Therefore, oil and some other natural resources are becoming more and mor attractive targets for speculators. In these circumstances, countries highly dependent on natural resources imports, especially those that do not have their own powerful resource multinationals, get increasingly concerned about supply destabilization risks. Predictions about an all-out resource war or bitter fights among buyers for limited amounts of oil or metallic ores look like an exaggeration. However, buyers’ competition for particular kinds of resources within particular periods of time due to particular circumstances is becoming a more frequent phenomenon. For instance, the Philippines and Vietnam protested to China against its patrol boats hindering their oil exploration activities near the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. China demanded that its neighbours stop exploration work in this area. Tensions rose as the United States of America declared that the South China Sea was in the sphere of its national interest and that it would stand by the Philippines as its ally. Now, when it comes to supernatural affairs, the angels are “sent forth to minister to the heirs of salvation,” reports Hebrews 1.14, but not to take the place of Christ or the Holy Spirit. The apocalypse seems to show that this ministration of angels to the saints on Earth is a ministration for war in the spiritual realm against the forces of Satan; but there is little indication given of ministry in any other way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
After the first Advent, when there was great angelic activity over the wondrous event of the Father brining the “Firstborn: of the new race (Romans 8.29) into the inhabited Earth (Hebrew 1.6), and again at the Advent of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost to begin His work of forming a Body like unto the Risen Head—and during the early years of the Church—the employment of an angel in direct and visible communication with believers seems to give way to the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit. The entire work of witnessing to Christ, and leading the Church into all truth, has been committed to the Holy Spirit. Therefore all intervention of “angels” or of audible voices from the spiritual realm purporting to be from God may be taken as counterfeits of psychopathological offenders, whose supreme object is to substitute the workings of their own wicked offenders in the place of God. In any case, it is best and safest in these days of peril to keep in the path of faith and reliance upon the Holy Spirit of God working through the Word of God. Man, the microcosm, the mirror of reality has structures of beings found in him, and are found analogously in the subhuman realm. Selfhood, inner awareness, freedom and destiny—all are verified analogously in subhuman beings. Furthermore, the concepts of courage, love, power, and justice are used to describe analogously the characteristics of all beings and of being-itself. The point we wish to make is that this use of analogy based on human experience seems to yield valid knowledge. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Moving up now to the relationship between man and God, one would expect that on the same principle, but with proper adjustments, man could get an analogous knowledge of God. Symbols are not a means of knowing God, but rather a way of speaking about Him. If one wishes to talk about God, finite material must be used, and this is justified by the fact that all finite beings participate in being-itself. Without such an analogy nothing could be said about God. However, the analogia entis is in no way able to create a natural theology. It is not a method of discovering truth about God; it is the form in which every knowledge of revelation must be expressed. In this sense anlogia entis, like “religious symbol,” points to the necessity of using material taken from finite reality in order to give content to the cognitive function in revelation. What is boils down to is that analogy or symbolism is the expression of an encounter with God. Through the revelatory experience is far more than an intellectual communication—it is primarily a reunion with the ground of being—it contains a cognitive element conveyed by symbols which are qualified as channels of communication by their participation in being-itself. Yet, it seems not, for every creature participates in being-itself, and yet not everything is a religious symbol, although it has the potentiality to become one. What is the decisive ingredient of symbolism beyond ontological participation? These symbols are not arbitrary interpretations of the concrete revelatory experiences. However, they appear within this experience itself. They are not created intentionally, but they are born in the same dimension in which the revelatory experience takes place. In and through its symbols the religious encounter with reality opens up the dimension of reality in which ultimacy appears. There is no other way of expressing our encounter with the holy than in symbols. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
From the standpoint of the counselor who finds one’s role ambiguous, it seems more than likely that exploration of a developmental perspective would help resolve the conflicts implicit in one’s professionalization. For the psychotherapist who thinks of oneself as a physician who cures sickness, or who avoids this and speaks only of the “difficulties of living,” there may appear to be no conflict in one’s role. One may be satisfied to reduce symptoms of disorder, to solve the problem presented and to think of oneself primarily as someone who relieves distress, without defining one’s goals beyond that. However, apparently more and more thoughtful counselors do not think they can stop there, or do any permanent good, unless they leave their patients better able to cope with later problems and future strains. Some even feel that their job to plan for the optimal development of their clients, or to organize clients to plan for their own. The ambiguous feelings of the professional who presumes to assist in the personal problems of family members may be all to the good if these are construed in a framework of family relations which includes oneself. The concept of transference goes only part way. The client in the course of the counselor-client interaction frequently construes the counselor as a figure representative of previous others, with whom relations have been unresolved but are thus worked out through the interviews. The difficulty, however, from the client’s standpoint, is that no matter how versatile one’s counselor may be, and no matter how facile or fantastic one’s own imagination, the range of persons with whom a person needs intimate discourse in order to achieve one’s optimal development of self far exceeds the resources of this single relationship. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Moreover, there is the fact that the client must pay in cold cash for the kind of communication which the best families afford on a basis of affectional reciprocity; thus the most sacred disclosures hover at times on the verge of something equivalent to prostitution. Regardless of ethics and their enforcement by professional insistence upon its eventual termination, and the limitation of reciprocity to monetary reward; in a word, the elaboration of this relationship lead nowhere. The best hope for fruition of any gains that accrue is tht they serve as a bridge to the regeneration of their client’s involvement in a quasi-family constellation which includes near-rivals and critics, models and admirers, other ages and other genders, in both work and play. Only through others can one obtain the continual characterizations of self essential to valid knowledge of self. Research and experience have already shown that the human being, from birth until death, almost to the degree that the fish requires water, thrives only in social interaction. Neglect, isolation, loneliness, solitary confinement, and deteriorative influences very hard to endure, even though every physical condition of survival is met. And among all kinds of interaction, the most potent of all for personal development are those characterized by the unconditional acceptance of family relations. Only here is the listener who always finds more in the person than one presents in one’s actual behaviour. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Only here is the audience that never grows tried. Only here is the person of similar background, for whom every aspect of the culture—of class and ethic experience—resonates with comparable meaning. That a counselor could ever aspire to duplicate these functions of the optimal family is beyond the hope of those who have thought and written about it. In a sense this analysis of the implicit or potential demands on the counselor’s role both justifies and specifies a therapeutic approach. It also shows that one’s role must be transcended by more adequate institutions for providing each client with a stable constellation of significant others, who can be the precisely appropriate self-definers at each critical stage in one’s personal development. For the person whose actual family has failed one the solution suggested by this analysis is the invention of effective quasi-families. The process by which each person contributes to the self-knowledge of others, and others contribute to one’s knowledge of oneself, it immanent in human society. Where self-knowledge and self-control are deficient relative either to norms or ideals, the best means for reversing these deficiencies is effective utilization of all available knowledge of how selves originate, operate, and co-operate. Recognition that some tasks are beyond the powers of the unassisted individual does not mean that society must be divided into two classes, therapists and their patients. It means, or at least can be made to mean, joint action to perform these tasks. Such an approach is as relevant and applicable to the tasks of counseling agencies as to the other types of family agencies. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Mystery Before Us Which We Have Raised
Drugs are everywhere, both figuratively and literally. At any given moment, a large percentage of people nearly everywhere in the World are using one or more drugs as a medical requirement, a lifestyle choice, or to satisfy a desire or addiction. The consequences of drug use, from prescription pharmaceuticals to illicit substances, are felt on a daily basis by the individual and society at large. The recreational abusers unanimously agreed that there was no shortage of socially acceptable experimental drug use while in pharmacy school. For those who were interested, this environment provided ample opportunity to refine and expand their usage. One 48-year-old male pharmacist described the makeup of his pharmacy school cohort as follows: “There was a third of the pharmacy students in school because Mom and Dad or Grandfather or Uncle Bill were pharmacists, and they looked up to them and wanted to be one. Good enough. They had never seen a pharmacy. A [second] third had been in the [Vietnam] war. They were a pharmacy tech in the war or had worked in a pharmacy. They had the experiential effect of what pharmacy is and found a love for it or a desire to want it…Then you had the other third over here, and we were just drug addicts…It had nothing to do with altruism. We didn’t know what the practice was all about, but we did know that we got letters after our names, guaranteed income if we didn’t lose our letters, and we had access to anything [drugs] we needed.” Many of the recreational abusers claimed that they specifically sought out fellow pharmacy students who were willing to use prescription drugs. The most common locus for these associations were in pharmacy-specific fraternities. The respondents said that there was usually ample drug use going on in these organization and that they allowed them the opportunity to cautiously scout out and identify with other drug users. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Once they were connected with other drug users, the prescription drug use of all involved parties increased. This type of small-group drug use allowed for access to an expanded variety of drugs, a broader pharmacological knowledge base, and even larger quantities of drugs. However, numerous respondents clearly stated that these drug-based associations were tenuous and temporary in nature. Over time, as the intensity of their drug use increased, the recreational abusers described how they became more reclusive and guarded and selective in their relationships, fearing that their heightened use of prescription drugs would come to be defined as a problem by their fellow pharmacy students. One 43-year-old male pharmacist said: “You get the sense pretty quickly that you are operating [using] on a different level. Those of us that were busily stealing [prescription drugs] from our internship sites began to tighten our social circle. We might party a little bit with the others but when it came to heavy use, we kept it hush, hush.” Unlike other pharmacy students who were genuinely experimenting with drugs on a short-term basis, these recreational abusers noticed an added intensity associated with their own prescription drug use. While most of these recreational abusers entered pharmacy school with some prior experiences in recreational street drug use, their pre-college prescription drug use was usually not extensive. As such, it was not until they got into pharmacy school that they began to develop more pronounced street an prescription drug use habits. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
A 38-year-old female pharmacist discusses this transition into increased usage in the following interview excerpt: “I went off to pharmacy school. That was a 3-year program. I had tried a few things [before that], but I would back off because it was shaming for me not to get straight A’s. The descent to hell started when I got to pharmacy school. There were just so many things [prescription drugs] available and to many things that I thought I jut had to try. It might be a different high; it might be a different feeling, anything to alter the way that I just felt. I was pretty much using on a daily basis by the time I got to my last year.” Once the recreational abusers got into a permanent practice setting, they quickly deduced that they had free reign over the pharmacy stock. At first, they referenced other pharmacists for normative or behavioural guidance in access or using the prescription drugs. However, they soon realized that their nearly unrestricted access meant that they could not try any drugs that they wanted without guidance, and most did. More importantly, increased access allowed the young pharmacists to habitually and secretly use the drugs that they liked most. Not surprisingly the levels and frequency of their drug use usually skyrocketed shortly after entering pharmacy practice and going more solo with their use. A 41-year-old male pharmacist explained: “By the time I got to pharmacy school in 1971, I was smoking dope probably every day or every other day, and drinking with the same frequency, but not to the point of passing out kind of stuff. Then in 1971, that was also the year that I discovered barbs [barbiturates]. I had never had barbs up until I got to pharmacy school. So it was like ’75 or ’76 [when I got out of pharmacy school], I was using heavy Secondals and Quaaludes and Ambutols [all barbiturates]. I withdrew and it [the heavy misuse] just took off.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
At the start, the recreational abusers’ drug use was openly displayed and took on an air of excitement, much like others’ experimentation with street or prescription drugs. However, as it intensified over time, the majority described how they slowly shielded their use from others. They thought it important to appear as though they still had the situation under control. As physical tolerance and psychological dependence increasingly progressed, these individuals began to lose control. Virtually all of the recreational abusers eventually developed serious prescription drug use habits. Using large quantities and sometimes even multiple drug types, their prescription drug use careers were usually marked by a steep downward spiral. This trend was clearly evidenced in the hand-sketched life history timeline that was drawn by each respondent. What started out as manageable social drug experimentation persistently progressed to increasingly more secretive drug abuse. In almost every case, it took several years for the drug use to reach its peak addictive state. The intense physical and psychological effects of the drug use meant that the recreational abuser’s criminal/deviant career was punctuated by a very “low bottom.” Commonly identified signs of “bottoming out” included life-threatening health problems, repeated dismissals from work, having action taken against their pharmacy licenses, habitual lying, extensive cover-ups, divorces, and suicide attempts. By all accounts, the personal and professional lives of these recreational abusers suffered heavily from their drug abuse. In the end, most were reclusive and paranoid—what started out as collective experimentation ended in a painful existence of solitary addiction. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The criminal/deviant career paths of the remaining 27 interviewees (54 percent) fit a different substantive theme. To differentiate these individuals from the recreational abusers, we call this latter group of pharmacists “therapeutic self-medicators.” One of the defining characteristics of this ground was that they had little or no experience with street or prescription drug use prior to entering pharmacy school. In fact, many of these individuals did not even use alcohol. What little drug involvement they did report was usually occasional experimentation with marijuana or other “soft” drugs. If they had ever used prescription drugs, it was done legitimately under the supervision of a physician. Members of this group did not begin their illicit prescription drug use until they were well into their formal pharmacy careers. The onset of the therapeutic self-medicators’ drug use was invariably attributed to a problematic life situation, accident, medical condition, or occupationally related pain. When faced with such problems, these pharmacists turned to familiar prescription medicines for immediate relief. Rather than reporting a recreational, hedonistic, or pleasure motivation, these pharmacists simply decided to use readily available prescription drugs to treat their own medical maladies. The therapeutic self-medicators unanimously insisted that their prescription drug use was never recreational—that they never used drugs solely for the euphoric effects. Instead, their drug use was focused on specific therapeutic goals. This trend is illustrated in the comments of a 33-year-old male pharmacist: “There was no recreation involved. I just wanted to press a button and be able to sleep during the day. I was really having a touch time with this sleeping during the day. I would say by the end of that week I was already on the road [to dependency]…the race had started.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Other pharmacists described how their drug use began as a way of treating insomnia, physical trauma (exempli gratia, a car accident, sports injury, or a broken bone), or some chronic occupationally induced health problem (exempli gratia, arthritis, migraine headaches, leg cramps, or back pain). It is important to point out that during their earliest stages of their drug use, these individuals appeared to be “model pharmacists.” Most claimed to have excelled in pharmacy school. Moreover, occupational and career success usually continued after they entered full-time pharmacy practice. Personal appraisals, as well as annual supervisory evaluations, routinely described these individuals as hard working and knowledgeable professionals. Since they were usually treating the physical pain that resulted from the rigors of pharmacy work, all of the therapeutic self-medicators described how their prescription drug use started and progressed under seemingly innocent, or even honorable, circumstances. In many cases, they were treating the physical pain that resulted from the rigors of work. Instead of taking time off from work to see a physician, they chose to simply self-medicate their own ailments. A 50-year-old male pharmacist described this situation as follows: “When I got to Walgreen’s the pace there was stressful. We were filling 300 to 400 scripts a day with minimal support staff and working 12, 13 hours days. The physical part bothered me a lot. My feet and my back hurt. So, I just kept medicating myself until it got to the point where I was up to 6 to 8 capsules of Fiorinol-3 [narcotic analgesic] a day. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Without exception, the therapeutic self-medicators described how they always engaged in solitary and secretive drug use. Although they usually kept their drug use to themselves, many claimed that their initial use was shaped by their interactions with co-workers. That is, they got the idea to begin self-medicating from watching a co-worker do so or merely followed the suggestion of a concerned senior pharmacist who was seeking to help them remedy a physical malady, such as a hangover, anxiety, physical pain. To further highlight this illustration, a 38-year-old male pharmacist described an incident that occurred soon after being introduced to his hospital supervisor: ‘I remember saying one time that I had a headache. [He said] “got take some Tylenol-with-Codeine elixir [narcotic analgesic].’ I would never have done that on my own. He was my supervisor at the time, and I said, ‘okay, if you think I should.’ He said, ‘that’s what we do.’ I guess that started the ball rolling a little bit mentally.” Members of the therapeutic self-medicator group took notice of the drug-related behaviours and suggestions of their peers but never acted upon them in the company of others. Instead, they maintained a public front condemning illicit prescription drug use but quietly followed through on the suggestive behaviours when in private. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Whereas the recreational abusers used drugs to get high, the therapeutic self-medicators saw drug use as a means to a different end. Even as their drug use intensified, they were able to convince themselves that the drugs were actually having a beneficial effect on their work performance. This was not all together inaccurate, since they began using the drugs to remedy some constraining health problem that was detracting from their work efficiency. Some therapeutic self-medicators looked to their notion of professional obligation to justify their drug use. To further highlight this illustration, in describing his daily use of Talwin, a Schedule II narcotic analgesic, a 43-year-old male pharmacist maintained: “I thought I could work better. I thought I could talk better with the nurses and patients. I thought I could socialize better with it.” This type of convenient, altruistic-based explanation was quite common among the therapeutic self-medicators. That is, they were adept at convincing themselves that their patients and employers needed them to produce at a certain level. When their performance fell below this level, they turned to prescription medicines as a way of neutralizing whatever inhibiting force that was deemed responsible. At first, the pharmacists’ therapeutic self-medication behaviours seemed to work well. They remedied the problematic situation (pain, insomnia, et cetera) which allowed them to return to normal functioning. However, over time, they began to develop a tolerance for the drugs and thus had to take larger quantities to achieve the same desired effects. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The following interview excerpt from a 50-year-old male pharmacist offers a good overview of the life history of a therapeutic self-medicator: “Well, I didn’t have a big problem with that [early occasional self-medication behaviour]. I wasn’t taking that much. It was very much medicinal use. It was not an everyday thing. It really was used at that point for physical pain. But that’s when I started tampering with other things and started trying other things. I would have trouble sleeping so I would think, ‘You know, let’s see what the Dalmane [benzodiazepine] is like?’ When I was having weight problems… ‘Let’s give this Tenuate [amphetamine] a try.’ And I just started going down the line treating the things that I wanted to treat. And none of it got out of hand. It wasn’t until I came down here [to Sacramento]…that things really started to go wild.” In generally took between 5 and 10 years for these pharmacists to progress into the later stages of drug abuse. That is, they were able to control their use for a long time without it interfering with their personal or professional life. A handful of therapeutic self-medicators were not so lucky. For them, there was less time between the onset of their use and their entry into drug treatment. Their progression was much faster. This trend is illustrated by the comments of a 49-year-old male pharmacist: “About two or three years after I had my store, I was working long, long hours. Like 8.00 to 8.00 Monday through Saturday and some hours on Sunday. And my back hurt one day. It was really killing me and I started out with two Empirin-3 [narcotic analgesic]. Just for the back pain. I mean I hurt, my back hurt, my head hurt. I don’t know why, but I just reached for that bottle and I knew it was against the law to do that, but I did it any way. Man I felt good. I was off and running. This was eureka. That was it. It progressed. I started taking more and more then I finally…” #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The key to self-medicator’s fast-paced progressive drug use seemed to lie in the given individual’s perceived need to treat a wider and growing array of physical ailments. It got to the point that many “drug thirsty” pharmacists recognize that they were actively seeking out or inventing ailments to treat in themselves. As a 40-year-old female put it, “I had a symptom for everything I took.” Several other quotes illustrate this tendency for therapeutic self-medicators to invent ailments. In all, there were 27 pharmacists who fit into the category of therapeutic self-medicators. These individuals were admittedly naïve about drug abuse when they entered their pharmacy careers. They were either counseled or convinced themselves that there was no harm in the occasional therapeutic use of prescription medicines. The normative and behavioral advanced in their deviance were gained largely by exploiting or manipulating their professional position and knowledge. The therapeutic self-medicators always used their drugs in private and kept their use from others around them. Over time, their false confidence and denial that allowed their drug use to significantly progress. Once their façade was broken, these pharmacists awoke to the reality that they were chemically dependent on one or more of the drugs that they so confidently had been dispensing to themselves. If you have a drug addiction, consider seeking help from the church or a trusted medical professional. Counseling of family members by persons and agencies outside their family is very old, probably as old as humanity. Nevertheless, the process of differentiation, specialization, and professionalization which had brough into being agencies staffed by full-time counseling personnel is decidedly recent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
And the application of the concepts and findings of social science to counseling is more recent still. Since counseling agencies were started a few decades ago their methods and philosophy have only become systematized in some areas of their work. The rapidity and unevenness of their growth—further consumed by conflicting schools of thought—makes generalization risky, but for any appraisal of their place in the institutions affecting American families some rough summery of their emergence is necessary. The development of family counseling agencies can be schematized in several ways. When their characteristic techniques in successive periods are considered, it may be said that they proceeded from moral exhortation and sanction, through individual guidance or therapy, to procedures adapted to work with groups. Some of these group methods are oriented to conventional individual psychology, others stress interactional conceptions. When the doctrines rather than the techniques of the agencies are considered, it appears that successive periods saw emphasis on religion and morals, then on individual psychology or psychiatry, and finally on social psychology or sociology. As mentioned before, these phases of development have overlapped and still do. Also, certain family agencies primarily devoted to activities like medical care or economic rehabilitation carry on family counseling, although it is not their main duty. Every family-serving professional, whether lawyer, clergyman, teacher, or even architect, can rarely avoid being asked to advise on matter for which the psychiatrist, social worker, and clinical psychologist are especially trained. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The quest for guidance goes far beyond a mere demand for information. Similarly, many agencies listed as primarily engaged in counseling do not always limit their work to guidance, advice, and insight, but may offer such services as recreation, participation in clubs, or education. From the standpoint of their personnel, it might be fairer to survey and evaluate counseling agencies according to their success in reaching goals they have set for themselves. The main focus of attention of counselors in the strict sense intended is the personalities of their clients. To be sure, questions of vocational guidance or family budgeting frequently involve personality questions, and cannot be avoided or isolated in a doctrinaire manner from economic concerns. It is only when personality problems are paramount in the concern and responsibility of the agency, however, that it will be called a counseling agency. Or all types of family agencies, the counseling agencies are most conspicuously bunched at the second or therapeutic phase. They show an especially lively interest and experimental attitude to group therapy. A number of mental hospitals are actively experimenting with various forms of milieu and play therapy as major tools for providing large numbers of patients not merely with custody but with psychiatric care. Crime prevention bureaus in certain cities are exploring the value of clubs for delinquent modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous, and some experiments in group rehabilitation are actually going on with correctional institutions. While much of the development through official and professional channels is still handicapped by an individualistic approach, some agencies in theory and procedure are adopting a much more interactional outlook. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Yet even where community organizers have set up community councils and conducted community self-surveys, the therapeutic motive had in the end predominated, and tended to lead to clinics and casework. Inevitably such observations appear disparaging, yet the intent is not to criticize or condemn but merely to note the direction these developments have taken. The feeling that progress is not as rapid as originally hoped, and that some sort of ceiling is soon reached by efforts aimed only at correction psychopathology, had pervaded several studies of social work. Various kinds of families in trouble had characteristic persons or groups to which they turned when in trouble. In the same way, each family counseling agency appears to attract a characteristic clientele. When an agency had recruited as its clientele all that segment of the community which habitually turns with its kind of problem to that kind of agency, its operations are likely to settle into a routine procedure. Its progress then becomes measured mainly in terms of technique, such as its interview methods or efficiency in spending its means. Only where it can set before citizens a creative succession of new and positive goals does it have a fair chance to avoid such a ceiling of routinization. There are still immense areas and many strata of communities in the United States of America which barely enjoy the philanthropic or charitable phase of development of counseling agencies; there are many more which have yet to reach professional standards at the therapeutic phase; and there are only a handful who have made the step from individual casework to group work. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
It may thus seem premature to suggest inadequacies in the therapeutic approach. Yet there is no apparent reason, other than the failure to conceive goals beyond adjustment, to prevent the adoption of a beneficial, planning approach to the functions of counseling agencies. Psychological offenders are able to counterfeit the voice of God because of the ignorance of believers that they can do so, and their ignorance also of the true principle of God’s way of communication with His children. The Lord said: “My sheep know My voice….,” id est, My way of speaking to My sheep. He did not say this voice was an audible voice, nor a voice giving directions which were to be obeyed apart from the intelligence of the believer; but, on the contrary, the word “know” indicates the use of the mind, for although there is knowledge in the spirit it must reach the intelligence of the man, so that spirit and mind become of one accord. The question whether God now speaks by His direct voice audibly to men needs consideration at this point. A careful study of the epistles of Paul—which contain an exhaustive summation of God’s will for the Church, the Body of Christ, even as the books of Moses contained God’s will and laws for Israel seems to make it clear that God, having “spoke to us in His Son,” no longer speaks by His own direct voice to His people. Nor does it appear that, since the coming of the Holy Spirit to guide the Church of Christ into all truth, He frequently employs angels to speak or to guide His children. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
God must be approached cognitively through the structural elements of being-itself because God is the ground and the structure of being. The structural elements serve as symbols which are rooted in and point toward their ground. However, before speaking symbolically of God, the theologian must make at least one nonsymbolic statement about Him. Otherwise there would be an infinite series of symbols pointing ever onward, for it is the nature of symbols not to rest in themselves, but to point. That statement that God is being-itself is a nonsymbolic statement. It means what it says directly and properly. After this, nothing else can be said about God as God which is not symbolic. Our ability to speak about God depends upon whether or not the finite can be used to asset something about the infinite. The infinite is being-itself, and everything finite participates in it. The analogia entis gives us our only justification of speaking at all about God. Thus, by its participation in the ground of being, them meaning of the symbol is affirmed. Yet, at the same tie, its proper meaning is negated, for the ground of being transcends its structural elements; the ground is also the abyss. Religious symbols operate in two directions. They bring the infinite down to the finite by concretizing it; and they elevate the finite by revealing its participation in the infinite. For example, if God is symbolized as “father” or “king,” He is brought down to the level of human relationships. Yet simultaneously fatherhood and kingship are consecrated, for their theonomous depth, their holy character is revealed. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
When it comes to resolving disputes, there are reasons for using private ordering when pertaining to information. In this context we have a threefold key distinction, between private, observable, and verifiable information. Consider a transaction between two parities. Information is private when it is available to one of the parties but not the other. Sometimes the informed party wants to convey the information truthfully to the other party, but must do so in a credible way because the uninformed party will be wary of strategic misrepresentation. Id the two parties’ interests are well aligned, mere declaration (cheap talk) may work. Otherwise the informed party has to look for a costly action (signal) that credibly conveys the truth of the matter, because that action would not have been optimal had the information been different. Sometimes the uninformed party can devise tests (screening or mechanism design), requiring the informed party to undertake actions that will reveal the truth. They theory of asymmetric information is now a standard part of economic theory. Signaling and screening can be parts of contracts between the two parties. For example, if the seller of a car knows its quality much better than the buyer can find our by inspection, then a warranty may serve as a signal of quality. However, the terms of such a contract cannot specify actions to be taken under circumstances that only one of the parties can observe, because that party would have every reason to misrepresent the circumstances so as to avoid taking a costly action. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Thus the warranty cannot specify the circumstances under which a part of the car has to be replaced in such a ways that only one party can observe them. If the buyer is the sole judge of whether the transmission operates satisfactorily, he may claim that it is unsatisfactory at the slightest excuse and obtain a new one. Contracts must implicitly or explicitly give each party the discretion to act on the basis of its private information. To address environmental challenges of our time, it is crucial to overcome existing global stereotypes and think of alternative approaches. The time is ripe to go far beyond the UNFCCC framework (though it does not mean a call to bury it altogether) and, first of all, to make it clear that today’s environmental issues should be looked upon from a much wider angle than the one of the climate change talks. We are facing a really big global problem of the deterioration of the natural environment on our Mother Earth, which includes deforestation, extinction of many species of plants and animals, air pollution, water contamination, more and more frequent extreme weather events, unbearable noise levels in the cities, and so on. Obviously, the problem is not limited to CO2 emissions or rising temperatures. Every country or groups of countries must do their utmost to find and implement the solutions taking into account their development stage, economic and social conditions, financial and technological capabilities, and so on. Comprehensive environmental solutions have to be well balanced with policies and measure aimed at achieving other key social and economic goals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Countries should actively exchange information and experience in this area, launch joint projects (both at the bilateral and multilateral level) where possible, and set binding or nonbinding environmental targets for themselves if they consider them useful. The UN should not be looked upon as the only coordinator of international efforts—furthermore, it is unlikely to be the most efficient coordinator. Definitely, the West should actively assist developing countries working to preserve and improve their natural environment—financially, technologically, and intellectually. However, it has to be made clear that, especially in the area of financing, limits exist as most Western economies themselves are facing touch fiscal constraints. Perhaps other countries should be willing to accept the role of one of the major sources of global environmental financing. With the economies of Japan and Europe recovering from World War II, American firms face heavy competitive fire. Constant innovation is needed to compete—new ideas for products, technologies, processes, marketing, finance. Something on the order of 1,000 new products are introduced into America’s supermarkets every month. Even before the model 486 computer replaced the model 386 computer, the new 586 chip was on its way. Thus smart firms encourage workers to take initiative, come up with new ideas and, even if necessary, to “throw away the rulebook.” Work units shrink. The scale of operations is miniaturized along with many of the products. Vast numbers of workers doing much the same muscle work are replaced by small, differentiate work teams. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Big businesses are getting smaller; small businesses are multiplying. In just 30 years, the number of IBM employees has gone from 370,000 to 288,300. As its employees are being pecked to death by small manufacturers around the World, to survive, it lays off many workers and splits itself into thirteen different—smaller—business units. In the Third Wave system, economies of scale are frequently outweighed by diseconomies of complexity. The more complicated the firm, the more the left hand cannot anticipate what the right hand will do next. Things fall through the cracks. Problems proliferate that may outweigh any of the presumed benefits of sheer mass. The old idea that bigger is necessarily better is increasingly outmoded. Struggling to adapt to high-speed changes, companies are racing to dismantle their bureaucratic Second Wave structures. Industrial-era complies typically had similar tables of organization—pyramidal, monolithic and bureaucratic. Today’s markets, technologies, and consumer needs change so rapidly and put such varied pressures on the firm, that bureaucratic uniformity is on its way out. The search is on for wholly new forms of organization. “Re-engineering,” for example, the current buzzword in management, seeks to restructure the firm around processes rather than market or compartmentalized specialties. Relatively standardized structures give way to matrix organizations, “ad hocratic” project teams, profit centers, as well as to a growing diversity of strategic alliances, joint ventures and consortia—many of these crossing national boundaries. Since markets change constantly, position is less important than flexibility and maneuverability. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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My Soul to Nothingness, but I Will Strive
Many persons accustomed to travelling the old country side were sure so fair a place was never seen. Of all that charmed the romantic eye, it seemed an emerald through the clouds of fleecy white, and cerulean sky. As the sun crowned its lawny crest, smiling upon the flowers and trees, bright eyes reflected the majesty of Llanada Villa. The lively and robust body of this remarkable house contrasts its physicality against the darkness, secrets, and void of the dense ancient elms. Tall ornamental hedges maintain the privacy of the dwelling. The fruit orchard much like an enchanted forest, in which the bluebirds returning to their nest, guard the fruit from pests, as the straggling deer who peep from beneath the branches, do not startle the natural and undisturbed dominion. Heightened by euphoria, delightful shapes of mystery and fear clear in youthful bloom of its immortal spirit. On stormy nights, as the guard described, one can hear the doors clapping inside, and the howl and sobbing of the wind through it ornate galleries. I carried with me some blessings and a good many curses. I was woken in the early morning, by hearing my name called softly. I rose and went to my door in my nightgown, but there was no one in the passage. The voice sounded like my niece Daisy’s, but when I came to her door, it was closed. All was silent; the bathroom door stood slightly open; there was the morning room beyond; then the landing and the staircase. I heard my name called again, only this time the voice boomed like a gong inside my head; the light failed, as if a candle had been snuffed, and something rushed at me out of the gloom. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
I screamed and struggled until the light came back with the sound of running feet and I realized that the demon who had seized me was, in fact, a Welsh priest. A fornight or so later—certainly, after the doctor had pronounced me well on the way to recovery—I was sitting up in bed reading when my grandmother came into the room and sat down in the chair beside me, looking exactly as he had when we first met: the same calf length frock coat, double-breasted vet, and wool trousers, with his hair parted on the left and neatly combed to the side, the same familiar scent of alone wood, orange flower, musk and spices. The chair creaked as he settled himself in it, smiled at me and took up his work, just as if he had only been gone for five minutes, rather than resting in the Evergreen Cemetery for nine years. I was vaguely aware that my husband was supposed to be dead, but somehow this did not matter; his presence at my bedside seemed entirely natural and comforting. And though my own tranquil acceptance of the visit would later seem, to me, as strange as the visit itself, we sat in companionable silence for an indefinite interval until my husband gathered up his work, smiled once more at me and went slowly from the room. Daisy came in so soon after that I thought they must have passed each other in the hall, so I asked, “Did you see your uncle William?” I saw from her look of consternation that I had best not pursue the subject, and agreed that I must have been dreaming. As with the strange radiance of William’s appearance was followed by one of the worst headaches I had ever endured. But I felt certain I had been wide awake. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
Even after the strangeness of the experience had become fully apparent to me, I found I could not think of my visitant as a ghost. My reading in sensational literature had enhanced an already vivid imagination of how ghosts ought to conduct themselves: a hint of transparency and one or two bloodcurdling groans was surely the least that could be expected, whereas William had been—well, just my husband. And though nothing like this had ever happened to me before, I had not felt in the slightest afraid. Dr. Wayland had declared me well enough to get up, and the memory of my husband’s visit had faded to the point where I could almost believe it had been a dream, when one evening after dinner I saw my father-in-law crossing the hall ahead of me. He was no more than ten paces away, I heard the floor creak under his tread. Looking neither right nor left, he entered his study and closed the door behind him, just as he would have done in life. Again I felt no fear; only an overwhelming impulse to go up to the door and knock. When there was no answer, I tried the handle. The door opened readily, but there was no one there, only the familiar cracked brown leather armchairs on the worn Persian rug, the elaborate desk with its feet carved into the fierce face carved into faces of angels, the bookshelves crammed with Blue Book and army lists and regimental histories and accounts of gun dealers, the lingering faint scent of timber, leather and bindings. I remained in the doorway for a long time, lost in a trance of recollection. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
I picked up one of Willian’s old letters and went out into the garden and sat down on a charming bench, under a group of magnificent lime trees. The sun was setting with all its melancholy splendour being the horizon, and the fountains wound through a group of noble trees, almost at my feet, reflecting in their current the fading crimson of the sky. His letter was extraordinary. So much so that I read it twice over—the second time to the spirits. It said, “I miss you my darling wife, for as such I love you. During these last days of my illness, I was too weak to write you. Before then I had no idea of the danger. I will soon no longer be with you. Thank you for the hospitality. Thank you for receiving me into your heart, gaiety, and for being a charming companion. Heaven! I devote my remaining days to the gleaming light that you cast upon my heart. I hope you may accomplish your merciful purpose. I curse my conceited incredulity for unduly leaving you to mourn my absence. If only I could live for eternity, I would remain by your side. Farewell. I love you, my beloved.” My eyes filled with tears at his passion and intelligence. The sun had now set, and it was twilight by the time gone back inside. It was a soft evening, and I loitered, speculating upon seeing him again. I could hear his voice in animated dialogue and recall how proud he was to be a father, and turned about to admire the beautiful scene. The glade which I had just walked lay before. At the left narrow of the path wound away under the clumps of lordly trees, and was lost to sight amid the thickening forest. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
At the right of the path stands the Observational Tower, which guarded the estate. Over the grounds, a thin film of mist was stealing, like smoke, marking the distances with a transparent veil; and here and there I could see the fountains flashing in the moonlight. No softer, sweeter scene could be imagined. I enjoyed the picturesque, and I, stood looking silence over the expanse beneath me. Standing a little way behind me, discoursed upon the scene, and were upon the eloquent moon. When the moon shone with a light so intense it is well known that it indicates a special spiritual activity. The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy is manifold. It acts on dreams, it acts on lunacy, it acts on nervous people; it has a marvellous physical influence connected with life. One of the carpenters, having taken a nap on the balcony on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light of the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side. The moon, this night, is full of odylic and magnetic influences—and when one looks behind at the front of the mansion, how all its windows flash and twinkle with that silvery splendour, as if unseen hands had lighted up the rooms to receive fairy guests. There are indolent states of the spirits in which, indisposed to talk ourselves, the talk of others is pleasant to our listless ears; and I gazed on, pleased with the tinkle of the stars. But I felt as is some great misfortune were hanging over me. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
O THOU great, powerful, and mighty KING AMAIMON, who bearest rule by the power of the SUPREME GOD EL over all spirits both superior and inferior of the Infernal Orders in the Dominion of the East; I do invocate and command thee by the especial and true name of God; and by they Thou Worshippest; and by the Seal of thy creation; and by the most mighty and powerful name of GOD, IEHOVAH TETEAGRAMMATON who cast thee out of Heaven with all other infernal spirits; and by all the most powerful and great names of God who created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all things in them contained; and by their power and virtue; and by the name PRIMEUMATON who commandeth the whole host of Heave; that thou mayest cause, enforce, and compel the Spirit Murmus—The Fifty-fourth Spirit and His 30 Legions of Spirits, Lord of darkness and liberation come forth! Murmus awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the God of limitation Ahura Mazda! Murmus, Zairich, and Tairich, unholy fever and thirst come forth! Murmus awaken! Tairich awaken! Zairich awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Amardad! Akiman, demon of evil mind come forth! Akoman awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Vohuman! Naikiyas, Div or rebellion and discontent come forth! Naikiyas awake! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Spandarmad! #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Andar, Div of antinomian fire come forth! Andar awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fllen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Arwahist! Taromat, beautiful Div of rebellion come forth! Taromat awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Spandarmad! Aeshma, wielder of the bloody mace! Demon of the wounding spear and bringer of wrath come forth! Aeshma awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Srosh! Sovar, merciless leader of Divs come forth! Sovar awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel shahrewar! I stand alone as the embodiment of the Adversary known as Ahriman, the Black Dragon of Chaos and becoming! I devour the natural order of stasis brought forth by Ahura Mazda and forge my destiny through the power of the Black Sun! By the figurative mystery of this holy mansion, I will clothe it with the armour of salvation in the strength of the Most High, ANCOR, AMICAR, AMIDES, THEDONIAS, ANITOR, that so the end which I desire may be effected, O ADONAI, through Thy strength, to whom be praise and glory for ever and ever. 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, an warning thee that it thou didst not manifest this moment, I still straightway smite thee and all thy race with the Blasting Rod of the great ADONAY, ELOIM, ARIEL, and JEHOVAM. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
In 2007, while closing up The Winchester Mystery House, Jeff kept catching sight of a shadow moving. He would turn quickly to see if it was a person, but nothing was there. It unnerved him, not knowing what was taking place. The activity picked up when they started to decorate for the Christmas season. Finally, he consulted one of the guests about the strange occurrences. He was very talkative, and would relate experiences about a ghost. During one conversation with the guest, Jeff related that he heard people upstairs laughing and thumping around in the Grand Ballroom, almost like they were dancing country-western style. When he investigated, he would find nothing out of place and no living person upstairs. When opening the mansion in the morning, they found linen that had been neatly arranged, laying on the floor, yet no one had been in the mansion since he had closed it the night before.
One morning he found an entire display sitting at the foot of the stairs. Everything had been moved during the night. His first thoughts were that someone had broken into the place, but there were no signs of an intruder. Early another morning, Jeff and a few other employees heard a music box playing. They went deep in the mansion to find the source. After searching for hours, they found nothing in the mansion, until they went up the dark stairs to the fourth floor. The stairs were steep, and when Jeff got to the top, he snapped a picture down the stairway. He took the picture at that moment because he had a strange feeling. After the investigated the fourth floor, Jeff said he felt a cold draft come by him, as though it was rushing past them down the stairs. The resulting picture was a tragic and forlorn figure dressed in nineteenth century clothes. People have reported seeing her figure walking toward doors that lead to parts of the mansion that are off limits to guest and that she passes unimpeded through locked doors. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Do Injustice and Evil Rule Over the Progress of Humanity?
Those who have never lost by death some one deeply loved have never sounded the depths of despair, have never bruised themselves against the closed door of the tomb. We seek, and an impenetrable wall rises inexorably before the terror that confronts us. If the existence of human beings leads to nothing, what is this comedy all about? It is hard not to desire an answer to the formidable question that presents itself when we think of our destiny, or when a cruel death has taken from us someone we love. How is it possible not to ask whether or not we shall find each other again, or if the separation is for eternity? Does a Deity or Goodness exist? Do injustice and evil rule over the progress of humanity, with no regard for the feelings that nature has placed in our hearts? And what is this nature itself? Has it a will, an end? Could there be more intelligence, more justice, more goodness, and more inspiration in our infinitesimally small minds than in the great Universe? How many questions are associated with the same enigma! We shall die; nothing is more certain. When the Earth on which we live shall have turned only a hundred times more around the sun, not one of us, dear readers, will still be on this World. Ought we to fear death for ourselves, or for those whom we love? From among the many symbols of the divine, we select that of “personal God” in order to illustrate in one stroke the theory and symbolism, the implications of God as being-itself, and one aspect of the living God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The religious encounter, the experience of the holy, demand an I-Thou relationship. God cannot be an “It.” Anything less than a personal God is incapable of arousing an ultimate concern in man. A sub-personal God is not God. That is the reason that the symbol of the Personal God is indispensable for living religion. However, there are difficulties. Is not God as being-itself an impersonal God? Nothing seems more incompatible than the warmth of a person and the bleakness of being-itself. Moreover, if God is a person, is He not reduced to the status of a being along side other beings? Due to these difficulties, particularly the latter, the personal God is a confusing symbol. The solution is the divine transcendence. Calling God a person does not necessarily pull Him down to the same level as other persons and beings, for the absolute individual is also the absolute participant. The other polar element of participation guarantees that God remains being-itself who participates in all beings as their ground. Furthermore, God as being-itself means that God is the ground of everything personal and the He carries within Himself the ontological power of personality. He is the Personal-Itself, the ground and abyss of every person. God is transpersonal in the sense the He includes the personal, but transcends it. Religiously speaking, man encounters the personal God. Theologically speaking, he encounters the ground of everything personal. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
However, in either case the symbol of the personal God indicates that our personal center is grasped by the manifestation of the inaccessible ground and abyss of being. God declares that are bodies are His temple, and we are to keep them pure. This also means abstaining from fornication and drugs. One-time drug abuse can be harmful, and in the few cases where people are sensitive to the drug, it can be lethal. Continued recreational use of drugs cause brain damage and increasingly compromises your ability to make decisions. Habit forming drugs not only affect your body, but as you surrender your body and will to them, they will also destroy the other command center of your body—your spirit. Choosing to disobey the Word of Wisdom will lead you away from the Lord. Trying drugs “just once” can physically harm you in some cases. However, “just once” will always harm you spiritually. Narcotic addiction serves the design of the psychopathological offender, for it disrupts the channel to the holy spirit of truth…Addiction has the capacity to disconnect the human will and nullify moral agency. It can rob one of the power to decide. Agency is too fundamental a doctrine to be left in such jeopardy. Stay away from illegal drugs. If the federal government forbids their use, that means they are illegal. Drugs will take away your powers of reason. They will enslave you in a vicious and terrible way. They will destroy your mind and your body. They will build within you such cravings that you will do anything to satisfy them. The same goes for abusing prescription drugs or any other addictive substance, including alcohol and tobacco. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The need for governance arises because, in its substance, individuals pursing their own interests would generate an inferior equilibrium outcome. American pharmacists fill over 4 billion controlled drug/mediation prescription orders annually. This is up from 1.4 billion in 1994. Every day, hundreds of thousands of Americans walk into their local drug stores and rely on pharmacist to accurately dispense their medications. What the public does not realize, however, is that some of themselves using the drugs that they are entrusted to dispense. Self-report studies reveal that somewhere between forty and sixty-five percent of all practicing pharmacists have engaged in illicit prescription drug use. Moreover, these inquiries tell us that roughly twenty percent of practicing pharmacist use drugs on a regular basis and that five to ten percent consider themselves to be drug abusers. Given our specific interest in the various career aspects of deviant behaviour, after examining the transcripts of the interview it became apparent that the initiation and subsequent progression of pharmacist’ illicit prescription drug use followed one of two criminal career trajectories: recreational abusers and therapeutic self-medicators. Of the 50 pharmacists interviewed, 23 (46 percent) could be classified as recreational abusers. One of the defining characteristics of recreational abusers is that they all began experimenting with street drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, and various psychedelics, while in high school or during their early college years. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
These pharmacists described their early drug use as exclusively recreational. The motivation behind this use was quite simple, they were adventurous and wanted to experience the euphoric, mind altering effects that the drug offered. Because of procurement problems, these individuals reported that they engaged in little, if any prescription drug use before entering pharmacy school. For the recreational abuser, the onset of the illicit prescription drug use career usually began shortly after entering pharmacy training. These respondents were quick to point to the recreational motivations behind their early prescription drug use. As one 42-year-old-male pharmacist stated, “I just wanted the effect, I really just wanted the effect. I know what alcohol is. But what is you take a Quaalude and drink with it? What happens then?” Similarly, a 36-year-old male pharmacist said: “It was very recreational at first, year. It was more curiosity…experimental. I had read about all these drugs. Then I discovered I had a lot of things going on with me at that time and that these [drugs] solved the problem for me instantly. I had a lot of self-exploration issues going on at that time.” Trends in the data indicate that pharmacy school provided these individuals with the requisite access to prescription drugs. They recalled how they exploited their newly found access to prescription drugs in an effort to expand or surpass the euphoric effects that they received from weaker street drugs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
To further highlight this illustration, a 27-year-old male pharmacist said: “It was a blast. It was fun…It was experimentation. We smoked a little pot. And then in the “model pharmacy” [a training facility in college], there was stuff [prescription drugs] all over the place. ‘Hey this is nice…that is pretty nice.’ If it was a controlled substance then I tried it. I had my favorites, but when that supply was exhausted, I’d move on to something else. I was a ‘garbage head!’ It was the euphoria…I used to watch Cheech and Chong [movies]. That’s what it was like. I wasn’t enslaved by them [or so I thought]. They made the World go round.” Over half of the recreational abusers claimed that they specifically chose a career in pharmacy because they expected that it would offer them an opportunity to expand their drug use behaviours. For example, a 37-year-old male pharmacists said: “That’s one of the main reasons I went to pharmacy school, because, I’d have access to medications if I needed them.” Further evidence of this trend can be seen in the comments of a 41-year-old male pharmacist: “I [had to] change my major. So I [based my choice] on nothing more than: ‘well, it looks like fun and…gee all the pharmacy majors had drugs.’ The guys [pharmacy students] that I knew…every weekend when they came back from home, they would unpack their bags and bags of pills would roll out. I thought, ‘Whoa, I got to figure out how to do this.’ [I would ask:] ‘How much did you pay for this?’ [They would respond:] ‘I haven’t paid a thing, I just stole them. Stealing is okay. I get sh*t wages so I got to make it up somehow. So we just steal the sh*t.’ Well, I thought, ‘this is it, I want to be a pharmacist.’ So I went to pharmacy school.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
While many of these recreational abusers entered pharmacy school with prior experiences in drug use, their pre-college drug use was usually not extensive. It was not until they got into pharmacy school that they began to develop more pronounced and progressive drug habits. A 41-year-old male pharmacist discusses this transition into increased usage, in the following interview excerpt: “It [pre-college use] had been recreational type use. It was pretty consistent. But I was still just experimenting. I hadn’t, at that point, become actively addicted. [I was] smoking pot and drinking beer, [doing] psychedelics and Quaaludes [depressant]. Just whatever [I] would come across, if [I] came across [it], great, if I didn’t, no big deal…That was before pharmacy school. By the time I got into pharmacy school, the recreational drug use turned into a fairly steady drug use. Certainly not more than a month to two months would go by without something…I really started drinking and drugging. A lot of my friends after high school said, ‘Oh great, you’re going into pharmacy school. You can wake up on uppers and go to bed on downers,” all that stuff. At first, [I said] no. The first time I ever [used prescription drugs] I thought, ‘no, that’s not why I’m doing it. No, I’m doing it [in pharmacy school] for the noble reasons.’ But then after a while I thought, well, maybe they had a point there after all. Once in pharmacy school, the recreational abusers consistently described how they adopted an applied approach to their studies. For example, if they read about particularly interesting drugs in pharmacy school, they wanted to try them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
If they were clerking or interning in a pharmacy setting which offered them access to prescription medicines, they wanted to steal drugs and use them. If a teacher or employer told them about the unusual effects of a new drug, they recalled how they wanted to experiment with it. This meant that these individuals usually began using prescription drugs soon after entering pharmacy school or while working in the pharmacy during school. This pattern of application-oriented learning is exemplified in the comments of a 44-year-old male pharmacist: “When we studied Valium [benzodiazepine], I had to find out what Valium was…If I studied a class of drugs, I had to say, ‘Well, I don’t know that. I don’t understand that. What did they mean by tranquilizer? What did they mean?’ I’d have to find out. Then, of course, I found the ones that I liked and the ones I didn’t…got worse when I got on the job. It was so fascinating to me, reading the prescriptions and going and finding the drug back there [on the shelf]…I would take inserts home and read about it. It was just so fascinating to me. That’s when I was learning about it and reading it as much as I could…That’s where it [the use] definitely…definitely started.” They explained that they wanted to experience the drug effects that they read about in pharmacy textbooks. These individuals adeptly incorporated their newly found scientific training and professional socialization in a way that allowed them to excuse and redefine their use. They began to see their own drug use as beneficial to their future patients. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
This adaptation strategy is illustrated in the comments of a 59-year-old male recreational abuser: “In a lot of ways, it [college drug use] was pretty scientific. [I was] seeing how these things affected me in certain situations….testing the waters…‘better living through chemistry.’ I thought, ‘I’ll be able to counsel my patients better the more I know about the side effects of these drugs. I’ll be my own rat. I’ll be my own lab rat. I can tell [patients] about the shakes and chills and the scratchy groin and your kin sloughing off. I can tell you all about that stuff.” We will continue this discussion on “socially acceptable drug use in pharmacy school” in the next few days. As one’s spiritual life develops, the believer knows to a great extent the true guidance of the Spirit of God. One knows true inward constraint to act, and restraint from action in like manner—such as when to speak to another about one’s soul, when to rise and testify in a meeting, et cetera. However, after a time one may cease to watch for this pure inward moving of the Spirit—often through ignorance of how to read the monitions of one’s spirit—and may begin to wait for some other incentive or manifestation to guide one in action. This is the time for which the psychopathological offenders have been watching. Since at this point the self-actualized has ceased, unknown to oneself, to cooperate with the inward spirit action—to use one’s volition, and to decide for oneself—one is not watching for some parallel, supernatural indication of the way to go, or the course to take. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Hence one must have “guidance” somehow—some “text,” some “indication,” some “providential circumstance,” et cetera, et cetera. This is the moment of opportunity for a deceiving spirit to gain one’s attention and confidence. And so some words are whispered softly—words that are exactly in accordance with the inward drawing that one has had, but which one does not recognize as from another source. The Holy Spirit, however, led via a deep inner constraining and restraining of one’s spirit. The soft whisper of the deceiving spirit is so delicate and gentle that the believer listens to and receives the words without question, and begins to obey this soft whisper, yielding more and more to it, without any thought of exercising mind, judgment, reason or volition. The “feelings” are now in the body, but the believer is unaware that one is ceasing to act from one’s spirit and by the pure unfettered actions of one’s will and one’s mind, which, under the illumination of the Spirit, are always in accord with one’s spirit. This is a time of great danger if the believer fails to discriminate the source of one’s “drawing” feelings and yields to them before finding out. One should examine one’s basic principle of decision, especially when it has to do with feeling, lest one should be led away by a feeling without being able to say where it comes from and whether it is safe for one to go by it. One should know there are physical feelings, soulish feelings, and feelings in the spirit—any of which can be divine or unholy in their source; therefore reliance on “feelings”—feeling drawn, et cetera—is a source of great mischief in the Christian life. From this point deceiving spirits can increase their control, for the believer had begun the listening attitude, which can be developed acutely until one is always watching for an “inner voice” or the voice of God in the spirit; and thus the believer moves and acts as a passive slave to “supernatural guidance.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Generally speaking, the development of social competence is a matter of learning by doing. If one family member has the opportunity to meet strangers, to plan and conduct parties, to speak before audiences, to obtain the co-operation of others in group activities which one leads, one develops social competence. One learns not only how to avoid giving offense to others, but how to elicit their approval, sympathy, and collaboration—“how to win friend and influence people.” If such experience is not available to one, one’s potentialities for social growth remain undeveloped. Moreover, one’s social ineptitude is not merely an embarrassing handicap or distressing lack to one; it is a serious impediment to the equal exercise of one’s right as a citizen to participate in group matters involving one’s welfare. Inequalities of this character are hazards to the genuine enjoyment of that political equality which is supposedly guaranteed by law. As long as individuals were relatively independent and government was minimal, the one-man-one-vote principle displayed on election day may well have been sufficient evidence of political and legal equality. However, now with the increasing requirement for individuals to participate daily in large organizations, something more than the mere opportunity to vote in periodic elections becomes more conspicuously necessary—namely, the power and ability to exercise one’s voice in governing the conduct from day to day of these enveloping organizations. Otherwise, as critics of Anglo-American political democracy contend, membership in the community for large numbers of presumed citizens becomes formal and empty, conveying no sense of sharing in its control. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
It has always been recognized that experience in forming and operating voluntary associations has been the best training ground for responsible citizenship outside the family itself. In this sense at least, all voluntary associations, whatever their concrete aims, might be termed family agencies for the development of the necessary competence. For this reason, it is impossible to list here as legal and political agencies all the countless voluntary associations which exist. Instead, when we come to consider potential changes in the operation of the various other types of family agencies, the function of equipping individuals for active citizenship will have to be considered as distributed among all of them. The emphasis of historians and other observers of American society upon our characteristic plethora of voluntary associations may well deserved. Nevertheless, numerous as the many forms of association are, membership in them is confined to a relatively small segment of each community (one-third is a generous estimate), and activity to an even smaller segment. Where members of one family may belong and hold office in half a dozen organizations, another half-dozen families belong to none at all. In almost every community, the cry goes up constantly that leadership, activity, and influence are concentrated in a few hands, and among the older rather than the young people. This cry goes up no more often as a complain from critics than as a plea from the leaders themselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
In public as well as in private forms of association, the complaint is chronic that far too few people exercise their rights to vote, to petition representatives, to keep informed on issues and to exert influence upon their outcome. Perhaps these persistent exhortations and condemnations are but the negative expression of our national ideal of full and equal citizenship; perhaps they point to a grievous deficiency which demands remedy; in either case there is a need for a considerable development of competence if there is to be successful working with others in accomplishing common ends. From this standpoint alone we can presume to suggest that ways are needed whereby family agencies can contribute a great deal more to universalizing such competence. From this standpoint also, it seems fair to point to legal and political agencies as the type of family agencies which have done the least to go beyond the mere redress of correction of grievances, into the therapeutic and positive planning stages of development. Even in modern advanced economies where the state promulgates and enforces laws bearing on economic conduct, these laws rarely govern all detailed aspects of transactions and contracts. Most business transactions between, as well as within, firms are conducted using various informal arrangements, such as handshakes and oral agreements, ongoing relationships, and custom and practice. If disputes arise, the parties first attempt to resolve them by direct negotiation. The law is available if these attempts at private settlement fail, but recourse to it is usually the last step, not the first, and often signifies the end of an ongoing relationship. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Evidence bearing on this goes back at least as far as the classic article of Macaulay (1963), and covers many countries with well and poorly functioning legal systems alike. Such private ordering in the shadow of the law arises for different reasons, and takes different forms that attempt to respond appropriately to each reason. Perhaps the simplest of these reasons is the cost of using the formal legal system. The cost can arise in many ways. Firs, even in countries with well-functioning state civil law, obtaining and enforcing a judgement in the court system takes a long time; three years is not uncommon. The court may include interest when calculating damages, but for most traders who are somewhat constrained in access to capital markets, the interest rate used in this calculation is likely to be an underestimate of the rate at which they discount the future. Next, in its calculation of damages, the court may underestimate or even leave out items like lost profit that are speculative and can be overstated by the plaintiff. Third, judges in state courts have to cover all conceivable matters that could arise under civil law, and therefore lack the expertise that insiders would be able to acquire about a specific industry. Therefore their verdicts in commercial disputes can be less predictable than those available in alternative specialized forums. Both parties to a dispute dislike this unpredictability. Finally, courts may require public both parities to the dispute would prefer to keep secret. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Sometimes the parties wish to avoid public knowledge of the mere fact that they were involved in litigation, because potential future transactors may think of them as inflexible and unwilling to renegotiate deals in response to changed circumstances. When the operation of the law is costly, both parities can benefit by resolving their dispute through bargaining or renegotiation, in which the expected outcome of recourse to legal systems constitutes the fallback, or the best alternative to negotiated agreement (BATNA) in Harvard Business School jargon. In turn, their initial contract and economic choices will be affected by this prospect of future renegotiation. This view of bargaining in the shadow of the law is well developed in the Law and Economics literature. Mass production, the defining characteristic of the Second Wave economy, becomes increasingly obsolete as firms install information intensive, often robotized manufacturing systems capable of endless inexpensive variation, even customization. The revolutionary result is, in effect, the demassification of mass production. The shift toward smart flex-techs promotes diversity and feeds consumer choice to the point that a Wal-Mart store can offer the buyer nearly 110,000 products in various types, sizes, models and colours to choose among. However, Wal-Mart is a mass merchandiser. Increasingly, the mass market itself is breaking up into differentiate niches as customers need diverge and better information makes it possible for businesses to identify and serve micro-markets. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Specialty stores, boutiques, superstores, TV home-shopping systems, computer-based buying, direct mail and other systems provide a growing diversity of channels through which producers can distribute their wares to customers in increasingly de-massified marketplace. Visionary marketers no longer focus on “market segmentation.” They now focus on “particles”—family units and even single individuals. Meanwhile, advertising is targeted at smaller and smaller market segments reached through increasingly de-massified media. The dramatic breakup of mass audiences is underscored by the crisis of the once great TV networks, ABS, CBS, and NBC, at a time when digital streaming offers virtually an infinite number of TV programs that can be ported into your home via WiFi and play on your television. And you select the times when you want to watch a program and what program you want to watch. Such systems means that sellers will use stealth advertising to target buyer with even great precision. The simultaneous de-massification of production, distribution and communication revolutionizes the economy and shifts it from homogeneity to ward extreme heterogeneity. Work itself is transformed. Essentially interchangeable muscle work drove the Second Wave. Mass, factory-style education prepared workers for routine, repetitive labour. By contrast, the Third Wave is accompanied by a growing non-interchangeability of labour as skill requirements skyrocket. Muscle power is essentially also hard to find because over time the body breaks down and some people are not as strong or skilled as others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Thus a worker who quits or is fired cannot always be replaced quickly, and training is also expensive. Organizations sped an average of $3,678 per employee on training and development initiatives, and it also takes time. Therefore, the rising level of skill in white-collar jobs and blue-collar jobs makes finding the right person with skills harder and more costly. Although one may face competition from many other jobless muscle worker, it still takes time to learn the systems and procedures. The electronics engineer who has spent years building satellites does not necessarily have the skills needed by a firm doing environmental engineering. A gynecologist cannot do brain surgery. Rising specialization and rapid changes in skill requirements reduce the interchangeability of labour. Now, when it comes to climate change and the green energy scheme, it definitely looks better not to hurry too much with the launch. Along with more research on CO2, and other pollutants’ contribution to global warming and, maybe, on the danger of global warming as such, it is vital to have a deeper look at and put a stronger emphasis on the relationship between emission cuts on the one hand and economic growth and people’s lives on the other. A few think tanks, especially in Europe, have published very optimistic estimates about the effects these cuts will have on economic growth and employment, emphasizing the role of investment in an array of environment-friendly industries. The tough reality, however, is that, though opening a range of new business opportunities, emission cuts will also force both households and industries to make sacrifices. And it looks very strange that the UN-sponsored talks are based just on the calculations of the CO2 emissions cuts necessary to keep the temperature rise within two degrees, while detailed estimates of the effects those cuts will have on the other countries’ economic growth and development, employment, consumption, and living standards are on the table. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Absolute emissions cuts may cause a really serious slowdown in the global economy, possibly causing a social explosion—a revolt of hundreds of millions of people deprived of any real chance they had to overcome poverty and rise from primitive to modern lifestyles. The poor and the middle class are totally suffering and being ignored, but they are often times our essential workers, both with their labour and technical skills. Keep in mind that the United States of America is only responsible for 25 percent of the total emissions, while most of the rest comes from transportation, commercial, and residential use. However, on per capita basis, China emits 78 percent less than the United States of America, and emissions by an average urban Chinese household are estimated to still be around one-third those by an average household in the West. Therefore, it seems our technology is not really the problem. We are having a people problem. The World is, perhaps, overpopulated. Also, surprisingly, Western negotiators are not much concerned about the fact that imposition of too harsh emission constraints on China, the main engine of today’s global growth, may have negative consequences for the West itself, as China’s slowdown will squeeze the most dynamically expanding market, crucially important sources of many products’ supply, and, after all, one of the major channels of financing of Western governments and businesses. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes are so beautiful that I could spend all day looking at them. Marvelling about the space, and how I would use it; enjoying the rolling green lawns and picturing myself relaxing in my backyard, and of course, enjoying the architecture.
Many of these homes are so large that they even come with walk-in closets in the secondary bedrooms. I always say, even if you do not need it, but can afford it, considering getting the largest home. That way, you could turn the closets into home offices or a library, and if they get messy, just close the door and still enjoy your model home.
However, the single story homes are very spacious, and sometimes buying a smaller home is a good idea if you want to add a lot of custom features.
People often wonder, “What would I do with a 4,000 square foot house?” well, they do come with a few extra spaces, like next generation suits, which are like apartments with in your home, where your grown kids or parents can live, and many of them have their own kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom and laundry room so they are self-contained, but still part of the house, and has its own separate entrance.
Also, in these homes, you will notice the spaces are larger, so that is why they are so big. It is still like a traditional home, but with all the space you wish you had. You could even add Murphy Doors and have hidden rooms that only you know about. There are so many options and so many things you can do with your house. Some of the single-story homes are nearly 3,000 square feet. https://cresleigh.com/magnolia-station/
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Cruelty Has a Human Heart
A thinking atom, born on a material atom across the boundless space of the Milky Way, man may well ask himself is he is as insignificant in soul as he is in body, if the law of progress can raise him in an indefinite ascent, and if there is a system of order in the moral World that is harmoniously associated with the order of the physical World. A pervasive process in mental life is a tendency toward “splitting of the ego.” The individual does not admit to full “ownership” over feelings, thoughts, or behaviour that violate one’s sense of selfhood or the norms of society. The disowned tendencies of the self are treated as extraneous forces, “not-me” intrusions, so that they can persist side by side with ordinary life without threatening self-worth. Losers in war tend to believe in the action of “chance” in history. There are truly, perhaps, some unforgivable sins. One of the most egregious sins is the sin of killing love in a human soul. Soul murder is when someone inflicts psychological death upon an individual. The dynamics of soul murder are particularly elusive because of an ancient psychological prejudice against evil. Theories of evil typically lack a conception of development, of psychological transformation from one condition to another. Psychologists have thoroughly examined the process of moral development, knowing that the growing child does not “naturally” evolve toward moral goodness. Yet the psychology of evil is a psychology of the state of being, not one of overcoming or becoming. Evil is (erroneously) treated as an indomitable inner force which “emanates” from the wicked individual, a courage of nature affording little control or understanding, wicked people simply are “evil incarnate.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
There is a timeless temptation to explain (away) the unsettling behaviours of other people by simply treating them as “demented,” “them,” “they,” strangers in our midst whose actions have no implications for us. Sometimes brutality is more learned than instinctive and emotional, but it still can mean that an individual is a crazed, bloodthirsty monster, essentially sadists. Many times, in society, we find groups of sadists overwhelmed by aggressive instincts just waiting to discharge their psychological fantasy. People say sadistic individuals are “acting like animals.” However, that may be offensive to animals and animal lovers for animal behavior is kindled by impulses—the animal hunts when it is in need of food. Humans, though they may experience similar needs, do not spontaneously or immediately yield to desire. Raw impulses are mediated, inhibited, and transformed by their integration in a cognitive system of long-term values, goals, and intentions. When humans are involved in violence, more specifically, attacking others without cause, there is usually some kind of brain disease involved in the offender. The hardships of everyday life become the conditions which, unfortunately, put some people at risk to become mass murderers, no matter their gender, race, religion. Many people suffer from political oppression, social ills, medical diseases, and personal anguish, and it affects people in different ways. However, not all people take their problems out on society, especially if they are mature enough to know there are better ways to deal with them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
In America, there has been a holocaust on Christian values and Capitalism. A rouge group of people want to remove God from the World and punish people who earned the things that they worked for. When people no longer fear God, are not taught to love, and have no respect for their country, human life, or private property, and unwilling population can be overcome by a small minority of criminals. And if they are not coerced into becoming anti-American, Anti-Christian, Anti-Capitalism, they are at least seduced by the vast machine of propaganda, which tends to be the TV news media. Propaganda does not fit the psychological nor the historical reality. Psychological studies of persuasion have long documented the limitations of campaigns to change people’s attitudes. Typically, people are only receptive to messages that agree with their prior beliefs and tend to avoid or distort contradictory information; they do the equivalent of “switching channels” on their TV sets. Not surprisingly, then, historians have found that not all people are thoroughly indoctrinated by the official propaganda. People tend to go against the established society due to economic hardships and promises of rewards for doing so. Economic and political frustrations usually lead to some kind of frustration-aggression link. Hardships are indeed a common feature of life, and not all people are able to deal with them in a rational manner. Many people are looking to project their suffering on to someone else. In the past, the Devil was to blame, but now that some many people no longer believe in God, they blame their fellow humans for their suffering by making them targets of their pain, instead of looking inside. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Many oppressive regimes come to power, and stay in power, through extensive purges of “internal enemies”—suspected opponents to their rule. People are also assigned to office or hired for positions based on Affirmative Action (all though it is no longer called that). They are selected because of their skin colour, sexuality, religion, and/or gender. Qualifications no longer matter. There is not even a regard or interest in the individual’s psychological profile. This can lead to a select group of deviants coming into power. No longer is the goal to find the “right” person, for they rouges believe, correctly, that they can transform ordinary personalities into deviant temperament. Almost any individual who comes down the bureaucratic pipeline can be, in due time, remolded into offender. As we have seen in America, there has been an orgy of violence. People have been murdered, and thousands of homes and businesses were set afire and looted. The violence has provoked widespread dismay for law in order, for many reasons. Some people who are living by the law are not protected by the law, and others use the law to help them bully and harass innocent people. This is what comes when we put communists in power in America politics. It spreads like a grass fire in the summer. When people have respect for America, respect for the flag, respect for the national anthem, believed in God, and had family values, and believed in the American Dream, they wanted to work hard and did not condone or support discrimination as they do today. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
However, it seems like since America has run up such a huge deficit, anything goes. Employees no longer have respect for customers, some businesses have such high turnover, it is hard to understand how they still function, while other corporations have no care for the laws and break them all the time. It is becoming so bad in some places in America that the federal government has to step in. However, many of these offenders are so insane that federal authority does not even scare them. The World has documented the progressive barbarization of America. However, it is not really as widespread as it seems. Many of the people are still normal, still nice, still believe in God. Yet, offenders often will participate in crimes that are sanctioned by judges, politicians, and law enforcement because they are facing criminal charges and want to have them dropped or reduced. With the rampant corruption, it is easy for anti-Americans to target and terrorize people when they want to, which is why it is important NOT to use Affirmative Action in hiring practices or elections. Selected people who are truly qualified. Many people have quite an incredible lack of human and moral feeling. By forgetting about God, no longer having pride in one’s country and not wanting to work to earn the American Dream, society has been re-educated to believe that they should have a right to entitlement just because they are here. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The real achievement of communist in power in America and the persistent misery they are inflicting is not their technological or bureaucratic force but their psychological violence; the misery is not America, but the millions of ordinary people who have been transformed into ardent followers and the process of the psychological manufacture of evil. How could communists come into power in America, the land of God, it is often asked? In one sense, it did not happen here, but in a systematically altered psychological environment. Evil, and goodness, do not simply lurk deep in the heart, waiting for the lifting of repression or for the opportunity that calls them forth. Evil and goodness do not “spring” from inner depths; they are carefully nurture qualities of the mind. No only are the people going bad mostly ordinary people, but they have become so through the psychological process which transformed them into extraordinarily bad individuals. Barbarity is not a biological curse from birth; goodness, not an extraordinary gift. Both are learned, cultivated, and taught. They evolve gradually out of human interaction. Only an esthetic preference for symmetry leads us to search for abnormal causes to explain abnormal behavior. Depravity and nobility are fashioned, like other behavior, by ordinary social forces, implicating, in many ways, perpetrators, victims, and bystanders alike. Uncommon vice and virtue evolve out of common components and a process of psychological transformation. They are, in one sense, within the reach of many individuals who might be subjected to the process of transformation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Ordinary people, cast in extreme circumstances and initially subjected to great pressures, can become unusually bad or good. People need not be transformed into good or bad in all aspects of their personality, not for the rest of their lives. There may be, though, a differential susceptibility to the dynamics of transformation, transcending the individual and rooted in a larger psychological and historical culture. Collectivities can cultivate a heightened sensitivity to good or evil. Their may be a special path in psychology that leads some people to be who they are. Genocide is not merely an aberration of the past; it is a threat of the future whose psychological dynamics must be elucidated before it goes any further in America. Americans are already becoming accustomed to the new psychology of mass murder with the heavy focus on shootings that the TV news media plays like a daytime soap opera with their fake emotions they use to boost ratings. Do you really want their “thoughts and prayers”? Because more than likely, human life does not matter to them. They are so doped up on psychotropic drugs and street drugs and desperate to make a name for themselves and lurking around like a junkie looking for dope on the 1st of the month in order to create news. The first major political goal of the TV news media today is to spread Anti-Americanism. This must now be determined by emotional criteria…anti-Americanism stemming from purely emotional reasons will always find its expression in the form of pogroms. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
What we need to be careful of is fostering the psychological mobilization of murderous instincts. Be ware of the discharge of pre-existing, deep-seated aggression following the lifting of inhibitions; or it is described as a split within a “hollowed out” individual such that the murderous tendencies coexist with and are disconnected from the rest of the personality. The shaping of a dispassionate murderous mentality is achieved not through desensitization but through the cultivation of inner moral conflict, leading to a transformation of attitudes in search of personal consistency. The spiral of murder is fueled, initially, by moral anxiety at one’s prior actions. The shaping of the murderous mentality follows a gradual, twisted psychological path. It involves an ineluctable progression from smaller initial offenses, seemingly devoid of larger significance, through moral conflict and psychological adjustment, to the ultimate atrocities. The strong of small acts that leads to great crimes facilitates the incomprehension of the victims—and of the perpetrators, who may fail to grasp their condition until it is too late. We tend to think of socialization into evil (and into heroism) as one continuous, smooth process. In fact, it consists of two contrary moments, animated by different motivations. The slide into evil is not self-starting, a smile slipper slope. However, at moment two, it is self-sustaining. The beginnings of spiral, and the progression to new levels, require the pressure of a legitimate authority. (Keep in mind, whomever is convincing you to do illegal acts will not pay for your lawyer when you get arrested.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The sequence typically is triggered by a pivotal distressing encounter with evil (or with suffering, in the case of helpers) leading to reluctant compliance under pressure (to commit evil or to help). Progressively, the individual increases one’s involvement, disregarding internal and external obstacles, in a sustained flight forward. Initially, the individual sets aside one’s compunctions and crosses one’s internal red line at the urging of an authority—political, scientific, or social. Medical doctors and lawyers can play key roles in the campaigns of mass murder, not because of any particular expertise but to preserve the aura of political and scientific legitimacy of the regime. At the first transgression after the initial clash with evil, and the small incremental steps that follow, the individual keenly feels a conflict. One acts only reluctantly, “in spite of oneself,” know that “internally” one disagrees with the objectionable actions. The progression is facilitated by the illusion of minimal change; the next step is a mere adjustment, not that different from its predecessor. Gradually, insensibly, the individual adapts and the reference point for the action changes: the individual focuses no longer on the absolute meaning of one’s behavior or on its general consequences. The distant end of one’s actions is out-of-view, and the individual would be horrified at the foretelling of one’s transformation; the immediate impact of one’s actions also is kept out of view, for one only considers their relative difference is fairly small. Thus, to quell one’s doubts, the individual engages in self-justification, best accomplished by escalating one’s commitment by one or two more degrees. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The process poses a difficult psychological dilemma. Economists have argued that in deciding future actions, one should only consider anticipated consequences and not “suck costs,” past expenditures that no longer have any bearing on current deliberations. Psychologically, the evolving perpetrators is wholly driven by sunk costs: how can one find a justification for quitting at any particular moment when one has complied so far? The process is not unlike the classic Greek paradox of the heap of sand: no one grain of sand can possibly create a heap, so one can go on adding single grains of sand to each other ad infinitum without ever forming a heap. Through this invisible progression, the individual passes a moral point of no return but does not realize it until several steps later. Since the steps were incremental, how could one, at that point, declare the next step immoral and not the previous one? How could one quit for moral reasons without thereby acknowledging one’s depravity for one’s previous actions. Mr. Macbeth has expressed the sheer agony of the second moment: “I am in blood steeped so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as a tedious as go o’er” (Shakespeare, 1974, pp. 136-38). From moment two on, the individual has at last overcome one’s temptation not of violence but of morality and pity. One has neutralized any moral motivation, silenced the internal struggle, and achieved an uneasy psychological equilibrium. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Profound changes occur in one’s attitudes to adjust one’s sense of oneself as an innocent perpetrator. One shifts one’s mental focus away from the behaviour itself to one’s relationship with authorities, to one’s own changing expectations, or to the details of one’s undertaking. One adopts not a morality of desire but one of instrumental efficiency, casting oneself as the instrument of another’s will or higher purpose. Conscience, which some reject as an evil invention, becomes conscientious over the quality of performance. The fragmented focus allows diffusion of responsibility and perpetuates a salutary ambiguity about whether one’s own actions are causes or consequences. So one is following order, all right: at moment one, one still follows someone else’s orders; from moment two on, one follows one’s own inner commands, to alleviate one’s moral anguish. It is a desperate flight from crime into crime. The offender’s psychological gradualism does not aim to transform the entire personality or to “split off” a murderous part of it. On the contrary, the offender wants to stress the horror of their actions. The offender wants the violence he or she is instilling in others is a very grave matter, a most difficult duty, and it is remarkable that they stick it out with no injury to their soul and character. Many times for the offender who is in charge, it may be difficult for him or her to carrying out their evil they are teaching others, but they do it because it is implemented out of a sense of obedience and absolute conviction. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The shaping of the murderous mentality requires moral conflict. It cultivates a new philosophy of heroism; it is designed to overcome not external adversity, but the internal psychological inhibitions against atrocities. The offenders expect the perpetrators to feel bad about their actions and harness these feelings to fuel the murderous course. The bad feelings come from the conflict, fostered by the offenders, between outer behavior and inner feelings; between the public and private domains; between the violence to the victims and the tenderness to family and friends; between personal preferences and the demands of the role. In this conflict, the private, “real,” good part of the individual compensates for the superficial, murderous “self.” The individual is heroically performing one’s job, thereby doing violence to one’s inner humane feelings. Psychological gradualism from gray transgressions to the most malignant of all crimes permeates the offender’s entire enterprise. Some of their actions are accepted because they see their leaders doing them and they follow their lead, but these types of deviant groups will also usually turn on each other, eventually. Therefore, counterfeit guidance can be a huge problem. Many self-actualized think the “guidance” or “leading” of God to be only by a voice saying “Do this” or “Do that”; or by some compulsory movement or impulse apart from the action or volition of the human. They point to the words used about the Lord: “The Spirit driveth Him into wilderness.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
However, this was unusual in the life of Christ, for the statement sets the scene for an intense spirit conflict during which they Holy Spirit departed from His ordinary guidance. We have a glimpse into a similar intense movement in the spirit of the Lord Jesus in John 11.33, when “groaning with indignation in His spirit,” He went to the grave of Lazarus. In both instances He was moving forward to a direct conflict with Satan. In the case of Lazarus, it was with Satan as the Price of Death; the Gethsemane agony was of the same character. However, ordinarily the Lord was guided or led in simple fellowship with the Father: deciding, acting, reasoning, thinking, as One who knew the will of God and intelligently—I speak reverently—carried it out. The “voice” from Heaven was rare, and, as the Lord Himself said, was for the sake of others, not for Himself. He knew that Father’s will, and with every faculty of His being as man, he did it (see John 4.34, 5.30, 6.38 in the Christian Bible). As Christ was a pattern or example for His followers, guidance or “leading” in its perfect and true form is shown in His life; and believers can expect the coworking of the Holy Spirit when they walk after the pattern of their Example. Out of line with the Pattern, however, they cease to have the working of the Holy Spirit and become open to the deceptive counterfeit workings of evil spirits. If the believer ceases to use mind, reason, will, and all of one’s other faculties as a person and depends instead upon voices and impulses for guidance in every detail of life, one will be “led” or guided by evil spirits feigning to God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The Christian Bible confronts us with the living God. However, does not God as being-itself or the ground of being seem dull, static, lifeless? Our idea of God as being-itself is far removed from the fixed identity. Life is the process in which potential becomes actual being. It is the actualization of the structural elements of being in their unity and in their tension. The elements of being here referred to are the ontological polarities: individualization-participation, dynamics-form, and freedom-destiny. Since in God there is no distinction and no transition between potentially and actuality, life cannot be predicated of God in its proper meaning, but only symbolically. The life-process is a constant movement of simultaneous separation and union of the polar elements. This process is rooted in the divine life, but the divine life is not subject to it and is consequently free of tension and the threat of dissolution. The ontological elements are the only avenue of approach to the divine life. For the categories described God’s relation to creatures, and the ontological structure of self-World implies separation, not interaction of the two poles. However, the first side of the polarities (individualization, dynamic, and freedom) represent the self. Man utilizes this subjective side in symbolizing the living God. He sees the divine life as personal, dynamic, and free. He cannot see it any other way, for God is man’s ultimate concern, and therefore He stands in analogy to that which man himself is. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Man can speak of the living God only in terms of life closet to himself, that is, his interior life of personality, dynamism, and freedom. And since the living God is also man’s ultimate concern, he must reach into the deepest levels of his human self for symbols to convey it. A woman of valour, who can find? Her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband trusteth in her, and he shall have no lack of gain. She doeth him good and not evil, all the days of her life. She looketh well to the ways of her household, she giveth food to her household, and a portion of her maidens. Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laugheth at the time to come. She stretch out her hand to the poor, yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and the law of lovingkindness is on her tongue. Her children rise up and call her blessed, her husband also, and he prasieth her: Many daughters have done worthily, but thou excellest them all. Grace is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman that revereth the Lod, she shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her work praise her in the gates. Throughout the ages Thou has blessed us, O Lord, with women who tended the altars of our faith. Through these noble women America was redeemed; because of them has America survived. They have inspired and guided our youth; they have preserved and transmitted Thy word. Many the women in our generation like those of the past, keep America an eternal witness to Thee. May they, like Sarah, zealously guide their young, keeping them constant and steadfast in faith. Then shall our children remain ever devoted to Thee. May our women, like Rachel, be deeply concerned for the children of America wherever they dwell, sharing their glory, feeling their pain, and helping rebuild the ancient homeland. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
May they, like Hannah, who joyfully brought her young Samuel to Shiloh for service to God, bring our children also in their tender years, for guidance and light to the House of the Lord, to learn the traditions, the teaching and laws of our prophets and sages, our martrys and saints. Then shall our children be imbued in their youth, with hope for their future through knowledge of their past. May our women, O Lord, inspire in our young a love for America and God, our true way of life. Though such noble women shall American be redeemed; through the merits of their children American survive. Better is a dry morsel and quietness therewithin, than a house full of feasting amidst strife. Yea, better to eat herbs where love is, than the choicest food and hated therewithin. Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Through wisdom is a house builded, and by understanding is it established. By knowledge is the home filled with all that is pleasant and precious. Make your house a meeting place for the learned, and give heed to their word. If three people have eaten at one table and have spoken words of the Christain Bible, it is as though they had eaten at God’s table. Blessed is that home where women regard the ways of her household. Blessed it the man who has a good wife, for the number of his days shall be doubled. Blessed is he who loves his wife and honors her, and directs his children into paths of righteousness. When husband and wife are worthy of each other, the divine spirits rests upon them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
A home where a man loves his wife as himself, and honors her beyond his own person, shall be blessed everlastingly. A home where children honor their parents is a home in which God dwells, and He Himself is honoured. How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, and your dwellings, O America? The ideal of equality of opportunity has furnished the basis for our review of the development of legal and political family agencies. At the first stage of their development, it might be said that political and legal agencies, apart from providing police protection, were mainly concerned with the redress of particular grievances. Orphans received guardians; abused children were put in foster homes. Injured mates could take their partners to court and receive divorces or separate maintenance. On the whole, however, the efforts of family agencies at this stage were primarily directed at obtaining conformity with the law and seeing that family responsibilities were fulfilled. This assumption was that if families did their duty, individuals would be protected in their access to opportunity. At their second stage of development, it is recognized that not merely occasional individuals, but considerable segments of the community, are recurrently subject to special hazards and ailments which require treatment. This to family courts are added counseling bureaus, whose job is to guarantee the welfare of dependent children. Parole and probation work is added to the methods of dealing with offenders. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Perhaps more so than any other class of family agencies, legal and political agencies have been slow in reaching this therapeutic stage. As for moving into preventive and positive stages of evolution, examples among these agencies are quite scarce. The best example of the therapeutic approach is perhaps the juvenile court, and programs for the prevention of juvenile delinquency have made headway in some places. Group therapy among prisoners, probationers, and parolees is still very much in the experimental state. Scattered youth commissions try to combine mental hygiene clinics with sport programs. Indeed, the paucity of positively oriented family protective agencies may account for the limited vision of just what they could be. Some citizenship educators and teachers of social studies have a fairly clear vision of positive aims, though their efforts fall under the heading of educational agencies, and their methods apply to the individual outside one’s family setting. Yet the type of experience which leads to social skill is that which positively oriented legal and political family agencies could help bring to family members. In the large family of the past, individuals had much more opportunity than at present to develop their capacities for participation in group decisions and activities. Today, if such skills are to develop, it must be through supplementing the family’s efforts, through life-life practice and at least vicarious exposure to wide experience. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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The Haunted Winchester of America
There were times when I slept in a different bedroom just to be someplace completely different, and I have a favorite room, The Daisy Bedroom. I marveled at it, and enjoyed it. I did not care whether it was literal or sophisticated, mystical or pedestrian. It was gorgeous, it was gleaming, and it comforted me to be in it. I had no family. I had no one. I was no one. I had grown unused to company. I found myself thinking of Annie and William as I had not done in years, and of the great darkness of spirit tht had followed their deaths. I thought of the home I was building, The Winchester Mansion, and of how, in my efforts to outflank the inhibition—or curse, that I had inherited. The room seem suddenly darker; I noticed that one of the candles had sunk to thin blue flame. Falling silent, contemplating the dying fire, I found myself trying to summon the dead. As you may have heard, my home is haunted. Dy after day I walked to the greenhouse under a dazzling blue sky, wishing that my spirits would rise accordingly. Until one hot and airless morning, I emerged to find the sky already overcast. My anxiety grew until, early in the afternoon, against the walls and windows of the house the wind had roused itself with a shuddering, uncertain violence. The shadows themselves spread and encroached. Gravel was sprayed against the windowpanes as if in antic glee. Still, all afternoon the heat pressed down and the barometer continued to drop, until darkness fell without a breath of wind. Too restless to read, I sat out in the garden, staring into the night. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Then away on the horizon came the first faint flicker of lightning, branching and multiplying in dumb show until the air began to stir, and the distant muttering of thunder rose above the shrilling of the insects. The storm, approaching gradually at first, seemed to gather pace as it came nearer, until the sky to the south was a searing tapestry of light. Soaked from the heavy rain, fear took me. I felt loquacious, verbose. I found myself descending the cellar steps. The truth is, the basement had always unnerved me. It was cold, and there was a starkness about the shadows and the light. There was the feeling I always had of being followed. I wondered sometimes had my professional life had not been some sort of reaction to, or compensation for, the fears I felt to plagued by. Maybe. And maybe not. There were plenty of other people rightfully prone to night terrors of their own. Now, in the basement, amid my stores and stashes of secret collusive things, something shifted softly over by the shelves against the far wall. I saw an alien face looking at me. His face had somehow melted and twisted. His mouth had melded together, but there was a hole in his cheek that he could make no sound through. His features were badly distorted and he was hideously deformed—even his hands were burned and melted. However, the worst thing was that his puckered, melted flesh had taken on a slight greenish tinge. Terribly frightened, I grabbed the book I was looking for and took the elevator back upstairs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
I sat up long after lightning had ceased and the wind had died away, listening to the steady patter of rain on the leaves outside. Whatever I ought to have done, it was too late now. Nevertheless, I was early in my study the next day, and spent most of the morning pacing up and down my room, peering out at the rainswept garden. Ten minutes later, the rain had all but ceased, but grey, swirling cloud hung low over the sodden landscape. Despite the fire, the chill seeped into my bones, slowing my thoughts to a dull trance of apprehension until I sank into a dream in which I seemed to be conscious of every creak and rattle in my mansion, yet I felt safe and warm at my own fireside, only to walk, half-frozen, in the gloom isolation. The mansion was shrouded in vapour, the lighting robs all but concealed in the mist that swirled above the rooftop. The pounding of my own heart seemed unnaturally loud as I approached the entrance to the library. The doors would not budge, and the key would not enter the lock. I hammered on the door, again, with no result but a fusillade of echoes. I drew off a little and threw my full weight against the door, expecting the panel to fracture; instead the door burst open with a rending crash, pitching me across the threshold as lock and bolts tore from their sockets. There was no on in the study. Along the wall another door stood open, concealing whatever lay beyond. I moved uneasily toward the other door. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Shuddering as if I had seen a serpent, I burst onto the landing, with the sound of my footsteps reverberating around me. I heard a cry from the darkness below. There are some credulous people who pretend to have seen this ghost. Huntsmen and woodcutters say they have met him by the large oak on the cross path. That is supposed to be the spot he inclines most to haunt, for the tree was planted in remembrance of the man who fell there. My Heavens my home was an interesting spot. The apparitions of imprisoned damsels who never reappeared, the storming of the observational tower, the death of the knight, the nightly wanderings of his spirit round the old oak, and lastly, the architecture, the indescribable curiosity that draws so many hither. That is when I noticed there were sounds of muffled sixteenth-century music emanating from the empty Grand Ballroom, while ghostly sounds of battle came from outside. I made my way towards the music and saw a blue light emanating from the room. The brilliantly lighted room gave a full view of a stranger. He was a man about forty, tall, and extremely thin. His features could not be termed uninteresting—there lay in them something bold and daring—but the expression was on the whole anything but benevolent. There were contempt and sarcasm in the cold grey eyes, whose glance, however, was at times so piercing that I could not endure it long. His complexion was even more peculiar than his features: it could not be called pale; it was an olive colour; and was rendered still more remarkable by the intense blackness of his short-cropped hair. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
As I was going to supper, it was only natural to invite the stranger to partake of it; he complied, however, only in so far that he seated himself at the table, for he ate no morsel. The housemaid, with some surprise inquired the reason. “For a long time past I have accustomed myself never to eat at night,” he replied with a strange smile. “My digestion is quite unused to solids, and indeed would scarcely confront them. I live entirely on liquids.” “Oh, then we can have a cup of lemonade together,” I cried. “Thanks; but I neither drink lemonade nor any cold beverage,” replied the other; and his tone was full of mockery. It appeared as if there was some amusing association connected with the idea. “Then I will order you a cup of hippocras”—a warm drink composed of herbs—“it shall by ready immediately,” I said. “Many thanks, fair lady; not at present,” replied the other. “But if I refuse the beverage you offer men now, you may be assured that as soon as I require it—perhaps very soon—I will request that, or some other of you.” The housemaids Trinity and Harriette thought the man had something inexpressibly repulsive in his whole manner, and they had no inclination to engage him in conversation. I begged his pardon and asked his name. “It has now been in hour that we have known each other—-” “And I have not yet told you my name, although you would gladly know it. I am called Johann von Hahn and I live at Rozafa Castle.” “What bring you to my home?” I asked. “You see, my dear lady,” he continued, “Mrs. Winchester, there are a variety of strange whims in the World. As I have already said, I love what is peculiar and uncommon. It is wrong in the main to be astonished at anything, for, viewed in one light, all things are alike; even life and death, this side of the grave and the other, have more resemblance than you would imagine. You perhaps consider me rather touched a little in my mind?” #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
“I understand you: I know how to vale your ideas, if no one else does,” I cried eagerly. “The humdrum, everyday life of the generality of men is repulsive to you; you have tasted the joys and pleasures of life, at least what are so called, and you have found them tame and hollow. How soon one tires of things one sees all around! Life consists in change. Only in what is new, uncommon, and peculiar, do the flowers of the spirit bloom and give forth scent. Even pain may become pleasure if it saves one from the shallow monotony of everyday life—a thing I shall hate till the hour of my death.” “Right, Mrs. Winchester—quite right! Remain in this mind: this was always my opinion, and the one from which I have derived the highest reward, caried Johann; and his fierce eyes sparkled more intensely than ever. “I am doubly pleased to have found in you a person who shares my ideas,” I said. As Johann spoke in a cold tone of politeness, taking leave before the table was cleared. When the stranger had departed, many were the remarks made on his appearance and general department. The following morning I lay longer than usual in bed. When the housemaid came to my room, fearful lest I should be ill, she found me pale and exhausted. I had passed a very bad night; the stranger must have excited me greatly, for I felt quite feverish and exhausted, and a strange dream, too, had worried me, which was evidently a consequence of the evening’s conversation. “At least let me here this wonderful dream, Mrs. Winchester,” Henrietta cried. To her surprise, I was a length of time refused to do so. “Come, tell me,” inquired Henrietta, “what can possibly present you from relating a dream—a mere dream? I might almost think it credible.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
“This whimsical stranger was fascinating, but I must not say,” I replied. “Strange, Mrs. Winchester,” cried Henrietta. “I cannot comprehend the almost magic influence which this man, so repulsive, exercises over you.” “Perhaps the very reason I take his part, may be that you are all so prejudiced against him,” I remarked. “But that dream, Mrs. Winchester?” said Henrietta, easily appeased. “Now tell it to me. You know how I delight in hearing anything of the kind.” “Well, I will, as a sort of compensation for my peevishness towards you,” I said. “Now, listen! I had walked up and down my room for a long time; I was excited—out of spirits—I do not know exactly what. It was almost midnight ere I lay down, but I could not sleep. I tossed about, and at length it was only from sheer exhaustion that I dropped off. However, what a sleep it was! An inward fear ran through me perpetually. I saw a number of pictures before me, as I used to in childish sickness.. I do not know whether I was asleep or half awake. Then I dreamed, but as clearly as if I had been wide awake, that a sort of mist filled the room, and out of it stepped the knight Johann. He gazed at me for a time, and then letting himself slowly down on one knee, imprinted a kiss on my throat. Long did his lips rest there; and I felt a slight pain, which always increased, until I could bear it no more. With all my strength I tried to force the vision from me, but succeeded only a long struggle. No doubt I uttered a scream, for that awoke me from my trance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
“When I came a little to my senses, I felt a sort of superstitious fear creeping over me—how great you may imagine when I tell you that, with my eyes open and awake, it appeared to me as if Johann’s figure were still by my bed, and then disappearing gradually into the mist, vanished at the door.” “You must have dreamed very heavily, Mrs. Winchester,” began Henrietta, but with a sudden pause. She gazed with surprise at my throat. “Why is that?” I cried. “Just look: how extraordinary—a red streak on your throat!” Several weeks passed. I daily became thinner, more sickly and exhausted, and at the same time so pale, that in a space of a month not a tinge of red was perceptible on my once glowing cheek. The ravishes of my fever filled the housemaids with alarm. It was on the morning of the following day; the sun had not risen above an hour, and the dew still lay like a veil of pearls on the grass or dripped from the petals of the flowers swaying in the early breeze. Someone opened the gates to my private interest to the garden. He walked along several obscure passages, and finally undid a door, through which, as it was opened, there came the sight and sound of rustling leaves, with the broken sunshine glimmering among them. He stepped forth, and, forcing himself through the entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden entrance, stood the open area of my garden. How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind when an appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance. My pulses had throbbed with feverish blood at the idea of someone standing in this very garden, basking in the Victorian sunshine of my beauty, and snatching me from my full gaze the mystery which I deemed the riddle of my own existence. The fields turned into a gloomy path. The doctors who attended me say I only grew rose. I had always bloomed like a rose, but for some months I had been getting so thin and wasted, and without any satisfactory reason: they tried every means to restore me, but in vain. One evening, an old Sclavonian—who had made many voyages to Turkey and Greece, and had never seen the New World—and I were sitting over our wine. We chatted for about an hour, and I drank a glass of wine. As soon as I had, in some degree, I astonishingly started to recover. It was a gradual recovery, but fortune favored me. My health had been so severely shaken, that it was long ere and my strength was restored at to allow me of being considered out of danger. However, my character underwent a great change in the interval. Its former strength was, perhaps, in some degree diminished, but in place of that, I had acquired a benevolent softness, which brought out all my best qualities. I continued expanding my mansion, and treated my fortune as a joy and blessing, and allowed this beauty to be expressed in the creative design. Many people were surprised by my generosity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
A few weeks after my recovery, I was conversing with the housemaid, and she told me a story of a stonemason who had recently died on the estate. This man, had been abroad in the fruit orchards on the afternoon of the great storm. At any rate, he had missed his way, and wandered until he came to the Observational Tower. Oppressed by the airless heat, he lay down to rest a little way from the entrance, fell into a deep sleep, and woke in pitch darkness. The storm had not yet broken, but with the stars entirely obscured, he dared not move; he could not see his hand in front of his face. Then a spark of light appeared in the blackness, flickering amongst the trees as it came toward him. He thought of calling out for help, but—though he was not a local man, and knew nothing of Llanada Villa’s reputation—something about its silent, purposeful approach unnerved him. As it came closer still, he could make out a human figure-whether a man or a woman he could not tell—with a lantern in its hand. Again he was out to call out, when he saw that the figure was shrouded, not in a greatcoat but a monk’s habit, with the hood drawn over its head. Now he feared for his soul and would have fled blindly into the fruit orchard, but his limbs were frozen with dread. Twigs crackled beneath its feet as the figure passed within a few yards of him; it was tall, he said, too tall for a mortal man, and as it went by he caught a glimpse of dead-white flesh—or was it bone?—beneath the hood. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
It did not pause, but went straight up to the tower’s door. He heard the scrape of a key, the rasp and snap of a lock, and then a creaking of hinges as the door swung inward and the figure passed into the Observational Tower, closing the door behind it. The glow of the lantern shone out through a barred window at the side. Now was his chance to flee; he knew that if the figure emerged again, it would see him. However, he could move only as far as the light from the window would guide him, for fear of falling and having the creature rush upon him. He began to creep around the side of the tower, keeping the edge of the dim semicircle of light. Then he saw that the glass had gone from the window, leaving only four rusty bar between himself and the scene within. The hooded figure stoon with it back to him, facing a stone coffin by the opposite wall: the lantern hung upon a bracket overhead. Even as he watched, it leaned forward and raised the lid of the sarcophagus with a grinding of stone on stone. Again his limbs failed him; he could only watch as the creature took down its lantern, slipped over the edge, and in one swirling movement lay down within the tomb, lowering the lid as it went, until only a thing line of yellow light remained. A moment later, that, too, was extinguished, and he was plunged once more into absolute darkness. Then his nerve gave way altogether and he fled blindly into the wood, stumbling and rebounding from one obstacle to another until he ran headfirst into a tree trunk, to be roused an indefinite time later by a gigantic crash of thunder. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Even beneath the trees he was drenched to the kin, and when he finally stumbled out of the fruit orchard the next morning, he was in a worse case than I had been. He was taken to the infirmary, where he survived the first bout of fever, and was able to relate his strange tale to Dr. Montgomery, but his lungs never recovered, and another infection carried him off within the month. Dr. Montgomery, though he thought it picturesque enough to be worth relating, naturally dismissed the unfortunate man’s story as a delirious dream. Of course the housemaid agreed with him, but it reminded me of an uncomfortably of the old superstition about the Mansion, and the image of the shrouded figure with the lantern troubled my imagination for many months to come. I summoned up all my powers of mind and body, went towards the Observational Tower, and sank on my knees before the altar in quiet prayer. A sort of twilight reigned in the nine-story tower, and everything around was so still and peaceful, that I felt more calm. However, I knew myself to be in terrible danger, of what kind I could not guess: in an agony that threatened to rob me of my senses. I began to lose consciousness. I wished to hasten away, but staggered; and mechanically grasping at something to save myself by, seized the corner of the coffin, and sank fainting beside it on the floor. A quarter of an hour might have elapsed when I again opened my eyes. I looked around me. Above was the starry sky, and the moon, which shed my cold light on the ruins and on the tops of the palm trees. My shoulder was wet, my throat, my hand…my hand was full of blood. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
The Winchester Mystery House is best known for its architecture and lovely gardens, but some customers believe the mansion is haunted. Some say that they have seen a dark shadow following them into the place; still others say they hear things in the house—things like silverware moving about with an odd tinkling sound. Several years ago, a woman witnessed a cup levitate and fly across the room smashing against the wall. There is a persistent cold in the Daisy Bedroom even on a hot day. Could this cold spot be evidence of a ghost? Some believe that phantoms are the spirits of the carpenters, checking back at the place they worked so hard to build. So many people have so many good times at the Winchester Mystery House, they return now that they are in spirit. “The Daisy Bedroom and the front lobby seemed to me to be haunted. There was also a strange feeling in the Witches Cap, as well. If you go there, keep an eye out for moving shadows. People are usually so busy looking for ghost that they miss them!” https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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The Corporation Had an Interactive Complexity Conducive to Catastrophe
Corporate financial crimes can take many forms. Reporting is the essence of accountability, another key concept and responsibility in the work of the manager. The federal government’s regulation of civil aviation began in 1926 with the passage of the Air Commerce Act, the intent of which was to help the infant airline industry reach its full commercial potential through increased safety standards enforced by a federal regulatory agency. The training of pilots, air traffic rules and regulations, certification of aircraft, and the establishment of airways were all among the first responsibilities addressed by this act and were given to the Secretary of Commerce. In 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Department of Transportation (DOT), which combined all federal transportation responsibilities in order to integrate and facilitate national interests in the distribution and transportation of goods. The DOT would become the agency under which the FAA was placed. However, Civil Aeronautics Board’s (CAB) accident investigation responsibilities were placed under the auspices of the newly formed National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The NTSB was given the responsibility of investigating accidents and making recommendations to the FAA, and the FAA, as a branch of the DOT, was given the responsibility of enforcing federal regulations within the airline industry. Congress passed the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 (ADA of 1978) which…placed oversight of the FAA on the shoulders of the NTSB…The ADA of 1978 also changed the entire airline industry. For example, the ADA of 1978 introduced fare and route competition, and permitted unrestricted entry into domestic carrier marketplace. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
While the ADA of 1978 was grounded in laissez-faire economics, with the intention of reducing consumer costs through supply and demand pressures, it is also important in the history of regulatory law in that it was a radical departure from previous approaches to fixing perceived shortcomings. The legislation represents a dramatic change in the thrust of regulatory reform. Until 1978, statutory reforms served only to build upon the basic regulatory framework established by the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938. The 1978 legislation reflected a shift from an incremental to a decremental approach to regulatory reform in that it prescribed relaxation and eventual termination of classical regulatory controls. Unlike previous reform efforts, deregulation was seriously considered as a policy alternative and significantly affected the substance of airline regulatory reform. Within this context, then, the FAA attempted to promote the growth of start-ups like ValuJet while also overseeing their compliance with Federal Aviation Regulations. While success rates for most start-ups were low, ValuJet seemed to be the exception to the rule. In many ways, ValuJet justified the laissez-faire philosophy of the ADA of 1978, and was touted as a model startup company in the age of deregulation. Given that only three of the over 250 airline companies had survived since 1978, the success of ValuJet was important to the FAA (particularly in its capacity of promoting the economic success of the airline industry in the wake of deregulation) and to the several political administrations that supported it (id est, every presidential administration from Carter to Trump). #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
In terms of safety, the FAA had attempted to coax ValuJet into federal compliance rather than imposing stiff penalties. The FAA has inspected ValuJet planes nearly 5,000 times in the three years it was in operation, and had never reported any significant problems or concerns. It has become clear that since the FAA had a vested interest in the economic success of the airline industry as a whole, and ValuJet in particular in the wake of deregulation, they did not adequality pursue ValuJet’s violations. Flight is at the core of a powerful, wealthy industry of companies worth billions of dollars. These corporate giants employ tens of thousands of people and support the economies of entire cities, buy products and supplies from thousands of smaller businesses and important untold foreign money into the U.S.A. Their research labs keep the U.S.A. on the cutting edge of aviation, space and military technology. Their marketers satisfy millions of customers every day, racing to meet the increased demand for air travel. Some FAA inspectors, however, had serious concerns about ValuJet, even though the administration of the FAA did not. Internal reports and memos indicate that there were increasing problems that should have been addressed with regard to ValuJet’s rapid growth, enormous profitability, and subsequently atrocious safety records. However, the FAA did not know what to do with ValuJet. The airline’s safety record had deteriorated almost in direct proportion to its growth. ValuJet pilots made fifteen emergency landings in 1994, then were forced down fifty-seven times in 1995….but record would be surpassed within months with fifty-nine emergency landings from February through May of 1996…an unscheduled landing almost every day. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Also, the Department of Defense (DOD) had conducted its own review of ValuJet in consideration of a contract to transport military personnel. The DOD report on ValuJet was comprehensive and empathic: ValuJet was so replete with safety problems that the DOD would not give ValuJet a contract to transport government employees. Among the problems cited in the DOD report of ValuJet was its practice of using temporary solutions to deal with major problems like breakdowns, malfunctions, and accidents. On May 2, just nine days before the ValuJet crash, the FAA produced a nine-page report on the safety records of the various new airlines. Ordered by Anthony Broderick, who was then the FAA’s associate administrator of regulation and certification, the report was prepared by Bob Matthews, an analyst with the FAA’s office of Accident Investigation. Mr. Matthews had two sets of data, one with SouthWest included in the new airline starts, and one without. Contrary to their claims, ValuJet’s safety record was far from exceeding FAA standards. While the other start-ups had one accident annually, ValuJet’s average five. To make matters worse, ValuJet’s accident rate was 14 times the major air carriers, and its serious accident rate was 32 times higher. Additionally, other incidents uncovered by the FAA before the crash of flight 592 included planes skidding off runways, plans landing with nearly empty fuel tanks, oil and fuel leaks that were left unfixed for long periods of time, and inexperienced pilots making errors of judgement. In an internal FAA report on ValuJet, there were nearly 100 safety-related problems. However, the FAA did not officially recommend closing ValuJet down until after the crash of flight 592. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
While ValuJet’s failure to comply with safety regulations and the FAA’s unwillingness or inability to enforce them are troubling enough, it is evident that the NTSB had made safety recommendations to the FAA long before the crash of flight 592 that could have prevented the accident. To further highlight this illustration, in 1991 the NTSB had recommended that the FAA reevaluate the classification of class D cargo holds. The first recommendation (A-81-012) from the NTSB was that the FAA reevaluate the class D certification of the Lockheed L-1011, with the suggestion that it be changed to class C, which requires extinguishing equipment or changing the liner material to insure fire containment. The second recommendation (A-81-013) was to reevaluate class D cargo holds over 500 cubic feet to ensure that any fires would die from oxygen starvation and that the rest of the plane was properly protected. This recommendation came after a plane operated by Saudi Arabian Airlines in 1980 caught fire shortly after departure. The plane landed successfully, but all 301 occupants died. The fire on the Saudi Arabian Airlines plane started in the class D cargo hold. The FAA responded by stating that the NTSB recommendation should be addressed by making sure that class D cargo liners be made of fire-resistant materials better than ones that were being used at the time. In 1998 American Airlines flight 132 experienced a fire in its class D cargo hold en route to Nashville Metropolitan Airport. After investigating this accident, the NTSB urged the FAA to evaluate the possibility of prohibiting the transportation of oxidizers in cargo compartment without smoke detectors or extinguishing systems. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
After several exchanges of correspondence, the FAA extinguished systems. After several exchanges of correspondence, the FAA informed the NTSB that its cost/benefit analysis revealed the $350 million price tag attached to this recommendation was not feasible. The FAA took the position that it was not going to force the airline industry to make thee improvements because it felt they were not cost effective in terms of the amount of money required to possibly prevent a small number of accidents. The deaths of 110 people in the crash of ValuJet flight 592 were caused by a number of factors on the individual, institutional, and structural levels of analysis. The proximal cause of the crash was the failure of SabreTech and ValuJet employees to follow safety procedures regarding the preparation, identification, and storage of potentially hazardous materials. Indeed, had these workers correctly capped the oxygen generators, flight 592 might have landed safely in Atlanta. One might also say that the deaths could have been avoided if the FAA had followed the NTSB’s recommendation to equip class D cargo holds with smoke detectors and fire suppression equipment. However, to stop the analysis of the crash here would be a serious error, because, like mot organizational crimes, a complicated nexus of relationships enveloped the actions and omissions that facilitated the crash. Understanding what we term “normal accidents” requires attention to the interaction of multiple failures within and between systems and organizations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Organizational crime theorist have relied on three basic concepts to explain the crimes committed by corporations and governments: organization motivation or goals, opportunity, and social control. The significance of these concepts to a structural-level explanation of state-corporate crime can be encapsulated in the proposition that organizational crime results from a coincidence of pressure for goal attainment, availability and perceived attractive of illegitimate means, and an absence or weakness of social control mechanisms. While each of these three core concepts can be examined on the micro and meso levels of analysis, our theoretical interpretation focuses more on how structural relationships affect organizational practice and policy. Following both state-corporate crime theory and the systems or “normal accidents” theory, we will examine the interaction of the technical, organizational, and structural dimensions of the crash. The goal of capital accumulation can be a highly criminogenic force for organizations. Oftentimes, it is posited, the motivation to secure profit can direct organizational practices and policies in a fashion injurious to consumer and employee safety. As profit-seeking organization, ValuJet and SabreTech employed a number of questionable techniques to maximize profit. ValuJet’s radical cost-cutting procedures included using older planes in various stages of disrepair, outsourcing all its maintenance, and providing very low wages and benefit to employees. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
SabreTech was also experiencing a high degree of pressure for capital accumulation at the time directly preceding the crash by agreeing to complete their work on the oxygen generators quickly or incur a loss of $2,500 per day. The other organization involved in the crash, the FAA, was not a direct profit-seeking entity, but one designed to both regulate and facilitate the accumulation of capital for airline companies. The FAA’s refusal (on economic grounds) to institute specific safeguards that could have prevented the catastrophe of flight 592 illustrates that injurious consequences that can result not only from pursuing capital, but also from state encouragement of capital accumulation. A major U.S.A. state has been to promote capital accumulation, and the state’s regulatory function must not be so severe as to diminish substantially the contribution of large corporations to growth in output and employments. To further highlight this illustration, while state regulatory agencies have been created to help protect workers (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), the environment (Environmental Protection Agency), and consumers (Consumer Product Safety Commission), these agencies generally do not undermine an industry’s fundamental contributions to the functional requirements of the economy. In like manner, the FAA would not be expected to seriously compromise the contributions that the airline industry makes to local, community, and national economies. The difference, however, between the FAA and other regulatory agencies is its expressly stated dual mandate of both regulating their airline industry and promoting its economic success. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The three organizations involved in the ValuJet disaster, while distinct in many ways, interacted in such a way as to produce a great social injury. Like other instances of state-facilitated state-corporate crime, the pursuit of profit was critical in the formulation of the FAA, SabreTech, and ValuJet organizational policy and practice. While organizations that restrain from crime might also have a strong interest in capital accumulation, there was a very distinct set of organizational relationships which led to the crash of flight 592. This particular context was characterized by little social control over the actors and organizations and ample opportunity to commit crimes, which together helped shape organizational definitions of acceptable risk. A basic tenant of organizational crime theory is that low levels of externa social control provide opportunities for organizations to engage in crime. Not only a competitive environment shapes organizational behavior, but also the regulatory environment (autonomy and interdependence), which is affected by the relationship between regulators and the organizations they regulate. The symbolic relationship between those who regulate and those being regulated may vary in both depth and breadth, but ValuJet coupling resulted in an “interactive complexity” conducive to catastrophe. Deregulation and the contradictory role of the FAA as regulator and promoter of the airline industry provides the larger background for ValuJet’s organizational genesis and persistence. We have described the deficiencies and contradictions in the structural control of the airline industry brought about by deregulation, and have argued that this is related to the FAA’s organizational disregard for the unsafe nature of many of ValuJet’s planes and practices. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Instead of aggressively mandating the ValuJet place it fleet into compliance with applicable regulations, the FAA held up ValuJet as the poster child of deregulation—a victor among many losers in the market of air travel in the post-deregulation era. In this sense, the FAA’s failure to practice its mandate to make air travel safe for consumers through the vigorous inspection of airline companies and their planes facilitated the crash of flight 592. Following this line of theoretical reasoning, had the FAA enforced federal airline safety regulations (id est, had it exerted formal control over ValuJet and SabreTech), the companies may not have been so indifferent to the quality and safety of their activities and commodities. Such oversight would have created an environment where both SabreTech and ValuJet would be more likely to communicate to their employees that productivity and safety are important and rewardable. In other words, the “normalization” of the deviance that produced the ValuJet “accident” would not have gone unnoticed or unchecked. The series of oversights and confusion regarding the content and condition of the boxed holding the oxygen generators are related to how SabreTech and ValuJet rewarded the behavior of employees that contributed to productivity and efficiency, but not behaviour that contributed to safety. Following this line of reasoning and the available data, then, the unspent and uncapped oxygen containers made it into the airplane because employees of SabreTech and ValuJet were not adequately trained, rewarded, or encouraged to conduct careful and complete inspections of materials to be transported by air. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
This explanation is consistent with the findings of a number of studies that illustrate the power of organizational culture over the individual and collective actions of employees in such diverse settings as the Holocaust, police violence, and U.S.A. human radiation experiments. Our interpretation is also consistent with the notion of “the normalization of deviance,” a condition in which deviations from technical protocols gradually and routinely become defined as normative. The normalization of rule breaking is applicable to the manner in which the oxygen canisters were processed, but it is institutionally situated as well. Risky practices, which can be an outcome of or a precursor to the normalization of deviance, became defined as acceptable for capital accumulation (ValuJet) and capital facilitation (FAA). While the crash was an undesirable outcome for all the organizations involved, a number of matters related to the cause of the crash were defined as acceptable risks in light of social phenomenon, the sociology of mistake. As we found with the Challenger explosion, the ValuJet crash can also be interpreted as an event related to how environmental and organizational contingencies create operational forces that shape World view, normalizing signals of potential danger, resulting in mistakes with harmful human consequences. Let us return to an extreme conceptual situation that is the true realm of Lawlessness and Economics, namely an economy lacking any government-provided legal institutions or organizations for protection of property rights and enforcement of contracts. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Protection of property rights raises some issues. Violation of property rights is a unilateral action taken by the predator; this differs from contractual relationships, which are based on voluntary consent of both or all parties. Indeed, the owner of a property may not even know the identity of the potential thief or extortionist. Then the potential victim must take unilateral steps to deter the potential invader, and to detect and punish one if deterrence fails. The property owner may try to do this directly, diverting resources from other productive uses into protection, or one may hire a specialized protector—a private guard or, again, organized crime. In some countries and at some times the government or its agents may be the thieves who try to extract as much as they can from the citizens for their own consumption. The citizens cannot hope to resist the government’s coercive power with force, but may attempt to hide their assets. Also, the prospect that the fruit of one’s efforts will be taken by the government will be distinctive. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the various alternative institutions of governance can be very effective. Only a handful of documents contain[ing] allegations of misconduct in the archives of the correspondence among Maghribi traders. In the numerous transactions that occur every year among the 2000 members of the New York Diamond Dealers’ Club and the numerous non-members who trade there, only 30-40 trades result in a judgment from the arbitration system of the club. Exact figures are not available for the total number of transactions or the number of cases where the defendant refuses to pay the judgment, but a safe guess is that the former is in the hundreds of thousands and the latter in single digits. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Some may regard this as evidence for fundamental goodness of human nature. However, the record of failures of other less-well-designed institutions of governance suggest otherwise. Less developed countries with poor property-right and contract-enforcement systems fail to attract foreign investment and sustain growth. Thus we should conclude that institutions can be effective deterrents to opportunism, but that in their absence, beneficial economic activity is likely to be hindered by a well-grounded fear of being cheated. While land, labour, raw materials and capital were the main factors of production in the Second Wave economy of the past, knowledge—broadly defined here to include data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology and values—is now the central resource of the Third Wave economy. As we have seen, the appropriate data, information and/or knowledge make it possible to reduce all the other inputs used to create wealth. However, the concept of knowledge as the “ultimate substitute” is still not widely grasped. Most economists and accountants are mystified and put off by this idea because it is hard to quantify. What makes the Third Wave economy revolutionary is the fact that while land, labour, raw materials and perhaps even capital can be regarded as finite resources, knowledge is for all intents inexhaustible. Unlike a single blast furnace or assembly line, knowledge can be used by two companies at the same time. And they can use it to generate still more knowledge. Thus, Second Wave economic theories based on finite, exhaustible inputs are inapplicable to Third Wave economies. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
While the vale of a Second Wave company might be measured in terms of its hard assets like buildings, machines, stocks, and inventory, the vale of successful Third Wave firms increasingly lies in their capacity for acquiring, generating, distributing and applying knowledge strategically and operationally. The real value of companies like Compaq or Kodak, Hitachi or Siemens, depends more on the ideas, insights and information in the heads of their employees and in the data banks and patents these companies control than on the trucks, assembly lines and other physical assets they may have. Thus capital itself is not increasingly based on intangibles. UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has a goal of cutting the emissions of carbon dioxide in order to keep the global temperate increase within at least two degrees Celsius compared to the preindustrial period. However, there is still no clear and internationally accepted scientific evidence that emissions of CO2 is the major factor of global warming—on the contrary, we hear a lot of arguments against this assumption. Even some prominent champions of the fight with C)2, beginning with Al Gore, have openly admitted that it may not be so. The data published by experts including James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and “the grandfather of the global warming theory,” shows that gases other than CO2 are responsible for most—and currently maybe even for all—of the global warming, and that major greenhouse has is methane. Furthermore, there is a lot of skepticism about global warming. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The negotiations framework based on shaky presumptions is doubtful by definition. At least it would be safe to say that, to draw a sound conclusion on whether the road has been chosen is right or not, much more preliminary scientific work has to be done. However, not surprisingly, once the UN talk machine has started, it cannot be stopped. Currently, the goal is to reduce global carbon dioxide emission by 45 percent by 2023 from 2010 levels, and reach net-zero emission by 2050. Many countries will argue, however, that they cannot accept binding obligations because they have the right to develop and that, as the problem itself was caused by the industrial development of the West, it is exactly the West tht has to take the major responsibility for the emission cuts. These reductions are associated with unacceptable sacrifices in terms of growth and development. Other countries may not even be willing to compromise and go along with this scheme. However, developed countries will have to reduce their emission in absolute terms on a mandatory basis. Developing countries will make reductions on a voluntary basis, mostly targeting the levels of emissions per unit of GDP. The West will have to support those reductions financially and technically—by the way, allocating a lot of funds in times when its own finances are in disarray. This is it—a very asymmetrical deal. A more favorable combination for the West is hardly feasible. As this scheme is being launched, the West knows it is getting ready to bear the heaviest environmental burden in terms of both reductional levels and financing. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Directories of family agencies of all types are testimony to the variety of ways in which interested people attack what they conceive to be the problems of the family. While proposals are heard from time to time that these many family agencies ought to be co-ordinated, such proposals have to be carefully scrutinized before the can be properly evaluated. On the one hand, it could mean subordination to some authoritatively ordained set of ends; on the other hand, it could mean further freeing the channels of communication among agencies, so that experience could be more fully shared and consensus widened, with decisions involving all arrived at through compromise or synthesis of recognized, conflicting interests. The adoption of the annual budget of a community chest or council of social agencies is an excellent model of such decision-making. It involves politics, strife, compromise, and restless revision of goals and means, but it does create a kind of working unity—even the common understanding of respected differences—which is faithfully believed by Americans to be superior to the superficial appearance of harmony found in an organization dominated by a supreme value and a ruling elite which professes to embody it. Whether it is the society that moulds the family, or whether it is the other way around, there is much evidence for supposing the same correlation between the democratic family and democratic society as between the authoritarian family and authoritarian society. Full and free participation by wife and children—to the limits of their capabilities—in the discussion and decisions affecting the whole family makes the family members willing to dissent and prepare them to respect dissent in others. Sympathetic consensus and agreement to disagree are essential to our characteristic voluntary associations. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
There are also other functions of the family: status placement and cultural continuity. By this, we mean identification of the person through one’s family with the social class into which one was born or hopes to rise, and indoctrination in the subculture of that class. To accept such concepts seems to imply acceptance of the family as a permanent device for insuring that advantageous and disadvantages will be passed on from one generation to the next. That families have so behaved is manifest; to assume that such behavior is inevitable and necessary is neither manifest nor helpful analytically. Rules against nepotism are broken, but they are also kept, and social mobility is almost demanded of next generation. True confessions of conduct disorder should come from deep conviction and not compulsion. It should be made only to God, if the conduct disorder is one only known by God; to a man personally, and in private, when the conduct disorder is against a man; and to the public only when the conduct disorder is against the public. Confession should never me made under the impulse of a compelling emotion but should be a deliberate act of the volition—choosing the right and then putting things right, according to the will of God. That psychopathological offender’s kingdom gains by public confession are evident from the devices the enemy uses to push men into them. Psychopathological offenders drive a believer into conduct disorder which they forced one to commit—contrary to one’s true character—in order to make the conduct disorder which they forced one into a stigma upon on for the remainder of one’s life. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Ofttimes the “conduct disorder” confessed have its rise in the believer from the insertion by wicked spirits of feelings as consciously abhorrent and loathsome as were the former “conscious” feelings of Heavenly purity and love one was experiencing when one declared that one knew of “no conduct disorder to confess to God,” or “no rising of a psychopathological impulse” whatever—which had led one to believe in the complete elimination of all conduct disorder from one’s being. The counterfeit manifestations of the divine presence in the body in agreeable and Heavenly feelings can be followed by counterfeit feelings of sinful things wholly repugnant to the volition and central purity of the believer—who is as faithful to God now in his hatred to conduct disorder as in the days when he revelled in the sense of purity given consciously to his bodily frame. The ground of being is closely conducted with the depth-dimension. As a symbol, the ground of being points to the mother-quality of giving birth, carrying, and embracing, and, at the same time, of calling back, resisting independence of created, and swallowing it. “Ground,” therefore, evokes the image of the Earth, that upon which we stand, which underlies and sustains us. Everything that is rests upon being-itself as its ground, for, in order to be, a being must share in being-itself, must receive its being from the infinite source of being. Immediately one is tempted to conceive the ground being as cause or substance. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
However, if God is called the cause of being, He is enmeshed in an endless but finite chain-reaction of causes and effects, for effects drag causes down to their own level. If God is termed the substance of being, it means that He is imprisoned in accidental beings, and they, in turn, forfeit their independence and freedom. We must accept a symbolic sense for cause and substance which is free from the finiteness of the literal sense and which relates beings to God without diminishing His infinity. Symbolically, God is prima causa and ultima substantia in the sense that God is the cause of the entire series of causes and effects, He is the substance underlying the whole process of becoming. As symbols, cause and substance amount to the same thing—the “underlying,” the ground of being. Ground, therefore, oscillates between cause and substance and transcends both of them. The notion of ground leads to the notion of abyss as naturally as the image “mountain” conjures up the image “valley.” From the viewpoint of finite being, the ground of being as the source and power of being is creative, positive, and the mysterium fascinosum. However, by its very inexhaustibility and the unlimited force of its power, the ground of being infinitely surpasses finite being. In this sense, it is negative; it is tremendum. For finite being is lost, swallowed up in the bottomless depths of the ground of being. The ground becomes the abyss. #RandolpHarris 19 of 19
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Pelted by a Storm of Silver Dollars While Looking for a Dime
Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar. If you have a lot of what people want and cannot get, then you can supply the demand and shovel in the dough. The men who contributed greatly to the palpability of the American Dream—shaping the legacy of this country through their actions and feats—rarely fall neatly int the categories of good or bad, virtuous or vile. Some were downright crooks, scoundrels, and thugs. Some murdered, and many stole. Some used language that would make your mother blush. These men, for the most part, are called “politicians.” However, to be a Mafioso, or a gangster of note, requires more than just criminal activity. Such individual garner perennial respect and admiration by representing complicated but quintessentially American concepts of honor, ambition, and style. The identification of the mafia with organized crime—and thus the idea of an alien conspiracy polluting the economic and social life of the country—has been rejected by the majority of American social scientists since the 1960s. These have alternatively accused the mafia-centered view of organized crime of being ideological, serving personal political interests, and lacking in accuracy and empirical evidence. Some scholars, however, overreacted; up to the early 1980s, they categorically denied the existence of the of the Italian-American mafia as a structured and longstanding criminal organization. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
One of the earliest proponents of the new approach, expressed organized crime as, “illicit enterprise is the extension of legitimate market activities into areas normally proscribed—id est, beyond existing limits of law—for the pursuit of profit and in response to a latent illicit demand. More often, however, organized crime itself has been equated with the provision of illegal goods and services. Hence, organized crime [should] be defined as (or perhaps better limited to) those illegal activities involving the management and coordination of racketeering and vice. It is a social bad, that harms people and the economy. Yet it is also a phenomenon that goes beyond the profit motive, involving rituals, norms of behaviour, and codes of conduct. Organized crime has, thus, become a synonym for illegal enterprise. That is, the involvement in criminal market activities has become nowadays the basic requirement of virtually all definitions of organized crime in the U.S.A. scientific and official discourse. All organized criminals see themselves as different from common delinquents and random street thus. They aim to obtain exclusive control over specific criminal marketplaces not only by using violence and intimidations but also by creating networks of trusts outside the gangs—lawyers, chartered accountants, brokers, bankers, bureaucrats, politicians, police officers, judges, and labour union representatives. Their ultimate goal is power, not money, and they will do anything to get it, using all kinds of tactic, from violence to bribery and other corruption schemes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In the World of organized criminals, the aim is also to acquire control or power over crime territories, which constitute the main source of money for the organized criminals which then, in turn, can be used to expand the power realm, thus guaranteeing more power in a vicious circle that is of great advantage to the criminal groups. This territory-power-money dynamic can be compressed into a formula that emblemizes the overall objective and operationality of all organized criminals. Territorial control = Power = Money = More power. The evil we are fighting out of us is also among us, inside us. Murders and tortures do not only have the cruel and famous faces of those who got their hands dirty with blood and in popular imagination are considered monsters (from monstrum: the person who is put on display) and on whom the evil of the Mafia can be cathartically projected, and exorcized. They also have the faces of people like us, who attend the same school, can be met in the best salons and pray to the same God, feeling they are good Christians at peace with themselves. Mobsters live among us undetected, making them enormously dangerous. They do not stand out publicly as marauders, like the pirates or brigands of the past, who could be identified easily through the particular type of clothes they wore and the kinds of weapons they bore. The mobsters move about incognito, indistinguishable from everyone else. They are doubly dangerous because they are well connected within legitimate society, having established connections with people in positions of influence and power—an arrangement based on the reciprocal exchange of favors. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
At one time, this system of collusion was called patronage. Today we call it corruption, a quid-pro-quo system formed between the gangsters and city politicians, members of the police, and other upright citizens. Gangsters and the operators of illegal business helped win elections as campaign worker or financial contributors, or they helped to steal elections using fraud or intimidations. In return, politicians used their direct or indirect influence over the police and the courts to provide virtual immunity for favored criminals, particularly those who ran or protected gambling or prostitution enterprises, and even to eliminate petty potential rivals to established entrepreneurs. In sharp contrast to the Mafia, most organizational offending takes on a longer, colleague, or peer format. To further highlight this illustration, persons who engage in individual acts of crime and who work in environments with a weak work group dynamic (id est, hawk jobs) will tend to operate as loners. Embezzlers who steal cash from a bank, or academics who commit plagiarism or research fraud almost always seek to keep their crime a secret. These offenders are willing to exploit opportunities that arise from associations with other but they rarely discuss their wrongdoings with others. Other forms of organizational crime take on a more social character, fitting better into what we call a colleague-like arrangement. This is the hallmark of offending that takes place in “vulture” or “donkey” jobs. Most salespeople who commit expense account fraud like to keep their offending to themselves, despite the fact that they know of coworkers who engage in similar misdeeds. The same type of pattern manifests itself among cashiers who steal from the till. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
“Wolfpack” jobs (id est, heavily rule-orientated, but group-centered workplaces) tend to produce yet another brand of organizational alignment. Here, strong group solidarity breeds peerlike associations and collective offending. For example, nurses and police officers are known to work together to ferine and maintain their collective and continued workplace violations. Regardless of the level of organizational alignment, it is safe to say that almost all organizational offending emerges from identifiable socialization scripts. Some horrific things such as the Nazi Holocaust can be incorporated into the common flow of everyday life. All members of the Nazi party, Germany army, and German population did not conspire to kill millions of Jewish people. Instead, the Nazi leadership devised and implemented a gradual transformation of how the rest of the country thought and behaved toward the Jewish people. This is called “metamorphosis,” “soul murder,” and “murder by installment.” It is the incremental move toward mass murder and the accompanying denial. The close-knit contacts within an organizational setting almost always provide ample opportunity for criminal tutelage to take place. By most accounts, the societal reaction to crimes that occur within organizational contexts is less severe than it is for street crime. This observation remains true even when the organizational crime in question is a violent or serious property offense. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
In the organizational crime in question is a violent or serious property offense. In the final analysis, Americans simply subject business relations to a more loose set of moral expectations than they do personal relations. If someone kills a friend during n argument, we are outranged. However, if someone dies because of a profit-driven product was poorly designed or manufactured, we are likely to depict the situation as an unfortunate cost of doing business. Public apathy along with political denial or even complicity (id est, pressure from lobbyists and/or campaign contributions) gives rise to relaxed formal social control processes at every stage in the game (id est, enforcement, prosecution, and sentencing). Even when formal authorities want to get involved, they are forced to face the reality that these crimes are different. Corporate offenses pose special investigatory and prosecutorial problems that make the successful application of the criminal law complicated and difficult. The law enforcement response to cries that occur within organizational contexts has long been notoriously weak. For starters, organizational crime draws spotty attention from members of the law enforcement community. Federal authorities who bear the brunt of the enforcement workload reported 10,477 fraud (individual and institution-based consumer fraud combined) 1,170 tax fraud. There were 1,118 embezzlement, 745 RICO (organizational and nonorganizational offenders included), 419 obstruction of justice, 400 generic regulatory offense, 381 bribery, 341 civil rights, 318 forgery, 141 food and drug violation, 242 antitrust, and 4 national defense arrests. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Given the sheer number of employers and employees that exist in this country and the self-reported prevalence estimates that we have provided here, it seems quite reasonable to suggest that millions of organizational crimes go unreported to enforcement agencies each year. The question is why? Logic dictates the need for a multipart answer. First, many organizational offenses go undetected. Many of our nation’s corporations are so big that even the loss of large sums of money may never come to the attention of supervisors. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the finance department of most American corporations are sadly lacking in auditing skills and implementation. As such, unless a financial transgression is painfully obvious, most accountants will pass it over. In-house security personnel do little to improve this situation. In many cases, security departments are understaffed or underbudgeted. Take, for example, the retail industry. The average retail firm directs 0.79 percent of its total operating budget toward loss prevention and security. The average firm employs 5.75 security employees for $100 million in sales volume—the average firm deploys less than one security officer (0.85) per store location. Oftentimes, corporate officials become aware of transgressions but choose not to report them to outsiders. Organizations are hesitant to report internal theft for fear that it will be perceived as a sign of financial ineptitude by stockholders or potential clients. Company personnel choose to involve the police (id est, press charged) in 36 percent of all employee theft cases but 79 percent of all shoplifting cases. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The news does not get much better when it comes to the prosecution of organizational offenders. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Attorneys declined to purse a criminal indictment in 36 percent of the embezzlement, 52 percent of the bribery, 55 percent of the perjury, and 57 percent of the regulatory cases that were forwarded to them. This is not to say that organizational offenders illicit no response from or federal prosecutor. A study found that U.S. Attorneys brought criminal cases against 55 percent of the suspects that they investigated. This figure was nearly identical to that observed among non-white-collar suspects. When charges were filed, the federal prosecutors were said to pursue the case with the same tenacity as they did violent, property, or public offenses. State-level Attorney Generals are the highest-ranking state prosecutors with jurisdiction over organizational offenses. We found that these officers of the court pursue individual violators with much greater frequency and tenacity than they do corporate or organizational entities. We conclude that civil or administrative remedies were the preferred course of action when dealing with crime suspected white-collar crime. It is fairly clear that prosecutors prefer to resolve white-collar crime cases via plea bargains. The average case is quite complex and defendants generally employ a very capable defense team. This makes for a long and expensive trial with no guarantee of conviction. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Defendants will gladly plea bargain their case if they feel that the government has a strong case against them; namely, they will seek to cut a deal that allows them to avoid a term of incarceration. However, if the evidence is at all suspect, the defense team is likely to force the prosecutor into a trial. We found that 20 percent of the federal white-collar defendants in our sample pled not guilty and forced a trial. This figure is 3 to 4 times the trial rate that is experienced for most conventional street crimes. Cases involving corporations and/or their executive stand as a notable exception to the rule. We found that less than 1 percent of the 200,000+ organizational defendants in our sample saw their cases proceed to trial. Landmark criminal proceedings such as the Ford Pinto case reveal that it is very difficult to obtain a trial conviction in the case of corporate violence. Very few examples exist in which prosecutors have gone to trial alleging murder by a corporation or its executives and come away with a conviction. The resources that corporate entities can bring to bear are sizable and simply insurmountable. The available literature suggests that white-collar individuals and organizations are treated less harshly than conventional offenders when it comes time for judges to impose sentencing. It seems that, although they can ruin more lives at one time than a street criminal can, they are given a higher status because they have power. Judicial empathy, a fear of the broad social consequences that go with harsh corporate sanctions, and the respectability of the offenders get offered up as possible explanations for the leniency. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Convicted white-collar criminals face a 36 percent chance of going to prison. This compares to incarceration rates of 53 percent for those nonviolent street crimes and 80 percent among convicted violent offenders. If convicted, white-collar offenders can generally expect to do less time than street offenders. The Federal Bureau of Prisons show the average time served for a robbery, larceny, and burglary was 46.5, 18.3, and 17.9 months, respectively. For fraud, embezzlement, and income tax evasion, the figures dropped to 13.6, 11.4, and 10.3 months, respectively. Almost half of all white-collar defendants are sentenced to less than 1 year behind bars. Governmental regulators and court officials often seek to levy fines and restitution as penalties against corporate and white-collar offenders. For example, we found that 89 percent of the corporate defendants who were convicted in federal court received some sort of fine. Another 16 percent were ordered to pay restitution, and 19 percent were ordered to make civil or some other sort of payment. Here again, however, corporate offenders are often able to sidestep the system by managing to have their cases subject to regulatory review as opposed to criminal prosecution. In our review of thirty-six of the most notorious acts of corporate and governmental violence from the past century (everything from the three Mile Island radiation leak to the Corvair and Pinto cases the plagued the automobile industry) reveals that, in the end, corporate violators almost always receive what can only be characterized as a slap on the wrist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Civil litigation is the most frequently imposed form of formal social control that gets meted out against corporate, state, professional, and individual-level offenders. These cases can be brought to bear against violators by individuals, groups of individuals (id est, class-action suits), governmental regulators, or other organizational entities. We observed that, in almost every case, the plaintiff is severely outgunned by highly paid and knowledgeable corporate lawyers. More often than note, the defendant has vast resources and political power to mobilize on its behalf. In light of this bleak picture, numerous scholars and policy makers have proposed alternative means of formal social control that might be directed toward organizational crimes and criminals. We have proposed a form of “organizational probation.” This would involve the use of “occupation incapacitation” in which convicted offenders would be removed from the corporate or market environment in which they habitually offended. There is also a call for increased criminalization of corporate and individual-level misconduct. Some even endorse the use of community service and point-by-point monitoring as a means of achieving “corporate rehabilitation.” There is also a proposed punishment called “corporate dissolution,” whereby corporate entities would be held responsible for the crimes of their employees (if it could be shown that the corporation benefited from or endorsed the crimes). Informal social control efforts directed at crimes within complex organizations are diverse in nature but generally ineffectively implemented. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
We often allow corporations, industries, or profession to self-regulate themselves. This is generally accomplished through the development and use of codes of ethics and internal oversight entities (review boards, investigators, and the like). Th sad reality is that profit motives and self-preservation usually get in the way of these efforts. Other advocate the use of shame and embarrassment techniques as a means of informational social control. It is encouraged that organizational entities develop and maintain “corporate case law” that would allow them to counsel repeated offenders into compliance without having to rely on threatening and ineffective external sources of control. Still there are people that advocate a structured transformation of organizations that would guide and encourage “whistleblowers” to come forward with information. We should enlist the research capabilities of the National White Collar Crime Center (a hybrid academic-political agency) to study the diverse phenomena and formulate more effective alternative policies. Most jurisdictions have in place specific statutory provisions that outlaw tampering with witness, informants, physical evidence, and/or public records information. Even in modern countries where a well-functioning institution and apparatus of government-provided law exists, economic—or, indeed, non-economic—disputes do not immediately lead to litigation. Recourse to the law is often the last resort, not the first one. People attempt to resolve their disputes using various private methods of negotiation, and only if these fail do they go to courts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
In the context of business, this idea goes back at least as far as Macaulay (1963). Williamson (1996, pp. 10, 122), citing previous legal scholars, says that business people “speak of ‘cancelling the other’ rather than “breaching our contract’,” and that contracts and courts are “a norm of ultimate appeal when the relations cease in fact to work.” In matters of personal relationships, too, less and 10 percent of divorce are contested in court. All of this had led to the concept of private ordering in the shadow of the law. An obvious explanation for the persistence of such private ordering is that resolution of disputes using the formal machinery of state law is far from costless; in fact it costs especially times costs, often exceeded those of alternative methods of private ordering. Sometimes formal law may yield outcomes that are worse for all parties than can private ordering. Therefore the outcome that the parties expect to obtain in the court (net of the costs of using the court system) becomes a backstop or threat point to private negotiation. Long-term relationships and arbitration are the most common modes of private ordering. Long-term relationships can be self-enforcing for reasons familiar from the theory of repeated games: the immediate gains from behaving opportunistically can be offset by future losses, because the opportunism leads to a collapse of the relationship and therefore to lower future payoffs. However, now we have another possibility. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The relationship need not collapse completely; it can be replaced by one based on formal contracts and court enforcement. This is still costly and therefore serves to deter opportunism in the original ongoing relationship. However, the cost may be less than that of a total breakdown of interaction. Correspondingly, the deterrence effect falls short of the level possible when total breakdown is the only alternative. Thus availability of court enforcement may, in a seeming paradox, reduce the extent of good behavior that can be sustained in the long-term relationship. The official law can interfere with a long-term relationship in another way, namely by agreeing to hear a case filed by one of the parties in such a relationship attempting to overturn an adverse outcome in the implicit contract. However, courts often recognize the merits of implicit contracting in long-term relationships like employment, and refuse to hear such cases. This is the doctrine of forbearance. Private arbitration can have cost advantages over the government’s courts, but perhaps more importantly, it can have information advantages and therefore provide dispute resolution of higher quality. Arbitration forums specialize by industry, geographic region, and so on, in the range of disputes they take up. They acquire expertise in their special areas. They can adopt procedures and rules of evidence that suit their specific concerns. State courts must stand ready to consider all matters that could arise under the law, and although some attempt can be made to assign cases to judges on the basis of their expertise, the rules and procedures must remain the same for all cases. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
For these reasons, arbitrators are better able to obtain, interpret, and use information pertinent to the dispute than are the state courts. Arbitrators lack the coercive powers of the state and therefore cannot ensure compliance with their verdicts. However, as with long-term relationships, the government’s courts often recognize the advantages of arbitration for governance of particular classes of transactions. Then they accept the arbitrator’s verdict and will not agree to rehear the issue. This is formalized in USA laws and in international agreements. Given this shadow of the law, if one party refuses to comply with the arbitrator’s verdict, the other can enlist the help of the courts for enforcement. A specific historical institution, namely the lex mercatoria or merchants law was developed in medieval Europe. Many principles developed by the private judges or adjudicators of the law merchant were later taken over by the state’s law. However, private adjudicators lack the incentives to supply the public good of principles and precedent, so we expect it to be underprovided. So much is written about the substitution of computerized equipment for human labour that we often ignore the ways in which it also substitutes for capital. Indeed, in a sense knowledge is far greater long-term threat to the power of finance than are organized labour or anticapitalist political parties. For, relatively speaking, the information revolution is reducing the need for capital per unit of output in a capitalist economy. Nothing could be more revolutionary. Vittorio Merloni is a businessman. Ten percent of all washing machines, refrigerators and other major household appliances sold in Europe are made by Mr. Merloni’s company. His main competitors are Electrolux of Sweden and Philips of Holland. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
According to Mr. Merloni, “we need less capital now to do the same thing” that required more capital in the past. “This means that a poor country can be much better off today with the same amount of capital than five or ten years ago.” The reason, he says, is that knowledge-based technologies are reducing the capital needed to produce dishwashers, stoves or vacuum cleaners. To begin with, information substitutes for high-cost inventory, according to Mr. Merloni. By speeding the responsiveness of the factory to the market and making short runs economical, better and more instantaneous information makes it possible to reduce the amount of components and finished goods sitting in warehouses or railroad sidings. Mr. Merloni at one point cut a startling sixty percent from his inventor costs. Mr. Merloni’s case has been duplicated by every major company in the United States of America, Japan and Germany as just-in-time delivery of parts, based on computerized information, is slashing inventories everywhere. Cuts in inventory, of course, not only translate back into the smaller space and real estate costs mentioned earlier, but also into reduced taxes, insurance and overhead. Even though the initial cost of computers, software, information and telecommunications may itself be high, Mr. Merloni says the overall saving means that his company needs less capital to do the same job that it did in the past. Michael Milken, who for better or worse knows a thing or two about investment, has summed it up in six words: “Human capital has replaced dollar capital.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Because it reduces the need for raw materials, labour, time, space, capital, and other inputs, knowledge becomes the ultimate substitute—the central resource of an advanced economy. Ans as this happens, its value soars. To elevate living standards in America, we need to increase international and domestic consumption of American made products. One way to do this, is by getting the nation back under control. America needs to again become a nation of law in order and have a serious President so people will look at Americans as sane and as leaders. Then we need to help Americans achieve the American Dream of home ownership, so other nations will want to emulate the American lifestyle and buy American cars and trucks and other American made products because they are trendy and represent sophistication and class. There is a noticeable trend in the family law which deals with the authority of husband over wide, and of parents over children. The trend, of course, is toward greater freedom and equality for wives and children, and greater restriction upon the authority of husband or parents to dispose of the person or property of dependents. Compulsory education laws, laws restricting employment of minors, laws limiting the degree of physical violence which may be practiced upon one’s closet kind, often monitored by private humane societies, are of quite recent emergence, and are still being extended, along with appropriate inspection and enforcement agencies such as state licensing of boarding homes, nursery schools, and camps. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
For those to whom the family is a means to personal development, new horizons of emancipation remain to be achieved. Greater freedom and equality for women is being followed by a reduction of the voting age. Political efforts to pass laws to protect working women from special occupational hazards have been followed by agitation to dissolve the remaining barriers to their entering any occupation of their choice. The question of being leads to finitude which, in turn, leads to the question of God. The existence of God cannot be taken literally. God, the ground of being, is not found within the World of existing beings. Nor can existence be predicated of him, since it means an actual state of distorted being and of disruptive tensions. God does nor exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him. To make the World the data and God the conclusion is to derive God from the World. The argument for God’s existence is the expression of the question of God which is implied in human finitude. The worth of the so-called ontological and moral arguments (Augustine, Anselm, Kant) lies in this, that they provide a description of the way in which potential infinite is present in actual finitude. Man has a prior awareness of God that enables him to asked about the infinite from which he is separated, about the source of his courage to face anxiety. The truth of the ontological and moral argument is the acknowledgement of the unconditional element in the structure of reason and reality. They reveal n awareness of God which renders possible the question of God. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The cosmological and teleological arguments cannot prove the existence of a highest being, but they describe the threat of non-being, the ontological anxiety that drives man to ask the question of God. The cosmological argument is based on the categories of finitude. It seeks to the “eternal now” in which time and space are affirmed and overcome, the “ground of being” in which cause and substances are rooted and conquered. The teleological argument asks for the ultimate meaning of the ontological polarities and tensions. However, seeking is not finding, and to ask is not to receive. The cosmological and teleological arguments portray the inevitability and necessity of the question of God just as the ontological and moral arguments show its possibility. The ontological analysis began with the question being, and it ends with the question of God. How is He the answer to being? God is being-itself. Negatively, this means that God is not a being, not even the highest being, alongside other beings. Positively, it means that God is the ground of being or the power of being. He is beyond essence and existence because as being-itself He does not participate in nonbeing and finitude. He does not exist; He is. Counterfeits of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost Spirit are recognizable by the manifestations being given to the senses, id est, in the physical realm. For the true indwelling of God is in the shrine of the spirit alone; and the soul vessel, or personality of the self-actualized, is purely a vehicle for the expression of Christ, who is enthroned within by His Spirit; while the body, quickened by the same Spirit, is governed by God from the central depths of the human spirit, through the self-control of the man acting by his renewed will. #RandolphHarri 19 of 20
The counterfeit presence of God is given by psychopathological offenders working upon the physical frame, or within the bodily frame but upon the senses. We have seen the beginning of this, and how the first ground is grained. Control is advanced by these same-manifestations being repeated, ever so gently, so that the man goes on yielding to them, thinking this is truly “communion with God”—for believers too often look upon communion with God as a thing of sense, rather than of spirit. So one starts praying to psychopathological offenders under the belief that one is praying to God. The self-control is not yet lost, but as the believer responds to or gives oneself up to these “conscious” manifestations, one does not realize that one’s will power is being slowly undermined. At last, though these subtle, delicious experiences, a conviction is established that God Himself is in possession of the body, quickening with it felt thrills of life, or filling in with warmth and heart, or even with “agonies” which seems like fellowship with the sufferings of Christ and His travail for souls, or the experience of death with Christ in the consciousness of nails being driven into the bodily frame, et cetera. From this point the lying spirits can work as they will, and there is no limit as to what they may do to one who is deceived to this extent. Counterfeit manifestations of the divine life in various modes now follow quickly; movements in the body, pleasant thrills, touches, a glow as of fire in different parts of the body; or sensations of cold, shaking, and tremblings—all of which are accepted as from God. Psychopathological offenders work by sudden suggestions—which is not the ordinary working of the mind but suggestions which come without—“flashes of memory,” again not the ordinary working of the memory but thoughts coming from without; touches and twitches of the nerves; feelings of a draft and sensations of wind blowing upon the area round about, et cetera. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 