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How Could She Possibly Have Fallen to Sleep When Her Heart Was Breaking?
The Winchester mansion’s construction began in 1887. In the dead center of this 160-room catacomb, it is rumored that the house would swallow people whole. Amidst specially designed thousand-dollar stained-glass doors and windows, anti-social kids would melt back into obscurity. It was on the evening of August 25, 1889 that a man was discovered on the stairwell leading to the third floor, wearing only his underwear, had sustained 25 stab wounds to the face and chest. Rumours abounded concerning the perpetrators of this frenzied attack: fundamentalist Christians, a rival of Mrs. Winchester’s from San Francisco, fanatical anti-Nazis were all suggested on the grapevine. The evil act was perpetrated, like some troop of Satanic boy scouts were thirsty for blood, while listening to haunting hymns of the Norse gods of old. It was terrible. Mrs. Winchester patiently waited for someone to remove the body, the thick carpet was bloody and blood trickled down the walls, as it dripped from the ceiling. But across her fact was a frightful gash, like a sabre-cut, deep and shadowy within, but clean and sharp at the edges. When the butler tenderly pressed her head to close the gaping wound, the edges made a find grating sound, that was painful to hear, and the lids of the dark eyes quivered and trembled as Mrs. Winchester was also suffering dreadfully. “Poor Mrs. Winchester!” he exclaimed sorrowfully. “But I shall not hurt you much, though you will take a long time to get strong.” After done tending to Mrs. Winchesters wound, he wrapped the body in plastic and dragged it to the basement to incinerate it in the furnace. Mrs. Winchester had evidently not been long in the World; for her complexion was perfect, her hair was smooth where is should be smooth, and surely where it should be curly, and her silk clothes were perfectly new. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
This is why Mrs. Winchester’s arrival to the valley was sensational. The valley was thrilled by the dramatic entrance of a millionairess; by those freight cars sidetracked in Santa Clara, unloading rich imported furnishing. However, also intriguing was the fact that the mansion seemed to mushroom to 500 rooms in what seemed like a matter of day, but people were also spooked by the ghostly screams heard coming from inside and the shadowy figures that lurked in the windows at night and that could be seem in daylight, quiet frequently, stalking about in the Victorian gardens. The longer Mrs. Winchester worked on her glorious estate, the more fond the spirits became of her chestnut brown hair, and caramel coloured eyes. The ghosts sat for hours gazing at Mrs. Winchester’s delicate face. She was wonderfully mended. She was quite strong, and in a valley where she could live for a hundred years to tell of the fearful curse that had befallen her and the Winchester mansion. As the twilight deepened, Mrs. Winchester grew anxious, and walked up and down the zig zag stairs, no longer able to think of Annie and William. An indefinable, disquieting sensation came upon her by fine degrees, a chilliness and a faint stirring of her thick hair, joined with a wish to be in any company rather than to be alone with the ghosts much longer. It was the beginning of fear. She stood back from the table, to get out of the way of the chair, and began to cross the board floor. Something was following her in the dark. There was a small pattering, as of tiny feet upon the boards. She stopped and listened, and the roots of her hair tingled. It was nothing. She made two steps more, and she was sure that she heard the litter pattering again. Mrs. Winchester turned her back to the window, leaning against the sadh so that the panes began to crack, and she faced the dark. Everything was quite still. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Mrs. Winchester sensed that someone was in the room. “Is anyone there?” she cried. But no answer in the room. Just darkness. Mrs. Winchester was shocked at how long she had been alone. She was shocked and frightened, and she ran across the room to the door. As she fumbled for the door handle, he distinctly heard the running of the little feet after her. “Mice!” she exclaimed feebly, just as she got the door open. She shut it quickly behind her, and felt as though some cold thing had settled on her back and were withering upon her. The passage was quite dark, but she could hear laughter and calls of children, playing some game out of doors. She wondered how she could have been so nervous, and for an instant she thought of the motive from the crime that had occurred that evening. A gaggle of adolescent nihilists who found themselves transformed into a “cult” or naughty spirits? There were a number of similar cases that received plenty of attention on the “Satanic” angle. There was a story of a ghoul stabbing a priest to death. Another ghoul murdered an unpopular fifteen-year-old boy. And another ghoul shot a man in the neck at the back of Italy. Two young farmers were convicted of the crime, both had alibis, however. While these murders—which occurred alongside a spate grave desecration, the violence barely made a ripple. However, around 100 youths, chiefly from affluent families in the valley, were arrested and charged with “Satan worship.” Their homes were ransacked and “evidence”—such as voo doo dolls, drawings, and magic spells was recovered. It was rumoured that the Winchester mansion was so large, these kids held “Satanic Parties” while Mrs. Winchester slept. One of the accused observed, “I don’t have anything to do with Satanism. I joined because their parties were exciting, and people wore amazing costumes and appear and disappeared right before my eyes.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
There is no justification for those who stir up hostility, commit acts of blasphemy, vandalism, violence and even murder. But, when it came to the Winchester mansion, it was hard to tell if the ghosts were real, supernatural, or a mixture of both. When the feared tide of violence failed to break Mrs. Winchester, business as normal resumed. It was one o’clock in the morning when Mrs. Winchester went up stairs to her bedroom. As she turned the key to unlock the door again, worn out and hopeless and broken-hearted, her heart stood still, for she knew that she was awake and not dreaming, and that she really heard those tiny footsteps pattering to meet her in the passage of her house. However, she was too unhappy to be much frightened any more, and her heart went on again with a dull regular pain, that found its way all through her with every pulse. So she went in her room in the dark, and lite a candle. Mrs. Winchester was so completely devastated that she sat down in her chair before the work-table and almost fainted, as her face dropped forward upon her folded hands. Beside her the solitary candle burned steadily with a low flame in the still warm air. She was so terrible hurt that she did not even feel something pulling at her nightgown so gently that it was like the nibbling of a tiny mouse. If she had noticed it, she might have thought that it was really a mouse. Then a coo breath stirred her thin hair, and the low flame of the one candle dropped down almost to a mere spark, not flickering as though a draught were going to blow it out, but just dropping as if it were tired out. Mrs. Winchester felt her hands stiffening with fright under her face; and there was a faint rustling sound, like some small silk thing blown in a gentle breeze. She sat up straight, stark, and scared, and a small ghoulish voice spoke to her. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
“Ma-ma” it said, with a break between the syllable. Mrs. Winchester stood up with a single jump, and her chair feel over backwards with a smashing noise upon the wooden floor. The candle had almost gone out. It was Annie’s voice that had spoken, and she should have known it among the voices of a hundred other ghosts. And yet there was something more in it, a little human ring, with a pitiful cry and a call for help, and the wail of a hurt child. Mrs. Winchester stood up, stake and stiff, and tried to look round, but at first, she could not, for she seemed to be frozen from head to foot. Then she made a great effort, and she raised one hand to each of her temples, and pressed her own head round as she would have turned a manikin’s head. The candle was burning so low that it might as well have been out altogether, for any light it gave, and the room seemed quite dark at first. Then she saw something. She would have no believed that she could be more frighted than she had been just before that. However, she was, and her knees shook, for she saw her daughter Annie standing in the middle of the floor, shining with a faint and ghostly radiance, her pretty glassy brown eyes fixed on her. And across Annie’s face and her delicate pink lips was a smile, and her chubby ruby red cheeks. Yet there was something more in the eyes, too; there was something more human than ghostly. It was enough to bring back all of Mrs. Winchester’s pain which made her forget her fear. “Annie! My little Annie!,” she cried aloud. The small ghost moved. “Ma-ma,” it said. It seemed this time that there was even more of Annie’s tone echoing somewhere between the wooden notes that reached her ears so distinctly, and yet so far away. Annie was calling her, Mrs. Winchester was sure she was. Her face was perfectly white in the gloom, but her knees did not shake any more, and she felt that she was less frightened. “Yes, baby girl! Where are you? Where are you?” she asked. “Where are you, Annie?” “Ma-ma!” #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Annie died when she was only six weeks old, so these were the first words Mrs. Winchester ever heard her speak. She broke down in tears, not realizing that the Satanic ritual the boy performed had manifested her daughter who had been running around in the mansion for days trying to get her attention. Annie had lost her left shoe and was trying to get Mrs. Winchester attention so she could put it back on her. Mrs. Winchester had not been dreaming. The candle burned brightly now, and she heard Annie’s foot steps running to the door. Mrs. Winchester had fallen asleep and was not able to tend to her ghost child. How could she possibly have fallen asleep when her heart was breaking? She said what a fool she was. She should have been out in the streets looking for her child. “Ma-ma!” The longing, wailing, pitiful little wooden cry rang from the secret passage behind the wall, which was being a wall, and behind another wall. Mrs. Winchester stood for a moment later her hand was on the handle. Then she was in the secret room, with the light streaming from the open door behind her. Quite at the other end she saw the little phantom shining clearly in the shadow, and the right hand seemed to beckon to her as the arm rose and fell once more. She knew all at once that it had not come to fright her, but lead her, and when it disappeared, an she walked boldly towards the door, she knew that it was in the safe, waiting for her. Mrs. Winchester forgot she was tired and had eaten no supper, and had walked many miles, for a sudden hope ran through and through her, like a golden stream of life. And sure enough, it led her to the door-to-nowhere. She saw the small ghost flitting before her. Sometimes it was only a shadow, where there was other light, but then the glare of the gasoliers made a pale green sheen on the wall. The entire figure shone out brightly, with its light brown hair with blonde highlights. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
Baby Annie seemed to trot like a tiny child, and Mrs. Winchester could almost hear the pattering of the golden slippers on the hardwood floors as it ran. However, it went so very fast, and she could only just keep up with it, tearing along with her thick brown hair blown by the night breeze. Then the little angel was gone. Mrs. Winchester was suddenly troubled and disturbed. She heard noises as if chains were being rattled, together with crashes and sounds of knocking. Her bed began to move up and down repeatedly. At first she did not know whether it was a sign of mental illness or a result of her magi practices. She tried to read her Bible and pray but this was almost impossible. She was convinced that the source of the trouble lay in some evil power. Mrs. Winchester went to one of her friends, a Christian woman in Oakland, and subsequently a group was formed to pray for her. At first she wavered between faith and doubt. She was in a turmoil. She longed to be at peace with God but could not rid herself of a terrible feeling of fear. The battled lasted for decades. In the end she saw a vision of a golden cup being handed down from Heaven It was full of blood and the words came to her, “This is the blood of Christ which has been shed for you.” From that moment her attacks ceased as she believed in her Saviour. Faith in Christ had delivered her. However, there was still two kinds of spirits in the Winchester mansion. The ones that smiles like a dame of Heaven before she is married, and the ones that gets to be tearing devils after her market’s made and she has got a husband. In the summer of 1898, a demon-possessed farmer at the Winchester mansion heard of the Christian gospel through Mrs. Winchester. He then tore down his Victorian cottage Mrs. Winchester provided for, which had been his shrine and ceased worshipping the demon. The death of his sick child occurred a few days later. In great distress his wife urged him to restore the shrine and resume the worship, believing her daughter’s death was caused by the offended demon. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
However, the new Christian remained adamant and refused to break his vow to worship and trust in Jesus. A few days later, the demon Bifrons returned and spoke through his victim to the wife: “I have returned but for one visit. If your husband is determined to be a Christian, this is no place for me. But I wish to tell you I have nothing to do with the death of your child.” Demons not only know of Christ, who had delivered people from the power of demons, they are experts in their own bailiwick. They share in the cunning subtlety and deception of Satan and carry on his work with great skill in an effort to blind the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4.4). The possession of extraordinary knowledge always characterizes the demon as he speaks through the body of his victim. Powers of oratory and poetic expression and the gift of ventriloquism are often evidenced. Perhaps the most striking character is the demon’s ability to speak languages unknow by the subject. This is a widespread phenomenon frequently referred to by Chinese witnessed. In Germany under the ministry of Pastor John Christopher Blumhardt (1805-1880), demons encountered in his prayer cures “spoke in all the different European languages, and in some which Blumhardt and others present did not recognize. The victim’s new personality often displays not only supernatural knowledge but supernatural physical strength and other physical alterations as well. Rapid change of facial expression quickly turns friendliness into dreadful grimace. A sudden shift of voice, perhaps from a high soprano to a resounding bass, introduced the new personality. These psychic transformations are commonly accompanied by a display of tremendous physical strength, often expressed in delirium, wild flailing of hands and feet, and destructive mania endangering those near at hand. Frail women or even children under demon possession can resist three or four strong men. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
Children who have visited the Winchester mansion report bursting forth with unified voices. They say that witch’s specters come to torment them. In 1888, one child was demon possessed for more than ten days, while visiting the Winchester mansion. He has such show of physical strength that the people had leashed him to a tree like an animal. As soon as the farmers prayed for him, the chained boy gave several mighty leaps in the air and said, “Take off the chains!” The people were afraid to obey, but the took the chains off the boy and led him quietly into the house, where the victim fell into a peaceful sleep. Satanism that had emerged in the New World was very different from its European counterpart. According to the confessions, the witches met in a pasture outside the Winchester mansion at night. A trumpet was sounded, audible to all witches in Santa Clara County, but never heard by those who were not in tuned to the supernatural. The witches, thus signaled, mounted, their broomsticks and flew to the meeting. Once there, they all sat in an orderly congregation, partaking of the sacrament in the usual manner, except for the fact that both blood and wafers. Then they heard a sermon delivered by the Devil. The sermon usually dealt with the overthrow of the theocratic system then in existence and the abolition of strict social laws; the new system that would follow would bring with it greater abundance and more pleasurable life. The singing of the Devil’s book was present, but the initiates differed as to the method of signing. Few of the confessors said they had signed the book in the traditional manner, with their own blood, but most of them had signed with plain pen and ink. Epidemics of possession tend to occur most frequently in times of social tension. Since a possessed person is no longer responsible for one’s behavior, such outbreaks function psychologically as a release, as a means of casting off authority with impunity, as well as a method of casting off authority with impunity, as well as a method of projecting repressed doubts or guilt. “The Devil made me do it.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
It is not surprising, then, that outbreaks of mysterical contagion have historically taken place in areas where authority, manifested in an overpowering social structure or system of values, was the greatest, and where emotional safety of values, was the greatest, and where emotional safety valves for bleeding off social tensions were the least. Ironically, though the criminal antics of the Black Metal Circle attracted the international attention that led to the genre’s global renaissance, most current black metal bands distance themselves of the early 1990s—while conceding that they lent the genre a pathological allure. There is an ambivalence at work that is almost classically Satanic. The sheer number and diversity of bands involved in the black metal scene today is breathtaking: “black metal” is defined not so much by a musical style as by a lyrical fixation with the Satanic (though not necessarily Satanism itself), evoking dark passions and gothic moods. Within these boundaries, black metal is arguably the most vital and creative force in contemporary music. Black metal musicians plunder almost every aspect of the Western musical canon, from folk and techno to orchestral and jazz influences. They are also becoming increasingly literate and well-informed. Whereas, three decades before, Black Sabbath were inspired by a Dennis Wheatly novel, the new generation of demonic rockers are exploring writers like Dante and Milton, with Norwegian act Ulver releasing an album based upon Willian Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Black Metal is the state-of-the-art pinnacle in extreme music and the most alternative, most underground form of demi-monde culture this side of hades! BLACK METAL, blackmetal, BM, Norwegian, Northern, true, elite, modern black, dark-metal, Greek, blackened death, gothic-metal, Pagan metal, vampiric, death-industrial, black-noise, dark-ambient/black-ambient, etcetera—these are the nomenclature that sets our music apart from the mediocrity of conventional culture and brings us all together in the most cutting-edge community!…Hail Satan! #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
If you get down to the magic of the Winchester Mystery House, you will discover the spirits come straight from the heart. One does not have to do it very often, but if your music is emotional and affects you, it is Satanic. It can be classical, death metal, whatever. It is a manner of how you write it and why you write it. People are becoming more aware. A lot of things are getting exposed and people are getting sick of the corruption. Certain people get a lot of balderdash. Death threats in person. People vandalize cars and gardens, and attack others. It is ridiculous. They call those who express their nature bad guys, but they are the ones who behave in a bad fashion. Rituals are quite important as they impress one’s mind—you know you are dealing with serious stuff—and that is how magic works. It comes from within: you release certain energies and draw certain energies; therefore it is important that people can control their own minds This takes a lot of effort to master. For examples, novices should not throw themselves into situations they cannot normally cope with, learn to cope with them first. A Satanist should suffer from no paranoias and master their fears. The Decadent movement of Mrs. Winchester’s time is why the nineteenth century was known as the Satanic century, and the concept of Decadent lifestyle is quite appealing. I am a great fan of Decadent writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, and enjoy stories about the macabre and unknown in general, like the work of H.P. Lovecraft. I agree with a lot of Nietzsche’s philosophy on the will to power, morals, and the superman. I read the Marquis de Sade, who I find fascinating—Gilles de Rais was also a very interesting character. Satanism is a way of living. It is a philosophy and a magical path. I think to be a Satanist you have to have a dark, sinister side to you—you have to be born that way. You must be an extreme person, a strong-willed person—emotional but not controlled by your emotions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
You have to understand the darker aspects of human psychology and behaviour. You must be your own master, be responsible for your own actions. A Satanist is an individual. A Satanists is usually also a misanthrope. One appreciates that most people are weak and foolish and follow the crowd, like sheep. Satanism is quite masculine. It required logical, cold thinking. Most white magicians are too scared to step into the dark side because they know they cannot handle it. If they cannot handle “demons,” how can they call themselves magicians? It is pathetic. The real demon is their own fear. Another characteristic of demonomania is the complete change of moral character and spiritual disposition of the victim when the new personality is in control. This transformation is due to the nature of the inhabiting demon who completely controls one’s victim during the demonized state (the attack), and thus manifests one’s own character. Just like human beings, demons have different intellectual, moral, and spiritual traits. These traits will manifest themselves accordingly through the possessed person. Some demons are refined, educated, cultured, and ever appear to be “good” and benevolent, parading as elect unfallen angels, even as the Holy Spirit himself. Others are unrefined, uneducated, coarse, vile, and morally filthy. Demons are not always viciously immoral and unclean. However, all spirits who are not of God always display their essential God-defying and Christ-resisting trait. They always abhor the triune God and the Christian faith. If you ever hear ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion, the bell in the belfry high in the gables tolling, maybe the Winchester Mystery House is summoning you. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
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The Business World’s Equivalent of a Star!
He is a celebrity. The business World’s equivalent of a star. His marriages make the gossip pages. His name induces fear and fascination in the financial community. Still in his forties, he is a cocky man, by turns charming and choleric. He is a rabid reader whose Sunday afternoons may be spent wandering the Upper East Side of Manhattan, unrecognized in a turtleneck sweater, in search of a bookstore to browse in. He has butted heads with some of the mightiest corporate chieftains, made front-page business news, and built a personal fortune estimated at nearly half a billion dollars. He is also a lawbreaker. What is more, the law he has broken is not some wimpy law against stock market shenanigans or white-collar crime. It is the most macho of laws—that which prohibits violence. Paraphrased for brevity’s sake, here is this story. “After flames broke out in one of my company’s computer centers in a nearby city, our investigators came to the conclusion the fire was set by a pissed-off employee. Trouble is, we didn’t have evidence that would stand up in court, and we couldn’t get the local cops interested. Even if we could, we knew it would take forever to get anything done about it. So we wired up another employee with a hidden tape recorder and sent him to a bar, where he sidled up to the guy we suspected. He admitted it. Even bragged about it. When he did that, I wasn’t going to take any chances. So our security men had a little talk with him and threatened to break his legs (or more) if he didn’t quit his job in my company and get the hell out of town—fast! Was that against the law? Sure. Would I do it again? You bet! The next fire he set would have killed some of my employees. Am I going to wait around for the cops and the courts to see what would happen? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
This story reminds us that in every society there is what might be called a “secondary enforcement system,” which operates around the edges of the formal, official law-enforcement system. However, it also tells us that, under the smooth surface of business, things happen that few wish to speak about. We seldom stop to think about force as a factor in business. Most of the trillions of business transactions carried out each day are so free of anything suggesting violence, so peaceful on the surface, that we seldom lift the lid to see what may be seething below. Yet the same three sources of power we find in family life, government, or any other social institution operate in business as well, and much as we might prefer to think otherwise, violence has always been part of the economy. From the day the first paleolithic warrior smashed a rock into a small animal, violence has been used to produce wealth. Taking preceded making. In may be just a fluke, but Roget’s Thesaurus, which devotes 26 lines to synonyms of the word borrowing and 29 lines to lending, devotes fully 157 lines to alternative descriptions of taking—including “capture,” “colonize,” “conquer,” and “kidnap,” not to mention “rape,” “shanghai,” and “abduct.” The agricultural revolution, starting some 10,000 years ago, represented a dramatic shift from taking—through fishing, foraging, or hunting—to make wealth. However, even agriculture was steeped in violence. Knout and knife, club and quirt were as much a part of the agricultural economy as the sickle, the scythe, or the space. Before the smokestack revolution, when our great-grandparents slaved away on the soil, the whole World was as economically underdeveloped as the poorest, most capital-starved countries to day. There were no “developed” economies to turn to for billion-dollar loans or foreign assistance. Where, then, did the first fortunes come from that financed the earliest smokestack industries? #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Many of them flowed, directly or indirectly, from pillage, plunder, and piracy…from the slavemaster’s whip…from the conquest of land…brigandage…extortion….terrorization of the peasant by the lord…forced Indian labor in gold and silver mines…from the vast tracts of land granted by grateful monarchs to their warriors and generals. Thee pools of red-stained wealth turned pink and later snowflake-white as they passed from father to son and grandson, over the generations. Eventually they funded those first iron foundries, textile mills, shipping lines, and clock factories that came alive in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Violence continued to play a role in the production of wealth in those early factories and mills, as children were shackled to machines and beaten, women miners brutalized or raped, men cudgeled into resignation. Los Angeles is famous for its freeways, one of which, the 405, is notorious for its bumper-to-bumper traffic, so jammed that much of it spills over to the street that parallels it for many miles, Sepulveda Boulevard. It is on Sepulveda that one finds what is surely one of the World’s most unusual business enterprises: A car wash. What makes this particular car wash unique is not the gas pumps and autos you see when you pull up but the surprise that awaits you when you go inside to pay your bill. For what you have entered just could be the World’s only combination car wash and bookstore. And as we will see, it is the spirit that led to that strange juxtaposition that will be needed to overcome—or better yet prevent—the systemic breakdown of the institutions we rely on every day for our lives. From its start in early 1900s until 1980s, American Telephone and Telegraph grew into the World’s biggest company. It is hard today to appreciate just how dominating an institutional presence AT&T was in American life for the part of a century. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
“Ma Bell,” as it was known, was a part of every community. Its black rotary telephone was present in virtually every American home. It had enormous political influence, not only in Washington but in communities all over the nation. Its Bell Labs, bedecked with Nobel Prizes, was commonly regarded as the greatest industrial research and development organization in the World. By the 1970s, AT&T employed almost a million workers. In that age of pre-digital telephones, a tremendous number of these employees were female phone operators, and their number was rising year after year. Broken up by Uncle Sam in 1984. AT&T eventually shrank to a bare wisp of what it once was. And in 2005 its remnants were acquired by SBC Communications. If that can happen to AT&T, it can happen, and a lot faster, to even the most seemingly solid of institutions. Speaking of institutions, one of the problems in World War I that had to be overcome to maintain the stability of cooperation was the rotation of troops. About every eight days, a battalion would change places with another battalion billeted behind it. At longer intervals, larger units would change places. What allowed the cooperation to remain stable was the process of familiarization that the outgoing unit would provide for the incoming unit. The particular details of the tacit understandings with the enemy were explained. However, sometimes it was sufficient for an old timer to point out to a newcomer that “Mr. Bosche ain’t a bad fellow. You leave “im alone; ‘e’ll leave you alone.” This socialization allowed one unit to pick up the game right where the others left it. Still another problem for the maintenance of stable cooperation was the fact that the artillery was much less vulnerable to enemy retaliation the was the infantry. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Therefore, the artillery had a lesser stake in the live-and-let-live system. As a consequence, the infantry tended to be solicitous of the forward observers from the artillery. As a German artillery man noted of the infantry, “If they every have any delicacies to spare, they make us a present of them.” The goal was to encourage the artillery to respect the infantry’s desire to let sleeping dogs lie. A new forward observer for the artillery was often greeted by the infantry with the request, “I hope you are not going to start trouble.” The best answer was, “Not unless you want.” This reflected the dual role of artillery in the maintenance of mututal restraint with the enemy: the passiveness when unprovoked, and the instant retaliation when the enemy broke the peace. The high commands of the British, French, and German armies all wanted to put a stop to tacit truces; all were afraid that they sapped the morale of their men, and all believed throughout the war that a ceaseless policy of offense was the only way to victory. With few exceptions, the headquarters could enforce any orders that they could directly monitor. Thus the headquarters were able to conduct large battles by ordering the men to leave their trenches and risk their lives in charging the enemy position. However, between large battles, they were not able to monitor their orders to keep up the pressure. After all, it was hard for a senior officer to determine who was shooting to kill, and who was shooting with an eye to avoiding retaliation. The soldiers became expert at defeating the monitoring system, as when a unit kept a coil of enemy wire and sent a piece to headquarters whenever asked to prove that they had conducted a patrol of no-man’s-land. What finally destroyed the live-and-let-live system was the institution of a type of incessant aggression that the headquarters could monitor. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
This was the raid, a carefully prepared attack on enemy trenches. If the raid was successful, prisoners would be taken; and if the raid was a failure, casualties would be prof of the attempt. There was no effective way to pretend that a raid had been undertaken when it had not. And there was no effective way to cooperate with the enemy in a raid because neither live soldiers nor dead bodies could be exchanged. The live- and-let live system could not cope with the disruption caused by the hundreds of small raids. After a raid neither side knew hat to expect next. The side that had raided could expect retaliation but could not predict when, where, or how. The side that had been raided was also nervous, not knowing whether the raid was an isolated attack or the first of a series. Moreover, since raid could be ordered and monitored from headquarters, the magnitude of the retaliatory raid could also be controlled, preventing a dampening of the process. The battalions were forced to mount real attacks on the enemy, the retaliation was undampened, and the process echoed out of control. Ironically, when the British High Command undertook its policy of raiding, it did not do so in order to end the live-and-let-live system. Instead, its initial goal was political, namely, to show their French allies that they were doing their part to harass the enemy. Their image of the direct effects of raiding was that it increased the morale of their own troops by restoring an offensive spirit and that it promoted attrition by inflicting an offensive spirit and that it promoted attrition by inflicting more casualties on their own troops by restoring offensive spirit and that it promoted attrition by inflicting more casualties on the enemy in the raids than the raiding troops themselves would suffer. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Whether these effects on morale and casualty ratios were realized has been debated ever since. That is clear in retrospect is that the indirect effect of the raids was to destroy the conditions needed for the stability of the tacit restraints widely exercised on the Western Front. Without realizing exactly what they were doing, the high command effectively ended the live-and-let-live system by preventing their battalions from exercising their own strategies of cooperation based on reciprocity. The introduction of raids completed the cycle of the evolution of the live-and-let-live system. Cooperation got a foothold through exploratory actions at the local level, was able to sustain itself because of the duration of contact between small units facing each other, and was eventually undermined when these small units lost their freedom of action. Small units, such as battalions, used their own strategies in dealing with the enemy units they faced. Cooperation first emerged spontaneously in a variety of contexts, such as restraint in attacking the distribution of enemy rations, a pause during the first Christmas in the trenches, and a low resumption of fighting after bad weather made sustained combat almost impossible. These restraints quickly evolved into clear patterns of mutually understood behavior, such as two-for-one or three-for-one retaliation for actions that were taken to be unacceptable. The mechanism of the evolution of these strategies must have been trial and error and the imitation of neighboring units. The mechanisms for evolution involved neither blind mutation nor survival of the fittest. Unlike blind mutation, the soldiers understood their situation and actively tried to make the most of it. They understood the indirect consequences of their acts as embodies in what I call the principle: “To provide discomfort for the other is but a roundabout way of providing it for themselves.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
The strategies were based on thought as well as experience. The soldiers learned that to maintain mutual restraint with their enemies, they had to base that restraint on a demonstrated capability and willingness to be provoked. They learned that cooperation had to be based upon reciprocity. Thus, the evolution of strategies was based on deliberate rather than blinded adaption. Nor did the evolution of strategies was based on deliberate rather than blind adaption. No did the evolution involve survival of the fittest. While an ineffective strategy would mean more casualties for the unit, replacements typically meant that the units themselves would survive. Now, restoration Day Ceremonies are always moving events. For some reason, the seniors always cry, even though they day they are happy. Crying, Tracy Stiegler thinks, does not may any sense. She looks again through the camouflage screen over the sandy Triangle Keys beach, gazing across the Caribbean, toward the Yucatan Peninsula. Soon this will be theirs again, and that is all to the good. Tracy and the other scientists from BioArchive have positions of honor in today’s Restoration Day Ceremony. Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been no living Caribbean monk seals, only grisly relics of the years of their slaughter: seal furs and dry museum specimens. Tracy’s team struggled for years, gathering these relics and studying them with molecular instruments. It had been known for decades—since the 1980s—that genes are tough enough to survive in dried skin, bone, horn, and eggshell. Tracy’s team had collected genes and rebuilt cells. They worked for years, and gave thanks to the strict protection—late, but good enough—that saved one related species. At last, a Hawaiian monk seal had given birth to a genetically pure Caribbean monk seal, twin to a seal long dead. And now there were five hundred, some young, some middle-aged, with decent genetic diversity and five years’ experience living in the confines of a coastal ecological station. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Today, with raucous voices, they are moving out into the World to reclaim their ecological niche. As Tracy watches, she thinks of the voices that will never be heard again: of the species, known and unknown, that left not even a bloody scrap to be cherished and restored. Thousands (millions?) of species had simply been brushed into extinction as habits were destroyed by the farming and logging. People knew—for years they had known—that freezing or drying would save genes. And they knew of the ecological destruction, and they knew they were not stopping it. And the ignorant individuals did not even keep samples. Tracy discovers that she, too, cries at Restoration Day Ceremonies. People will surely push biomedical applications of nanotechnology far and fast for human health care. With a bit more pushing, this technology base will be good enough to restore some species now thought lost forever, to repair some of the damage human beings have done to the web of life. It would be better to preserve ecosystems and species intact, but restoration, even of a few species, will be far better than nothing. Some samples from endangered species are being kept today, but not enough, and mostly for the wrong reasoners. We are also facing an unstable arms race. Disputes over technology development and trade sourced relationships between Singapore and the Japan-United States of America alliance. Diplomatic inquires regard peculiar seismic and sonar readings in the South China Sea had just begun when they suddenly became irrelevant: and estimated one billion tons of unfamiliar, highly automated military hardware appeared in coastal waters around the World. Accusations began to fly between Congress and PeaceWatch personnel: “If you’d done your jobs—” “If you’d let us do our jobs—” And so, in late February, Singapore emerged as a military superpower. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
Low cost, high-quality, high-speed production can be applied to many purposes, not all attractive. Nanotechnology has enormous potential for abuse. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo put in place the dynamite that would blow up theology and metaphysics of the medieval World. Newton lit the fuse. In the ensuing explosion, Aristotle’s animism was destroyed, along with almost everything else in his Physics. Scripture lost much of its authority. Theology, once the Queen of the Sciences, was now reduced to the status of Court Jester. Worst of all, the meaning of existence itself became an open question. And how ironic it all was! Whereas men had traditionally looked to Heaven to find authority, purpose, and meaning, the Sleepwalkers (as Arthur Koestler called Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo) looked not to Heaven but to the heavens. There they found only mathematical equations and geometric patterns. They did so with courage but not without misgivings, for they did their best to keep their faith, and they did not turn away from God. They believed in a God who had planned and designed the whole of creation, a God who was a master mathematician. Their search for the mathematical laws of nature was, fundamentally, a religious quest. Nature was God’s text, and Galileo found that God’s alphabet consisted of “triangles, quadrangles, circles spheres, cones, pyramids, and other mathematical figures.” Kepler agreed, and even boasted that God, the author, had to wait six thousand years for His first reader—Kepler himself. As for Newton, he spent most of his later years trying to computer the generations since Adam, his faith in Scripture being unshaken. Descartes, whose Discourse on Method, published in 1637, provided nobility to skepticism and reason and served as a foundation of the new science, was profoundly religious man. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Although he saw the Universe as mechanistic (“Give me matter and motion,” he wrote, “and I will construct the World”), he deduced his law of the immutability of motion from the immutability of God. All of them, to the end, clung to the theology of their age. They would surely not have been indifferent to knowing when the Last Judgment would come, and they could not have imagined the World without God. Moreover, the science they created was almost wholly concerned with questions of truth, not power. Toward that end, there developed in the late sixteenth century what can only be described as a passion for exactitude: exact dates, quantities, distances, rates. It was even thought possible to determine the exact moment of the Creation, which as it turned out, commenced at 9.00 a.m., October 23, 4004 B.C. These men who thought of philosophy (which is what they called science) as the Greeks did, believing that the true object of investigating nature is speculative satisfaction. They were not concerned with the idea of progress, and did not believe that their speculations held the promise of any important improvements in the conditions of life. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton laid the foundation for the emergence of technocracies, but they themselves were men of tool-using. Nietzsche’s psychology concerns the impulse toward God, for in that impulse the self arrays and displays all its powers; and his influence brought a new burst of religious interest, if not religion, to the intellectual World. God is myth Nietzsche taught. Myths are made by poets. This is just what Plato says in the Republic, and for him it is equivalent to a declaration of war between philosophy and poetry. The aim of philosophy is to substitute truth for myth (which by its definition is falsehood, a fact too often forgotten in our post-Nietzschean fascination with myth). #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Since myths are there first and give men their first opinions, philosophy means a critical destruction of myth (which by its very definition is falsehood, a fact too often forgotten in our post-Nietzschean fascination with myth). Since myths are there first and give men their first opinions, philosophy means a critical destruction of myth in favor of truth for the sake of freedom and living naturally. Socrates, as depicted in the Platonic dialogues, questioning life; and his death at the hands of his countrymen for not believing in their myths epitomizes the risks of philosophy. Nietzsche drew precisely the opposite conclusion from the same facts about myth. There is no nature and no such freedom. The philosopher must do the contrary of what Socrates did. So Nietzsche is the first philosopher ever to have attacked Socrates, because Socrates’ life is not the model life, but a corrupt and monstrous one lacking in all nobility. The tragic life, which is Socrates defused and purged, is the serious life. The new philosopher is the ally of the poets and their savior, or philosophy it itself the highest kind of poetry. Philosophy in the old mode demythologizes and demystifies. It has no sense of the sacred; and by disenchanting the World and uprooting man, it leads into a void. The revelation that philosophy finds nothingness at the end of its quest informs the new philosopher that mythmarking by his central concern in order to make a World. Some call advertisers mythmakers. Advertisers do not care at all is you know the advertising is fictional. They make very little effort to fool you about that, because whether or not you know it is fictional, the image of the product goes into your head. From then on, you have got the image and there is no letting it go. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
If you then always through a supermarket and spot the toothpaste that you have been carrying as an image, a little click goes off in your head. Familiarity. It does not mean you will buy the toothpaste, but the click goes off anyway. They implanted the image, and you then carry it around inside of your like some kind of neuronal billboard. If you are going to keep watching television at all, there is nothing you can do about it. Your knowledge of real and not-real is useless. All images are real. In a sense, the advertising images are more real than other television images because you get to see the image “live” right in your supermarket. First you ingest the image of the toothpaste from television and file it. Then you see it in the store and you recognize it. (Have you heard our child say, “Hey, I saw that on television”? There is a real excitement being expressed.) If you buy the toothpaste, it is then right there in your bathroom, so the image from the screen materializes in your homes. Advertisers are the alchemists of our day. It works the same way, albeit more subtly, with the behavioral content of advertising and programs. You see Archie Bunker of the Waltons solve a family problem. You find yourself in a family situation which is not dissimilar. The image flashes past. You may reject it, but it flashes past nonetheless. If that is the only imagine instance you have available to call upon for such a situation, you are somewhat more likely to be influenced by it. You do not interrupt your behavior to say, “Wait a minute; I have got to keep straight my bank of television imagery from my bank of real-World imagery.” The mind does not work that way. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Many people have been preoccupied with the problem of evil. The struggle must begin within one’s own soul—all else will follow upon this. The darkness out of which one was hewn needed to be taken from nowhere else than from our own slothful and malicious hearts. It is our betrayal of God that has made Gog to grow so great. We are dealing here, as Plato already knew, with truths such as can be communicated adequately to the generality of humankind only in form of the myths. The anthropological exposition shows the domain in which they materialized again and again. Everything conceptual in this connection is merely an assistant, a useful bridge between myth and reality. Its construction is indispensable. Humans know of chaos and creation in the cosmogonic myth and one learns that chaos and creation take place in oneself, but one does not see the former and the latter together; one listens to the myth of Lucifer and hushes it up in one’s own life. One needs the bridge. The Biblical account of the so-called fall of man may well be founded upon a primeval myth of the envy and vengeance of gods, of whose contents we have no more than an inkling: the story that has been written down and preserved for us has acquired a very different meaning. The divine being whose actions are here recorded is repeatedly referred to (with the exception of the dialogue between the serpent and the woman) by appellation, alien to the style of the rest of the Bible, which is compounded out of a proper name—interpreted elsewhere (Exodus 3, 14) as He-is-there—and a genetic term which is plural in form and corresponds most nearly to our “Godhead.” This God is the sole possessor of the power both of creation and of destiny; He is surrounded by other celestial beings, but all these are subject to him without names or power of their own. Of course, he does not impose His will upon man, the last of His works; He does not compel him, He only commands, or rather forbids him albeit under a severe threat. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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Why Does the Work Force Seem Riddled with Ulcer-Producing Levels of Angry and Envy?
It is hardly surprising that even smart executives seem confused. Some take Dale Carnegie courses on how to influence people, while others attend seminars on the tactics of negotiation, as though power were purely a matter of psychology or tactical maneuver. Still others privately bewail the presence of power in their firms, complaining on that power-play is bad for the bottom line—a wasteful diversion from the push for profit. They point to energy dissipated in personal power squabbles and unnecessary people added to the payroll of power-hungry empire-builders. When many of the most effect power wielders smoothly deny have any, confusion is redoubled. The bewilderment is understandable. Free-marketeer economists like Milton Friedman tend to picture the economy as an impersonal supply-and-demand machines and ignore the role of power in the creation of wealth and profit. Or they blandly assume that all the power struggles cancel one another out and thus leave the economy unaffected. This tendency to overlook the profit-making importance of power is not limited to conservative ideologues. One of the most influential texts in U.S.A. universitites is Economics by Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus. Its latest edition carries an index that runs to twenty-eight pages of eye-straining fine print. Nowhere in that index is the word power listed. (An important exception to this power-blindness or purblindness among celebrated American economists has been J.K. Galbraith, who, regardless of whether one agrees with his other views, has consistently tried to factor power into the economic equation.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Radical economists do a lot of talking about such things as business’s undue power to mold consumer wants, or about the power of monopolies and oligopolies to fix prices. They attack corporate lobbying, campaign contributions, and the less savory methods sometimes used by corporate interests to oppose regulation of worker healthy and safety, environment, progressive taxation, and the like. However, at a deeper level, even activists obsessed with limiting business power mistake (and underestimate) the role of power in the economy, including its beneficial and generative role, and seem unaware that power itself is going through a startling transformation. Behind many of their criticisms lurks the unstated idea that power is somehow extrinsic to production and profits. Or that the abuse of power by economic enterprises is a capitalist phenomenon. A close look at today’s powershift phenomenon will tell us, instead, that power is intrinsic to all economies. Not only excessive or ill-gotten profit, but all profits are partly (sometimes largely) determined by power rather than by efficiency. (If it has the power to impose its own terms on workers, suppliers, distributors, or customers, even the most inefficient firm can make a profit.) At virtually every step, power is an inescapable part of the very process of production—and this is true for all economic systems, capitalist, socialist, or whatever. Even in normal times, production requires the frequent making and breaking of power relationships, or their constant readjustment. However, today’s times are not “normal.” Heightened competition and accelerated change require constant innovation. Each attempt to innovate sparks resistance and new power conflict. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
However, in today’s revolutionary environment, when different systems of wealth creation collide, minor adjustments often no longer suffice. Power conflicts take on new intensity, and because companies are more and more interdependent, a power upheaval in one firm frequently produces reverberating shifts of power elsewhere. As we push further into a competitive global economy heavily based on knowledge, these conflicts and confrontations escalate. The result is that the power factor in business is growing more and more important, not just for individuals but for each business as a whole, bringing power shifts that often have a great impact on the level of profit than cheap labor, new technology, or rational economic calculation. From budget-allocation battles to bureaucratic empire-building, business organizations are already increasingly driven by power imperatives. Fast-multiplying conflicts over promotions and hiring, the relocation of plants, the introduction of new machines, or products, transfer pricing, reporting requirements, cost accounting, and the definition of accounting terms—all will trigger new power battles and shifts. The Italian psychologist Mara Selvini Palazzoli, whose group studies large organizations, report a case in which two men together owned a group of factories. The present hired a consulting psychologist, ostensibly to boost efficiency. Telling him that morale was low, he encouraged the consultant to interview widely to find out why the work force seemed riddled with ulcer-producing levels of angry and envy. The vice-president and co-owner (30 percent, versus 70 percent owned by the president) expressed skepticism about the project. Hiring a consultant, the president shrugged, was merely “the thing to do” nowadays. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Analysis by Palazzoil’s group revealed a snake pit of power relationships gone awry. The consultant’s overt agenda was to increase efficiency. However, his real task was different. In actuality, the president and vice-president were at dagger-points and the president wanted an ally. Palazzoli and her group write: “The president’s secret agenda was an attempt to gain control, through the psychologist, of the whole company, including manufacturing and sales [which were largely under the control of his vice-president and partner]….The vice-president’s secret agenda was to prove himself superior to his partner and to show that his authority derived from his greater technical competence [id est, better knowledge] and more commanding personality.” The case is typical of many. The fact is that all businesses, large and small, operate in a “power field” in which the three basic tools of power—force, wealth, and knowledge—are constantly used in conjunction with one another to adjust or revolutionize relationships. However, what the above case chronicles is merely “normal” power conflict. In the decades just ahead, as two great systems of wealth creation come into violent collision, as globalization spreads and the stakes rise, these normal contests will take place in the midst of far greater, more destabilizing power battles than any we have yet seen. This does not mean that power is the only goal, or that power is a fixed pie that companies and individuals fight to divine, or that mutually fair relationships are impossible, or that so-called “win-win” deal (in which both sides gain) are out of the question, or that all human relationships are necessarily reduced to a “power nexus,” rather than to Marx’s famous “cash nexus.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
However, it strongly suggests that the immense shifts of power that face us will make today’s takeovers and upheavals seem small by comparison, and will affect every aspect of business, from employee relations and the power of different function units—such as marketing, engineering, and finance—to the web of power relations between manufacturers and retailers, investors and managers. Men and women will make those changes However, the instruments of change will be force, wealth, and knowledge and the things they covert into. For inside the World of business, as in the larger World outside, force, wealth, and knowledge—like the ancient sword, jewel, and mirror of the sun goddess Amaterasu-ominkami—remain the primary tools of power. Failure to understand how they are changing is a ticker to economic oblivion. If that were all, business-men and -women would face a time of excruciating personal organizational pressure. However, it is not all. For a powershift, in the full sense, is more than a transfer of power. It is a sudden, sharp change in the nature of power—a change in the mix of knowledge, wealth, and force. To anticipate the deep changes soon to strike, therefore, we must look at the role of all three. Thus, before we can appreciate what is happening to power based on wealth and knowledge, we must be prepared to take an unsettling look at the role of violence in the business World. One reason the “surplus complexity” imposed on consumers when companies bundle too many functions into a single product is hopes of widening its market, a holdover from the era of mass merchandising. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
The result is cell phones that play music, take pictures, screen videos, offer games, track appointments, identify location, store memos and—if you are lucky—place and receive phones calls. Or a Volkswagen Passat that boasts of 120 different features, including a refrigerated glove compartment that can keep sushi cool. However, the more multi-functional a product, the more suboptimized its functions are, the more costly it is, and the more difficult it is to use. Since few customers want or need all the functions, the rest of us are victims of this surplus complexity. Complexity at the personal level is immensely amplified at the level of business, finance, the economy and society. In America, Elon Musk, who ought to know, speaks of “overcoming astronomically rising complexity.” In Germany, the Federal Financial Supervisory Board speaks of the “growing complexity of banking.” In Basel, Switzerland, the powerful Bank for International Settlements, which sets rules for banks all over the World and tells them how much capital they need to keep on hand, drafted a new set of proposed regulations called Basel II. These rules can shake up the World’s biggest banks, and governments everywhere are battling over them. Yet they were so obfuscating and complex that, according to banking consultant Emmanuel Pitsilis of McKinsey & Co., “Nobody understands 100 percent of Basel II or its implications.” Similarly, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is pulling together a collection of the financial and business instruments used in foreign direct investment and in deals among multinational corporations. Designed to be “conveniently available” to its user, the compendium runs to a mere fourteen volumes. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Welcome to “Complexorama”—the new everyday reality. Computers are supposed to help us cope with complexity, but software, according to MIT’s Technology Review, has “outrun our ability to comprehend it. It’s next to impossible to understand what is going on…whenever a program runs lager than a few hundred lines of code—and today’s desktop software contains millions of lines.” Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows software contains fifty million lines of code and its Vista product even more. Says Ran S. Ross of the National Information Assurance Partnership, the complexity of I.T. systems themselves has “outstripped our ability to protect them,” making “complexity…the No. 1 enemy of security.” We see mounting complexity in every aspect of business, from scheduling and marketing to calculating taxes. Especially taxes. The Cato Institute in Washington reports that the American tax code has been changed no fewer than seven thousand times in the past two decades, requiring a 74 percent increase in the number of pages needed to print it. The complexity of the system costs Americans an estimated six billion hours each year spent filling out forms, trying to understand the rules and collecting and storing records of transactions. Then there is the compliant, by USA Today, that the perennially low American savings rate is being further depressed by complexity. With seven different types of individual retirement accounts and many others offered by employers, each with its own rules and constraints, “a once simple savings concept has grown into an incomprehensible thicket that can be stored out only by high-priced accountants.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Exactly as one might therefore expect, the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that positions for accountants are multiplying rapidly. As one job search firm puts it, the growing demand reflects the “increasing complexity of the corporate transactions and growth in government.” Yet another measure of skyrocketing complexity is the increase in sub-and sub-sub-specialties in many fields. Half a century ago, before the shift to a knowledge economy began, the health-care profession was divided into about ten specializations. Today there are more than 220 categories of medical professionals, says Dr. David M. Lawrence of the Kaiser Permanente health network. In the 1970s they had to stay abreast of approximately one hundred randomized, controlled clinical research trials a year. Today the annual number is ten thousand. Outside the United States of America, we see a slower but similar process of complexification at work. The European Union agency devoted to R&D speaks of the “growing complexity of all our societies,” adding that “companies’ ability to manage this complexity will be a determining factor for Europe’s future innovation capacity.” An official of the British prime minister’s Office of Public Reform reports that “more complex personal and social problems are presented for state solution” and that “national objectives for better education, health and other outcomes can only be successful by engaging with this complexity.” Meanwhile, Karola Kampf of the University of Mainz in Germany describes the escalating complexity of higher education. Kampf speaks of the “increasing number of system levels,” the multiplying types of “corporative actors” involved with the university, the rising importance of NGOs and “intermediary actors,” the “growing number of policy fields concerned with higher education” and a rise in “different modes of coordination.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The mounting complexity of universities, however, whether in Europe or elsewhere, is nothing compared with the dizzying complexity of health-care systems dependent on fast-diversifying medical specializations, tests and forms of medical treatment, equipment, schedules, government regulations, financial and accounting arrangements—all constantly interacting at high speed. These are just a few examples. However, lay over these the additional intricate complexities of local, national and now global environmental regulations; financial and trade rules; disease controls; anti-terror constraints; negotiations over water and other resources; and an endless list of other interrelated functions, processes and laws. Then lay on top of that the complexities introduced by tends of thousands of NGOs each proposing or demanding it own new complexities. A decade ago, the Union of International Associations in Brussels published the two-volume Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential. Its ambitions compendium listed no fewer than12203, “world problems,” each one cross-referenced to others that are “more general,” more specific, related, aggravating, aggravated, alleviating [or] alleviated.” The index to the section had no fewer than 53,825 entries, backed by a bibliography of 4,650 sources. And that was then. We are moving beyond the relative simplicity of an industrial era that everywhere emphasized uniformity, standardization and one-size-fits-all massification. And the United States of America is not alone in generating the new complexity. Add the byzantine complexities imposed by the European Union in an attempt to “harmonize” everything from education to cheese. Only computers can keep track. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
What we see, then, are changes in the deep fundamentals that are creating the revolutionary wealth system and a corresponding way of life, both based on unprecedented levels of economic and social complexity. Together, the convergence of acceleration, de-synchronization and reglobalization, along with a tsunami of new knowledge, is overwhelming our rust-belt institutions and driving us ever closer to implosion. Fortunately, there is a way out. Before looking further at the stability of the cooperation, it is interesting to see how cooperation got started in the first place. The first stage of the war, which began in August 1914, was highly mobile and very bloody. However, as the lines stabilized, nonaggression between the troops emerged spontaneously in many places along the front. The earliest instances may have been associated with meals which were served at the same time on both sides of no-man’s land. As early as November 1914, a noncommissioned officer whose unit had been in the trenches for some days, observed that “the quartermaster used to bring the rations up…each night after dark; they were laid out and parties used to come from the front line to fetch them. I supposed the enemy were occupied in the same way; so things were quiet at that hour for a couple of nights, and the ration parties became careless because of it, and laughed and talked their way back to their companies.” By Christmas there was extensive fraternization, a practice which the headquarters frowned upon. In the following months, direct truces were occasionally arranged by shouts or by signals. An eyewitness noted that: “In one section the hour of 8 to 9am was regarded as consecrated to “private business,” and certain places indicated by flag were regarded as out of bounds by the snipers on both sides.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, direct truces were easily suppressed. Orders were issued making clear that the soldiers “where in France to fight and not to fraternize with the enemy.” More to the point, several soldiers were court martialed and whole battalions were punished. Soon it became clear that verbal arrangements were suppressed by the high command and such arrangements became rare. Another way in which mutual restraint got started was during a spell of miserable weather. When the rains were bad enough, it was almost impossible to undertake major aggressive action. Often ad hoc weather truces emerged in which the troops simply did not shoot at each other. When the weather improved, the pattern of mutual restraint sometimes simply continued. So verbal agreements were effective in getting cooperation stared on many occasions early in the war, but direct fraternization was easily suppressed. More effective in the long run were various methods which allowed the two sides to coordinate their actions without having to resort to words. A key factor was the realization that is one side would exercise a particular kind of restraint, then the other might reciprocator. Similarities in basic needs and activities let the solider appreciate that the other side would probably not be following a strategy of unconditional defection. For example, in the summer of 1915, a soldier saw that the enemy would be likely to reciprocate cooperation based on the desire for fresh rations. “It would be child’s play to shell the road behind the enemy’s trenches, crowded as it must be with ration wagons and water carts, into a bloodstained wilderness…but on the whole there is silence. After all, if you prevent your enemy from drawing his rations, his remedy is simple: he will prevent you from drawing yours.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Once started, strategies based on reciprocity could spread in a variety of ways. A restraint undertaken in certain hours could be extended to longer hours. A particular kind of restraint could lead to attempting other kinds of restraint. And most importantly of all, the progress achieved in one small sector of the front could be imitated by the units in neighboring sectors. Just as important as getting cooperation started were the conditions that allowed it to be sustainable. The strategies that could sustain mutual cooperation were the ones which were provocable. If necessary, during the periods of mutual restraint, the enemy soldiers took pains to show each other that they could indeed retaliate. For example, German snipers showed their prowess to the British by aiming at spots on the walls of cottages and firing until they had cut a hole. Likewise, if they wished to, the artillery would often demonstrate with a few accurately aimed shots that they could do more damage. These demonstrations of retaliatory capabilities helped police the system by showing that restraint was not due to weakness, and the defection would be self-defeating. When a defection actually occurred, the retaliation was often more than would be called for by TIT FOR TAT. Two-for-one or three-for-one was a common response to an act that went beyond what was considered acceptable. “We go out at night in front of the trenches…The German working parties are also out, so it is not considered etiquette to fire. The really nasty things are rifle grenades…They can kill as many as eight or not if they do fall into a trench…But we never use ours unless the Germans get particularly noisy, as on their system of retaliation three for every one of ours come back.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
There was probably an inherent damping process that usually prevented these retaliations from leading to an uncontrolled echo of mutual recriminations. The side that instigated the action might not the escalated response and not try to redouble or retriple it. One the escalation was not driven further, it would probably tend to die out. Since not every bullet, grenade, or shell fired in earnest would hit its target, there would be an inherent tendency toward escalation. Therefore, it is clear that business negations are a lot like war strategy. When it comes to transportation outward, there are other things we need to consider. For example, Jim Salin’s afternoon from Dulles International is on the ground, late for departure. Impatiently, Jim checks the time: any later, and he will miss his connecting flight. At last, the glassy-surfaced craft rolls down the runway. With gliderlike winds, it lifts its portly body and climbs steeply toward the east. A few pages into his novel, Jim is interrupted by a second recitation of safety instructions and the captain’s announcement that they will try to make up for lost time. Jim settles back in his seat as the main engines kick in, the wings retract, the acceleration builds, and the sky darkens to black. Like the highest-performance rockets of the 1980s, Jim’ liner produces an exhaust of pure water vapor. Spaceflight has become clean, safe, and routine. And more people go up than come down. The cost of spaceflight is mostly the cost of high-performance, reliable hardware. Molecular manufacturing will make aerospace structures from nearly flawless, superstrong materials at low cost. Add inexpensive fuel, and space will become more accessible than the other side of the ocean is today. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Galileo did not invent the telescope, although he did not always object to the attribution. A Dutch spectacle-maker named Johann Lippershey was probably the instrument’s true inventor; at any rate, he was the first to claim a license for its manufacture, in 1608. (It might also be worth remarking here that the famous experiment of dropping cannon balls from the Tower of Pisa was not only not done by Galileo but actually carried out by one of his adversaries, Giorgio Coressio, who was trying to confirm, not dispute, Aristotle’s opinion that larger bodies fall more quickly than smaller ones.) Nonetheless, to Galileo must go the entire credit for transforming the telescope from a toy into an instrument of science. And to Galileo must also go to the credit for transforming the telescope from a toy into an instrument of science. And to Galileo must also go the credit of making astronomy a source of pain and confusion to prevailing theology. His discover of the four moons of Jupiter and the simplicity and accessibility of his writing style were key weapons in his arsenal. However, more important was the directness with which he disputed the scriptures. In his famous Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, he used arguments first advanced by Kepler as to why the Bible could not be interpreted literally. However, he went further in saying that nothing physical that could be directly observed or which demonstrations could prove ought to be questioned merely because Biblical passages say otherwise. More clearly than Kepler had been able to do, Galileo disqualified the doctors of the church from offering opinions about nature. To allow them to do so, he charged, is pure folly. He wrote, “This would be as if an absolute despot, being neither a physician nor an architect, but knowing himself free to command, should undertake to administer medicines and erect buildings according to his whim—at grave peril of his poor patients’ lives, and the speedy collapse of his edifices.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
From this and other audiation arguments, the doctors of the church were sent reeling. It is therefore astonishing that all the church made persistent efforts to accommodate its beliefs to Galileo’s observations and claims. It was willing, for example, to accept as hypotheses that the Earth moves and that the sun stands still. This, on the grounds that it is the business of mathematicians to formulate interesting hypotheses. However, there could be no accommodation with Galileo’s claim that the movement of the Earth is a fact of nature. Such a belief was definitively held to be injurious to holy faith by contradicting Scripture. Thus, the trail of Galileo for heresy was inevitable even though long delayed. The trail took place in 1633, resulting in Galileo’s conviction. Among the punishments were that Galileo was to abjure Copernican opinion, serve time in a formal prison, and for three years repeat once a week seven penitential psalms. There is probably no truth to the belief that Galileo mumbled at the conclusion of his sentencing, “But the Earth moves” or some similar expression of defiance. He had, in fact, been asked for times at his trial if he believed in the Copernician view, and each time he said he did not. Everyone knew he believed otherwise, and that it was his advanced age, infirmities, and fear of torture that dictated his compliance. In any case, Galileo did not spend a single day in prison. He was confined at fist to the grand duke’s villa at Trinita del Monte, then to the palace of Archbishop Piccolomini in Siena, and final to his home in Florence, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1642, the year Isaac Newton was born. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
In a society like ours, in which people have become increasingly isolated from each other in their offices, private cars, single-family living units and television-watching, sharing personal information has become a rarity. The extended family is gone and neighborhood community gatherings are increasingly the exception to the rule. There is less and less interpersonal sharing of intimate problems, few windows into other people’s lives. Now our only windows are professional counselors, psychiatrists, and, least expensive and most available, television. It becomes the window for most people. That it looks into fictional lives is irrelevant. Although critics complain about the stereotyped characters and plots of TV dramas, many viewers look on them as representatives of the real World. Anyone questions that assertion should read the 250,000 letters, mostly containing requests for medical advice sent by views during the first five years of one doctor’s practice on television. Imagine a hermit they suggest, who lives in a cave linked to the outside World by a television set that functions only during prime time. One’s knowledge of the World would be built exclusively out of the images and facts one could glean from the fictional events, persons, objects and places that appear on television. His expectations and judgments about the ways of the World would follow the conventions of TV programs with their predictable plots and outcomes. His views of human nature would be shaped by the shallow psychology of TV characters. There are definite distortions of reality in three areas that we measured: Heavy users of television were more likely to overestimate the percentage of the World population that lives in America; they seriously overestimated the percentage of the population who have professional jobs; and they drastically overestimated the number of police in the United States of America and the amount of violence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In all these cases, the overestimate matched a distortion that exists in television programming. The more television people watched, the more their view of the World matched television reality. Knowledge that the television programs were fictional—surely no one who watched them can consciously doubt that police dramas are fiction—does not prevent one from “believing” them anyway, or at least gaining important impressions which lead to beliefs. If you need further proof of this, there is always advertising. A recent study showed that a greater percentage of voters based their decisions concerning candidates and ballot propositions on information received from advertising than on information received in any other way. This may be partially due to the fact that, except for big electoral races which are widely reported in all news media, we are likely to receive a greater quantity of data from advertising than from the news. This is certainly true of most congressional races and ballot issues. Yet we all know that advertising cannot be considered always truthful. In fact, it is by nature one-sided. Advertising always reflects only the facts and opinions of the people who pay for it. Why lese would they pay for it? And yet, knowing that people use advertising information as though it can be relied upon. When it comes to product advertising, the situation is clearer still. When one is watching an advertisement, one knows for sure that the advertiser is trying to get you to do something: but the product. One also knows that the people in the ad are not “real,” that is, they are actors who are speaking lines, in situations that do not represent their actual lives. Everyone knows this. We all know that the motive of the sponsor and the actors and the writers of the ads is that they are all trying to implant a feeling in us that will eventually get us to but something. We know they are doing this, but we often act on the ad. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
In Meat Joy (Paris, 1964) nearly naked men and women interacted, in a rather frenzied, Dionysian way, with one another and with hunks of raw meat and carcasses of fish and chickens. They smeared themselves with blood, imprinted their bodies on aper, tore chickens apart, threw chunks of raw meat and torn fowl about, slapped one another with them, kisses and rolled about “to exhaustion,” and so on. The sparagmatic dismemberment and the suggestion of the suspension of mating taboos both evoke Maenadism and the Dionysian cult. The wild freedom advocated by this ancient cult, as well as its suggestions of rebirth, seemed appropriate expression of the unchecked newness that faced the art World as its boundaries dissolved and opened on all sides into unexpected vistas, where traditional media, torn apart and digested, were reborn in unaccountable new forms. The Dionysian subversion of ego in the cause of general fertility has become another persistent theme of appropriation performance. Barbara Smith has performed what she calls a Tantric ritual, that included pleasures of the flesh, in a gallery setting as an artwork. In general, performance works involving appropriate of religious forms follow two groups: those that select from the neolithic sensibility of fertility and blood sacrifice, and those that select from the paleolithic sensibility of shamanic magic and ordeal; often the two strains mix. Both may be seen as expression of the desire, so widespread in the 60s and early 70s, to reconstitute within Modern civilization something like an ancient or primitive sensibility of oneness with nature. Though the erotic content of the works based on the themes of fertility has been received with some shock, it is the work based on the shamanic ordeal that the art audience has found most difficult and repellent. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Clearly that is part of the intention of the work, and in fact a part of its proper content. However, it is important to make clear that these artists have an earnest desire to communicate, rather than simply shock. Seen in an adequate context, their work is not aggression but expression. Nietzsche restored to something like the soul to our understanding of man by providing a supplement to the flat, dry screen of consciousness, which with pure intellect looks at the rest of humanity as something alien, a bundle of affects of matter, like any other object of physics, chemistry and biology. The unconscious replaces all the irrational things—above all divine madness and eros—which were part of the old soul and had lost significance in modernity. It provides a link between consciousness and nature as a whole, restoring therewith the unity of humanity. Nietzsche made psychology, as the most important study, possible again; and everything of interest in psychology during the last century—not only psychoanalysis but also Gestalt, phenomenology, and existentialism—took place within the confines of the spiritual continent he discovered. However, the difference between the self and the soul remains great because of the change in the status of reason. The reconstitution of man in Nietzsche required that sacrifice of reason, which Enlightenment, whatever its failings, kept the center. For all the charms of Nietzsche and all that he says to hearten a lover of the soul, he is further away from Plato in this crucial respect than was Descartes or Locke. Since the wicked man has negated his existence, he ends in nothing, his way is his judgement. However, with sinners it is different: their “not standing” does not refer to the decision of the supreme judgement, it is only a human community which is unable to offer them any stability if it is not to make its own stability questionable. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
However, entry into this community is not closed to them. They need only to carry out that turning into God’s way, of which permits us to the divine, is not merely open to them but that they themselves may desire it in the depths of their hearts, whereas they do not feel themselves strong enough, or rather fancy they are not strong enough, to enter upon it. Is the way, then, closed to the wicked? It is not closed from God’s side—so we may continue the reflection of the divine way—but it is closed from the side of the wicked themselves. For in distinction from the sinners they do not wish to be able to turn. That is why their way peters out. Here, it is true, there arises for us modern interpreters of the Divine way to which neither this nor any other work of knowledge nor any human word knows the answer: how can an evil will exist, when God exists? The abyss which is opened by this question stretches, even more uncannily than the abyss of Job’s question, into the darkness of the divine mystery. Before this abyss the interpreter of the Psalms stands silent. Underlying principles of respect that were once commonplace in society have increasingly given way to unkind behavior. To help our children and youth set aside the many negative examples that bombard them, we must first understand respect, reasons we sometimes act disrespectfully, gospel principle that apply, and ways we can be better teachers and exemplars of respect. Respect is being polite or civil to those we meet or with whom we interact. This would include being respectful of a teacher. We hope grandchildren will treat grandparents respectfully during visits. We usually treat strangers with polite respect. We want children and others to treat us with respect—using good manners—but also to honor our standards, which we seek to exemplify through Christlike living. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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By the Way of King Diamond and Diamond Baby
Black metal, as a 1990s phenomenon, is a creature with an identity largely distinct from its parent heavy metal music. Growing like a poisonous fungus away from the light of mainstream media and interest, it developed its own bizarre sounds, imagery and philosophies. Fostered upon a diet of xeroxed fanzines with names like Thanatograpy (after Thanatos, Greek god of death), Hammer of Damnation and Baphomet, its teenage male exponents were keen to make their mark with a genre too willfully obnoxious for outsiders. Visually, bands tried to outdo each other with outrageously macabre or offensive imagery: fire-breathing; tattered black clothing or robes; blood-soaked or naked flesh; medieval weaponry; bullet belts and spiked leather; insane calligraphy—spattered with profane images—which rendered band names illegible or scarcely identifiable. The most striking black-metal “fashion statement,” however, was the sepulchral black-and-white make-up worn by many bands which became known as “corpse paint”—a mutated offspring of the theatrical greasepaint worn by KISS in the 1970s, by way of King Diamond. At the movements genesis, few band members had racked up enough years of experience to excel at their instruments in the traditional fashion—instead, they concentrated on producing unearthly, crazed, bizarre sounds with guitars, drums, the human voice and keyboards. Specialist independent record labels, founded by fans or the bands themselves, sprang up as a truly international underground: Osmose Productions in France; Blackground Records 2.0 and Wild Rags in America; Candlelight Records in Spain. The list continues to proliferate to the present day, but the most influential of all was a small Scandinavian label called Deathlike Silence—of which, much more later. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
One of the more arresting rock artists of the early 1990s bridged the gap between the musical extremes of black metal and rock “n” roll’s demonic roots in the blues. Far subtler than most black metal bands, Glenn Danzig still operated at the infernal end of the spectrum. An anomaly who stubbornly refused to bow to the expectations of either purists or populists, Danzig began his career at the height of the punk revolution in 1977 as vocalist for New Jersey band the Misfits. No ordinary punk band, Danzig’s classic rock “n” roll delivery gave a quasi-1950s feel to their abrasive sound, while they spurned the usual punk look in devour of an all-year-round Halloween image. Sporting monstrous black quiffs they dubbed “devil locks,” the Misfits often took the stage in skeletal garb—indeed, Danzig’s skull make-up was prescient of the “corpse paint” popular among the 1990s black metal bands. The Misfits were one of the first punk bands whose songs possessed a strong gothic undercurrent. Many reflected their love of fascinating schlock movies, such as “Teenagers from Mars” and “Return of the Fly,” but others were genuinely disturbing explorations of hat and violence. Their second recording, Bullet, featured a song entitled “Hollywood Babylon,” inspired by magus and film-maker Kenneth Anger, while another track included an authentic Latin chant for effecting a werewolf transformation. In what was to become a familiar pattern, Danzig tired of the more tongue-in-cheek aspects of the Misfits, forming Samhain (pronounced “Sow-En”—the precursor to Halloween, a Celtic festival dedicated to fire and death) who released their first album, Initium, in 1984. This was a stark journey into primal evil, threatening rhythms and bleak guitars combining with Danzig’s lupine vocals to create a musical beast that howled at the World. It was all too bleak for most audiences and, in 1987, the vocalist dissolved the band in order to enter his third incarnation—called simply Danzig. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Danzig was in many ways the singer’s most innovative project, as well as the most overtly Satanic. Voodoo blues as deep and black as Mississippi mud met predatory heavy metal, with vocal style redolent of early rock “n” roll’s late-fifties/early-sixties crooners. Typically, Glenn Danzig’s insistence on treating his Satanic subject matter without a trace of irony did not endear him to the press. Short, powerfully built, with raven black hair and prominent side-burns, the music media dubbed him as “Evil Elvis” or, more irreverently, “Fonzig.” Some audiences were also perplexed: younger black metal fans wanted a less subtle Satanism, while rock fans who appreciated Danzig’s musical approach found his lyrical preoccupation off-putting. Nevertheless, the ban attracted a dedicated fan base, appreciative of a familiarity with demonic subject matter that most shock-horror rockers could only envy. Nietzschean howls of defiance against the Creator, such as “Godless,” complemented more traditional takes on hellish suffering like “Tired of Being Alive.” At his quietest, Danzig was at his most sinister—like the poet William Blake, Danzig identified love as “a Devil’s thing.” In 1994, when MTV picked up on the video for the anthemic “Mother, the band received mainstream attention; in the same year, an uncompromising Glenn Danzig released a solo project entitled Black Aria: an album of quasi-classical music retelling the story of Satan’s fall from grace. In 1996, after four albums of powerfully-infernal rock music, Danzig took his eponymus band in a new direction. BlackAcidDevil was predominantly an industrial record, many fans mourning the passing of the classic Danzig sound and dismissing at as “poor man’s Nine Inch Nails.” In truth, when the industrial grind is layered with the dark velvet of Danzig’s seductive tones—as on “Come to Silver,” an exploration of temptation—then the material becomes really interesting. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The indifferent sales and reviews that greeted BlackAcidDevil tested Danzig’s already-strained relationship with the music business. He let the band slip back into the cult status he was perhaps happiest with, and began spending the money he had made from his musical career on other projects—most notably a comic-book company named Verotik. As the company’s name suggests, these comics are crammed with violence and erotica, combined with the fascination for all things infernal that has become Glenn Danzig’s trademark. Scripting many of the comic-strips himself, Danzig introduced overly devilish characters, like the vamp Satanika, to stake his claim as one of the main modern contributors to Satanic popular culture. On the continent of Europe, particularly in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, things were being taken to a less subtle extreme. Deathlike Silence was an independent record label owned by a young man who re-named himself Euronymous—according to some folklore traditions, a cannibalistic demon with skin the bluish-black colour of a meatfly’s carapace—who also ran a dank, dingy specialist record store named Helvete (meaning “Hell”) and founded a band called Mayhem. Mayhem formed in 1984, just as the original black metal scene was peaking, debuting with a demo called Pure Fucking Armageddon and an album called Deathcrush. Interest in Satanic imagery, with its attendant gothic spikes-and-leather garb, was faltering among audiences at this time, but Mayhem clung onto its uncompromising style. They sounded like a rawer, more grinding version of Venom, screaming and thundering between militaristic marches and growling rage. As the tastes of young underground fans in the 1990s swung further towards the diabolical excess, Euronymous’ obsessive dedication made him a potent force on the newly-burgeoning black metal scene. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
During the early 1990s, Euronymous’ store became the focus for a small circle of likeminded Scandinavian metal fans who all started their own bands. This loose group named itself variously the Black Metal Circle, Satanic Terrorists or Black Metal Mafia, and was influenced by the supposedly Satanic doctrines of Euronymous—based around a vague reading of the biblical concept of war between Heaven and Hell. For Euronymous, siding with Satan meant endorsing everything that was considered evil, spiteful, hateful. Hate motivated his philosophy, coloured by the cold, depressive morbidity that characterizes the negative edge of the Scandinavian psyche. All of the releases on Deathlike Silence were stamped with the “Anti-Mosh” symbol (moshing is a raucously combative form of dancing common to thrash and death metal fans). Around the symbol were stamped the messages “No Mosh,” “No Core” (a reference to the hardcore punk revival), “No Trends” and “No Fun”—these sentiments taking against those metal audiences who were introducing splashes of gaudy mainstream colour, in the form of Bermuda shorts, baseball caps and skateboards. In the center of the “No Moshing” symbol was a red line struck through those figures Euronymous professed to hate most: Scott Burns, the Florida-based record producer whose work had come to dominate the death metal scene, and curiously, Anton LaVey. Euronymous divorced himself from all Satanic tradition, loathing LaVey because of the Church of Satan’s philosophy of self-empowerment and individualism. Euronymous’ simple faith expressed all that was negative: a cold core for violent code of self-destructive nihilism. Joining Mayhem in their isolated World of hate were several other extreme bands. Burzum—chiefly a vehicle for Count Grishnackh (given name Kristian Vikernes, though he legally changed his first name to Varg, Norwegian for “wolf”), who had lived in the damp, lightless cellar of the Helvete record shop for some time—were a prominent presence. Burzum were an odd blend of frustrated insanity and strange, sad, ambient mood music, pained pathos and gibbering fury—oddly effective, but distinctly disturbed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Founder member Grishnackh took his name from one of the evil “orc” characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings, while Burzum meant “darkness” in the orcish language conceived by Tolkien. Perverse as this seems, it should be remembered that The Bible is just a book of stories—in this light, perhaps using The Lord of the Rings as the basis for an (im)moral philosophical code is not wholly ludicrous. However, it does an infernal philosopher’s credibility no favours to identify too closely with “hobbits” (glorified goblin). Grishnackh’s personal mythology combined the darkness-versus-light motifs of “mystic quest”/sword-and-sorcery sagas with the violent Viking tradition he believed true Northern Europeans belonged to. While this seems symptomatic of Scandinavia’s peripheral removal from—and distorted imitation of—Western pop culture, it also has an authentic dark side. As is common among Norse pagan revivalists, the Black Metal Circle began to espouse race-based Nazi political views. (Though totalitarian-loving Euronymous also expressed admiration for communist despots and Cambodian genocidalist Pol Pot.) Also pivotal in this new movement were the bands Emperor, Immortal, Enslaved and Arcturus. The last to join Euronymous’s Norwegian cadre were Dark Throne, who had already recorded one death metal album, Soulside Journey, in 1990. In the following year, they disowned their debut, donned corpse-paint and joined the “Satanic Mafia” with their album A Blaze in the Northern Sky. If Euronymous exemplified the nihilistic hate at the heart of the Black Metal Circle, and Burzum represented its violent Norse/Nazi fantasies, then Dark Throne symbolized the Circle’s isolation and sociopathic need for solitude. Taking their country’s sombre, anti-social reputation to extremes, the band never met to record, spoke little, and spent increasing periods alone in the frost-bitten Norwegian wilderness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the spring of 1991, Mayhem’s vocalist died: a Swede who, by way of black comedy, had re-named himself “Dead.” Dead blew his head off with a shotgun, leaving a note to day that he felt he was not of this World, but belonged instead to the cold solitude of the forest. He also apologized for the mess. As in common with obsessively inward-looking groups like the Black Metal Circle, a crisis of this type either causes the grouping to dissolve, or re-enforces their convictions. The latter instance applied, and the Circle hailed Dead as a hero. Euronymous, who found the corpse, rushed out for a camera to take his final photograph of Dead before altering the authorities—claiming a morsel of brain to make into soup and a fragment of skull to fashion into a necklace. At this point, the Black Metal Circle were no longer merely a group of disaffected teens and early-twentysomethings, but a subculture who believed themselves to be at the center of significant, apocalyptic events. Euronymous’ demented, anti-social rants were making him a regular feature in the underground metal fanzines; despite the continued indifference of the global music media, black metal was rising from the grassroots across the World. The “legend of Dead” contributed to a growing international interest in extreme, Scandinavian Satanic metal, with Deathlike Silence treating the grim event as a grotesque promotional gimmick. For the first time, European countries bordering the Mediterranean also began throwing up a slew of black metal acts—most notably the Greek band Rotting Christ. In contrast to the could hatred of the Northerners, the Southern European scene was inclined to a less self-destructive, more LaVeyan approach—though Anton LaVey would have regarded many of them as blasphemy-fixated novices, struggling to topple the repressive Christianity that dominates their culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Much of black metal is supposed to be inspired by demons. They cannot be any worse than human being, right? Many of them just have never possessed a body of their own. They are souls who have been lurking around before humanity. Before the dinosaurs. They are the darkness. The reason God created life so that life could flourish and grow and rest when it is dark. Demon possession is a condition in which one or more evil spirits or demons inhabit the body of a human being and can take complete control of their victim at will. By temporarily blotting out one’s consciousness, they can speak and act through one as their complete slave and tool. The inhabiting demon (or demons) comes and goes much like the proprietor of a house who may or may not be “at home.” When the demon is “at home,” one may precipitate an attack. In these attacks the victim passes from one’s normal state of possession. The condition of the afflicted person in the “possessed” state varies greatly. Sometimes it is marked by depression and deep melancholy, sometimes by vacancy and stupidity that resemble idiocy. Sometimes the victim may be ecstatic or extremely malevolent and wildly ferocious. During the transition from the normal to the abnormal state, the victim is frequently thrown into a violent paroxysm, often falling to the ground unconscious, foaming at the mouth with symptoms similar to epilepsy or hysteria. The intervals between attacks vary greatly from an hour or less to months. Between attacks, the subject may be healthy and appear normal in every way. The abnormal or demonized stages can last a few minutes or several days. Sometimes the attacks are mild; sometimes they are violent. If they are frequent and violent, the health of the subject suffers. The chief characteristic of demon possession or demonomania is the automatic projection of a new personality in the victim. During attack the victim’s personality is completely obliterated, and the inhabiting demon’s personality takes over completely. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The inhabiting demon uses the victim’s body as a vehicle for one’s own thoughts, words, and acts. The demon even speaks out of the victim’s mouth and declares emphatically that one is a demon. Frequently one gives one’s name and dwelling place. The new personality reveals itself in a different voice and sometimes uses a different language or dialect on a completely different educational or cultural level. Pronouns are used to emphasize the new personality. The first personal pronoun consistently designates the inhabiting demon. Bystanders are addressed in the second person. The victim is referred to in the third person and looked upon during the attack as unconscious and for all practical purposes as nonexistent during this interval. Demonomania should be clearly differentiated from the insanity in which a person imagines oneself to be someone else, often a famous personality such as Liz Taylor, Julius Caesar, of William Randolph Hearst. The demoniac, when in the demonized state characterized by the new personality, speaks and acts in all respects like a completely different person. By contrast, the insane person is one’s own diseased self, one’s assumed personality being a transparent unreality. In cases of demon possession the new personality clearly and constantly recognizes the distinct existence and individuality of its “possessed” victim, speaking of that victim in the third person, an element entirely lacking in cases of insanity. Because various inadequate theories have left demon possession largely unexplained, it is quite probable that some patients in mental hospitals are demon possessed rather than insane. This was the conviction of the famous nineteenth-century specialist in mental diseases, Dr. Forces Benignus Winslow (1810-1874). He correctly recognized the demoniac by a strange duality; and by the fact that, when temporarily relived from the oppression of the demon, he is frequently able to describe the force which takes control of one and compels one to act and speak shamefully. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
While in the demonized state many persons give evidence of knowledge which cannot be accounted for naturally. The demon who takes control of the body of one’s victim is obviously the source of the superhuman knowledge. While demon possessed, many persons recognize the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and display an aversion to and a fear of Him (Mark 1.23-24; 5.7). The case of Mrs. Winchester, who lived in Santa Clara County, illustrates how a woman came under demon domination through practicing séances. Being centered within our own God like power is of utmost importance. Even when evoked to create change directly, keep in mind that you are the God that wields these powers for the cause of Counter Creation. Just be careful! As a God you will be tested and so how these powers are wielded is a powerful initiatic test in its own right. Mrs. Winchester was in her Blue Séance Room, she lite a candle on her left first, and then a candle on her right. A sacred serpent was sacrificed over the wood sigil and the blood was left to drain upon the idol. Then the body of the serpent was encircled around it, she chanted “I do invocate and conjure thee, O Spirit, Sabnock; and being with power armed from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by BERALANENSIS, BALADACHIENSIS, PAUMACHIA, and APOLOGIAE SEDES; by the most Powerful Princes, Genii, Liachidae, and Ministers of the Tartarean Abode; and by the Chief Prince of the Seat or Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee, and by invocating conjure thee. And being armed with power from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by Him Who spake and it was done, and unto whom all creatures be obedient. Also I, being made after the image of GOD, endued with power from GOD and created according unto His will, do exorcise thee by that most mighty and powerful name of GOD, EL, strong and wonderful; O thou Spirit Sabnock. And I command thee and Him who spake the Word and HIS FIAT was accomplished and by all the names of God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
“Also by the names ADONAI, EL, ELOHIM, ELOHI, EHYEH, ASHER EHYEH, ZABAOTH, ELION, IAH, TETRAGRAMMATON, SHADDAI, LORD GOD MOST HIGH, I do exorcise thee and do powerfully command thee, O thou Spirit Sabnock, that thou dost forthwith appear unto me here before this Circle in a fair human shape, without any deformity or tortuosity. And by this ineffable name, TETRAGRAMMATON IEHOVAH, do I command thee, at which being heard the elements are overthrown, the air is shaken, the sea runneth back, the fire is quenched, the Earth trembleth, and all the hosts of the celestials, terrestrials, and infernals do tremble together, and are troubled and confounded. Wherefore come thou, O Spirit Sabnock, forthwith, and without delay, from any or all parts of the World wherever thou mayest be, and make rational answers unto all things that I shall demand of thee. Come thou peaceably, visibly, and affably, now, and without delay, manifesting that which I shall desire. For thou art conjured by the name of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, HELIOREN, wherefore fulfill thou my commands, and persist thou therein unto the end, and according unto mine interest, visibly and affably speaking unto me with a voice clear and intelligible without any ambiguity. I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O thou Spirit Sabnock, to appear and to show thyself visible unto me before this Circle in fair and comely shape, without any deformity or tortuosity; by the name and in the name IAH and VAU which Adam heard and spake; and by the name of God, AGLA, which Lot heard and was saved with his family; and by the name IOTH, which Jacob heard from the angels wrestling with him, and was delivered from the hand of Esau his brother; and by the name ANAPHAEXTON which Aaron heard and spake and was made wise; and by the name ZBAOTH, which Moses named and all the rivers were turned into blood; and by the name ASHER EHYEH ORISTON, which Moses named, and all the rivers brought forth frogs, and they ascended into the house, destroying all things. #RandolpHarris 11 of 21
“And by the name ELION, WHICH Moses named, and there was a great hail such as had not been since the beginning of the World; and by the name ADONAI, which Moses named, and there came up locusts, which appeared upon the whole land, and devoured all which the hail had left; and by the name SCHEMA AMATHIA which Ioshua called upon, and the sun stayed his course; and by the name ALPHA and OMEGA, which Daniel named, and destroyed Bel, and slew the Dragon; and in the name EMMANUEL, which the three children, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, sang in the midst of the fiery furnace, and were delivered; and by the name HAGIOS; and by the SEAL OF ADONI; and by ISCHYROS, ATHANATOS; and by these three secret names, AGLA, ON, TETRAGRAMMATION, do I adjure and constrain thee. And by these names, and by all other names of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, the LORD ALMIGHTY, I do exorcise and command thee, O Spirit Sabnock, even by Him Who spake the Word and it was done, and to Whom all creatures are obedient; and by the dreadful judgments of GOD; and by the uncertain Sea of Glass, which is before the DIVINE MAJESTY, mighty and powerful; by the four beasts before the throne, having eyes before and behind; by the fire round about the throne; by the holy angels of Heaven; and by the mighty wisdom of GOD; I do potently exorcise thee, that thou appearest here before this Circle, to fulfill my will in all things which shall seem good unto me; by the Seal of BASDATHEA BALDACHIA; and by this name PRIMEUMATON, which Moses named, and the Earth Opened, and did swallow up Kora, Dathan, and Abiram. Wherefore thou shalt make faithful answers unto all my demands, O Spirit Sabnock, and shalt perform all my desires so far as in thine office thou art capable hereof. Wherefore, come thou, visibly, peaceably, and affably, now without delay, to manifest that which I desire, speaking with a clear and perfect voice, intelligibly, and to mine understanding. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
“Tbatlu! Bualu! Tulatu! Labusi! Ubisi!—Let thee also appear and being before me the Spirit of Sabnock. Sovar, merciless leader of Divs come forth! Inner eye behold the demon before me. 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! Taromat, beautiful Div or rebellion come forthy! Inner eye behold the demoness before me. Toramat awaken! Rise up within that I may compel the rise of the fallen ones and devour the very essence of the Holy Angel Spandarmad! Ahirman, Lord of Darkness divine, I thank you for your presence within this unholy temple of counter creation. I have offered you the life of this noxious creature as a gateway to your manifestation within this realm to stand before me! You are Angra Mainyu who is the Lord of counter creation, whom has brought forth the mountains to the plains! You have brought forth the beasts to the field and the creatures of the night! Ahriman with your infernal blessing I ask that you would bring forth the baneful powers of the wolf kin to fill this oil with their essence that it may be compelled according to my will! I offer my nails as fangs which will devour that which stands in my way! I offer my hair to embody their predatory essence! I give my blood as a gateway to empower them to act within this world according to my will and purpose!” Then Mrs. Winchester heard the distant howling of wolves and she perceived their phantom shadows as they began to surround her and encroach. She was focused on Sabnock and dared not fear that which she had just conjured. SABNOCK—of course is the Forty-third Spirit of the Winchester Mansion. He is a Marquis, Mighty, Great, and Strong, appearing in the Form of an Armed Soldier with a Lion’s Head, riding on a pale-coloured horse. His office is to build high Towers, Castles and Cities, ad to furnish them with Armour, etcetera. Also he can conflict Men for many days with Wounds and with Sores rotten and full of Worms. He giventh Good Familiars at the request of the Exorcist. Commandth 50 Legions of Spirits; and his Seal is this, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Mrs. Winchester fell down unconscious, frothing at the mouth, and was carried to her room, outside where the crescent hedge is planted. A doctor was called in gave her large doses of medicine to no avail. He left and refused to have anything more to do with the case as he saw with in hours gables and towers rise, wings of the mansion extended right before his eyes, and gardens grow from sprouts and spring up to mature plants and trees before night fall. For five of six days Mrs. Winchester raved wildly, and her staff and friends were in great distress. In desperation they proposed giving Mrs. Winchester more medicine. However, the demon, speaking through her, replied: “Any amount of medicine will be of no use.” Daisy then implored, “If medicine will be of no use, what shall we do?” The demon replied, “Burn incense to me, and submit yourself to me, and all will be well.” The staff knelt down and worshiped the demon, imploring him to torment Mrs. Winchester no longer. During that time Mrs. Winchester was in a state of complete unconsciousness. A little later when the demon drove Mrs. Winchester to renewed frenzy, her distraught staff repeated their promise to worship and serve him. They also promised that they would urge their Mrs. Winchester to do likewise. When Mrs. Winchester regained consciousness, she reluctantly consented to do so. The demon gave explicit directions regarding the proposed worship. On the first and fifteenth of each month, incense was to be burned, food offered, and the require prostration made before the shrine of himself, SABNOCK. Periodically the demon came, sometimes every few days, sometimes after a month’s lapse. Each time, Mrs. Winchester felt fluttering of her heart, a sense of overwhelming fear, and inability to control herself. She would quietly as Daisy to fetch a neighboring woman whenever the demon came. The two would burn incense to the demon in Mrs. Winchester’s stead and receive his directives, which they then communicated to the possessed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Although these communications were spoken by the Mrs. Winchester’s (the victim) lips, she was completely unaware of them, since she was in the demonized state. The demon often bade the audience not to be afraid, protesting he would not harm them, but rather help them in various ways. He declared he would instruct the victim in the healing art, so that people would flock to her and be cured of their sickness. This soon proved true, although may diseases were not under the demon’s control. Apparently only those afflicted by evil spirits were completely cured. Mrs. Winchester’s long-ill child was not helped. The demon declared he controlled many inferior spirits. He also frequently outlined his plan for Mrs. Winchester’s life and work. He promised he would help her grow more proficient as a healer, and the people would compensate her for her services. Gifts thus earned were donated to the nearby ancient pagan temple. As certain parts of the Winchester mansion would appear but once every seventeen years, SABNOCK was never seen save on the eve of some awful calamity, visitors to the mansion had a very slight chance of seeing his physical body. There could be no doubt though of the existence of the mansion and SABNOCK, for everybody knows he was one of the greatest of the giants during his natural lifetime, nor could any better evidence be asked then the facts that he guided Mrs. Winchester into turning stone, wood, and class into the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansions. The door-to-nowhere was also known as Lovers’ Leap;” from which Mrs. Winchester once flung herself when she was a state of deep morning, and survived unharmed. The path SABOCK made from the door-to-nowhere to the mountains was used by him when he would leave his island and come to shore. Upon being informed of the variety and amount of legendary material collected about the Winchester mansion and Mrs. Winchester’s doings, many people unhesitatingly pronounced the entire assortment condemned all the gathered treasures as creations of the supernatural. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It was very well beknown that in them old days there were giants in plenty hereabouts, but they did not make the make an appearance at the estate very often. But everyone knows that there were giants, because if there were not, no one would know of them at all. They were just like human beings, except in the matter of size, and one of them could make a dozen like men that live now. When they walked, they carried oak trees for sticks and lived in the forest of the giants, and carved the mountain and caves. (It should be noted that spiritistic visions of this nature are quite likely to occur in the course of reading occult literature. Sometimes people mistake these visions for genuine religious experiences. However, it is again a case of Satan disguising himself as an angel of the light.) Yet, there are more than 20,000 accounts of spirits, ghost, angels and demons being seen in the Winchester mansion. The uncanny phenomena places one under a charm. The pattern of the courts during this early period in the 1800s was erratic, sometimes convicting, sometimes throwing cases out of court for lack of evidence, something awarding damages for slander to those who had been maligned as witches by accusers. This vacillation sprang from the fact that the judicial bodies that heard the causes were not religious but secular, and therefore had little competence in dealing with matters that were primarily religious. As far as control was concerned, in adhering to the principles of congregationalism, the responsibility for suppressing heresy and enforcing religious behavior within the communities went to the state. The trial judges were not the sure, steadfast, confident Dominican Inquisitors or Protestant prosecutors of the Old World, but merely secular officials of the valley who had been forced into the position of trying heresy for lack of anyone else to do it. Mary Johnson, who was hired at the Winchester mansion in 1887, as a cook, admitted have had “familiarity with the Devil” and was executed by the state. She confession to have pleasures of the flesh with demons and other sorted things. She made no mention of mass meetings; rather, her Devil seems to have been a personal one, coming to her assistance when needed. #RandolphHarri 16 of 21
Dolls were sometimes used as a means of projecting curses, and Mary said she had attended meetings with Satan and his consorts. Witches’ pact with Satan was attributed as part of God’s inscrutable plan of the Universe. The Puritan settlers in Santa Clara Valley believed in the doctrine of Original Sin wholeheartedly; their pessimistic outlook proclaimed that all men were unworthy until God saw fit to bestow His grace upon them. They believed that the God allowed the Devil to afflict not only the guilty but also anybody else that might happen to get in the way. If He had to teach misguided humans a lesson, He might punish an entire community for the sins of the most wicked in that community. And it appeared to the God-fearing Puritans that He was doing just that. The Puritans were highly intolerant and has a paranoiac distrust of other religious groups, some were farmers at the Winchester mansion, and did not always like the rituals that were performed, but they were very loyal and protective of Mrs. Winchester. Many of the people who worked at the Winchester mansion were often under suspicion of witchcraft. The Puritans came to the Winchester mansion because they felt it was a true kingdom of God on Earth, and they could help Mrs. Winchester live peacefully. However, what they found was something different. They found that the vast acres of the estate had bitterly cold winters, and the terrain could be inhospitable. They found themselves in a wilderness, surrounded by demonic tribes whom they considered to be the legions of Hell incarnate. Having come to settle in this last stronghold of the Devil, they were plagued by him constantly for the very reason that they were God’s chosen people, thus the most likely target for unholy temptation. The fact that the new settlers in the Santa Clara Valley were being attacked by Satan seemed incontestable. The estate was ravaged by smallpox, and had suffered constant harassment by envious local town’s people and demonic tribes. Mrs. Winchester wondered what she had done to offend God that He should allow the Devil such free range. She experimented with the spirits to bring peace to her life and home. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Mrs. Winchester had an answer: Judgment Day was at hand and Satan was therefore stepping up his activities in one last desperate move. It was simply the nova-like burst of the energy from a dying star. She glibly stated that “there will again be an unusual Range of the Devil among us, a little before the Second Coming of the Lord, which will be to give the last stroke in destroying the works of the Devil.” This theory found wide acceptance among the servants and laity of Santa Clara Valley, for not only did it offer a simple explanation for all their maladies and misfortunes, but it also gave them hope, promising cooly a quick end to their hardships. Satan is most able to seduce human in periods o great discontent, for human, in times of poverty and affliction, will turn knowingly to whatever hands will feed them. The valley had had a difficult time of it up to that time, and famines had reduced the population drastically. However, as if labouring under the most severe environmental handicaps was not enough, Puritan perfectionism went even further in making life unbearable. In seeking to establish a holy kingdom, according to Heaven’s law, self-indulgence in any form was strictly repressed. Severe punishments were meted out for drinking, swearing, and licentiousness; in Santa Clara, it was a punishable offense to walk on the streets on Sunday, except when going to and from church. And witches, people possessed by demons, and others also attended church to blend in and keep the peace. On top of it all, there stood the Calvinistic doctrine of election, holding that as soon as man was born, eh was judged to be headed for either Heaven or Hell, this choice being made according to God’s immutable law. However, even if a human thought oneself to be damned, the civil punishment for one’s indulgence were still exacted upon one. It was into this environment that the waters of the witchcraft flood would soon pour. The good people of Santa Clara clearly saw signs of Satanic activity in their midst, and an investigation was launched. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Mrs. Winchester confessed to having attended witches’ Sabbaths and of having met with the Devil, who was a tall, black man from New Haven, Connecticut. Soon the witch fever spread, and more people from the valley became posses by demons. The common belief was that at that time witches, when entering into a Covenant with Satan, because the owners of specters, with the help of which they could do harm to any person of their choosing. People believe that God—the Alpha and Omega was both God and Satan. That He has a soul and character. He is not just this futile entity but someone you can see many aspects to. Some people fled to Satanism because they had to deal with so much evil from Christians that they wanted another source of power to exalt them. Satanism is supposed to be something to be something secret, something people do not know anything of. One goes to America and in the telephone directory one can see “Church of God,” “Church of Jesus,” and “Church of Satan.” One calls, and a person answers: “Church of Satan, how may I help you?” One thinks, “This is not Satanism!” The Church of Satan deny Satan, they say He does not exist, yet they act as if He dd, they rebel against God. They call themselves Satanists because He also rebelled against God, but they are basically light and life worshipping individualists. Well, the phone is tapped, so I think you better write what you know. Some people have disappeared. And of course the normal grave yard desecration. Anne Winchester’s headstone was recently stolen, but replaced. Normal people just disappear and never show up again. It could have a Satanic connection. Every human is life, and some hate life, especially human life. That is why people disappeared. These people may have disappeared for some form of sacrifice. Something like that would be called a Satanic murder. The murder is the ritual sacrifice. These murders gain power from whoever was responsible. Everybody has their own aura, and auras can be stolen by sacrificing an individual, this allows one to gain more power. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Places of worship, such as churches, have their own spirit—the Winchester Mystery House, for example, has been worshipped in for maybe hundreds of years and has thus gained a lot of spirit in that time, it could qualify as a church and gain charitable tax exemption. But that is not the point. A person who sacrifices that will gains a lot of power and grows stronger. Some people fear the Winchester mansion, because there are a lot of different energies. There is fear, terror and suspense, but others feel a lot of light, happiness, and goodness. Sometimes the energy is mixed. Anton LaVey really surprises me. If your every rea his work, he seems very intelligent and not scary at all, but I guess it depends on what one reads. I have read parts of his Bible, and it is very straightforward, it is stuff people tell their kids every day. Stand up for yourself and do not let people run you over. I think that the Winchester mansion should also open on nights of a full Moon, not just Friday the 13th. During the full Moon, there is a lot of energy and symbolic value. A lot of people believe in the full Moon and a lot of people believe in virgins. That makes both the full Moon and the virgin more powerful because of belief in them. God was first and He created the World. Of course, a lot of scientists would deny that. However, I would challenge their view because I believe God used evolution, which is why it took so long, which is why we have evidence like dinosaur bones. Yet, some Gnostic Christians have suggested Satan created the World. Everybody will be taken as slaves except the warlords. Euronymus, who we talked about earlier, was murdered in August 1993, Aaliyah 2001. Some say that is a month when sacrifices are made. Grishnackh killed Euronymous, and a few hours later, he was laughing and joking, saying, “Ha ha, Euronymous is dead, I’m going to dance and piss on his grave.” It reminded of the jokes Howard Stern made about Aaliyah. It was not funny. These are not the rantings of someone who is all there. Grishnackh talked about the dynamite he had and how he was going to blow things up. Basically, they took things to illogical extremes, but it all made sense in their own heads. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
It is possible when dabbling with occultism for one to make an unconscious contract with the powers of darkness. The gift of discernment is absolutely necessary in life. It is generally not wise to lay one’s hands on a person who is occultly subjected. The retuning spirits will often attempt to creep back under the guise of some pious camouflage. It is in this way that evil can often enter unnoticed into one’s Christian life. A maid at the Winchester mansion once accepted the invitation of one of her coworkers to attend some spiritistic meetings. At first she felt as though she had gain something from going along to the meetings but later on she began to notice some psychic changes taking place in herself. She began to notice some psychic changes taking place in herself. She began to suffer from depression which resulted in her consulting a neurologist. During the course of the treatment she was committed to a lunatic asylum. However, as her condition improved, she could no longer attend the spiritistic séances. At the hospital the chaplain came to see her through his help and counsel she was able to make a complete recovery. One of the farmers at the estate wanted to see if charms actually worked, and some of them He. He practiced in the basement of the Winchester mansion. He drew a magic circle on the ground and drew some other magic symbols in the circle. He then used a charm three times in order to invoke the spirit. However, no spirit came. Yet, as he repeated, the charm he fell down in the magic circle and lay there unconscious for some time. The result was that for several weeks following this event he was semi-paralysed and drained of all his physical strength and will-power. After a few weeks, he died. Frequently identified as a common spot where the “wheelbarrow Ghost” is sighted, Steam Alley is one of the most well-known paranormal hot-spots in the mansion. Have you ever seen anything in the basement? #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Some stroll Sarah’s lovely gardens this Memorial Day Weekend. There is a beautiful parrot which Mrs. Winchester used to pet, it talks! He is supposed to be happy and impudent, and talks and laughs and screeches all the time. Maybe you may catch a glimpse at this wooded, flowery estate. It is such a beautiful spectacle, all of that life and grace and animation, and sun-smitten flash and sprinkle of rich colour.
This impressive mansion dates back to the 1880s, when it was developed by Sarah Winchester and the spirits, whose project enobed and enriched the community. It once had a nine-story military watchtower. Mrs. Winchester further developed the grounds of the 160 room mansion, introducing a Victorian garden at the hands of World renowed architect Gino Coppede around the turn of the century.
These adaptions made this idyllic mansion a unique asset, tinged with the signs and influences of eclecticism and Liberty, juxtaposed to the ancient Architectural characteristics of its medieval heritage. This mansion presents itself as impressive and spectacular. The building now spreads on four floors plus the basment, for a total of approximently 25,000 feet square.
There is lovely gift shop and cafe, and it is also an ideal venue for hosting private events, conventions and/or ballrooms are located on the back overlooking the internal garden with its panoramic position which glows thanks to its night-time lighting.
Inside the property there are splendid rooms filled with historial furniture, decorated ceilings and flamboyant fireplaces, vaulted ceilings and richly frescoes walls. In addition, there are several bedrooms, nine kitchens. and thirteen bathrooms, which made the structure a perfect luxurious accommodation for guests, and is now a tourist destination.
This mansion is located within a private park of 4 acres and elegant Nineteenth-century Victorian-gardens, that offer areas of wide lawns, and further green spaces. There is also a parking area, with free parking. Currently used to host guided tours and private events and functions. The enitre porperty sits at a close distance from the mall, hotels, and resturants. The high-fashion outlet complex and gourmet food has brought further development and tourism to Santa Clara County. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Drowned in Venomous Hatred of the Bourgeoisie
The World which is arising is still half-buried in the ruins of the World falling into decay…and no one can know which of the old institutions…will continue to hold up their heads and which in the end will go under. The FBI is a highly intelligent law enforcement group. However, the system can sometimes delay the process of investigation. Often times, many attacks and violence and threats are stopped before they happen. So often times, people do not realize how efficient law enforcement is. In a World in which business transactions (and criminal transactions) are accelerating, the FBI’s response time, like that of most bureaucracies, should be accelerated. When traces of anthrax turned in the Hamilton, New Jersey, postal facility and left five people dead, it took the FBI nearly a year to test all the mailboxes. When the Slammer virus rocketed out of nowhere to contaminate hundreds of thousands of computer systems, the FBI took thirteen hours to publicly acknowledge the threat, by which time private antivirus companies had already issued alerts. FBI experts were at home, a White House official explained, and it was hard to get “the right personnel” to respond However, this is not a story about the FBI, which, in fact, is little different from, and in many way better than, other government bureaucracies. Nothing it did in the sniper case matches, for example, the brilliance of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which—six moths after they crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center—issues student visas to the decidedly dead terrorists Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. Meanwhile, referring to his agency’s general response to crisis, State Department official Marc Grossman lamented in 2005 that “decision cycles sped up so much that the way we do business at the State Department was now too slow…If we do not change…then we are going to go out of business.” After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the breakdown of the levee system, New Orleans did, in fact, go “out of business.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Bureaucracies at the level of nation, state and town were hopelessly unable to work together. The Federal Emergency Management Agency proved feckless, leaving hundreds of thousands of victims to fend for themselves. Would today’s bureaucracies, not just in the United States of America, but in Europe and Asia, be any more effective in the event of a flu pandemic? Well, the European Commission reported that between 60 percent and 80 percent of the EU population was estimated to be infected with COVID-19, as of the bloc enters a post-emergency phase in which mass reporting of cases was no longer necessary. Whereas in American 58 percent of the population was infected with COVID-19. Everywhere today we find slow-moving and slow-thinking bureaucracies struggling unsuccessfully to keep up with the acceleration of the acceleration of change. And given the many powerful, converging forces driving us in this direction, it will become worse. Extreme economic competition, the cumulative nature of scientific research, the increasing number of minds committed to innovation and the instantaneity of communication are just some of the pressures pushing and shoving transitioning societies toward real-time response rates—and leaving bureaucracies behind. Many are reeling from the “acceleration effect.” Worse yet, todays high-speed changes in the economy and society come unevenly and, by their very nature, magnify the de-synchronization effect. At the level of the firm, as we noted earlier, when one department shifts to precisely calibrated “just-in-time” operations, another is forced to resynchronize, causing de-synchronization in still other departments, not to mention their suppliers (and their suppliers). Much the same happens in government agencies. However, something far more basic is happening at a higher level. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Across the board, a time wedge is being driven between the private sector and the public sector—one racing faster and faster, the other falling farther and farther behind. This worsens relations between the two as companies and governments inadvertently bang into each other, interfering with each other’s schedules, obstructing each other, wasting everyone’s time and money. Political hostilities intensify. Bureaucrats are demonized as inept, lazy or corrupt. Businesspeople are stigmatized as greedy. Politics becomes even more polarized. And the dysfunctionality of our institutions grows—driven, at least in part, by today’s transformatory changes in our relationships to the deep fundamental of time. Time, however, is only one of the deep fundamentals on which our institutions depend. Growing disparities in our treatment of time are matched by growing disparities in space. Today a company may manufacture in one country, locate its accounting and back-office operations in another, write its software somewhere else, put its customer-service call centers in still another country, maintain sales offices all around the World, put certain tax-avoiding financial operations on a remote Caribbean Island and still nominally call itself an American firm. It may be Japanese like Sony—gets 70 percent of its stock overseas. The NGOs Greenpeace and Oxfam operate in forty and seventy countries respectively. However, while private-sector institutions and NGOs alike are increasingly global, most public-sector organizations operate only nationally or locally. In short, as faster communication connects the World, goods, services, people, ideas, crime, disease, pollution, and terrorists all spill beyond national boundaries. Eroding traditional notions of sovereignty, they outflank and outrun public-sector institutions designed for purely local or national purposes. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
These changes with respect to the deep fundamental of space amplify the disruptions in time. No wonder so many institutions—designed for slow-tempo operations in a pre-global World—find it almost impossible to carry out their assigned functions effectively. The looming institutional implosion is brought still closer by changes with respect to the deep fundamental of knowledge. And here, again, managers and workers in the public sector are often at a disadvantage. Rapid change reduces more and more of what all of us know—or think we know—to obsoledge. However, the speed at which obsolete knowledge is replaced, updated and reformulated is frequently faster in the private sector, where competitive pressures force quick response and better technology makes that possible. Thus, by the time much of the data, information and knowledge that public employees need to do their jobs reaches them in useful form, it has already been acted on by private-sector players. Public-sector workers cannot keep up. Worse yet, bureaucratic institutions in both sectors break up knowledge and its components, storing and processing them in separate compartments, or “stovepipes.” Over time, these stovepipes multiply as ever-more-narrow specialization increases the number of such uncrossable boundaries. This makes it extremely difficult to cope with fast-changing new problems requiring knowledge that falls beyond artificial departmental borders. On top of that, guarding each stovepipe is an executive whose power is enhanced by control over data, information and knowledge, with little incentive to share it. Yet today, as industrial-age boundaries break down, it is only by sharing that important problems can be solved. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
The reluctance to share within an organization is even more pronounced with respect to outsiders. Thus the CIA and FBI have historically refused to cooperate with each other, as post-9/11 investigations have shown. Local officers do not like sharing crime information with national police agencies. Sales organizations, political parties, even, increasingly, scientists, try to hold their cards close to the chest—sometimes at horrific costs. What we see, therefore, melting the bolts and corroding the wires holding our industrial-age institutions together, are interconnected changes in our relations to the deep fundamentals. Each change has its own effects. Each increase the likely implosion of institutions in country after country and at the global level as well. However, it is the combination of changes in all three-time, space, and knowledge—that is likely to topple our familiar institutions and hurl us, unprepared, into a strange new economic and social tomorrow. Say hello, then, to Complexorama. And if that sounds like the name of a theme park it is because tomorrow will be filled with thrills, surprises and, for those brought up in the middle of the twentieth century, a definite sense of unreality. Knowledge and communication systems are not antiseptic or power-neutral. Virtually every “fact” used in business, political life, and everyday human relationships is derived from other “facts or assumptions that have been shaped, deliberately or not, by the preexisting power structure. Every “fact” thus has a power-history and what might be called a power-future—an impact, large or small, on the future disputation of power. Nonfacts and disputed facts are equally products of, and weapons in, power conflict in society. False facts and lies, as well as “true” facts, scientific “laws,” and accepted religious “truths” are all ammunition in ongoing power-play and are themselves a form of knowledge, as the term will be used here. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
There are, of course, as many definitions of knowledge as there are people who regard themselves as knowledgeable. Matters grow worse when words like signs, symbols, or imagery are given highly technical meanings. And the confusion is heightened when we discover that the famous definition of information by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, who helped found information science, while useful for technological purposes, has no bearing on semantic meaning or the “content” of communication. In general, in the pages ahead, data will mean more or less unconnected “facts”; information will refer to data that have been fitted into categories and classification schemes or other patterns; and knowledge will mean information that has been further refined into more general statements. However, to avoid tedious repetition, all three terms may sometimes be used interchangeably. To make things simple and escape from these definitional quicksands, even at the expanse of rigor, in the pages ahead the term knowledge will be given and expanded meaning. It will embrace or subsume information, data, images, and imagery, as well as attitudes, values, and other symbolic products of society, whether “true,” “approximate,” or even “false.” All of these are used or manipulated by power-seekers, and always have been. So, too, are the media for conveying knowledge: the means of communication, which, in turn, shape the messages that flow through them. The term knowledge, therefore, will be used to encompass all of these. Besides its great flexibility, knowledge has other important characteristics that make it fundamentally different from lesser sources of power in tomorrow’s World. Thus force, for all practical concerns, is finite. There is a limit to how much force can be employed before we destroy what we wish to defend. The same is true for wealth. Money cannot buy everything, and at some point even the fattest wallet empties out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
By contrast, knowledge does not. We can always generate more. If a traveler goes halfway to his destination each day, the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea pointed out that one can never reach his final destination, since there is always another halfway to go. In the same manner, we may never reach ultimate knowledge about anything, but we can always take one step closer to a rounded understanding of any phenomenon. Knowledge, in principle at least, is infinitely expandable. Knowledge is also inherently different from both muscle and money, because, as a rule, if I use a gun, you cannot simultaneously use the same gun. If you use a dollar, I cannot simultaneously use the same dollar. By contrast, both of us can use the same knowledge either for or against each other—and in that very process we may even produce still more knowledge. Unlike bullet or budget, knowledge itself does not get used up. This alone tells us that the rules of the knowledge-power game are sharply different from the precepts relied on by those who use force or money to accomplish their will. However, a last, even more crucial difference sets violence and wealth apart from knowledge as we race into what has been called an information age: By definition, both force and wealth are the property of the strong and the rich. It is the truly revolutionary characteristic of knowledge that it can be grasped by the weak and the poor as well. Knowledge is the most democratic source of power. Which makes it a continuing threat to the powerful, even as they use it to enhance their own power. It also explains why every power-holder—from the patriarch of a family to the president of a company or the Prime Minister of a nation—wants to control the quantity, quality, and distribution of knowledge within one’s domain. The concept of the power triad leads to a remarkable irony. For at least the past three hundred years, the most basic political struggle within all the industrialized nations had been over the distribution of wealth: Who gets what? Terms like left and right, or capitalist and socialist have pivoted on this fundamental question. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Yet, despite the vast maldistribution of wealth in a World painfully divided between rich and poor, it turns out that, compared with the other two sources of Worldly power, wealth has been, and is, the least maldistributed. Whatever gulf separates the rich from the poor, an even greater chasm separates the armed from the unarmed and the ignorant from the education. Today, in the fast-changing, affluent nations, despite all inequities of income and wealth, the coming struggle for power will increasingly turn into a struggle over the distribution of and access to knowledge. This is why, unless we understand how and to whom knowledge flows, we can neither protect ourselves against the abuse of power nor create the better, more democratic society that tomorrow’s technologies promise. The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow’s Worldwide struggle for power in every human institution. These changes in the nature of power itself are revolutionaizing relationships in the World of business. From the transformation and capital to the growing conflict between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” business and the emergence of startling new organizational forms, we will trace the new trajectory of power. These deep changes in business and the economy are paralleled by significant changes in politics, the media, and the global espionage industry. This will allow us to see how today’s tremendous, wrenching powershift will impact on the impoverished nations, the remaining socialist nations, and the future of the United States of America, Europe, and Japan. For today’s powershift will transform them all. If one imagines a system starting with individuals who cannot be enticed to cooperate, the collective stability of humanity implies that no single individual can hope to do any better than go along an be uncooperative as well. A World of “meanies” can resist invasion by anyone using any other strategy—provided that the newcomers arrive on time. The problem, of course, is that a single new comer in such a mean World has no one who will reciprocate any cooperation. If the newcomers arrive in small clusters, however, they will have a chance to get cooperation started. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Now supposed several people use TIT FOR TAT. Now if the TIT FOR TAT newcomers are a negligible proportion of the entire population, the meanies will be almost always interacting with other meanies. Thus, even a small cluster of individual’s using TIT FOR TAT can achieve more success than the large population of meanies they enter. Because the people who use TIT FOR TAT do so well when they do meet each other, they do not have to meet each other very often to make their strategy the superior one to use. In this way, a World of meanies can be invaded by a cluster of TIT FOR TAT—and rather easily at that. To illustrate this point, suppose a business school teacher taught a class of students to initiate cooperative behavior in the firms the join and to reciprocate cooperation from other firms. If the students did act this way, and if they did not disperse too widely (so that a sufficient proportion of their interactions were with other members of the same class), then the students would find that their lesion paid off. Therefore, for instance, a firm switching to TIT FOR TAT would need to have only 5 percent of its interaction with another such firm for them to be glad they gave cooperation a chance. Even less clustering is necessary when the interactions are expected to be of longer duration or the time discount factor is not as great. Nietzsche’s new beginning in philosophy starts from the observation that a shared sense of the sacred is the surest way to recognize a culture, and the key to understanding it and all of its facets. Hegel made this clear in his philosophy of history, and he had found the same awareness in Herodotus’ studies of various peoples, Greek and barbarian. What a people bows before tells us what it is. However, Hegel made a mistake; he believed there could be a thoroughly rational God, one who conciliated the demands of culture and those of science. Yet somehow he also saw that this was not so when he said that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, meaning that only when a culture is over can it be understood. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
Hegel’s moment of understanding of the West coincided with its end. The West had been demythologized and had lost is power to inspire and its view of the future. Therefore, it is evident that its myths are what animates a culture, and the makers of myths are the makers of cultures and of humans. They are superior to philosophers, who only study and analyze what the poets makes. Hegel admits that poetry has lost its prophetic power but consoles oneself with the belief that philosophy will suffice. The artists whom Nietzsche saw around him, those whose gifts were the greatest, attested to this loss. They were what he called decadents, not because they lacked talent or their art was not impressive, but because their works were laments of artistic impotence, characterizations of an ugly World that the poets believe they cannot influence. Immediately after the French Revolution there had been a stupendous artistic effervescence, and poets thought they could again be the legislators of humankind. The vocation provided for the artists in the new philosophy of culture heartened them, and a new classic age was born. Idealism and romanticism appeared to have carved out a place for the sublime in the order of things. However, within a generation or two the mood had noticeably soured, and artists began to represent the romantic visions as a groundless hoax. Men like Baudelaire and Flaubert turned away from the public and made the moralism and romantic enthusiasm of their immediate predecessors look foolish. Adulteries without love, sins without punishment or redemption became the more authentic themes of art. The World had been disenchanted. Baudelaire presented sinning man as in the Christian vision, but without hope of God’s salvation, piercing pious fraudulence, hypocrite lecteur. And Flaubert drowned in venomous hatred of the bourgeoisie, which had conquered. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Culture was just fodder for its vanity. The great dualisms had collapsed; and art, creativity and freedom had been swallowed up by determinism and petty self-interest. In his greatest creation, M. Homais, the pharmacist, Flaubert encapsulated everything that modernity was and is to be. Homais represents the spirit of science, progress, liberalism, anticlericalism. He lives carefully with an eye to health. His education contains the best that has been thought and said. He knows everything that has ever happened. He knows that Christianity helped to free the slaves, but that it has outlived its historical usefulness. History existed to produce him, the man without prejudices. He is at home with everything, and nothing is beyond his grasp. He is a journalist, disseminating knowledge for the enlightenment of the masses. Compassion is his moral theme. An all this is nothing but petty amour-propre. Society exists to give him honor and self-esteem. Culture is his. There are no proper heroes to depict nor audiences to inspire. They are all one way or another. Emma Bovary is Homais’ foil. She can only dream of a World and men who do not and cannot exist. In this sober World she is nothing but a fool. She, like the modern artist, is pure longing with no possible goal. Her only triumph and her only free act is suicide. The art of appropriation, then, is a kind of shadowy recreation of the Universe by drawing it, piece by piece, into the brackets of artistic contemplation. Artists engaged in this pursuit have concentrated on the appropriation of religious forms, of philosophical forms, of political forms, of popular forms, and more recently, of art historical styles. These enterprises have met different fates. The appropriation of religious contents has been the most unpopular, even taboo, while that that based on philosophy, even linguistic philosophy, for a while acquired and made chic. In this discrimination the Apollonian (to use Nietzsche’s dichotomy) surfaced over the hidden depth of the Dionysus, the unconscious, in which all things flow into and through oner another. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
In the Apollonian light each thing is seen clear and separate, as itself; in the Dionysian dark all things merge into a flowing and molten invisibility. That our culture, in the age of science, should favor the Apollonian, is not surprising. The value of light is beyond question; but where there is no darkness there can be on illumination. Rejection of the Dionysian does not serve the purpose of clear and total seeing. If it is to be practice with sufficient range of feeling not to trivialize life, universal appropriation has an exciting task. The levity, the sense of the will to entertain, that prevailed when Ben or Gilbert & George displayed themselves as sculptures was balanced by the sometimes horrifying order through which the appropriation of religious forms unfolded. It was necessary to descend from the pedestal, with its Apollonian apotheosis of the ego, into the Dionysian night of the unconscious, and to being into the light the logic of its darkness. There is a widespread belief that some things on television are “real” and some things are not real. Sports events are real; when we see them happening on television, we can count on the fact that they happen as we see them. Talk shows are real, although it is true that they happen only for television and they sometimes happen some days before we see them. Situation comedies are not real; neither are the police dramas, although they may be based on real events from time to time. Are historical programs real? Well, no, not exactly. Most are re-created various of events that happened a long time ago when cameras did not even exist. The people we see in them are actors, playing real people, or at least people who used to be real but are now dead. The actors are speaking for them, but they are usually not saying the exact words that the real people said. Also, some of the events in the historical treatment are dropped out—for reasons of time, or because they do not fit the line of the story—and some others are left in. So is it real? Or is it semireal? Or not real? #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Advertising is, of course definitely not real. Well, on the other hand, those are real people in those ads—we see them walking and talking—but the situations they are portraying are not real, although of course they may be true to life. Does this make them more real? How about Alice in Wonderland Sesame Street Are they real? Again, they are real people dealing with real subjects: animals, kids, math, jokes…but what does “real” mean in that context? Our society assumes that human beings can make the distinction between what is real and what is not real, even when the real and not-real are served up in the same way, intercut with one another, sent to us from many distant places and times and arriving one behind the other in our houses, shooting out of a box in our living rooms straight into our heads. What we see in our heads are real-looking human beings, walking and talking as though they were real, even though much of the time they are, or, that is, the parts they are playing are not real. At the University of Michigan, Joel Gregory grabs a molecular rod with both hands and twists it. It feels a bit weak, and a ripple of red reveals too much stress in a strained molecular bond halfway down its length. He adds two atoms and twists the rod again: all greens and blues, much better. Joel plugs the rod into the mechanical arm he is designing, turns up the temperature, and sets the whole thing in motion. A million atoms dance in thermal vibration, gears spin, and the arm swings to and fro in programmed motion. It looks good. A few parts are still mock-ups, but doing a thesis takes time, and he will work out the rest of the molecular details later. Joel strips off the compute display goggles and glovers and blinks at the real World. It is time for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He grabs the computer itself, stuffs it into his pocket, and head for the student center. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Researchers already use computers to build models, and “virtual reality systems” have begun to appear, enabling a user to walk around the image of a molecule and “touch” it, using computer-controlled goggles. We cannot build a super computer able to model a million-atom machine yet-much less build a pocket supercomputer—but computers keep shrinking in size and costs. With nanotechnology to make molecular parts, a computer like Joel’s will become easy to build. Today’s supercomputers will seem like hand cranked adding machines by comparison. In 1543, scholars and philosophers had no reason to fear persecution for their ideas so long as they did not directly challenge the authority of the church, which Copernicus had no with to do. Though the authorship of the preface to his work is in dispute, the preface clearly indicates that his ideas are to be taken as hypotheses, and that his “hypotheses need not be true or even probable.” We can be sure that Copernicus believed that the Earth or the planets moved in the manner described in his system, which he understood to consist of geometric fictions. And he did not believe that his work undermined the supremacy of theology. It is true that Martin Luther called Copernicus “a fool who went against Holy Writ,” but Copernicus did not think he had done so—which proves, I suppose, that Luther saw more deeply than Copernicus. The way is shown by God in his “direction,” the Torah. This God directs, that is, he teaches us to distinguish between the true way and the false ways. His direction, his teaching of the distinction, is given to us. However, it is not enough to accept it. We must “delight” in it, we must cling to it with a passion more exalted than all the passions of the wicked. Nor is it enough to learn it passively. We must again and again “mutter” it, we must repeat its living word after it, with our speaking we must enter into the word’ spokenness, so that it is spoken anew by us in our biographical situation of today—and so on and on in eternal actuality. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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Money Power and Muscle Power is Our Very Essence
The annual inflation rate in the United States of America slowed to 8.3 percent in April 2022 from a 41-year high of 8.5 percent in March, but less than market forecasts of 8.1 percent. Energy prices increased 30.3 percent, below 32 percent in March, namely gasoline (43.6 percent vs 48 percent), while fuel oil increased more (80.5 percent vs 70.1 percent). On the other hand, food prices jumped 9.4 percent, the most since April 1981 and prices also rose faster for shelter (5.1 percent vs 5 percent) and new vehicles (13.2 vs 12.5 percent). To grasp the full meaning of this looming implosion, however, it is not enough to look inside America. For the United States of America, it turns out, is hardly alone. In fact, from Germany, France, and Britain to South Korea, and Japan, we find a similar epidemic of failure—widening cracks in key institutions, starting, as in the United States of America, with the nuclear family. In Japan, divorce rates, especially among married couples married for twenty years or more, are soaring to unprecedented high. Far more arresting, however, are results of a survey by Japan’s Youth Research Institute. It showed that 75 percent of American schoolgirls agreed with the statement “Everyone should get married”—but that “a staggering 88 percent of Japanese girls disagreed.” South Korea’s divorce rate, traditionally low, has become one of the highest in the World. In the United Kingdom, there is a steady decline in the nuclear family. In fact, the number of households headed by married couples has fallen below 50 percent for the first time, reflecting sweeping social changes in British family life. Educational crises, too, are no U.S. monopoly. “CLASSROOM COLLAPSE” GRIPPING SCHOOLS NATIONWIDE, screams a headline in the Japan Times. The New York Times reported: EDUCATORS TRY TO TAME JAPAN’S BLACKBOARD JUNGLES.
Simultaneously, as in the United States of America, Japan’s once highly admired corporate giants have been hit by scandal after scandal—“Enronitis” Japanese-style. Even as its banking system teeters under loads of nonperforming loans, Tokyo Electric Power Co. sees its president and chairman resign in disgrace because the company falsified safety data at its nuclear-power plants. Soon following TEPCO into ignominy were leaders of Mitsui, Snow Brand Food, Nippon Meat Packers, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissho Iwai and other top corporations. All these were followed by that beset the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2005. First a computer crash shut down all trading for the first time in the exchange’s fifty-six-year history. A few weeks later, observers repressed laughter when a trader from Mizuho Securities Co. mistakenly sold 610,000 shares of a stock for one yen apiece rather than one share for 610,000 yen—a minor glitch that cost his firm $340 million. And on April 19th 2022, Japan’s Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki said on Tuesday the damage to the economy from a weakening yen at present is greater than the benefits accruing to it, making the most explicit warning yet against the currency’s recent slump versus the dollar. The yen’s fall has worsened imported inflationary pressures in Japan amid a spike in global commodity and oil costs, and an increase in supply snags, which have intensified in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. “Stability is important and sharp currency moves are undesirable,” Suzuki told parliament, repeating previous comments as the Japanese currency weakened to fresh 20-year lows on the dollar. “A weak yen has its merit, but demerit is greater under the current situation where crude oil and raw materials costs are surging globally, while the weak yen boosts import prices, hurting consumers and firms that are unable to pass on costs,” Suzuki reports. The currency market shrugged off the ministers warning, sending yen to 127.80 to the dollar, its lowest level since May 2002. The yen has lost about 10 percent against the dollar so far this year.
Investors say verbal warnings will not have much of an impact as the yen’s weakness reflects fundamental, noting contrasting prospects for an aggressive streak of Federal Reserve tightening with that of the Bank of Japan’s commitment to maintain its powerful monetary easing plan. An April 1-11 poll of 5,400 Japanese firms conducted by private credit research firm Tokyo Shoko Research showed roughly 40 percent suffered a negative impact from a weak yen, with assumed dollar/yen rates being as low as 110 yen among listed manufacturers. Furthermore, a former Nissan executive Greg Kelly has been found guilty of assisting the Japanese car giant’s ex-CEO Carlos Ghosn to his part of 9.3 billion yen ($80.4 million) of his income from financial regulators. The court also fined Nissan $1.6 million USD (200 million yen) for failing to disclose Mr. Ghosn’s pay. The carmaker pledged guilty at the start of the 19-month trial. Mr. Kelly was sentenced to six months in jail suspended for three years. In 2019, Mr. Ghosn fled Japan to his home country of Lebanon hidden in a box on a private jet. There was a 30 percent drop in Nissan sales at the outbreak of this tragedy. However, recently, fugitive former car executive Carlos Ghosn, said in a recent interview from Beirut, Lebanon that Nissan’s alliance partner Renault SA is struggling because of the Japanese automaker’s lack of vision. He is not very “optimistic about the future of Nissan.” Recent corporate crises have been even more dramatic in South Korea, where scandals have led to the flight of the founder of Daewoo, the suicide of one of the sons of Hyundai’s founder and the imprisonment of the head of SK another great chaebol—the country’s megafirms. Most Korean consumers expect that normalcy will return to routines only after June 2022, yet there are signs of pre-COVID-19 routines returning. Korean customers have been less optimistic than those in other countries about the economic recovery. However, optimism in Korea is much higher now than two years ago. Half of consumers indicate a desire to splurge, with intent to do so being the strongest in Gen Z and millennials. One-eight of consumers say they have returned to out-of-home activities.
In Europe, the recent scandal list includes Volkswagen in Germany, Parmalat in Italy, Credit Lyonnais in France, Skandia in Sweden and the oil companies Elf and Royal Dutch/Shell. On top of that, a commodity crisis, and a supply chain crisis. What is next? A global recession? Markets are a total mess, with Walmart tanking 10 percent in one trading session on May 18, 2022. The last time that happened was the stock market crash of October 1987. Inflation, thanks to unpresented money printing and Universal Basic Income test-drives during an unprecedented China-style lockdown of the U.S. economy in 2020-2021, is now eroding living standards. The U.K. inflation print of May 18 was 9 percent. How transitory is this? If Europe keeps the pressure on commodities in its economic war with Russia, then the answer is—as long as Europe and Russia are sanctioning each other to smithereens. The S&P has been on a losing streak for six weeks. If it loses for 8 weeks in a row, that is a record breaker. It is down 20 percent year-to-date. The Nasdaq is in similar territory. As is China, as measured by the CSI-300. Europe can only get worse from here, barring the European Central Bank buying DAX and CAC-50 blue chips without telling us. France just went through an election, and Emmanuel Macron saw his populist opponent, Marine Le Pen win more votes of those under the age of 50, than Macron. There are parliamentary elections coming up this summer, another test for how the Macron government is handling a series of non-stop crisis since the pandemic started in 2020, and the adults and expert class returned to power in Washington. Speaking of which, the Democratic Party is worried. There is constant talk of pulling tariffs off China to fight inflation. However, this is highly unpopular. Rolling back tariffs is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on U.S. inflation. Midterm elections are expected to turn the tide in the House for the Republicans, and maybe in the Senate, as well. Pretending to fight inflation by opening the flood gates to China imports is a bad policy and against voters’ interests.
This mother Janet Yellen warned President Biden that sanctions against Russia and retaliatory sanctions imposed by Russia against the U.S. and Europe risk plunging the World into a deep global recession. No one is getting Russian fertilizer or wheat. Oil will be cut off by the end of 2022, with a few exceptions. They are still buying natural gas, but claim to be trying to buy less as they wean themselves off of it to source from elsewhere, including Qatar, Nigeria, Algeria, and mor expensive American LNG. So what does a global recession mean? Well, it would be a period when many of the World’s economies are not successful and businesses experience a lot of problems: Huge increases in World energy costs are expected. Global recession can occur more easily in modern times because the economies of most countries are interdependent. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), total Worldwide economic growth of less than 3 percent constitutes a global recession. The most widely accepted definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. The United States of America is now facing the familiar precursors of a recession, including rising interest rates on the back of high inflation. Many economists are warning of a recession and Wall Street Gurus say those fears are exaggerated, even though the signs are here. Perhaps they are just being optimistic to keep funding their stocks and paychecks. If prices to do decelerate, as anticipated, the Fed faces a difficult path to stabilizing the economy. Still, the U.S economy is quite strong at the moment, but there is indeed some risk of slipping into recession. Its length and severity will depend in large part on the Fed’s response. Some of the nation’s largest and most influential retailers reported disappointing sales and profits this week because of higher costs and overstocked inventory issues, engineered to avoid supply chain disruptions, setting off a stock market meltdown. As reported earlier, Walmart stock plunged more than 11 percent. Target shares tumbled 26 percent, following a stunning 52 percent drop in quarterly profits, which executives attributed in part to cooling demand for big-ticket items such as TV’s, kitchen appliances and outdoor furniture.
Goldman Sachs this week revised down its forecast for second-quarter U.S. economic growth, to annualized rate of 2.5 percent, citing higher prices and continued supply chain disruptions. That follows an unexpected contraction in the first three months of 2022, when the economy shrank at a 1.4 percent pace, mostly because of a trade imbalance and drop in inventory purchases. The U.S. Dollar is becoming attractive to investor because it is very strong right now. However, national claims for unemployment insurance climbed up to 218,000 last week, a four-month high although still near historic lows, but some companies report they are overstaffed. Higher prices for basics like food, energy and housing are straining Americans’ budgets and clouding their view of the economy. If that were not enough to keep the headline writers busy, all these were paralleled, as the United States, by upsets and upheavals in the health sectors of many countries. In the United States of America, some politicians routinely point to the British health service as a model to be emulated. Yet, the British Council complains, “not a day goes by without another story about the ‘crisis’ in the National Health Service.” The German health service is described in the press as “collapsing,” and Sweden’s system as in “acute financial crisis.” And Japan’s health insurance system could also collapse. As for pensions, France’s prime minister claims its impending pension disaster threatens the survival of the republic. Nor is France alone. Europe faces a retiree crisis. Japan also has a crisis with the nation’s pension system, as does Korea. Underfunded corporate pensions just in America? Try Siemens in Germany, with is $10.6 billion pension-fund deficit. The same pattern continues right down the line. Thus the American media’s critical loss of credibility is mirrored, even before President Trump exposed the “fake news.” The crises at Le Monde and Le Figaro, France’s top daily newspapers; and at Asahi Shimbun in Japan.
How about charities? Scandals at the American Red Cross and United Way were paralleled rather spectacularly not long ago in Britain, where tenor Luciano Pavarotti, rock star David Bowie and playwright Tom Stoppard made headlines by publicly ending their support of War Child UK, a charity set up to help children in war-torn countries. Having discovered that its cofounder and a consultant had taken bribes from a contractor employed by the organization, Pavarotti led the walkout to disassociate himself, as a spokeswoman put it, from “anything that was corrupt.” Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement are dismissing allegations that they mismanaged millions of dollars after a scathing New York Magazine report revealed that they had purchased a $6 million home in Southern California with donated funds. The report revealed that the group secretly bought a 6,500 square-foot mansion in October of 2020 for its members to create content promoting social justice. The report only fueled questions about the organization’s finances, just a year after the foundation revealed a detailed look at its funds for the first tie. The Associated Press reported then that the foundation said it had taken in just over $90 million in 2020 and committed $21.7 million in grant funding to both official and unofficial BLM chapters, along with 30 other Black-led grassroots organizations. The foundation puts its operating budget at $8.4 million. Along with questions about the remainder of the $90 million, leaders from local chapters who said they had received little to no funding from the organization, and they wondered where money raised before 2020 had gone. History, it goes without saying, is replete with scandals, failures and crises. Our generation did not invent them. However, today’s outbreak in country after country are qualitatively different. Never—with the possible exception of the worst days of World War II—has a generation seen so many institutional breakdowns in so many countries, occurring within the same brief time frame and coming at so rapid a pace.
Never has so many institutional crises been as tightly interrelated—with powerful feedback flows linking family, education, work, health, retirement, politics, and media—all affecting the wealth system. And never has re-globalization sent the financial effects of these crises so quickly across so many borders. What is happening, therefore, is not a series of isolated upset but a truly systemic breakdown—a challenge to the survival of whole societies that depend on these shaking and rattling institutions. Today’s institutional upheaval is historically unique for yet another crucial reason. All these crises at national levels are taking place at a pivotal moment for global institutions, too, starting with the United Nations. Even as the U.N. has rocked the World over the past 17 years with the referral of 33 cases of sexual abuse and exploitation to national authorities globally. Over that same period, it has received 120 reports of sexual abuse and exploitation in Haiti alone. The alleged perpetrators include drivers, security guards, doctors, consultants, and senior staff. United Nations agencies’ employees have been charged with sexual misconduct repeatedly. Meanwhile there have been allegations of large-scale corruption in its oil-for-food program in Iraq, and one will remember when Secretary-General Kofi Annan came under fire for his son’s involvement with a company seeking contracts in Iraq, another scandal hit the headlines. This one centered on charges of pedophilia and sexual abuse of women by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa. Earlier, Annan had warned that the entire U.N. as an institution is in a potentially terminal crisis owning to its obsolete organization structure. The International Development Association is the part of the World Bank that is meant to help the World’s poorest countries. Its explicit mission is “to reduce poverty by providing zero to low-interest loans and grants for programs that boost economic growth, reduce inequalities, and improve people’s living conditions.” However, there is an internal war raging inside the World Bank even as outside analysts slam it for “incompetence, inefficiency and irrelevance.”
The uber-arrogant International Monetary Fund grudgingly admits that it, too, faces a crisis. The World Organization, meanwhile, is losing ground, along with many other intergovernmental agencies. At the global level, too, we are moving rapidly toward systemic crisis. And when institutional crises in the major nations converge with equally systemic breakdown of institutions at the global level, as they are likely to do, the combined, self-reinforcing impact will affect not just Americans. Affluent young latte sippers on Omotesando in Tokyo will feel the effects, as will coffee farmers in Central America, women on assembly lines in Chin, and small-business people in Germany’s Mittlestand, along with financial analysts and investors from Wall Street, London and Frankfurt to Singapore and Seoul. What happens will naturally be influenced by other powerful factors—war, terrorism, immigration, ecological disasters, geopolitical shifts. However, even without these, the mutually reinforcing convergence of national and global crises could trigger something far bigger and more dangerous than the failure of any single institution of an infrastructural implosion in any one country. This concatenation of breakdowns and scandals may cheer those who hate America and the West, or who hate rich nations in general. However, it would be wise for them to defer any celebration. For, as the Chinese have long known, crisis and opportunity walk together. Instead of a historical disaster, these interlinked crises can be turned to massive advantage. And not just for the countries experiencing them. To make that happen, we need to understand why in so many countries, and at the level of the global order itself, so many of our most important, interlinked institutions teeter on the brink of collective implosion. As you know, a revolution is sweeping today’s post-Bacon World. No genius in the past—not Sun-Tzu, not Machiavelli, not Bacon himself—could have imagined today’s deepest powershift: the astounding degree to which today both force and wealth themselves have come to depend on knowledge. (A power shift is a transfer of power. A “powershift” is a deep-level change in the very nature of power.)
Military might until not long ago was basically an extension of the mindless fist. Today it relies almost totally on “congealed mind”—knowledge embedded in weapons and surveillance technologies. From satellites to submarines, modern weapons are constructed of information-rich electronic components. Today’s fighter plane is a flying computer. Even “dumb” weapons today are manufactured with the help of supersmart computers or electronic chips. The military, to choose a single example, uses computerized knowledge—“expert systems”—in missile defense. Since subsonic missiles speed along at about 1,000 feet a second, effective defense systems need to react in, say 10 milliseconds. However, expert systems may embody as many as 10,000 to 100,000 rules elicited from human specialists. The computer must scan, weigh, and interrelate these rules before arriving at a decision as to how to respond to a threat. Thus the Pentagon’s Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sent as a long-range goal the design of a system that can make one million logical inferences per second. Logic, inference, epistemology—in short, brain work, human and machine—is today’s precondition for military power. Similarly, it has become a business cliché to say that wealth is increasingly dependent on brainpower. The advanced economy could not run for thirty seconds without computers, and the new complexities of production, the integration of many diverse (and constantly changing) technologies, the de-massification of markets, continue to increase, by vast leaps, the amount and quality of information needed to make the system produce wealth. Furthermore, we are barely at the beginning of this “informationalization” process. Our best computers and CAD-CAM systems are still stone-ax primitive. Knowledge itself, therefore, turns out to be not only the source of the highest-quality of power, but also the most important ingredient of force and wealth. Put different, knowledge has gone from being an adjunct of money power and muscle power, to being their very essence. It is, in fact, the ultimate amplifier. This is the key to the powershift that lies ahead, and it explains why the battle for control of knowledge and the means of communication is heating up all over the World.
We have Caesar’s explanation of why Pompey’s allies stopped cooperating with him. “They regarded his [Pompey’s] prospects as hopeless and acted according to the common rule by which a man’s friends become his enemies in adversity.” Where a business is on the verge of bankruptcy and sells it accounts receivable to an outsider called a factor. This sale is made at a very substantial discount because once a manufacturer begins to go under, even one’s best customers begin refusing payment for merchandise, claiming defects in quality, failure to meet specifications, tardy delivery, or what-have-you. The great enforcer of morality in commerce is the continuing relationship, the belief that one will have to do business again with this customer, or this supplier, and when a failing company loses this automatic enforcer, not even a strong-arm factor is likely to find a substitute. Similarly, any member of Congress who is perceived as likely to be defeated in the next election may have some difficulty doing legislative business with colleagues on the usual basis of trust and good credit. There are many other examples of the importance of long-term interaction for the stability of cooperation. It is easier to maintain the norms of reciprocity in a stable small town or ethnic neighbourhood (which in modern times are affluent in some cases). Conversely, a visiting professor is likely to receive poor treatment by other faculty members compared to the way these same people treat their regular colleagues. A fascinating case of the development of cooperation based on continuing interaction occurred in the trench warfare of World War I. In the midst of this very brutal war there developed between the men facing each other what came to be called the “live-and-let live system.” The troops would attack each other when ordered to do so, but between large battles each side would deliberately avoid doing much hard to the other side—provided that the other side reciprocated.
The strategy was not necessarily TIT FOR TAT. Sometimes it was two for one. As a British officer wrote in his memoirs of the takeover of a new sector from the French: It was the French practice to “let sleeping dogs lie” when in a quiet sector…and of making this clear by retorting vigorously only when challenged. In one sector which we took over from them they explained to me that they had practically a code which the enemy well understood: they fired two shots for every one that came over, but never fired first. Such practices of tacit cooperation were quite illegal—but they were also endemic. For several years this system developed and elaborated itself despite the passions of the war and the best efforts of the generals to pursue a policy of constant attrition. The story is so rich in illuminating detail. Even without going further into the episode of trench warfare, the occurrence of a two-for-one strategy does suggest that one must be careful about drawing conclusions from a narrow focus on a pure TIT FOR TAT strategy. Just how broadly applicable was the proposition about TIT FOR TAT which said that it was collectively stable if and only if the future of the interaction was significantly important? The next proposition says that this result is very general indeed, and actually applies to any strategy which may be the first to cooperation. Any strategy which may be the first to cooperate can be collectively stable only when the risk is sufficiently large. The reason is that for a strategy to be collectively stable it must protect itself from invasion by any challenger, including the strategy which always defects. The interaction must last long enough for the gain from temptation to be nullified over future moves. This is the heart of the matter. The advantage of a nice rule in resisting invasion is that it attains to get the best results possible in a population consisting of a single type of strategy. It does this by getting the reward for mutual cooperation on each decision. However, both parties retaliate after a defection by the other. This observation leads to a general principle, since any collectively stable strategy which is willing to cooperate must somehow make it unprofitable for a challenger to try to exploit it. The general principle is that a nice rule must be provoked by the very first defection the other player, meaning that on some later move the strategy must have a finite chance of responding with a defection of its own.
For a nice strategy to be collectively stable, it must be provoked by the very first defection of the other party. The reason is simple enough. If a nice strategy were not provoked by a defection move, then it would not be collectively stable because it could be invaded by a rule which defected on one nonaggressive move. It is Nietzsche’s merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the questions “How is it possible to do what I am doing?” He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Dr. Freud says that men are motivated by desire for pleasures of the flesh and power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. However, if he can be a true scientist, id est, motivated by love of the truth, so can other humans, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if one is motivated by pleasures of the flesh or power, one is not a scientist, and one’s science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of thing that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners. The highly ethical economist who speaks only about gain, the public-spirited political scientist who sees only group interest, the physicist who sins petitions in favor of freedom while recognizing only unfreedom—mathematical law governing moved matter—in the Universe are symptomatic of the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the theoretical life, which has dogged the life of the mind since early modernity but has become particularly acute with cultural relativism. Nietzsche, in response to this difficulty, self-consciously made dangerous experiments with his own philosophy, treating its source as the will to power instead of the will to truth.
The underlying question (and an insoluble knot in philosophy) is that of the relation between substance and attribute; specifically, how does one tell the agent from the activity? Certain Indian text, exploring imagistically the relation between god and the World, ask how one can tell the dancer from the dance. In the visual arts the question has always seemed easier, since the painter or sculptor or photographer has traditionally made an object outside him- or herself. However, universalizing appropriation has dissolved such a conception, and in performance art, as in the dance, the agent and activity often seem inseparable. In the last seventy years various performances by artists (James Lee Bryars, Chris Burden, Linda Montano, Aaliyah Haughton, Britney Spears, Beyonce, and others) carried this category shift or semantic rotation to its limit by moving into galleries and living there for extended periods as performances. In this situation even the minutest details of everyday life are temporarily distanced and made strange—made art, that is—by the imposition on them of a new category overlay that alters the cognitive focus of both the performer and the beholder. Something parallel, though with fewer possibilities for irony, occurs when novices in ashrams are advised to regard their experiences, at every moment of the day, as sacred and special. That these creations by designation are linguistic, involving a willed change in the use of the word “art,” does not altogether rob them of mystery and effectiveness. It should be emphasized that category shift by forced designation is the basis of many magical procedures. In the Roman Catholic mass, for example, certain well-known objects—bread and “spirits”—are ritually designated as certain other objects—flesh and blood—which, in the manifest sense of every day experience, they clearly are not; and the initiate who accept the semantic rotation shifts his or her affection and sensibility accordingly. Art has often been thought of as exercising a sort of magic; around 1960, some artists adopted an actual magical procedure—basically a linguistic form of what Sir James Frazer called “sympathetic magic.” At that moment art entered an ambiguous realm from which it has not yet definitively emerged.
For the magical rite is already an appropriation of a piece of reality into a sheltered or bracketed zone of contemplation; when it is reapportioned into the realm of art, a double distancing occurs. Furthermore, the universalization of any category, or the complete submission of its ontology to the process of a metaphor, blurs or even erases its individual identity. To be everything is not to be anything in particular. In regard to the universal set, the Law of Identity has no function. The semantical coextensiveness of art and life means either that art has disappeared into life, melting into it everywhere like a new spark of indwelling meaning, or (and this departs at once into theistic metaphor) that life has dissolved into art. In short it means ultimately that the terms have become meaningless in relation to one another, since language operates not by sameness but by difference, and two sets with the same contents are the same. Seeing is believing. Like many an axiom, this one is literally true. Only since the ascendancy of the media has this been opened to question. Throughout the hundreds of thousands of generations of human existence, whatever we saw with our eyes was concrete and reliable. Experience was directly between us and the natural environment. Nonmediated. Nonprocessed. Not altered by other humans. If we saw a flock of birds flying southward, then these birds were definitely doing that We could believe in it. We might interpret this concrete information in various ways, perhaps misinterpret it, but there could never have been a question as to whether it was happening. The information itself, the birds and their flight, could not be doubted. This is the case with all sensory information. Whatever information the senses produce the brain trusts as inherently believable. If the sense could not be relied upon, then the World would have been an utterly confusing place. Humans would have been unable to make any sensible choices leading to survival. If there were no concretely true information, there could have been no sane functioning; the species could not have survived. This belief in sense perception is the foundation, the given, for human functioning. This is not to say there is no illusion.
In a desert environment, as we know, mirage can cause some to believe they are seeing things that are not there. However, the humans who are fooled in this way are the humans who are new to that environment. It is a problem of experience and interpretation. Their senses are not yet attuned to the new informational context. People who live for generations in such places learn to allow for illusions and do not actually “see” them in the way that visitors do. They learn to look at the edges of images, like the shadow spaces of Castaneda’s Don Juan, and to perceive a reality which is different from the visitor’s. In jungle environments, and among certain creatures, there is a camouflage. Animals use it to fool each other, including humans. Humans also use it, or devise image tricks, to fool animals and other humans. In this way images become processed images, deliberately altered, and may serve to fool an observer whose senses and interpretations are not sufficiently sharp. These are the classical exceptions which prove the point, because the basis of success for camouflage and illusion is that humans will believe what they see. In this sense, camouflage is a kind of sensory jujitsu that only confirms the original point; the senses are inherently believable. In the modern World, information rom the senses cannot be relied upon as before. We attempt to process artificial smells, tastes, sights and sounds as though they could reveal planetary reality, but we cannot make anything of them because we are no longer dealing directly with the planet. The environment itself has been reconstructed into an already abstracted, arbitrary form. Our sense are no longer reacting to information that comes directly from the source. They are reacting to processed information, the manifestation of human minds. Our information is confined in advance to the forms that other humans provide. Now, with electronic media, our sense are removed a step further from the source. The very images that we see can be altered and are. They are framed, ripped out of context, edited, re-created, sped up, slowed down and interrupted by other images. They arrive from a variety of places on the planet where we are not and were filmed at times which are not the present. What is more, many of the images are totally fictional. The things that we see are not happening and never happened. That is, they happened, but it is only the acting that happened, not the event.
Obviously, in the present age, we ought not rely on images to the same degree that our ancestors relied on the image of flying birds. Meanwhile, the images proceed inward as though they were the same as natural, unprocessed imagery. They move, walk, talk, and seem real. We assume they are real in the way images have always been real. We are unaware of any alteration. The change is difficult to absorb. What is required is a doubting process, a sensory cynicism that would have been profoundly inappropriate, even dangerous, for all previous human history. To assume that some sensory data could be eliminated totally and other sense information made unreliable would have left humans totally confused, lost in space, without knowledge of how to do anything, as though sensory environment itself had somehow gone mad (Solaris). The synapse would be broken. Contact lost. That is the present situation. We are only the fifth generation that has had to face the fact that huge proportions of the images we carry in our heads are not natural images which arrived as though they were connected to the planet. Like the Inuit transplanted to the city, or the Native American from the jungle who must suddenly deal with metallic birds, we do not have the ability to cope. Evolution has not arranged for us to allow for varying degrees of absorption and reliance on visual and aural information. There is nothing in the history of the species which assist our basic senses in understanding that imagery can be altered in time, speed or sequence, or that an images can arrives from a distance. Without training in sensory cynicism, we cannot possibly learn to deal with this. It will take several generations to let go of our genetically coses tendency to soak up all images as though they are 100 percent real. And think if we do manage to do that, what will we have? Since nothing can be directly experienced, we will have creatures who cannot believe in their senses and who take everything as it comes. Without the human bias toward belief, the media could not exist. What is more, because of the bias is so automatic and unnoticed, the media, all media, are in a position to exploit, the belief, to encourage you to believe in their questionable sensory information. This bias to believe has commercial value for the media since it allows them to keep your attention, as though it were south-flying birds you were seeing. The media, all media but particularly moving-image media, which present data so nearly natural, effectively convert our naïve and automatic trust in the reliability of images into their own authority.
California Scout Troop 9731 has hiked for six days, deep in the second-wilderness forests of the Pacific Northwest. “I bet we are the first people every to walk here,” says Leo, one of the youngest scouts. “Well, maybe you are right about walking,” says Scoutmaster Justin, “but look up ahead—what do you see, scouts?” Twenty paces ahead runs a strip of younger trees, stretching left and right until it vanishes among the trucks of the surrounding forest. “Hey, guys! Another old logging road!” shout Charlie, an older scout. Several scouts pull probes from their pockets and fit them to the ends of their walking sticks. Justin smiles: It has been ten years since a California troop found anything this way, but the kids keep trying. The scouts fan out, angling their path along the scar of the old road, poking at the ground and watching the readouts on the stick handles. Suddenly, unexpectedly, comes a call: “I have got a signal! Wow—I have got PCBs!” In a moment, grinning scouts are mapping and tracing the spill. Decades ago, a truck with a leaking load of chemical waste snuck down the old logging road, leaving a toxic trail. That trail leads them to a deep ravine, some rusted drums, and a nice wide path of invisible filth. The excitement is electrifying. Setting aside their maps and orienteering practice, they unseal a satellite locator to log the exact latitude and longitude of the site, then send a message that registers their cleanup claim on the ravine. The survey done, they head off again, eagerly planning a return trip to earn the now-rate Toxic Waste Cleanup Merit Badge. Today, tree farms are replacing wilderness. Tomorrow, the slow return to wilderness may begin, when nature need no longer be seen as a storehouse of natural resources to be plundered. However, there is very little that need be taken from nature to provide humans with wealth, and it is post-breakthrough technologies can remove from nature toxic residues of twentieth and twenty-first century mistakes.
The modern technocracies of the West have their roots in the medieval European World, from which there emerged three great inventions: The mechanical clock, which provided a new conception of time; the printing press with movable type, which attacked the epistemology of the oral tradition; and the telescope, which attacked the fundamental proposition of Judeo-Christian theology. Each of these was significant in creating a new relationship between tools and culture. However, since it is permissible to day that among faith, hope, and charity the last is most important, I shall venture to say that among the clock, the press, and the telescope the last is also the most important. To be more exact (since Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and to some extent Kepler did their work without benefit of the telescope), somewhat cruder instruments of observation than the telescope allowed men to see, measures, and speculate about the Heavens in ways that had not been possible before. However, the refinements of the telescope made their knowledge so precise that there followed a collapse, if one may say it this way, of the moral center of gravity in the West. That moral center had allowed people to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the Universe and therefore that humankind was so special interest to God. After Copernicus, Kepler, and especially Galileo, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in some hidden corner of the Universe, and this left the Western World to wonder if God had any interest in us at all. Although John Milton was only an infant when Galileo’s Messenger from the Stars was printedin 1610, he was able, years later, to describe the psychic desolation of an unfathomable Universe that Galileo’s telescopic vision thrust upon an unprepared theology. In Paradise Lost, Milton wrote: Before [his] eyes in sudden view appear the secrets of the horary Deep—a dark illimitable ocean, without bound, without dimension. Truly, a paradise lost. But it was not Galileo’s intention—neither was it Copernicus’ or Kepler’s—to so disarm their culture.
There were medieval men who, like Gutenberg before them, had no wish to damage the spiritual foundations of their World. Copernicus, for example, was a doctor of canon law, having been elected a canon of Frauenburg Cathedral. Although he never took a medial degree, he studied medicine, was private to his uncle, and among many people was better known as a physician than an astronomer. He published only scientific work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the first completed copy arriving from the printer only a few hours before he death, at the age of seventy, on May 24, 1543. He had delayed publishing his heliocentric theory for thirty years, largely because he believed it to be unsound, not because he feared retribution from the church. In fact, his book was not placed on the Index until seventy-three years after it was published, and then only for a short time. (Galileo’s trial did not take place until ninety years after Copernicus’ death.) Through His contact with them God draws them out of the abundance of living creatures in order to communicate with them. This “knowing” of His, this reaching out to touch and grasp, means that the human is lifted out, and it is as those who have been lifted out that they have intercourse with Him. God knows the ways of Humans. The way, the way of life of these humans is so created that at each of its stages they experience the divine contact afresh. And they experience the divine contact afresh. And they experience it as befits a real way, at each stage they experience it in the manner specifically appropriate to the stage. Their experience of the divine “knowing” is not like any experience of nature, it is a genuinely biographical experience, that is, what is experienced in this manner is experienced in the course of one’s own personal life, in destiny as it is lived through in each particular occasion. However cruel and contrary this destiny might appear when viewed apart from intercourse with God, when it is irradiated by His “knowing” it is “success,” just as every action of this human, one’s disappointments and even one’s failures, are success. O the happiness of the man who goes the way which is shown and “known” by God!
New Homes Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch Residence 3
Residence Three at Mills Station boasts approximately 2,400 square feet in this expansive two story home. There are three bedrooms, with the option for adding one more bedroom, two and a half bathrooms, and a two car garage plus workshop!
The charming front courtyard welcomes you home and the high ceilings and thoughtfully designed floor plan let you know that you’ve made the right choice with Cresleigh. You can fully embrace the indoor/outdoor lifestyle so organic to Northern California with a covered patio located right off kitchen with sliding glass doors on all three sides.
The den on the first floor provides a private office if you work from home or play room for the kids to be nearby while offering an option for a bedroom on the first floor.
The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The openness in the design allows the Great Room and kitchen to interact with each other seamlessly. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/
Thank you for your interest in this highly coveted community. While homes at Brighton Station are no longer available, its neighboring community, Mills Station, is still actively selling with two new communities coming soon.
We look forward to meeting you!
The Highest-Quality of Power Comes from the Application of Knowledge
After wrestling throughout their lives with malfunctioning homes, schools, and medical institutions; after being fleeced by corrupt financial institutions and finally reaching retirement, American workers look ahead to their “golden years—the long-awaited time to take a breath, stroll to the mailbox and pick up one’s pension check. However, here Americans young and old face yet another institutional disaster—this one in the pension system. Critics of the current pension arrangements warn of a coming “financial meltdown.” Once considered heresy, such doubts have been attributed to no less an authority than a U.S. secretary of the Treasury. An underfunded pension plan is an employee benefit plan for retirement income that has fewer assets than liabilities, or what it owes in benefits. If a pension plan is underfunded, it is not on track to have enough money to pay out all its promised benefits and other expenses. Damage from corporate pension-plan losses has been piling up like a slow-motion train wreck. Once recent three-year period saw assets of U.S. private pension funds shrink by 15 percent, while liabilities soared nearly 60 percent. People who rely on their company pension plans to fund their retirement may be in for a shock: of the 200 biggest defined-benefit plans in the S&P 500 based on assets, 186 are not fully funded. Simply put, they do not have enough money to fund current and future retirees. A big part of the reason is the poor returns they got from their assets in the superlow interest rate environment that followed the financial crisis. It left a hole of $382 billion for the top 200 plans. Of course, the percentage of workers covered by traditional defined benefit plans—those that pay a lifetime annuity, often based on the years of service and salary—has been declining for decades as companies shift to defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s. However, each time a pension plan is terminated, canceled or altered, thousands of workers are affected.
The mothers of the under-funded pensions is no less a behemoth. General Electric Co. has a major problem. The company ended its defined benefit plan for new hires in 2012, but its primary plan, covering about 467,000 people, is one of the largest in the U.S.A. And at $31 billion, GE’s pension shortfall is one of the largest in the S&P 500. INTC US Equity, DAL US Equity, DLPH US Equity, AAL US Equity, APC US Equity, along with automakers, airlines and paper industries are also majorly underfunded. The good news is that the funded states of the 100 largest corporate defined benefit pension plans rose by $43 billion during March of 2022. The funded states surplus improved to $86 billion from $43 billion at the end of February 2022 thanks to liability gains, which improved due to an increase in the benchmark corporate bond interest rates used to value pension liabilities. As of March 31, the funded ratio rose to 105.2 percent, up from 102.5 percent at the end of February. March’s increase caps an impressive first quarter of 2022 which saw a $92 billion improvement in funded status. This is the highest funded ratio recorded by the Pension Funding Index (PFI) in nearly 15 years—since the end of 2007. The Milliman 100 PFI asset value fell by $16 billion to $1.738 trillion at the end of March due to investment losses of 0.56 percent. By comparison, the 2021 Milliman Pension Funding Study reported that the monthly median expected investment return during 2020 was 0.50 percent annualized. The projected benefit obligation (PBO), or pension liabilities, decreased to $1.652 trillion at the end of March. The change resulted from an increase of 26 basis points in the monthly discount rate to 3.62 percent for March from 3.36 percent for February 2022. March caps off the fourth consecutive month of discount rate increases.
The first quarter ending March 31, 2022, assets fell by $105 billion while plan liabilities decreased by $197 billion. Despite investments posting losses of 4.75 percent during the first quarter of 2022, discount rates rose 82 basis points and helped propel the funded status improvement, which totaled $92 billion by the end of the first quarter. The funded ratio of the Milliman 100 companies improved to 105.2 percent at the end of March from 99.7 percent at the beginning of 2022. The nation’s state retirement systems, however, finished the 2021 fiscal year in the best condition since the Great Recession of 2007-09. The gap between the cost of pension benefits that states have promised their workers and what they have set aside to pay for them dropped in 2021 to its lowest level in more than a decade. For the first time since 2008, approximately 80 percent of the state retirement systems are now funded. A decade of increasing pension contributions and the strong stock market rally of 2021 have combined to help stabilize state pensions funds. And total unfunded state pension obligations were less than $800 billion at the end of fiscal year 2021, the greatest progress in closing the state pension plan funding gap—the difference between plan liabilities and assets—this century. However, not all state pension funds are approaching long-term fiscal sustainability, defined as government revenue matching expenditures without a corresponding increase in public debt. As part of a larger project to develop a fiscal sustainability matrix highlighting the practices of successful state pension systems and presenting a critical 50-state data that facilitates comparative analyses and plan assessments, The Pew Charitable Trusts is producing individual state fact sheets. For example, California’s main pension plans—the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS)—are the nation’s largest state plans.
CalPERS requires that participating employers make the full actuarially recommended contributions but has been managing pension debt attributed to unfunded benefit increases offered in 1999. CalSTRS received less than the actuarially recommended contribution for several years, but reforms in 2014 strengthened the plan’s funding policy. The average state funded ratio as of 2019 is 71 percent. At the same time, some 40 percent of Americans cannot afford to come afford to come up with $400 dollars for an unexpected expense. If—or, more likely, when—they are confronted with such an expense, they would probably have to sell something or go into debt. Furthermore, roughly 46 percent of all Americans expect to retire in debt, and debt repayment is even harder on a fixed income and can threaten one’s retirement security. Maintaining enough cash on hand to cover recurring bills with interest is harder on a fixed income and adds another obstacle to the challenge of living comfortably. Debt can derail a lot of peoples’ retirement plans. These days, older Americas owe more than every before. The total debt burden for Americas over age 70 increased 614 percent through 2021 from 1999, to $1.27 trillion. Also, 43 percent of Americans fear their retirement dreams could be disrupted by Social Security going bankrupt. Already, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has said the Social Security trust fund will run out of money sooner than expected due to the COVID pandemic. A lot of people have been relying on credit cards to get through the pandemic, but this also has caused interest rates to rise. Your retirement income—monthly payments from investments and Social Security should cover debt payments and still afford one a comfortable lifestyle. Otherwise, one may need to work longer or find a supplement source of income from a part-time job.
California is becoming one of the nation’s most expensive states to live in with gas prices hitting $7 a gallon and a small basket of strawberries costing $8.00. If inflation increases by more than 7 percent between 2021 and 2022, the law says the minimum wage must increase to $15.50 per hour for everyone. However, official inflation figures will not be final until this summer. California has about 3 million minimum wage workers. The increase in the minimum wage will be about $3 billion, or less than 0.1 percent of the $3.3 trillion in personal income Californians are projected to earn. This is a mixed blessing. It means that people will get paid more, but they businesses will also hire or keep less employees. With that being the case, the employees they hire or retain will be those who are highly skilled, which should increase productivity. So, it is a huge benefit for big companies, but not so greater for incompetent workers, or customers who will have to pay higher prices. Yet, at this rate of pay, minimum wage will still be below market value. Analysis say it should be around $30 an hour, which would also mean that other workers are also underpaid. This is all due to globalization, sending our jobs and money overseas suppressed wages for American workers. Faced with a rapidly aging population and underfunded pensions, an intergenerational was is brewing among pensioners on one side and young workers on the other, who fear their will be nothing left for them by the time they retire. Confronted by failing institutions on all sides, many Americans seek help from charitable organizations, long regarded as ethically cleaner than the profit-making sector. That, however, was before some of the most prestigious nonprofits such as the United Way and the American Red Cross came under investigation for false accounting or misapplication of contributed funds.
Meanwhile, where did many Americans go to find out more about all these crises? The Internet, of course. However, as newspapers take pains to point out, much of what appears on the Net is unverified, biased or mistaken. What is needed, publishers say, is credible, accurate carefully checked and rechecked information. Yes. However, the print and broadcast media are themselves facing a credibility crisis that threatens their future, as journalistic scandals recently erupted at The New York Times, USA Today, NBC News, CNN, CBS News, Newsweek and other media outlets. It is not just that people are reading the newspaper less or watching the news less. These scandals take place against a background of declining readers and dwindling audiences, partly because people are busy, they do not trust the news, and they have digital content to watch. The estimated U.S. daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) in 2020 was 24.3 million from its 1983 peak of 63.3 million, while the U.S. population has grown by 100 million. A quarter of all U.S.A. newspapers have died in 17 years. At least 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 were without one at the beginning of 2020. More than 300 newspapers have failed, bring the death toll to 2,100, of the 9,000 newspapers than were being published 17 years ago. The list of institutional breakdowns in superpower America could be extended to include the failure of the U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence agencies—in combination with the White House under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—to present the 9/11 disaster despite various early warnings to correctly assess the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It is not much different than the southern boarder crisis. While many people do not want to deport unregistered immigrants, they would like to stop the 18,000 the are coming into the country daily without being registered. That is approximately 7 million people a year, while many America institutions are running dry. Joe Biden has been warned about the danger of ignoring the crisis.
Crisis, it may be said, is in the eye of the beholder—or in the rhetoric of self-interested parties demanding dramatic change. However, even allowing for statistical inadequacy, simplistic trend extrapolation and exaggerated rhetoric, or for difference in their importance, intensity or immediacy, they very multiplicity of these cases tells us something important: The whole adds up to more than its parts. Until recently, most observers, America or not, have viewed all these institutional crises in the United States of America as unrelated. However, that view is no longer tenable. America’s seemingly separate and distinct crises are increasingly interconnected. Health care and pensions. Pension and the corporate crisis. Family and education. The political crisis and all the rest feed into one another. What is developing, therefore, inside the United States of America is a systemic breakdown of its vital institutional infrastructure at the very time when many believe its power in the World is diminishing. Most conventional assumptions about power, in Western culture at least, imply that power is a matter of quantity. However, while some of us clearly have less power than others, this approach ignores what may now be the most important factor of all: the quality of power. Powe comes in varying grades, and some power is decidedly low in octane. In the fierce struggles soon to sweep through our schools, hospitals, businesses, trade unions, and governments, those who understand “quality” will gain a strategic edge. No one doubts that violence—embodies in a mugger’s switchblade or nuclear missile—can yield awesome results. The shadow of violence or force, embedded in the law, stands behind every act of government, and in the end every government relies on soldiers and police to enforce its will. This ever-present and necessary threat of official violence in society helps keep the system operating, making ordinary business contracts enforceable, reducing crime, providing machinery for the peaceful settlement of disputes. In this paradoxical sense, it is the veiled threat of violence that helps make daily life nonviolent.
However, violence in general suffers from important drawbacks. To begin with, it encourages us to carry a can of Mace, or to crank up an arms race that increases risks to everyone. Some people target shoot so often that they develop a callous on their thumb and seemed to be possessed by a feeling of wanting to look a man in the eye and rob him of his power and life. So, it is not the gun that is the problem, it is the individual who uses it to feel powerful that is the problem. Even when it “works” violence produces resistance. Its victims or their survivors look for the first chance to strike back. That is why it is not good to harm anyone nor get into an altercation, or even a car accident; some people will want to retaliate right then or later on. The main weakness of brute force or violence, however, is its sheer inflexibility. It can only be used to punish. It is, in short, low-quality power. Wealth, by contrast, is a far better tool of power. A fat wallet is much more versatile. Instead of just threatening or delivering punishment, it can also offer finely graded rewards—payments and payoffs, in cash or kind. Wealth can be used in either a beneficial or harmful way. It is, therefore, much more flexible than force. Wealth yields medium-quality power. The highest-quality of power, however, comes from the application of knowledge. Actor Sean Connery, in a movie set in Cuba during the reign of the dictator Batista, plays a British mercenary. In one memorable scene the tyrant’s military chief says: “Major, tell what your favorite weapon is, and I will get it for you.” To which Connery replies: “Brains.” High-quality power is not simply clout. Not merely the ability to get one’s way, to make others do what you want, though they might prefer otherwise. High quality implies much more. It implies efficiency—using up the fewest power resources to achieve a goal. Knowledge can often be used to make the other party like your agenda for action. It can even persuade the person that one originated it.
Of the three root sources of social control, therefore, it is knowledge, the most versatile, that produces what Pentagon brass like to call “the biggest bang for the buck.” It can be used to punish, reward, persuade, and even transform. It can transform enemy into ally. Best of all, with the right knowledge one can circumvent nasty situations in the first place, so as to avoid wasting force or wealth altogether. Knowledge also serves as a wealth and force multiplier. It can be used to augment the available force or wealth or, alternatively, to reduce the amount needed to achieve any given purpose. In either case, it increases efficiency, permitting one to spend fewer power “chips” in any showdown. Of course, maximum power is available to those in a position to use all three of these tools in cleaver conjunction with one another with one another, alternating the threat of punishment, the promise of reward, along with persuasion and intelligence. The truly skilled power players know intuitively—or through training—how to use and interrelate their power resources. To assess the different contenders in a power conflict—whether a negotiation or a war—therefore, it helps to figure out what commands access to which of the basic tools of power. Knowledge, violence, and wealth, and the relationships among them, define power in society. Francis Bacon equated knowledge with power, but he did not focus on its quality or on its crucial links to the other main sources of social power. Nor could anyone until now foresee today’s revolutionary changes in the relationships among these three. Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts. Moses, Jesus Christ, Homer, Buddha: these are the creators, the men who formed horizons, the founders of Jewish, Christian, Greek and Indian culture. It is not the truth of their thought that distinguished them, but its capacity to generate culture.
If it is life-preserving and life-enhancing, only then it is a value. The quasi-totality of men’s values consists of more or less pale carbon copies of the originator’s values. Egalitarianism means conformism, because it gives power to the sterile who can only make use of old values, other men’s ready-made values, which are not alive and to which their promoters are not committed. Egalitarianism is founded on reason, which denies creativity. Everything in Nietzsche is an attack on rational egalitarianism, and shows what twaddle the habitual talk about values is these days—and how astonishing is Nietzsche’s respectability on the Left. Since values are not rational and not grounded in the natures of those subject to them, they must be imposed. They must defeat opposing values. Rational persuasion cannot make them believe, so struggle is necessary. Producing values and believing in them are acts of the will. Lack of will, not lack of understanding, becomes the crucial defect. Commitment is the equivalent of faith when the living God has been supplanted by self-provided values. It is Pascal’s wager, no longer on God’s existence but on one’s capacity to believe in oneself and the goals one has set for oneself. Commitment values the values and makes them valuable. Not love of truth but intellectual honesty characterizes the proper state of mind. Since there is no truth in the values, and what truth there is about life is not lovable, the hallmark of the authentic self is consulting one’s oracle while facing up to what one is and what one experiences. Decisions, not deliberations, are the movers of deeds. One cannot know or plan the future. One must will it. There is no program. The great revolutionary must destroy the past and open up the future for the free play of creativity.
Politics are revolutionary; but unlike the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, the new revolutions should be unprogrammatic. They are to be made by intellectually honest, committed, strong-willed, creative men. Nietzsche was not a fascist; but this project inspired fascist rhetoric, which looked to the revitalization of old cultures or the foundation of new ones, as opposed to the rational, rootless cosmopolitanism of the revolution of the Left. Nietzsche was a cultural relativist, and he saw what that means—war, great cruelty rather than great compassion. War is the fundamental phenomenon on which peace can sometimes be forced, but always in the most precarious way. Liberal democracies do not fight wars with one another because they see the same human nature and the same rights applicable everywhere and to everyone. Culture fight wars with one another. They must do so because values an only be asserted or posited by overcoming others, not by reasoning with them. Cultures have different perceptions, which determine what the World is. They cannot come to terms. There is no communication about the highest things. (Communication is the substitute for understanding when there is no common World men share, to which they can refer when they misunderstand one another. From the isolation of the closed system of self and culture, there are attempts to “get in contact,” and “failures of communication.” How individuals and culture can “relate” to one another is altogether a mysterious business.) Culture means a war against chaos and a war against other cultures. The very idea of culture carries with it a value: man need culture and must do what is necessary to create and maintain cultures. There is no place for a theoretical man to stand. To live, to have any inner substance, a man must have values, must be committed, or engage. Therefore a cultural relativist must care for culture more than truth, and fight for culture while knowing it is not true.
This is somehow impossible, and Nietzsche struggled with the problem throughout his career, perhaps without a satisfactory resolution. However, he knew that the scientific view is deadly to culture, and that the political or moral cultural relativist of the ordinary sort is doomed to have no culture. Culture relativism, as opposed to relativism simply, teaches the need to believe while undermining belief. A difficulty with this concept of collective stability when applied to the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is that it can be very hard actually to determine which strategies have it and which do not. Others have dealt with this difficulty by restricting the analysis to situations where the strategies are particularly simple, or by considering only some arbitrarily limited set of strategies. The problem has now been solved, making it possible to characterize all collectively stable strategies for the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. For present purposes, it is not necessary to be so general. It is sufficient to take a particular strategy and see under what conditions it can resist invasion by any other strategy. A good strategy to investigate is TIT FOR TAT. TIT FOR TAT cooperates on the first move, and then does whatever the other person did on the previous move. Thus a population of people using TIT FOR TAT will cooperate with each other. If another strategy is to invade this population, it must get a higher expected value than this. What kind of strategy might be able to get more than this when negotiating with a person using TIT FOR TAT? The first thing that can be said is that such a strategy must defect at some point. When it first does it will get the temptation, which is the highest payoff. However, then TIT FOR TAT will defect. Consequently, if the negotiation is likely to last long enough for the retaliation to counteract the temptation to defect, TIT FOR TAT can avoid being invaded by such a rule. If the discount parameter is sufficiently large, no rule can TIT FOR TAT.
Culture is the only framework within which to account for what is specifically human in humans. Humans are pure becoming, unlike any other being in nature; and it is in culture that one become something that transcends nature and has no other mode of existence and no other support than a particular culture. The actuality of plants and the other animals is contained in their potentialities; but this is not true of humans, as is indicated by the many cultural flowers, essentially unlike, produced from the same seed, man. Nietzsche’s contribution was to draw with perfect intransigence the consequences of that idea and try to live with them. If there are many cultures, unsolicited by one perfect or complete culture in which man is man, simply—without prefix such as Greek, Chinses, Christian, Buddhist (id est, if Plato’s Republic, outlining the one best regime, is simply a myth, a work of Plato’s imagination), then the very word “man” is a paradox. There are as many kinds of man as there are cultures, without any perspective from which man can be spoken of in the singular. This is true not only of one’s habits, customs, rituals, fashions, but above all of one’s mind. There must be as many different kinds of mind as there are cultures. If the mind itself is not included among the things that are relative to cultures, the observations of cultural relativism are trivial and have always been accepted. Yet everyone likes cultural relativism but wants to exempt what concerns one. The physicist wants to save one’s atoms; the historian, one’s events; the moralist, one’s values. However, they are all equally relative. If there is an escape from one truth from the flux, then there is in principle no reason why many truths are not beyond it; and then the flux, becoming, change, history or what have you is not what is fundamental, but rather, being, the immutable principle of science and philosophy.
Now let us go a step further. Please bring to mind a baseball game or a football game. Have you got one? Hold it for a moment. If you are like most Americans, you have actually been to a game. You have seen one directly and probably participated in one personally. You have probably also watched at least one of them on television. Here is the question: Which one did you bring to mind? The television version or the one you experienced directly? If only because it was the most recent, although the answers vary on this point, many people I have asked will report that the television image is one which springs to mind first Most will say the images rotate. Once images are inside your head, the mind does not really distinguish between the image that was gathered directly and the one that derived from television. Of course you can distinguish. When I asked you whether it was a television image or a firsthand image, you were certainly able to identify which was which. However, until I asked you, you may not have thought to do that. Have you ever met movie stars or famous television personalities? Whenever I have met them I have always remarked to myself upon the difference in the personal image they presented and the television or film image. I could recognize them when I saw them in person, I am only saying that it was different. The main point is this: When I think about them now, in retrospect, their television images are just as likely to spring into my mind as their real-life images. If I wish to, I can decide to bring up their real images, but if their names are mentioned in passing conversation, or I read a review of a production they have been in, I am actually more likely to bring up a media image than one of the real person I have met.
Have you every visited McDonald’s? Which images dominate in your mind, those from your actual visit or those from television? They rotate, do they not? They take on a certain equality in your memory banks. You can make the distinction between the direct image and the advertising image, but do you? If for some reason the subject of McDonald’s comes up in conversation, which image comes into your mind as you talk? Do you make the distinction? If you are like most people to whom I have asked this question, it is only with great effort that you are able to distinguish which one is the personal experience and which is the television experience. It takes a certain amount of effort to do so; one does not ordinarily bother. The television image can be as real in effect as the personally experienced image. The mind does not automatically distinguish which image is from direct experience and which has been imposed by the media. If I should now ask you to erase the television image of McDonald’s, leaving only the reality—the personally experienced direct contact—can you do that? See if you can. Please make an effort. We are left a very bizarre phenomenon. Television is capable of dominating personally derived imagery—from books or imagination—and it is also capable, at least some of the time, of causing confusion as to what is real experience and what is television experience. The mind is very democratic about its image banks, all are equally available for our recall and use. And so when we call on our images for whatever purpose we may have for them, we are as likely to produce an implanted image as the one which was originally our own. The root of this unfortunate problem lies with the fact that until very recently, human beings had no need to make distinctions between artificial images of distant events and life directly lived. The process of universalizing the art context goes back at least as far as Duchamp’s showing Readymades. Dada and Surrealism, of course, had their input. However, the tendency came to maturity in the middle to late 50s, when Alain Robbe-Grillet, for example, insisted that is art is going to by anything, it has to be everything.
At about the same time Yves Klein, extending the tradition of French dandyism, said, “Life, it self…is the absolute art.” Similarly, in America, Allan Kaprow suggested that “the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps as indistinct, as possible.” Duchamp had appropriated by signature, as Klein did when, in about 1947, he signed the sky. Later Klein would designate anything as art by painting it with his patented International Klein Blue. Manzoni sometimes designated preexisting objects as art by singing them, and at other times by placing them on a sculpture base. In 1967 Dennis Oppenheim produced his “Sitemarkers,” ceremonial stakes used to mark off areas of the World as art. These procedures were sometimes employed in conscious parody of the theological concept of creation by the word. In 1960 Klein, imitating divine fiat, appropriated the entire Universe into his Theatre of the Void, as his piece for the Festival d’ Art d’ Avant-garde, in Paris. In the next year he painted a topographical globe International Klein Blue, thereby appropriating the Earth into his portfolio; soon Manzoni, responding, placed the Earth upon his Sculpture Base (Socle du monde, 1961), wresting it from Klein’s portfolio into his own. Of course there is a difference between fiat and appropriation. The purely linguistic procedure of forcefully expanding the usage boundaries of word does not create a wholly new reality, but shifts focus on an existing one. Any action that takes place in the appropriation sone is necessarily real as itself—yet semantically a kind of shadow-real. Insofar as the act’s prior category is remembered, it remains what it was, just a loan-word may retain a trace of its prior meaning—only it is reflected, as it were, into a new semantic category. Thus the process of universal appropriation has certain internal or logical limits; it is based on the assumption that a part can contain the whole, that art, for example, can contain life.
However, the only way that a part an contain its whole is by reflection, as a mirror may reflect a whole room, or by implication, as a map of a city implies the surrounding nation. The appropriation process, in other words, may rearrange the entire Universe at the level of a shadow or reflection, and this is its great power. At the same time, as with the gems strung together in the Net of Indra, only the shadowy life of a reflection is really at issue, and this is its great limit. The infinite regress implicit in such a procedure was illustrated when, in 1962, Ben Vautier signed Klein’s death and, in 1963, Manzoni’s, thereby appropriating both those appropriations of the Universe. The idea of signing a human being or a human life was in fact the central issue. In 1961 Manzoni exhibited a nude model on his sculpture base and signed her as his work. Later he issued his “Certificates of Authenticity,” which declared that the owner, having been signed by Manzoni, was now permanently an artwork. However, it was Klein who most clearly defined the central issue, saying, “The painter only has to create one masterpiece, oneself, constantly.” The idea that the artist is the work became a basic theme of the period in question. Ben acted it out, not long after the signing of Klein’s death, by exhibiting himself as a living sculpture. Soon Gilbert & George did the same thing. As early as 1959 James Lee Bryars had exhibited himself, seated alone in the center of an otherwise empty room. Such gestures are fraught with strange interplays of artistic and religious forms, as the pedestal has always been a variant of the altar. It was in part the Abstract Expressionist emphasis on the direct expression of the artist’s person was in fact the art. Through the survival in the art realm of the Romantic idea of the specially inspired individual, it was possible, though in a sort of bracketed parody, to confer on an artist the status of a royal or sacred being who is on exhibit to other humans.
When it comes to technologies, they can create problems for the spiritual life of medieval Europe. For example, the mills to which farmers flocked to have their grain ground became a favorite place for women of the evening to attract customers. The problem grew to such proportions that Saint Bernard, the leader of the Cistercian order in the twelfth century, tried to close down the mills. He was unsuccessful, because the mills had become too important to the economy. In other words, it is something of an oversimplification to say that tool-using cultures never had their customers and symbolic life reoriented by technology. And, just as there are examples of such cases in the medieval World, we can find queer but significant instance in technologically primitive societies of tools attacking the supremacy of custom, religion, or metaphysics. Egbert de Vries, a Dutch sociologist, has told of how the introduction of matches to an African tribe altered their habits of pleasures of the flesh. Members of this community believed it necessary to start a new fire in the fireplace after each act of pleasures of the flesh. This custom meant that each act of pleasures of the flesh was something of a public event, since when it was completed, someone had to go to a neighboring hunt to bring back a burning stick with which to start a fresh fire. Under such conditions, adultery was difficult to conceal, which is conceivably why the custom originated in the first place. The introduction of matches changed all this. It became possible to light a new fire without going to a neighbor’s hut, and thus, in a flash, so to speak, a long-standing tradition was consumed. In reporting on de Vries finding, Alvin Toffler raises several intriguing questions: Did matches result in a shift in values? Was adultery less or more frowned upon as a result? By facilitating the privacy of pleasures of the flesh, did matches alter the valuation of placed upon it?
We can be sure that some changes in cultural values occurred, although they could not have been as drastic as what happened to the Ihalmiut tribe early in the twentieth century, after the introduction of the rifle. The replacement of bows and arrows with rifles is one of the most chilling tales on record of a technological attack on a tool-using culture. The result in this case was not the modification of a culture but its eradication. However, people were also tired of sneak attacks, getting rob, having their livestock killed and stolen and their homes broken into. Nonetheless, after one acknowledges that no taxonomy ever neatly fits the realities of a situation, and that in particular the definition of a tool-using culture lacks precision, it is still both possible and useful to distinguish a tool-using culture from a technocracy. In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give away, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic Worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture, but also provide new freedoms and protection. For the most part tools become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives. With nanotechnology will mean for human life is beyond out predicting, but a good way to understand what it could mean is to paint scenarios. A good scenario brings together different aspects of the World (technologies, environments, human concerns) into a coherent whole. Major corporations use scenarios to help envision the paths that the future may take—not as forecasts, but as tools for thinking. In playing the “What if?” game, scenarios present trial answers and pose new questions. The following scenarios cannot represent what will happen, because no one knows. They can, however, show how post-breakthrough capabilities could mesh with human life and Earth’s environment. The results will likely seem quaintly conservative from a future perspective, however much they seem like science fiction today.
In Plumas, California, Jillian Harris flips on the light in her Cresleigh Home on a dark winter morning. The light comes on, powered by stored solar electricity. Nanotechnology can make solar cells efficient, as inexpensive as newspaper, and as tough as asphalt—tough enough to use for resurfacing roads, collecting energy without displacing any more grass and trees. Together with efficient, inexpensive storage cells, this will yield low-cost power (but no, not “too cheap to meter”). Jake Harris of Plumas, California, has been a bit hoarse for weeks, and just came down with a horrid head cold. For the past six months, he has been seeing ads for At Last! : The Cure for the Common Cold, so he spend his five dollars and takes the nose-spray and throat-spray doses. Within three hours, 99 percent of the viruses in his nose and throat are gone, and the rest are on the run. Within six hours, the medical mechanisms have become inactive, like a pinch of inhaled but biodegradable dust, soon cleared from the body. He feels much better and will not infect his friends at dinner. The human immune system is an intricate molecular mechanism, patrolling the body for viruses and other invaders, recognizing them by their foreign molecular coats. The immune system, though, is slow to recognize something new. For his five dollars, Justin bought 10 billion molecular mechanisms primed to recognize not just the viruses he had already encountered, but each of the five hundred most common viruses that cause cold, influenzas, and the like. Weeks have passed, but the hoarseness Justin had before his cold still has not gone away; it gets worse. He ignores it through a long vacation, but once he is back and caught up, Jake finally foes to see his doctor. He looks down his throat and says, “Hmmm.” He asked him to inhale an aerosol, cough, spit in a cup, and go read a magazine.
The diagnosis pops up on a screen five minutes after he pours the sample into his cell analyzer. Despite his knowledge, his training and tools, he feels chilled to read the diagnosis pops up on a screen five minutes after he pours the sample into his cell analyzer. Despite his knowledge, his training and tools, he feels chilled to read the diagnosis: a malignant cancer of the throat, the same disease that has cropped up all too often in his own mother’s family. He touches the “Proceed” button. In twenty minutes, he looks at the screen to check progress. Yes, Jake’s cancerous cells are all of one basic kind, displaying one of the 16,314 known molecular markers for malignancy. They can be recognized, and since they can be recognized, they can be destroyed by standard molecular machines primed to react to those markets. The doctor instructs the cell analyzer to prime some “immune machines” to go after the cancer cells. He tests them on cells from the sample, watches, and sees that they work as expected, so he has the analyzer prime up some more. Jake puts the magazine down and looks up. “Well Doc, what is the word?” he asks. “I found some suspicious cells, but this should clear it up,” he says. He gives him a throat spray and injection. “I would like you to come back in three weeks, just to be sure.” “Do I have to?” he asks. “You know,” he lectures him, “we need to make sure it is gone. You really should not let things like this go so far before coming in.” “Yes, fine, I will make an appointment,” he says. Leaving the office, Jake thinks fondly of how old-fashioned and conservative Dr. Buber is. The molecular mechanism of the immune system already destroys most potential cancers before they grow large enough to detect. With nanotechnology, we will build molecular mechanisms to destroy those that the immune system misses. God shows man the way to the righteous. To recognize God’s ways is to know. This knowing is developed in the realm of a relation of the soul to other beings, where the fact of mutuality changes everything.
Cresleigh Homes
Someone’s peeking out from behind the vase…do you spot the sloth?! 🦥 Could this bedroom be the nursery? 💖
Residence 2 at Meadows has 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms – in 2372 square feet of thoughtfully designed living space.
There’s room to decorate for each member of the family!
The Grounds Have their Share of Unexplained Mysteries
A mansion is not a mansion with its stately grounds, and Mrs. Winchester was just as attentive to the exterior of her estate as she was to the sprawling house. An avid gardener, she imported plans, flowers, trees, shrubs, and herbs from over 110 countries around the World. Mrs. Winchester employed eight to ten gardeners. Her head gardener was Mr. Nishiwara, who was responsible for seeing that the beautiful gardens, plus the tall hedge around the hose, were well maintained. The hedges were once so tall that only the top floor of the house was visible from the road! Mrs. Winchester loved to spend time in her gardens, and she had gazebos built where she could sit and enjoy her trees and flowers. It was a Saturday night, in January 1888, and Mrs. Winchester has, as usual, come home from the City early in the afternoon. It has been a black and foggy day, and the gas had been lighted in the streets and in the office where she worked from early morning. The fog was very bad at the time Mrs. Winchester returned home, and she congratulated herself on the fact that she had not to go out again that night. She sat with her puppy Zip in her sitting-room all the evening, with that comfortable feeling that she was able to relax until Monday morning, and that she need trouble about nothing outside the mansion. In due course, Zip went to bed, and then the maid Agnus reminded her of a letter that must be written and posted that night. Sufficient is it for Mrs. Winchester to say that the letter was to an elderly relative of some means who lived in Oakland, and who had taken great interest in her puppy Zip. The butler Martin remembered that the following day was the birthday of this relative, and that she should receive proper greeting by the Sunday morning post in the country town.
Frankly, Mrs. Winchester did not want the bother of it; but Agnus always knows best in these matters, and so Mrs. Winchester wrote the note and sealed it up. Mrs. Winchester had read nothing exciting during the evening—nothing to stir her imagination in any way. She stamped the letter and proceeded to the front door. Judge of her astonishment when, on throwing it open, she saw nothing but the gray wall of fog coming up to the very house; even the railings, not ten yards in the front of her grand estate, were blotted out completely. She called back into the house for the maid to come and look. “Don’t lose yourself, Mrs. Winchester,” she said, half laughing. “What a terrible night!” “I shall not lose myself,” Mrs. Winchester replied, laughing in turn. “The pillar-box is only at the end of the crescent; if I stick to the railing, I cannot possibly miss it. Do not wait here,” she added solicitously. “I will leave the door ajar, so that I can slip in easily when I come back. I have left my keys on my writing desk.” Angus went in, and Mrs. Winchester pulled the door close, and then stepped out boldly for the front gate. Imagine her standing there, just outside her own gate, and with her back to the crescent, knowing that she had to go to the left to find the pillar-box which was at the end of the crescent. There were thirteen Victorian cottages on her estate, so she knew she had to pass seven more before reaching the pillar-box. She also new that each cottage had an ornamental center-piece before she stepped away from the crescent at the end to reach the pillar box. That Mrs. Winchester knew would be something of an adventure, for the fog was the densest she had ever seen; she could only see the faint glow of her observation tower as she looked behind; the rest of her mansion was invisible.
Mrs. Winchester counted seven Victorian cottages, and then stood at the end of the last line of railings. She knew that the pillar-box was exactly opposite her. She took three quick steps, and literally cannoned into it. She was a little proud of her own judgment in getting it so nicely. Then she fumbled for the mouth of it, and dropped in her letter. All this may should very commonplace and ordinary. Mrs. Winchester is an observant woman, and she had noticed always that the mouth of the pillar-box faced directly along the crescent, thus standing at right angles to the road. At the moment that she had her right hand in that mouth, therefore, she argued that if she stood out at the stretch of her arm, she must be facing the crescent; Mrs. Winchester had but to move straight forward again to touch the friendly railings. She was putting that plan into operation, and had let go of the mouth of the pillar-box, when a man, coming hurriedly round the corner, ran straight into her, muttered a gruff apology, and was lost in the fog again in a moment. And in that accidental collision he had spun her round and tossed her aside—and she was lost! This is literally true. She took a step and found herself slipping of the kerbstone int the road; stumbled back again, and strove to find her way along by sticking to the edge of the pavement. After a minute or two, Mrs. Winchester was so sure of herself that she ventured to cross the pavement, and by great good luck touched in a moment one of those ornamental center-pieces of one of the gates—or so, at least, it seemed. She went on with renewed confidence until she saw certain bushes which topped the railings of one particular cottage, and then Mrs. Winchester knew that she was near her mansion’s front door. She pushed walked confidently, stepped quickly up the little path, and reached the door. She was right; the door yielded to her touch, and she went hurriedly in.
Mrs. Winchester had taken off her hat, and had held it towards the familiar hat-stand before she realized that it was not a familiar hat-stand at all; it was one she did not know. She looked round in some confusion, meaning to make good her escape without being observed, and yet wondering into what part of her mansion could she have come into, when she stopped stock still, with the hat held in her hand, listening. From a room near at hand, Mrs. Winchester heard the sound of a low, long-drawn moan, as from someone in pain. More than that, it was almost the wail of someone in acute terror. Now, Mrs. Winchester was a mild and caring soul, and her first instinct was to run. There was the door within a foot of her; she could open it again noiselessly and slip out, and leave whatever was moaning to its own trouble. Her next instinct, however, was a braver one; she might be able to help. Putting her hat on, and so leaving her hands free, she moved cautiously towards the sound, which was coming intermittently. She found that this wing of the house was unfamiliar to her; there was a 7-11 staircase built in the shape of a letter “Y,” which enabled the servants to quickly get to three different levels of the house. Then there were these stairs that lead to the ceiling, and there was also a cabinet that went straight through to the back thirty rooms of the mansion. When she went down the steps of the 7-11 staircase, slowly and cautiously, with her flesh creeping a little, the morning went on, and Mrs. Winchester was almost inclined to turn back with every step she took. However, at last, she got into the basement, and came to the door of the room from which the sound proceeded. She was in the very act of recklessly thrusting open the door when another sound broke upon her ears that held her still. The sound of someone singing in a raucous voice.
It was a sea song she remembered to have heard when she was a little girl in New Haven, Connecticut, and the words of which she had forgotten; it was something about “Boney was a warrior.” The door of the room was open a little way, and through the crack of it, Mrs. Winchester was able to peer in; and there she saw a sight that for a moment made her doubt her own eyes. She rubbed her eyes in a curious fashion and looked again, and this is what she saw: The room was in a neglected state, with strips of wallpaper hanging down from the walls and with a blackened ceiling. There was a table in the center of it, and at that table a man was seated, with a square black bottle and a glass before him, and a candle burning near his left hand. Mrs. Winchester could see the whole room now as plainly and as clearly as she saw it then. He was a man so villainously ugly that she had a thought that he was not a man at all, but some hideous thing out of a nightmare. He had very long arms—so long that they were stretched across the table, and his hands gripped the opposite edge of it; a great heavy head, crowed with a mass of red hair, was set low between enormously broad shoulders; his eyes, half closed, were high up and close together on either side of a nose that was scarcely a nose at all; the lips were thick and heavy. However, it was not the man that Mrs. Winchester looked at first, it was at two other figures in the room. These figures were seated on chairs facing the table at which the man was, and the strangeness of them lay in the fact that each was securely bound to the chair on which he and she sat, for it was a man and a woman. The man, who was quite young was not only bound, but gagged securely also; the woman was more lightly tied to her chair by the arms only, and her mouth was free. She was leaning back, with her eyes closed, and mingling with the raucous singing of the man at the table. Mrs. Winchester’s first impression was that the man at the table was some sort of unclean, bestial judge, and the others his prisoners.
He stopped his singing to pour some liquor from the square bottle into his glass and to drink it off; then he resumed his former attitude, with his fingers locked over the edge of the table. And now Mrs. Winchester noticed that while the woman, who was, by the way, quite young and very pretty, with a fair, dainty prettiness, still kept her eyes closed, the eyes of the bound man never left that dreadful figure seated at the other side of the table. Mrs. Winchester felt like she was on the eve of some awful calamity. She then unhesitatingly pronounced the entire assortment of people in the room as ghost, and condemned all the gathered treasures as the creations of petty intellect, which could not get out of the beaten track, but sought in the supernatural a reason for the explanation of every fact that seemed at variance with routine of daily experience. In her opinion the collection of people in this room had never seen at all in her day and generation, and must have been souls killed by the Winchester rifle ages ago; she did not yet believe her mansion was enchanted, however. To use her own language, “all those stories have been made by those people that set up overnight stirring out legends to entertain each other.” However, she must have known that she was in denial. For she was not insane and there were some kind of beings in this room. “Wouldn’t you like to speak, you dog?” said the red-haired man. “What would you give now to have the use of your limbs—the free wagging of your tongue? What would you say to me; what would you do to me?” The man who was bound could, of course, answer nothing. Mrs. Winchester saw his face flush and darken, and she guessed what his thoughts were. For herself, she was too fascinated by the scene before her to do anything else than peer through the crack and watch what was going one.
“Lovers—eh?” exclaimed the man at the table. “You thought I was unsuspicious; you thought I knew nothing and suspected nothing—didn’t you? While I was safely out of the way you could meet, the pair of you—day after day, and week after week; and this puppy could steal from me what was mine by right.” The woman opened her eyes for the first time and spoke. “It isn’t true,” she said, a sob breaking her voice. “It was all innocent. Martin and I have done no wrong.” “You lie!” thundered the man, brining his fist down upon the table with a blow that might have split it. “You’ve always lied—lied from the moment your father gave you to me—from the very hour I married you. You always hated me; I’ve seen you shudder many and many a time at the mere sight of me. Don’t I know it; haven’t I felt you stab me a thousand times more deeply than you could have stabbed me with any weapon? You devil! I’ve come at last to hate you as much as you hate me.” The woman turned her head slowly and looed at the younger man; a faint smile crossed her lips. In an instant the red-haired man had leapt to his feet, showing Mrs. Winchester astonishingly enough that he was a dwarf, with the shortest legs surely ever a man had. However, the bult of him was enormous, and Mrs. Winchester could guess, with a shudder, at his length. He caught up the glass, crossed the room, and flung the contents in the face of the man. “It’s a waste of good liquor—but that’s for the look she gave you. I wish there was some death more horrible than any invented yet that I could deal out to you,” he added, standing with the glass in his hand and glaring at his victim. “The death I mean for you is too easy.” He walked across to the fireplace in a curious purposeless way, and stirred a great fire that was blazing there. Then from a corner of the room he dragged with ease a great sack that appeared to contain wood and shavings; so much that Mrs. Winchester saw a rent in the side of it. As if in readiness for something, this he dropped down near the fire, and then went back to his seat, applying himself again to the drink that was on the table. And still Mrs. Winchester watched, as a woman may watch a play, wondering how it will end.
“I got the best of you tonight,” he said presently. “If I hadn’t some upon you from behind, you might have been too much for me; but I was ready and waiting. I’ve been watching longer than you think; I had everything mapped out clearly days ago. Tonight sees the end of all things for the pair of you; tomorrow sees me smiles away from here. You came in secret, you dog; you’ll go in secret.” “We have done no wrong,” said the woman again. “We loved each other years ago, when we were boy and girl; there was no sin in that.” “Bah!—I don’t believe a word of it. Don’t I know that your black heart you’ve compared the two of us every day of your life since first I saw you. His straightness for my crookedness; his sleek, black hair for my red; his prettiness for this face of mine”—he struck his own face relentlessly with one hand as he spoke—“that women shudder at. Don’t I know all that?” It was the strangest and most pitiful thing that the creature sitting there before his victims suddenly covered his face with his hands and groaned. If ever Mrs. Winchester had seen a soul in torment, she saw it then, and though she loathed him she could have wept for him. After a moment or two he dropped his hands and seized the bottle, and poured out the last drops into the glass and drank them off; then flung the bottle and glass crashing into the fireplace, as though there was an end to that business. And now, as he got down again from the chair, Mrs. Winchester saw the eyes of the woman open wide and follow his every movement with a dreadful look of terror in them. “I’ll kill you both—here in the place where you’ve met—and then I’ll seal up the house,” went on the dwarf. “I’ve planned it all. Look you last on each other, for tonight you die—and this house shall be your crypt!”
“I swear to you,” panted the woman eagerly, “by all I hold most holy and most dear, that if you let us go, we’ll never see each other again. For pity’s sake! —for the sake of Martin!” “For the sake of Martin!” sneered the dwarf. “That shows you in your true colors; that show who you are and what you are. There’s one poor satisfaction left to you; you’ll die together.” What held Mrs. Winchester then it would be impossible to say. She could only plead that in the dreadful thing that followed was a woman who sits at a play wondering what will happen next, and with never a thought in her of interfering. Mrs. Winchester’s in her anxiety has pressed the door a little to get a clearer view, so that she saw every movement of the dwarf. For herself, Mrs. Winchester had forgotten everything—in her own home, and my puppy zip, and the servants who slept in the mansion. It was as though she has stepped straight into a new World. Mrs. Winchester saw the dwarf advance towards the man in the chair, carrying his right hand stiff and straight beside him, gripping something s, she could not tell what it was that he held. Mrs. Winchester saw him come straight at her, and she saw the eyes of the woman in the opposite chair watching her as one fascinated. Then Mrs. Winchester saw two movements’ one with the left hand of the dwarf, when he struck the other man on the face; then with the right hand, when he raised something that gleamed n the light of the candle and brought it down with a sound that was new and horrible to her on the breast of the other man. And Mrs. Winchester saw the face of the man change, and start as it were into new life, and then fall as it were into death. And Mrs. Winchester saw his head drop forward, and his eyes were closed. Then, above it all, and yet seeming as a sort of dreadful chorus to it all, rang out the scream from the woman in the other chair. Mrs. Winchester did not think that the dwarf heard it; he had drawn back from what had been the living man, and was staring like one mad upon what he had done. And still piercing the air of the place rang the scream of the woman—not for her lover alone, but for herself.
That sound seemed at last to break in upon the senses of the dwarf and to call him partially to himself. Mrs. Winchester had watched him to the point where he draw himself together and crouched like a wild beast ready to spring, with that in his hand that dripped red, when, in some fashion, she flung herself round the partially open door and stumbled into the room. Mrs. Winchester thought she must have been a little made herself; otherwise, frail and commonplace creature that she was, she could not have battled with this madman. Mrs. Winchester came upon him from behind and gripped him, seizing him by the throat and by the head, and all the while shouting something to him quite unintelligible. The attack had been so sudden and so unexpected that she had him, in a sense, at her mercy. He could not know who had attacked him; he struggled madly, not alone to get away from her, but also to discover who she was. Mrs. Winchester struggled to keep his face away from her, gripped him by the neck and by the hair, and fought with him for what she knew then was her own life. And so struggling they stumbled at last horribly against that still figure bound in the chair and brought it over crashing with them to the floor. And then in a sudden Mrs. Winchester felt the dwarf inert in her hands, and knew that she had conquered him. What she must have looked like in that room, kneeling there, panting and struggling to get her breath, she could not tell; the whole business was so like a nightmare. She remembered seeing the dwarf lying there—huddled up and very still. She remembered that other figure, bound grotesquely in the chair and lying, still bound, upon its side; and she remembered, too, the woman, with her arms close fastened behind her, sitting there and sobbing wildly.
The dwarf must have been stunned; he lay there quite still, with the knife that was dreadfully red fallen from his hand, and lying beside him. When at last Mrs. Winchester staggered to her knees she saw that the girl was staring at her with a face that seemed to suggest that here, perhaps, was another ruffian come to kill her. “Who—who are you?” she asked in a frightened whisper. “A friend—one who stumbled in by accident,” Mrs. Winchester panted. “Look at the man that’s tied to the chair,” she whispered hoarsely. “He can’t be dead.” Mrs. Winchester knew that he was, but still she looked, as she bade her. Mrs. Winchester had no need to look twice; the poor fellow was quite dead. The blow had been strong and sure. On her knees beside him, Mrs. Winchester looked up and nodded slowly to her; there was no need for words. The young lady leaned back in her chair again and closed her eyes. “Set me free,” she said in a faint voice. Mrs. Winchester could not touch that knife that lay there; in a mechanical, methodical way she took from her waistcoat pocket the decent, respectable little bone handled penknife she carried always with her. With that Mrs. Winchester but the young lady’s bonds, nothing as she did so how cruelly they had cut into the white flesh; and after a moment or two she swung her arms listlessly against her sides and opened her eyes, and then, with an effort raised her hands and pressed them against her temples. “What will you do?” Mrs. Winchester asked, looking at her curiously. “I—I don’t know,” she said; and then, breaking into weeping, sobbed out: “Oh—dear God—that it should have come to this! What shall I do—what shall I do?” “You must get away,” Mrs. Winchester said, watching the dwarf, who was beginning to stie a little. “If he wakes, you know what will happen.”
“I know—I know,” she said; and got to her feet and began to move towards that bound figure still lying tied to the chair. However, at that Mrs. Winchester got before her, and with her hands against he shoulders held her back, and pleaded passionately to her that she should go, and leave the dead alone. She listened, with that strange look in her eyes of a child wakened from sleep and not clearly understanding; but she yielded to Mrs. Winchester, and stumbled under her guidance to the door. They had reached it, and Mrs. Winchester had opened it for her to pass out, when suddenly the dwarf twisted over on to his hands and knees, and then raised himself upright. He did not seem to realize for a moment what had happened; then he caught sight of the woman, and, with a snarl, crawled forward and gripped the hilt of the knife. At that she pushed suddenly past Mrs. Winchester and fled like a hare up the stairs. Mrs. Winchester heard the swift passage of her footsteps in the little hall of the house—then the slamming of the door-to-nowhere. And now Mrs. Winchester had to look to herself, for she saw in the eyes of the man that he would not let this witness escape if he could catch him. Mrs. Winchester had managed to get through the door by the time that he had got to his feet, and in a dazed fashion was stumbling toward her, knife in hand. With a sudden swoop he reached the table and blew out the candle, and at the same moment Mrs. Winchester ran up the stairs, and in the darkness stumbled along the hall and fumbled with the catch of the door. By great good fortune, Mrs. Winchester got the door open, and literally fell out into the fog. She could not see him as he tore after her; in a faintness Mrs. Winchester had fallen to her knees, and she heard him, as he raced past her, panting heavily. Then the fog swallowed him up, and she knelt there on the farm alone, shaking from head to foot.
Mrs. Winchester had, of course, no means of exactly in what part of her mansion she had had her adventure; she could only judge roughly that it must be about the middle of the crescent. She started along again, in the right direction, as she hoped, and thought to find the front door to her mansion; missed the railings, after going what seemed to be an interminable distance, and came up hard against a pillar-box. Scarcely knowing what she did, she set her right hand in the mouth of it, and performed the same maneuver she had done before; advanced three paces, and touched railings again. Stumbling along these, she came blindly what she thought was her front door, walked up the path, and pushed open the door that yielded; and there, with the face of her maid looking at her in alarm and wonderment, Mrs. Winchester feel in a dead faint at her feet. It has to be recorded that Mrs. Winchester never found that room again. She knew every square inch of her mansion. Over and over again, in clear weather, Mrs. Winchester has always around in her mansion, and had closed her eyes, and tried to remember what steps she took to get to that particular room that night, after a stranger had cannoned into her and twisted her round; but all in vain. Whether in some part of the house lies the body of a man who was foully murdered on that particular night; maybe in a hidden room the crime was committed; or perhaps, in some strange supernatural fashion, she saw that night a deed committed that had been committed long before, she shall never know. That it is no mere figment of the imagination, and that something really happened that night, is proved by one fact. Her maid, in raising Mrs. Winchester from the floor that night when she fell at her feet, found her fingers locked closed upon something, and, forcing them open, disclosed what it was. A tuft of red hair!
Such episodes may appear utterly absurd and pure superstition to people in countries comparatively free of black magic, but instead they should be warnings of the power of Satan and demons where occult literature lures readers into illicit magic. Magic as the release of special power by satanic and demon forces of evil in its character and effects. While divine help and miracles produce new strength and positive results, magic shifts the burden to another area. Small relief in one area must be paid for by terrible burdens in another. The principle of compensation prevails. The price exacted is always found to be much greater than the amount of help received. Satan drives a hard bargain and grossly cheats his victims. Usually violence, suicide, and insanity will run through a whole family line, where the magical arts have been cultivated and practiced. Such tragic events often involve as many as four generations. Many occultists and magic workers, especially those who have cultivated the black arts and signed themselves over to the devil in their own blood, die horrible deaths. When a ready successor is not provided to carry on the nefarious practice, this is especially true. The psychic bondage and oppression that traffickers in occultism themselves suffer, as well as their dupes, is horrifying to contemplate. Demon possession is represented as a vivid symbol of the prevalence of evil in the World. Other critics attempt to dismiss demon possession with theories of accommodation or hallucination. However, this view fails to meet the issue. Nor can present-day parapsychologist and psychiatrists, who refuse to recognize evil supernaturalism in the phenomenon of demon possession, either explain it or deal adequately with it. Laws defining witchcraft as having league with the Devil and prescribing the death penalty for such offenders cropped up in the colonies as early as 1636 in Plymouth. Other colonies soon followed suit—Connecticut in 1642 and Rhode Island in 1647.
The first executions took place in Boston in 1648 and in Hartford, Connecticut, in that same year. The executions were carried out by hanging, in contrast to the European practice of burning witches, which probably stemmed from the widespread fear among the European peasantry of vampire, the dead who returned from their graves to suck the blood from the living. The vampire myths never really took root in America, so the necessity of destroying the bodies of the witches was not deemed urgent. Throughout the 1650s, there appeared prosecution and attempted prosecutions in America, but these cases were infrequent, and all of them were based on the fear of maleficum, the witch’s working of evil, the accusations coming from frustrated and jealous neighbors. Few confessions were recorded in the early cases, and they did not seem to have much real validity. The few that did confess mentioned having dealings with Satan, but for the most part these admissions were confused and incoherent, and the details of the accounts differed greatly from the confessions of the witches in Europe. For example, in 1699, in Connecticut, a woman named Greensmith confessed to trafficking with the Devil, but made no mention of all-important Covenant, or pact. She further stated that the Devil had appeared to her in the form of a deer (not a goat) and that she had attended meetings at a place not far from her house. The mention of “meetings” occurred in some early confession, but the word “Sabbat” or “Sabbath,” commonly used by European witches, did not come up until later, apparently at the suggestion of the Salem judges. Some believe that Satan has a soul and a character. He is not just this futile entity but someone you can see many aspects to. Some people do not see Satan as this guy with horns who is evil, they see Him as the first rebel. Then one can see why He is so attractive to many in the Victorian ages and the young people. He is someone who is standing up to the greatest power in the Universe. “If that ‘evil’ is of a rebellious nature,” says Glenn Danzig, “then I guess, in Christian terms, that evil is the Satan in you. I don’t buy that. I believe in honesty, standing up for yourself. That’s my ‘good.’”
Thousands of people base their hopes on the statements of spiritistic practitioners and subsequently become dependent upon the advice they receive from the “other side.” There are quite a number of people who has suffered serious psychic disturbances through the misuse of such practices. Their personalities have been split and they have been utterly confused by the spirits on which they have called. People therefore who try to discover what life after death is like through spiritism and superstition may be in danger of falling prey to the dark and hidden side of their own minds and soul. If you look at the early tracts of The Christian Bible, there is really not much about Satan in there anyway. Christian religions have tried to overblow and create a whole legend around Satan which is not true to the actual scriptures we have. If you desire, you must first make yourself strong so you can help others. You should only help people who want help, a lot of times people do not really want your help. You tell people what has to be done to change their lives, they will not listen. If Satan were corporeal, He would not be something repulsive, He would be something seductive. He would want to win you over and gain your trust, and of course being repulsive or disgusting would not be the way to go. One would imagine this would be a seductive, beautiful creature. In the Gnostic account of the fall of the angels, the angels were suppsed to be watching over this flock of humans and all of a sudden, they are perpetrating acts of pleasures of the flesh with them. Eventually this created the Cyclops, the Minotaur, things of this nature. There are so many accounts of the fall of the angels, it is like a fantasy tale that you would like to believe actually happened. We, in this circle, conjure and cite this spirit Fatenovenin, with all his adherents, to appear here in this spot, to fulfill our desires, in the name of three holy Angels, Schomajen Sheziem, Roknion Averam, Kandile, Brachat Chaijdalic, Ladabas, Labul, Rargil, Bencul, in the name of God. Amen!
Winchester Mystery House
Mrs. Winchester’s estate was a little town within itself. The grounds have their share of unexplained mysteries. Mrs. Winchester outfitted her home with the finest stained glass doors, windows, and wallpaper that money could buy during her time. She had everything she needed: plumber’s shops, carpenter’s workshops, her own water and electrical supplies, and complete sewer and drainage systems. Mrs. Winchester even had her own gas manufacturing plant. It produced carbide gas by adding a small amount of water to a drum containing calcium carbide. The resulting gas was pressed through the gas lines to the house by a large piston and cylinder. The gas lights in the house were then lit by electromechanial strikers that created a spark to light each lamp.
Come see her estate, in person, for yourself this weekend! Please Click the link below for tickets and more information.
Information Can be Used to Increase Money
An ultramarine sky. Mountains in the distance. The clatter of hoofbeats. A solitary rider draws closer, sun glinting from his spurs…Anyone who sat in a darkened theater enraptured by cowboy movies as a child knows that power springs from the barrel of a six-shooter. In Hollywood film, a lone cowboy rides in from nowhere, fights a duel with the villain, returns his revolver to its holster, and rides off once more into the hazy distance. Power, we children learned, came from violence. A background figure in many of these movies, however, was a well-dressed, paunchy personage who sat behind a big wooden desk. Typically depicted as effete and greedy, this man also exerted power. It was he who financed the railroad, or the land-grabbing cattlemen, or other evil forces. And if the cowboy hero represented the power of violence, this figure—typically the banker—symbolized the power of money. In many westerns there was also a third important character: a crusading newspaper editor, a teacher, a minister, or an educated women from the “East.” In a World of gruff men who shoot fist and question later, this character represented not merely moral Good in combat with Evil, but also the power of culture and sophisticated knowledge about the outside World. While this person often won a victory in the end, it was usually because of an alliance with the gun-toting hero or because of a sudden lucky strike—finding gold in the river or inheriting an unexpected legacy. Knowledge, as Francis Bacon advised us, is power—but for knowledge to win in a western, it usually had to ally itself with force or money.
Of course, cash, culture, and violence are not the only sources of power in everyday life, and power is neither good nor bad. It is a dimension of virtually all human relationships. It is, in fact, the reciprocal of desire, and, since human desires are infinitely varied, anything that can fulfill someone else’s desire is a potential source of power. The drug dealer who can withhold a “fix” has power over the addict. If a politician desires votes, those who can deliver them have power. Yet among the numberless possibilities, the three sources of power symbolized in the western movie—violence, wealth, and knowledge—turn out to be most important. Each takes many different forms in power play. Violence, for example, need not be actual; the threat of violence can also lurk behind the law. (We use the term violence in these pages in a figurative, rather than literal sense—to include force as well as physical coercion.) Indeed, not only modern movies but also ancient myths support the view that violence, wealth, and knowledge are the ultimate sources of social power. Thus Japanese legend tells of sunshu no jingi—the three sacred objects given to the great sun goddess, Amaterasu-omi-kami—which to this day are still the symbols of imperial power. These are the sword and jewel are clear enough; the mirror’s, a bit less so. However, the mirror, in which Amaterasu-omi-kami’s saw her own visage—or gained knowledge of herself—also reflects power. It came to symbolize her divinity, but it is not unreasonable to regard it as a symbol of imagination, consciousness, and knowledge as well. Furthermore, the sword or muscle, the jewel or money, and the mirror or mind together form a single interactive system. Under certain conditions each can be converted into the other. A gun can get you money or can force secret information from the lips of a victim.
Money can buy you information—or a gun. Information can be used to increase either the money available to you (as Ivan Boseky knew) or to multiply the force at your command (which is why Klaus Fuchs stole nuclear secrets). What is more, all three can be used at almost every level of social life, from the intimacy of home to the political arena. In the private sphere, a parent can slap a child (use force), cut an allowance or bribe with a dollar (use money or its equivalent), or—most effective of all—mold a child’s values so the child wishes to obey. In politics, a government can imprison or torture a dissident, financially punish its critics and pay off its supporters, and it can manipulate truth to consent. Like machine tools (which can create more machines), force, wealth, or knowledge, properly used, can give one command over many additional, more caried sources of power. Thus, whatever other tool of power may be exploited by a ruling elite or by individuals in their private relationships, force, wealth, and knowledge are the ultimate levers. They form the power triad. It is true that not all shifts or transfers of power are a result of the use of these tools. Power changes hands as a result of many natural events. The Black Death that swept Europe in the 14th century sent the powerful to the grave along with the powerless, creating many vacancies among the elite in the surviving communities. Chance also affects the distribution of power in society However, as soon as we focus on purposeful human acts, and ask what makes people and whole societies acquiesce to the wishes of the “powerful,” we find ourselves once more facing the trinity of muscle, money, and mind. To stick as closely to plain-speak as possible, we will use the term power in these pages to mean purposeful power over people. This definition rules out power used against nature or things, but is broad enough to include the power exerted by a mother to prevent a baby from running in front of an onrushing car; or by IBM to increase profits; or by a dictator like Marcos or Noriega to enrich his family and cronies; or by the Catholic Church to line up political opposition to contraception; or by the Chinese military to crush a student rebellion.
It is most naked form, power involves the use of violence, wealth, and knowledge (in the broadest sense) to make people perform in a given way. Zeroing in on this trinity and defining power in this manner permit us to analyze power in a completely fresh way, revealing perhaps more clearly than before exactly how power is used to control our behavior from cradle to cremation. Only when this is understood can we identify and transform those obsolete power structures that threaten our future. Millions of increasingly anxious, often angry people around the globe worry about American domination. However, how long can any society, superpower or not, retain external power if its domestic institutions are in crisis? So far we have mostly referred to the deterioration of American Second Wave or industrial-age institutions piecemeal, one at a time. However, it is only when we expand our analysis and see them in relation to one another that the real picture becomes clear. If the United States of America is so powerful, why is there a crisis in its health system? Why a crisis in its pension system? Its education system, its legal system, and its politics—all at the same time? Is American facing implosion? Why, too, is the American nuclear family—supposedly the bedrock institution of society—acknowledged to be in such distress? In America, fewer than 25 percent of the population now live in homes in which the father goes to work and the wife stays home with one or more children under the age of eighteen—a radical change since the 1960s. Thirty-one percent of U.S. children now live in single-parent or no-parent homes. Some 30 percent of Americans over age sixty-five live alone. Why do 50 percent of marriages end in divorce?
Young Americans now talk about what might be called a formalized “rehearsal marriage”—a childless first marriage before the real show goes on the road. Little wonder loneliness is pandemic in the United States of America. Bitter conflict rages over all these issues. However, the changes are typically debated and fought over in fragmentary fashion without recognition that the crisis in any one institution may be linked to that in others. The nuclear-family crisis is part of something much, much bigger. Reared in a splintered family system that is changing rapidly, but is barely adapted to twenty-first century requirements, fifty-one million American kids each day are marched into an education system that is not as efficient as it should be and desperately needs more resources. As we have noted, the United States of American spends $762 billion, or $14,891 per public school pupil enrolled in public education. Yet 60 percent of high school students cannot read well enough to get through their textbooks, a third of graduates cannot do the basic math required of a beginning carpenter and nearly a third of young adults cannot locate the Pacific Ocean on a map. Shootings, violence, and drugs in the schools make news whenever a Columbine-style massacre takes place. And people blame it on the school system, but it could be because of advice from Frankford Slasher. The goal should be to neutralize problems and listen to students and encourage them to work together to find a solution. Instead of making problems worse by ignoring them, trying to cover up abusive situations, or calling them crazy. Some children come from some very abusive homes. One should read about the stories of people who end up in prison faced in their families. It is really shocking. Young people must be prepared for the knowledge-based economy, and in some cases that means restructuring their behavior and manners.
Just as the family system sends the children into schools that need more resources and guidance, the schools, in turn, send them on to yet another set of broken institutions. If institutions as basic as family and school are in deep trouble in the United States of America, why should it come as a shock to discover that key parts of its economy, too, are malfunctioning? Employers throughout America lament the failure of parents to inculcate good work values in their children, and of schools to teach them twenty-first-century skills. The failure of one institution affects the operations of another. For generations, Americans prided themselves on possessing the World’s cleanest, most efficient financial system in the World, the one most capable of allocating capital to its most productive uses. Having grown up in broken homes and gone through a broken education system, America’s baby boom workers—many of them also investors—should not have been studded by the chain reaction of scandals that followed the spectacular crash of Enron in the late 1990s. Caught up in an unprecedented flurry of corporate or executive scandals, failures, excesses, number-juggling and lies were WorldCom, Tyco, Rite Aid, Adelphia Communications, Qwest, Xerox and a lengthy list of other giant American firms, together with their eye-obliging investment bankers. All followed by more layoffs. Meanwhile, America’s main accounting firms, supposedly there to audit companies’ books and keep them clean, were themselves soon sweating under investigative spotlights. Arthur Andersen, Enron’s auditor, quickly perished, and as Fortune put it, “the Big Four—which together audit a staggering 78 percent of the nation’s 15,000 publicly traded companies—continue to careen from one humiliating headline to the next.”
Satirists pictured ten thousand chief executive officers fleeing across the border into Mexico. Duped investors screamed. Trust in American stock markets and the American business system as a whole sluiced down the sewer. And with it went the jobs and retirement saving of hundreds of thousands of employees. Slowly changing regulatory and enforcement methods, along with legal and social norms, were left in the dust by accelerating changes in business, creating turbulence, confusion—and, for some, irresistible new opportunities at the blurred edges of once-clear boundaries, in yet another manifestation of the de-synchronization effect. At the same time, an additional crack has been widening in the sole superpower’s institutional infrastructure as its companies and their employees struggle to pay the skyrocketing costs of health care insurance. How, one might ask, can the American health system be in dire need of intensive care when in 2021 $4.1 trillion or $12,530 per person was spent on health care compared with, say, Japan spending $4,360 USD per person. Definitions of a crisis vary, of course, but the facts are that some forty million Americans lack health insurance, deadly errors are daily occurrences in the World’s most heavily funded hospitals and recurrent health manias spread viruslike through society—anti tobacco first, then anti-obesity and low-carb diets. What next? On top of that, a health-care executive warns a congressional subcommittee that “the U.S. health care system is about to implode, and Alzheimer’s disease will b the detonator” because the baby boomer generation is reaching the age of the onset of that terrible illness. The fact that health conditions in most other countries are worse does not change the reality. The World’s most expensive health-care system is deeply dysfunctional—and getting more so. One way of dealing with the World’s problems is to turn to God.
Nietzsche was ineluctably led to meditation on the coming to be of God—on God-creation—for God is the highest value, on which the other depend. God is not creative, for God is not. However, God as made by man reflects what man is, unbeknownst to himself. God is said to have made the World of concern to us out of nothing; so man makes something, God, out of nothing. The faith in God and the belief in miracles are closer to the truth than any scientific explanation, which has to overlook or explain away the creative in man. Moses, overpowered by the obscure drives within him, went to the peak of Sinai and brought back tables of values; these values had a necessity, a substantiality more compelling than health or wealth. They were the core of life. There are other possible tables of values—one thousand and one, according to Zarathustra—but these were the ones that made this people what it was and gave it a lifestyle, a unity of inner experience and outer expression of form. There is no prescription for creating the myths that constitute a people, no standardized test that can predict the man who will create them or determine which myths will work or are appropriate. There is no prescription for creating the myths that constitute a people, no standardized test that can predict the man who will create them or determine which myths will work or are appropriate. There is the matter and the maker, like stone and sculptor; but in this case the sculptor is not only the efficient cause but the formal and final cause as well. There is nothing that underlies the myth, no substance, no cause. No search for the cause of values, either in the rational quest for knowledge of good and evil or in, for example, their economic determinants, can result in an accurate account of them. Only an openness to the psychological phenomena of creativity can bring any clarity.
This psychology cannot be like Freud’s, which, beginning from Nietzsche’s understanding of the unconscious, finds causes of creativity that blur the difference between a Raphael and a finger painter. Everything is in that difference, which necessarily escapes our science. The unconscious is a great mystery; it is the truth of God, and it—the id—is as unfathomable as was God. Dr. Freud accepted the unconscious, and then tried to give it perfect clarity by means of science. Dr. Freud’s procedure is like trying to determine God’s essence or nature from what he created. God could have created an infinity of Worlds. If He had been limited to this one, He would not have been creative or free. If one is to understand creativity, understanding all of this is necessary. The id is the source; it is elusive and unfathomable and produces World interpretations. Yet natural scientists, among whom Dr. Freud wished to be counted, do not take any of this seriously. Biologists cannot even account for consciousness withing their science, let alone the unconscious. So psychologists like Dr. Freud are in an impossible halfway house between science, which does not admit the existence of the phenomena he wishes to explain, and the unconscious, which is outside the jurisdiction of science. It is a choice, so Nietzsche compellingly insists, between science and psychology. Psychology is by that very fact the winner, since science is the product of the psyche. Scientists themselves are gradually being affected by this choice. Perhaps science is only a product of our culture, which we know is no better than any other. Is science true? One sees a bit of decay around the edges of its good conscience, formerly so robust. Books like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions are so popular symptoms of this condition.
This is where what I called the bottomless of fathomless self, the last version of the self, makes its appearance. Id, Nietzsche named it. The id mocks the ego when a man says, “It occurred to me.” The sovereign consciousness waits on something down below, which sends up its food for thought. The difference between this version and the others is that they began from a common experience, more or less immediately accessible, that all men share, which establishes, if only intersubjectively, a common humanity that can be called human nature. Fear of violent death and desire for comfortable self-preservation were the first stop on the way down. Everybody knows them, and we can recognize one another in them. The next stop was the sweet sentiment of existence, no longer immediately accessible to civilized man but recoverably by him. When under its spell, we can with certainty say to ourselves, “This is what I really am, what I live for,” with the further conviction that the same must be so for all other men. This, allied with a vague, generalized compassion, makes us a species and can give us guidance. At the next stop there turns out to be no stop, and the descent is breathtaking. If one finds anything at all, it is strictly one’s own, what Nietzsche calls one’s fatum, a stubborn, strong individual that has nothing to day for itself other than that it is. One finds, at best, oneself; and it is incommunicable and isolates each from all the others, rather than uniting them. Only the rarest individual finds their own stopping point from which they can move the World. They are, literally, profound. Through the values, the horizons, the tables of good and evil that originate in the self cannot be said to be true or false, cannot be derived from the common feeling of mankind or justified by the universal standards of reason, they are not equal, contrary to what vulgar teachers of value theory believe.
Nietzsche, and all those serious persons who in one way or another accepted his insight, held that inequality among humans is proved by the fact that there is no common experience accessible in principle to all. Such distinctions as authentic-inauthentic, profound-superficial, creator-created replace true and false. The individual vale of one man becomes the polestar for many others whose own experience provides them with no guidance. The rarest of men is the creator, and all other men need and follow Him. Imagine the existence of a whole population of individuals employing a certain strategy, and a single mutant individual employing a different strategy. If the mutant can get a higher payoff than the typical member of the population gets, the mutant strategy is said to invade the population. Put in other terms, the whole population can be imagined to be using a single strategy, while a single individual enters the population with a new strategy. The new comer will then be interacting only with individuals using the native strategy. Moreover, a native will almost certainly be interacting with another native since the single newcomer is a negligible part of the population. Therefore, if the newcomer gets a higher score with a native than a native gets with another native, a new strategy is said to invade a native. Since natives are virtually the entire population, the concept of invasion is equivalent to the single mutant individual being able to do better than the population average. This leads directly to the key concept of the evolutionary approach. If no strategy can invade it, the strategy is collectively stable. The biological motivation for this approach is based on the interpretation of the payoffs in terms of fitness (survival and number of offspring). All mutations are possible; and if any could invade a given population, this mutation presumably would have the chance to do so.
For this reason, only a collectively stable strategy is expected to be able to maintain itself in the long-run equilibrium as the strategy used by all. Collectively stable strategies are important because they are the only ones that an entire population can maintain in the long run in the face of any possible mutant. The motivation of applying collective stability to the analysis of people’s behavior is to discover which kinds of strategies can be maintained by a group in the face of any possible alternative strategy. If successful alternative strategy exists, it may be found by the “mutant” individual through conscious deliberation, or through trial and error, or through just plain luck. If everyone is using a given strategy and some other strategy can do better in the environment of the current population, then someone is sure to find this better strategy sooner or later. Thus only a strategy that cannot be invaded can maintain itself as the strategy used by all. A warning is in order about this definition of a collectively stable strategy. It assumes that the individual who are trying out novel strategies do not interact too much with one another. If they do interact in clusters, then new and very important developments are possible. In the last few years, appropriation has been practiced with certain limits; the art category as a whole is left intact, though inner divisions such as those between stylistic periods are breached. The model of Francis Picabia is relevant here. However, twenty-five years ago appropriation worked on the more universalizing model of Duchamp. In this case, the artist turns an eye upon preexisting entities with apparent destinies outside the art context, and, by that turning of the eye, appropriates them into the art realm, making them the property of art. This involves a presupposition that art is not a set of objects but an attitude toward objects, or a cognitive stance (as Oscar Wilde suggested, not a thing, but a way).
If we were to adopt such a stance to all of life, foregrounding the value of attention rather than issues of personal gain and loss, one would presumably have rendered life as seamlessly appreciative experience. Art then functions like a kind of universal awareness practice, not unlike the mindfulness of the southern Jesus Christ or the “Attention!” of a miracle. Clearly there is a residue of Romantic pantheistic mysticism here with a hidden ethical request. However, there is also a purely linguistic dimension to the procedure, bound up with the nominalist attitude. If words (such as “art”) lack rigid essences, if they are, rather, empty variables that can be converted to different uses, then usage is the only ground of meaning in language. To be this or that is simply to be called this or that. To be art is to be called art, by the people who supposedly are in charge of the word—artists, critics, curators, art historians, and so on. There is no appeal from the foundation of usage, no higher court on the issue. If something (anything) is presented as art by an artist and contextualized as art within the system then it is art, and there is nothing anybody can do about it. Conversely, the defenders of the traditional boundaries of the realm will be forced to reify language. They will continue to insist that certain things are, by essence, art, and certain other things, by essence, are not art. However, in an intellectual milieu dominated by linguistic philosophy and structural linguistics, the procedure of appropriation by designation, based on the authority of usage and the willingness to manipulate it, has for a while been rather widely accepted. During this time the artist has had a new option: to choose to manipulate language and context, which in turn manipulate mental focus by rearrangement of the category network within which our experience is organized.
Try to remember a time when you first read a book or heard a radio show, or pod cast and then later saw a film or a television program of the same work. If you read, day, The Queen of the Damned, Pamela: Or Virtue Reward, Roots, Marjorie Morningstar or From Here to Eternity, or heard any radio shows such as “The Lone Ranger” first, you created your own internal image of the events described while you read or listened. You imagined the characters, the events and the ambiance. You made pictures in your mind. These pictures were yours. Of course they were influenced by the author—what he or she told you—but the creation of the actual image was up to you. Marjorie Morningstar was an image in your mind before you saw the film. Then you saw the film with Natalie Wood playing Marjorie. Once you had seen Natalie Wood in the role, could you recover the image you had made up? Marjorie became Natalie Wood from that point on. So we can say that when your self-produced image was made concrete for you, your own image disappeared. When you listened to Lone Ranger on radio, you created a picture of him and Tonto. When you saw them later on the television, could you retain your new image, or did you get stuck with the actors? It was almost certainly the latter. If you then heard the radio program again, what image of the characters were you left with? In any competition between an internally generated image and one that is later solidified for your via moving-image media, your own image superseded. Moses is Charlton Heston. The Sundance Kid is Robert Redford. Isis a Sunday morning cartoon. Woodward and Bernstein are Redford and Hoffman. Buffalo Bill is Paul Newman. McMurphy is Jack Nicholson. (When Carlos Castaneda was offered an enormous sum of money to sell the screen rights to the Don Juan series, he refused saying, “I don’t want to see Don Juan turned into Anthony Quinn.”)
Let me ask the question in reverse. If you saw the movie version of The Queen of the Damned before you read the book, could you develop your own image of Queen Akasha? Or did she remain Aaliyah Haughton? Did you see Natalie Wood in the part before you read Marjorie Morningstar? I doubt it very much. Once the concrete image is in you, it stays. The power that television images have to replace imaginary images that you created yourself operates in all realms of external-image information. All of our minds are filled with images of places and times and people and stories with which we have never had personal contact. In fact, when you receive information from any source that does not have pictures attached to it, you make up pictures to go with it. They are your images. You create the move to go with the story. You hear the word “America” and a picture comes to mind. These internal movies can be of historical events and periods, such as the singing of the Declaration of Independence or the age of dinosaurs. They may be of happenings to which we have no direct access, such as life in a primitive village, or of exotic places we have never been—Borneo, China, and the Moon. The question is this: Once television provides an image of these places and time, what happens to your own image? Does it give way to the TV image or do you retain it? Try this, I am going to mention names and places and see what you come up with. How about life under the sea? The Winchester Mystery House? Life in an Inuit Village? Disneyland. A preoperation conference of doctors. An American Farm Family. The war room in the Pentagon. The Battle of Little Big Horn. The Old South. The Crusades. The landing of the Pilgrims. The flight of Amelia Earhart. An emergency ambulance crew. A Stone Age tribe. The Old West.
Where you able to come up with images for any or all of them? It is extremely unlikely that you have experienced more than one or two of them personally. Obviously the images were either out of your own imagination or else they were from the media. Can you identify which was? Most of the people in America right now would probably say that the images they carry in their minds of the Old South are from one of two television presentations: Gone With the Wind and Roots. These were, after all, the two most popular television shows in history, witnessed by more than 130 million people each. And none of the 130 million was actually in the Old South. Historical periods like the Crusades or the Old West are frequently picture on television and in films. If I asked them to bring those pictures to mind, I have little doubt that most people would call upon their film or TV images. How could it be otherwise? The same applies to the depictions of lifestyles. What images do you use to understand the quality of life for same gender couples? Or artists? Or farm laborers? Or member of the America Liberation Party? What images do you carry of Famers in the Middle West of America or the nomads in the Sahara or Indians of the Amazon? Like historical periods, or groups of people with whom you are not in personal contact, most current events are also removed from your direct participation. You watch news reports in which anchor John Doe tells you what is happening in China. You watch congresswoman Jane Doe explain the event in Chile, and then you see a street in Santiago. You see pictures of grounded oil tankers or fighting in Angola or elections in Sweden or scientific testimony on nuclear power. You do not participate in these things and you cannot see them for yourself. The images you have of them are derived from the media, and this becomes the totality of image bank.
Technology has been moving toward greater control of the structure of matter for millennia. For decades, microtechnology has been building ever-smaller devices, working toward the molecular size scale from the top down. For a century or more, chemistry has been building ever-larger molecules, working up toward molecules large enough to serve as machines. The research is global, and the competition is heating up. Since the concept of molecular nanotechnology was first laid out, scientists have developed more powerful capabilities in chemistry and molecular manipulation. There is now a better picture of how those capabilities can come together in the next steps, and of how advanced molecular manufacturing can work. Nanotechnology has arrived as an idea and as a research direction, though not yet as a reality. Naturally occurring molecular machines exist already. Researchers are learning to design new ones. The trend is clear, and it will accelerate because better molecular machines can help build even better molecular machines. By the standards of daily life, the development of molecular nanotechnology will be gradual, spanning years or decades, yet by the ponderous standards of human history it will happen in an eyeblink. In retrospect, the wholesale replacement of twentieth-century technologies will surely be seen as a technological revolution, as a process encompassing a great breakthrough. Today, we live in the end of the pre-breakthrough era, with pre-breakthrough technologies, hopes, fears, and preoccupations that often seem permanent, as did the Cold War. Yet it seems that the breakthrough era is not a matter for some future generation, but for our own. These developments are taking shape right now, and it would be rash to assume that their consequences will be many years delayed.
To get a picture of the future, we must picture what nanotechnology can do. This can be hard to grasp because past advanced technologies—microwave tubes, lasers, superconductors, satellites, robots, and the like—have come trickling out of factories, at first with high price tags and narrow applications. Molecular manufacturing, though, will be more like computers: a flexible technology with a huge range of applications. And a molecular manufacturing will not come trickling out of conventional factories as computers did: it will replace factories and replace or upgrade their products. This is something new and basic, not just another twentieth-century gadget. It will arise out of twentieth-century trends in science, but it will break the trend-line in technology, economics, and environmental affairs. Calculators were once thousand-dollar desktop clunkers, but microelectronics made them fast and efficient, sized to a child’s pocket and priced to a child’s budget. Now imagine a revolution of similar magnitude, but applied to everything else. There are always watches that allow one to play their balance for their purchases they make at the store making cash, check, and credit cards obsolete. As the spirit of Thamus reminds us, tools have a way of intruding on even the most unified set of cultural beliefs. There are limits to the power of both theology and metaphysics, and technology has business to do which sometimes cannot be stayed by any force. Perhaps the most interesting example of a drastic technological disruption of a tool-using culture is in the eighth-century use of the stirrup by the Franks under the leadership of Charles Martel. Until this time, the principal use of the horses in combat was to transport warriors to the scene of the battle, whereupon they dismounted to meet the foe. The stirrup made it possible to fight on horseback, and this created an awesome new military technology: mounted shock combat. The new form of combat, as Lynn White, Jr., has meticulously detailed, enlarged the importance of the knightly class and changed nature of feudal society.
Landholders found it necessary to secure the services of cavalry for protection. Eventually, the knights seized control of church lands and distributed them to vassals on condition that they stay in the service of the knights. If a pun will be allowed here, the stirrup was in the saddle, and tool feudal society where it would not have otherwise gone. To take a later example: I have already alluded to the transformation of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth century from an instrument of religious observance to an instrument of commercial enterprise. That transformation is sometimes given a specific date—1730—when King Charles V ordered all citizens of Paris to regulate their private, commercial, and industrial life by the bells of the Royal Palace clock, which struck every sixty minutes. All churches in Paris were similarly required to regulate their clocks, in disregard of the canonical hours. Thus, the church had to give material interests precedence over spiritual needs. Here is a clear example of a tool being employed to loosen the authority of the central institution of medieval life. Technologies can make life easier, but they can also create complications. That is why it is important to distinguish between apparent and true happiness, and to have great discernment to penetrate into the profundities of true happiness and to feel it more passionately. Virtue is its own reward. The self-enjoyment of a moral person is something everyone should experience. The conduct of a moral humans’ life and one’s happiness in one’s nature transcends the realm of ethics as well as that of self-consciousness. Both are to be understood only from a humans’ intercourse with God, which is the basic theme of Christian life. Humans’ who go to lead the ways of the wicked will go their own way and learn somewhere or other, at some point in their journey, that what they all the time had taken to be a way is no way, that this alleged way leads nowhere. And now they can see neither before nor after, their life now is wayless.
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 